73% of Americans believe in soulmates. Most of them envision everlasting love, romance, sexual attraction, and happiness, and to live happily ever after once they fall in love–without having to do any ongoing work in their relationship. However, this is a magical fairytale fantasy that rarely, if ever, happens in real life.
An Integral understanding of soulmates is that they:
(1) Are compatible to share their biological purpose.
(2) Challenge each other to become their best versions of themselves through ongoing mirroring, learning, healing, growing, and awakening.
(3) Synergize by sharing a purpose that is larger than either individual and makes the world a better place.
Three kinds of Soulmates:
Biological Soulmates are uniquely compatible in their DNA, values, needs/desires, and lifestyle to enact their Biological Purpose or Imperative to perpetuate their existence through self-sustaining processes such as:
1. Survival (food, shelter, safety)
2. Reproduction/Procreation (DNA/Raising offspring)
3. Group forming (Family/Community)
4. Territorialism
5. Competition/Cooperation
6. Quality of life seeking
Image Above: Biological Purpose.
Growth Soulmates (or worthy opponents) are opposites and equals who are uniquely compatible to challenge each other to become fully human through ongoing learning, healing, growing, and awakening.
1. Ongoing learning allows us to meet life’s challenges and living our Biological, Growth and Transcendental Purpose in ever better ways.
2. Ongoing healing supports empathetic, cooperative, social fitness (or love) in service of our Biological Purpose.
3. Ongoing growing (in consciousness) leads to increasing amounts of freedom (emancipation) through more available choices and wisdom to adequately respond to live challenges (with the caveat that people at higher levels procreate less and focus more on quality of life seeking.)
4. Ongoing awakening leads to increasing levels of peace and joy through present moment to moment awareness and surrender to what is, without attachment, desire, hatred, delusion.
Image Above:Â Growth Potentials Matrix
Transcendental Purpose Soulmates are uniquely compatible to realize their highest human potentials by co-creating more goodness, truth, beauty or functioning in service of the Biological Purpose and others by complementing their talents for empathy, cognitive intelligence, creativity/aesthetics, and practicality, as well as feminine/masculine polarities and personality types. They…
1. Share the same joy, passion, concern, pain, and desire to make the world a better place in service of the Biological Purpose and others, by sharing the same calling (to maintain, improve, innovate) and depth (gross, subtle, causal, pure witness, non-dual).
2. Assume equal rights and responsibilities in enacting their purpose by BOTH doing what they love to do and are good at, and what the world needs and pays them for.
3. Make feminine (care, compassion, feelings, relationships) and masculine (rights, justice, rationality, autonomy) validity claims to what is good, true, beautiful, and functional and only proceed to action when there is mutual understanding and agreement between them and all affected people living and unborn.
4. Co-create their love relationship as opposites and equals at the level of all seven chakras. They not only love each other, but even more so what is uniquely co-created between them.
Image Above: Couple Sharing Transcendental Purpose
About 90% of people envision a biological soulmate, 10% also envision a growth soulmate, 1% also envision a transcendental purpose soulmate (transcends and includes the first two.)
What is the soul versus the ego?
In the Integral Relationship Model, the soul is seen as the self that is not personal. It holds our unique potentials that exist genetically after conception (before our physical body and brain form and our separate sense of self (or Ego) is created through experiences and learning) to become fully human by sharing our biological, growth, and transcendental purpose, driven by the co-creative and procreative impulse.
The ego (Latin for “I”) in the way we use it here is the wounded, conditioned, separate sense of self that is not open to mutual co-creation or love, versus healthy Ego development of ever-higher awareness, consciousness, capacity, embrace, freedom, understanding, empathy, etc.
| Ego
Me | Soul
We/Us |
Soulmate Finding/Attracting/Inviting Process:
Most people take a bottom-up approach to dating and relating:
From biological transactional love, to growth transformational love, to shared transcendental purpose love.
Sometimes, biological love leads to transformational love or vice versa.
More often, partners split up when one of them evolves to live their growth or transcendental purpose and the other does not.
