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An excerpt of the book “Soul Mates” by Thomas Moore

A soulful relationship offers two difficult challenges: one, to come to know oneself – the ancient oracle of Apollo; and two, to get to know the deep, often subtle richness in the soul of the other. As you get to know the other deeply, you will discover much about yourself. Especially in moments of conflict and maybe even despair, being open to the demands of a relationship can provide an extraordinary opportunity for self-knowledge. It provides an occasion to glimpse your own soul and notice its longings and its fears. And as you get to know yourself, you can be more accepting and understanding of the other’s depth of soul.
It isn’t easy to expose your soul to another, to risk such vulnerability, hoping that the other person will be able to tolerate your own irrationality. It may also be difficult, no matter how open-minded you are, to be receptive as another reveals her soul to you. Yet this mutual vulnerability is one of the great gifts of love: giving the other sufficient emotional space in which to live and express her soul, with its reasonable and unreasonable ways, and then to risk revealing your own soul, complete with its own absurdities.
The idea of a soulful relationship is not a sentimental one, nor is it easy to put into practice. The courage required to open one’s soul to express itself or to receive another is infinitely more demanding than the effort we put into avoidance of intimacy. The stretching of the soul is like the painful opening of the body in birth. It is so painful in the doing that we often will attempt to avoid it, even though such opening is ultimately full of pleasure and reward.
What I am suggesting about intimacy in relationship here is a particular aspect of the general need to respect the soul’s wide range of mood, fantasy, emotion, and behavior. Most of us contain ourselves fairly well, but eventually some type of irrationality may come to the surface. We all have skeletons in our closets and monsters in our hearts. It can be taken as an axiom: the person who displays his or her sanity and morality most dramatically is likely to be the very person who finds it difficult to be sane and moral.
Being in a soulful relationship is to some extent frightening because by nature such a relationship asks that we show our soul, complete with its fears and follies. In “In Praise of Folly”, the Renaissance humanist Erasmus says that it is precisely in their foolishness that people can become friends and intimates. “For that the greatest part of mankind are fools,… and friendship, you know, is seldom made but amongst equals.” The soul, as our dreams reveal, is not terribly lofty. We may present a high-minded image to the world, but the soul finds its fertility in its irrationalities. Maybe this is a hint as to why great artists appear mad, or at least eccentric, and why, in times of strong emotion and difficult decision-making, we so often act foolishly. More than one person in therapy has confessed to me that the most difficult part of an intense episode of jealousy was the fear of being made a fool by their partner – a sign to me that soul was trying hard to enter their lives in the dress of the fool.
Oddly, then, the most intimate relationships may be the very ones that appear foolish. The couple madly in love are “fools for love”. The most unpredictable couplings sometimes make the best marriages. A person who appears quite ordered and logical at work may engage in outrageously irrational behavior at home. Some of the most tightly knit families don’t hide their battles and jealousies. In short, when a relationship is soulful, the soul’s irrationality will be revealed for all to see.

The following excerpt is by Gabrielle Roth from her book “Connections”:

When you are not resisting, when you simply relax into the flow of your energy, you short-circuit your ego and create a space for your soul to emerge from the dark mysterious quiet within. However, if your surface persona is anxious, tightly wound, or filled with turbulence, your soul will retreat and remain in hiding, leaving the field wide open for an ego invasion.

The ego is the force that gets us into global messes as well as personal ones. It sees the world in black and white, good and evil, left and right. It has to be pro or con. It can never be with. It has to be for or against. It can never be part of it all. It can never just be. It always has to create tension and conflict. It can never let you relax and let go.

… You need a way to access the part of you that is connected to the whole, to find a proactive way to create peace in your piece of the world. You can’t have one part of you struggling against the rest of you or the many parts of you struggling against each other if you want to be fluid and free. Freedom comes when you are receptive to the voices of the oppressed, whether they be your hip, your mother, or downtrodden people. Through deep listening comes right action.

An excerpt of the book “To love and be loved” by Sam Keen:

“Men and women have made war on each other for so long
that much of what is most precious now hides itself.

Wild and tender things have retreated into the forest and will
reveal themselves only to those who respect their shyness.

