Reader Question: Can your friends be soulmates, too? I have friends that I have known all my life and that have been there for me through good romantic relationships and bad ones. Most of the time my friends knew when these relationships were good for me and when they were not. Could it be that my friends are my soulmates and not the men that I have romantic relationships with?
The simple truth, the mystery of soulmates, is that every single person we meet is a soulmate of one kind or another.
You are so fortunate to have a circle of good friends. These good friends are indeed your soulmates. And so are all the men, “good” and “bad,” that you have dated.
Contrary to popular belief, soulmates are not just romantic partners. Love itself comes in many varieties – love for humankind or brotherly love; love for our circles of family, friends, and community; romance; and ultimately unconditional love which transcends all human relationships. Our circle of soulmates, our soul tribe or soul family, reflects each of those categories, not just the romantic ones.
Within each of those love categories we also have types of soulmates:
• Karmic Mates help us work out old issues and questions, possibly even from previous lives.
• Ego Mates help us navigate through our worries about what others think of us. They also help us understand service to self (selfishness, neediness) and service to others (selflessness, altruism) which helps us understand the true meaning of self care. Self care isn’t about giving ourselves treats or putting ourselves first at the expense of others. It’s about learning how to meet our own soul needs so we can be of service to others.
• Companion Mates provide those warm, supportive, affectionate, and sometimes passionate relationships. They may or may not be romantic, but through them, we begin to understand what the cycle of giving and receiving is really all about. The Giver becomes the Receiver becomes a lifestyle, not just a catchphrase.
• Soul Twins are those beings who are literally the matching half of our soul energy. They are not necessarily male and female gender, but are more like male and female energy, similar to the various types of energy that make up a complete atom, for example. Each is already complete and together they make a different kind of whole.
We each have many soulmates and many kinds of soulmates. Every single person we meet, whether that meeting becomes a relationship or is no more than a brief chance encounter, is a soulmate of some kind. It’s almost as if we are living in a giant game of cosmic pinball. Every interaction, long-lived or just a brush, is combined with all our free-will choices, and together they direct our course through life. Every contact we experience with another human changes our course a little or a lot. Because that’s actually what soulmates really do.
That also means we never have to worry about missing out on meeting The One. Depending on how we grow through this life, what free will choices we make, that ideal mate is a bit of a moving target. We are all evolving all the time. My darling Hubby and I have sometimes wished we met when we were younger and also realize we were different people back then who were not yet capable of the relationship we have today.
So you see our soulmates serve a much greater purpose than just romance. They help us explore ourselves and remember the profound truth that we came from love and that we are Love. That’s all we are, really, even though we can sometimes act or be acted upon in ways that seem unloving. In order to remember that truth our soulmates bring us the experiences of every kind of love and non-love that exists on earth. Part of the wisdom and beauty of human life is the principle of duality. It’s through showing us contrast in all its many forms that we come to understand truth and love.
So here’s the real burning question: Why do we typically think of romance when we think of soulmates? I believe it’s because we are all ultimately seeking reunion with Source, the Oneness, and it is with romantic partners that many of us experience that sense of togetherness, or at least the craving for it. the recognition that such a feeling exists.
In that respect, all of our earthly relationships are like training wheels, helping us get ready for that big reunion. They allow us to try on different experiences and relationships. They let us experience the results of our choices. They even allow us the grace to break up, hopefully kindly and compassionately, with family, friends, colleagues, and lovers and try again, taking what we’ve learned with us.
It’s a rich and elegant system. We don’t experience every kind of relationship in every lifetime. Your soul may have chosen to explore a different aspect of love for this lifetime. Once here, your free will made choices that either fueled or altered that course.
And all your many soulmates and all the many kinds of soulmates have been with you every step of the way.
Give thanks for your wonderful friends. And gives thanks also for the training wheel relationships and sandpaper experiences. They all have one goal - the care and feeding of your soul growth and human happiness.
Anne Wade is Teacher, Writer, Mentor, and Coach for courageous women in midlife and beyond who want to disrupt their own status quo and design life on their own terms, even in turbulent times. She has developed the Becoming Found process of going within to find and address the inner barriers we have all inadvertently built up against love, happiness, health, wealth and any other desires of our hearts. Teaching women to unapologetically shine like a superstar and live their legacy is Anne’s mission.
You can follow her on her Facebook page “Anne Wade – Becoming found” or join her “Becoming Found” Facebook group.