Unlike transactional and transcendental love, transformational love is often unstable, and people move through multiple successive or parallel relationships (serial monogamy or non-monogamy, incl. polyamory and phases of singlehood/celibacy), as partners learn, heal, grow, and awaken at different paces and in different developmental lines, such as consciousness, emotional, spiritual, sexual, anima/animus, etc.
A better approach (if possible) is a top-down process:
To first identify and live our transcendental purpose, and then finding/attracting/inviting our soulmate to fall in love with who also shares our growth and biological purpose.
Defining/envisioning our Integral Soulmate:
We cannot find, attract, or invite our Integral soulmate if we don’t know what we are looking for.
• What kind of soulmate are we ready for (Biological, Growth, and/or Transcendental?)
• What are realistic desires and expectations in a soulmate, depending on what we bring to the relationship?
• How will we feel when our desires are met?
• What are obstacles, concerns, limited views, negative self-talk, fears, blocks, etc.?
Desires – Contribution – Positive feelings -Obstacles:
Material/Lifestyle/Money (survival/safety)?
Answers:
Physical Body (looks, fitness, age, diet, hygiene, smell, sleep, etc.)?
Answers:
Sexuality (level, frequency)?
Answers:
Children/Grandchildren?
Answers:
Family/Community?
Answers:
Pets and Animals?
Answers:
Territory (Live and open to Move to) ?
Answers:
Profession/Status?
Answers:
Quality of Life (time, interests, passions, hobbies, dreams/vision for the future) ?
Answers:
Values/Needs/Ideals?
Answers:
Emotional Intelligence/Availability?
Answers:
Learning?
Answers:
Healing/Shadow Work?
Answers:
Growing Translation and Transformation?
Answers:
Spiritual Awakening?
Answers:
Shared Transcendental Purpose (Co-Creating Good, True, Beautiful, Functional/Practical)?
Answers:
Out of our answers, we can create our clear, captivating dating profile and/or vision map that focuses on the (ideally three) most important things, regardless if we use it online or not, and be clear who we want to find, attract, invite, or being invited by to explore a relationship with. We can then approach every potential, qualifying soulmate with “beginners mind” to stay open to potentials outside your profile/vision map.
Removing Psychological Blocks and Barriers to Love:
Rumi wrote: “Our task is not to seek love, but to remove all the barriers that prevent it.”
Most dating coaches have discovered that their clients first need to address psychological blocks such as fears, shame, negative self-talk, and deeply rooted behavioral patterns as a first step to find or attract their soulmate. Two good strategies are described below:
Voice dialogue:
Created in the early 1970s by Hal and Sidra Stone (also known as Big Mind process by Genpo Roshi). They discovered the presence of numerous sub-personalities/voices (also called energy patterns or selves) within the human psyche, for example the critic, the cynic, the protector, etc.
Immunity to Change:
Discovered by Harvard Graduate School of Education professors Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, who propose that when we fail at a goal we’ve set for ourselves, such as attracting or finding our Soulmate, it isn’t just a lack of willpower, it’s likely that an “emotional immune system” is covertly at work, defending us from feelings of disappointment, fear, or shame.
Getting ready, finding/attracting, and invitations:
After becoming clear what we are looking for in our soulmate, we can ready ourself and open up to finding/attracting or inviting potential soulmates or receiving their invitations.
Below are some suggestions:
Acceptance:
From Robert Augustus Masters “Transformation through Intimacy – The Journey Towards Mature Monogamy” on the page before the Introduction:
“The passage from immature to mature [Integral] Relationships is not just a journey of ripening intimacy with a beloved other, but also a journey into and through zones of ourselves that may be quite difficult to navigate, let alone get intimate with and integrate with the rest of our being. But however much this passage might ask of us, it gives back even more, transforming us until we are established in the unshakable love, profound passion, and radically intimate mutuality that epitomize mature [Integral] Relationships. And even if we do not end up in such a relationship, our having taken the journey toward it will immeasurably benefit us [and others] in whatever we do.”