How would you recognize your soulmate, or the mate to your soul? What is so different about a relationship with your soulmate or what I call your perfect counterpart, as opposed to a relationship with anybody else?

The difference is in how you reached that person. The difference is in the path. A wise friend said “The perfect counterpart is someone that you can only experience harmonious union with while you are in harmonious union with yourself.” In other, less harmonious and less healthy connections, the relationship crumbles when one person aligns with his or her true self, finds his or her true path, while the other person struggles to adjust and align himself to that.

Those connections don’t last long, but they are still valuable teachers. Those connections teach us balance. As long as we struggle to balance ourselves with the relationship or with the other person, we throw ourselves out of balance. Through years of trial and error with various relationships, we always lose our balance when we try to align ourselves with someone outside ourselves. For many people, this lesson lasts a lifetime. They repeatedly try to align themselves with other people rather than align with their true self. In the process they lose themselves, they lose their identity, they lose their pride, they lose their stability. Those relationships seem like a losing game, and many people eventually throw in the towel, give up on looking for the One completely, and then through some much needed solitude, unintentionally find a connection to themselves.

What happens when we connect with that self? We fall in love with who we are, what we have, our circumstances, our life. After all this is all our creation. In this space, the lucky few begin to appreciate their losses, their failures, all their bruises and scars. The process of connecting to the self is long, most people can’t be bothered with it. But for the few who manage to connect, this is a life altering experience.

It is a time for self-discovery, learning, inner growth, editing, discarding beliefs that no longer serve us. The process cleanses us and lightens our load. There is a dark side to the process, it is much more uncomfortable, yet still an enlightening experience. Make no mistake, this is a long journey, one that most people will give up on. However, it is all worthwhile. In that process, we achieve harmonious union with ourselves. We became unshakably loyal to our inner being, our inner truth, to our selves. Other people cease to be as important to us as we are to ourselves. We understand that others cannot create our happiness, and as we gain balance within ourselves, create our own energy, feed our own soul, we reach a state of self reverence. It is the ideal place to be for a being who has mastered herself.

In this state of self-reverence, we all become more attractive to others. In fact, we become magnets for both balanced and imbalanced people. Balanced people, who are like us, acknowledge us, enjoy our company, but stay balanced on their own. Unfortunately, we become extremely attractive to the imbalanced ones too. Why wouldn’t we, we are the epitome of stability, strength, wisdom, truth and alignment.

At this point it is extremely important to become discerning about friendships and romantic relationships. People see in us what they lack within themselves, and often become attracted to what we can provide. Unfortunately, most of them have not achieved balance or alignment, and often seek to lean on us, or extract from us what they lack within themselves. Having given a few of these relationships a chance, I learned the hard way that there is absolutely nothing that I can do for a person who has not achieved their own balance, or done their own inner work. As well meaning as I am, I fail every time.  Those relationships drain me, destabilize me, take away from the quality of my own life. I don’t blame anything on them, my willingness to give energy shows that I too can still lose balance. I need to strengthen my own alignment.

However, I do notice that as time goes by, I am more able to remain aligned despite who is near me. I now determine the health of a relationship by checking in with myself and measuring my balance, asking myself whether I am leaning on someone or is someone leaning on me, how centered am I as the relationship progresses?

I do find that now, after a decade of doing work on myself, I appreciate people who too have done that work. I value their experiences, I can learn from what they have become. I am better able to discern potential relationships by paying attention to the person’s inner world (if they have one), and am more apt to see what they need from me, and what they hope to achieve through the relationship.

But my most valued tool for assessing how balanced the other person is, is remaining in continued alignment with myself. When I can maintain that for short periods of time, I can easily filter out those men who struggle to find their equilibrium and their own power in my presence. What happens most often is that with my awareness locked into myself, they struggle to find my weakness, a need, a crack in my foundation, a way to gain a foothold as they climb up to my tower. They often fall flat on their faces. I don’t help them stand up. Others play feeble mind games, or employ trickery like NLP to control my attention. It doesn’t work, but it helps me identify them.

When I can maintain my alignment for extended periods of time, I am in harmonious union with myself. Some who have achieved this state claim that it is lonely at the top. I think there are fewer people up here who can maintain their alignment for so long. However, here we instantly recognize each other, we resonate with each other, we are among equals. There is nothing to prove to anyone, because we all ARE. There is no asking anything of anyone, because we all HAVE. There is no seeking, because we have all found ourselves. There is no leaning on other people, we are all balanced. Can you imagine how harmonious relationships are among people who aren’t seeking to gain anything from anyone, when no one is feeding off anyone, when all people have completed themselves? There may be fewer people here, but they are all enjoyable.

Relationships should be enjoyable, they should be in independent harmony, they should reflect our highest values. As long as they are not that, relationships are just our teachers. How many excellent teachers have I had? I am grateful for the life lessons, I hope they all found what they were looking for, I wish them nothing but the best that life can offer. But, I am in that place where I can hold on to my own alignment and maintain my own balance, and those who haven’t achieved that are not my equals. I wish them a pleasant journey.

S