Each of us lives within a private sanctuary into which we invite
only those who pay full attention to us and who wait patiently
until we open the door from the inside and welcome them.”

“….The masculine evokes a response and I, as a woman, in dark stillness, silently attentive, await the call, which initiates the dance, which spirals deeper and deeper into love, in all its myriad forms and expressions.”
“For many women, romantic love is often our first taste of divine intoxication. But this is a great paradox – that a man offers us a taste of divine love, and yet he is just a man! Can you hold that paradox? That through this person you touch some deep core of the Mystery and yet he doesn’t change his socks! Can you stay with those conflicts and still stay true to love? And not just today, but day after day, year after year?”
“Loving another human being is such a magnificent test and trial. For even as you love him completely, you will never be fulfilled! Because there is always the emptiness inside that belongs only to God, that only God can enter. So time after time we are drawn into love only to be left with nothing!”
“If you stand in this paradox you put yourself into the fire, the fire that burns away this lower nature. For every time you feel that human impulse to reach out for what you want – what every cell of you wants – what you find is the emptiness that has always been there. Then you are tested. You are confronted with your own desires and all your attachments to this world. You want, want, want, and yet the reality is that you will not get what you want. Not from a man on whom you project your desires. And so you can be angry, you can be hurt, you can be rejected, you can stay in all that still binds you and keeps you from His embrace, He who is the King of Love. Or, you can give in, and let go, and love without wanting anything, and in doing so wait patiently for what He wants you to have!”
“If you stay in the fire, true to Love, true to the deepest longing of your heart, a strange alchemy happens. Your expressions of love deepen and become more inclusive; an unfettered love starts to permeate all your relationships; your love becomes more and more selfless. This is mature love, love that wants nothing for yourself, love that is not confined to you and your lover. It is the real love that burns away the ‘you’ so that love can move through you into the world.”
“The ‘Yes!’ in your heart consents to this process, to everything this process includes. And the suffering can be tremendous, the ‘not getting’ sometimes more than you think you can bear. But this ‘Yes!’ will suffer anything in the name of love, all for His sake! And one day you understand that there is really only one relationship. And it is nearer when it is truly absent.”
“Eventually this storming of love, the agony and torment, becomes your most precious possession, the sweetest thing that you would never wish to relinquish. The hunger is somehow like being present at a great feast, the pain full of baffling tenderness. His absence becomes full of His presence, the longing His ‘HERE I AM!’”

The following is an excerpt of the book Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach:

“In order to know a semblance of serenity during the days of our lives, we also need to discover Time’s twin nature, which the ancient Greeks called chronos and kairos.

Chronos is clocks, deadlines, watches, calendars, agendas, planners, schedules, beepers. Chronos is time at her worst. Chronos keeps track. Chronos is a delusion of grandeur. Chronos is running the Marine Corps marathon in heels. In chronos we think only of ourselves. Chronos is the world’s time.

Kairos is transcendence, infinity, reverence, joy, passion, love, the Sacred. Kairos is intimacy with the Real. Kairos is time at her best. Kairos lets go. In kairos we escape the dungeon of self. Kairos is a Schubert waltz in nineteenth-century Vienna with your soul mate. Kairos is Soul’s time.

We exist in chronos. We long for kairos. That is our duality. Chronos requires speed so that it won’t be wasted. Kairos requires space so that it might be savored. We do in chronos. In kairos we are allowed to be.

We think we’ve never known kairos, but we have: when making love, when meditating or praying, when lost in music’s rapture or literature’s reverie, when planting bulbs or pulling weeds, when watching over a sleeping child, when reading the Sunday comics together in bed, when delighting in a sunset, when exulting in our passions. We know joy in kairos, glimpse beauty in kairos, remember what it means to be alive in kairos, reconnect with our Divinity in kairos.

So how do we exchange chronos for kairos?
- By slowing down
- By concentrating on one thing at a time
- By going about whatever we are doing as if it were the only thing worth doing at that moment.
- By pretending we have all the time in the world, so that our subconscious will kick in and make it so.
- By making time.
- By taking time.
- It only takes a moment to cross over from chronos into kairos, but it does take a moment.
All that kairos asks is our willingness to stop running long enough to hear the music of the spheres.
Today, be willing to join in the dance.
Now you’re in kairos.”