I believe we have Soulmates. Not in the way most people describe them, or the version Universal Studios depicts in romantic films, but they are Souls we are connected to throughout our many lives and who are important to our human experience and we to theirs. We don’t have just one Soulmate, we have several, and they can be friends, partners or family members. Our connections with them can come and go throughout our life depending on what purpose we serve each other.

My Mum and I were Soulmates. We had an incredible bond and despite my Mum having some very challenging issues my devotion to her never wavered. Soulmate connections most often provide security and comfort – their purpose is not spiritual awakening, although they can provide a degree of Soul growth.

I didn’t even know about the concept of Twin Flames until I met mine, but again there is a load of bunkum written about Twin Flames usually by people who’ve never encountered one. There is a myth that our Souls are split into two, the male half and the female half, and that our ‘other half’ is our Twin Flame but I don’t believe this is true. When life is created there is a separate egg and a separate sperm, who merge to become one life. Our Souls are whole and individual, but can merge with another to create spiritual oneness.

The other myth about Twin Flames is that you will have a tortuous relationship and will not end up together. I think this is perpetuated by people who have unrequited love, or as a way to explain relationship abuse, and has nothing to do with Soul connections. The purpose of Twin Flames is Soul growth and as I wrote about in this post growth is often achieved through challenge and adversity, not when life is comfortable. Therefore relationships with TFs can be initially challenging which is where the myth that they must be tortuous comes from, although they evolve and don’t remain that way. If abuse is involved that’s a human choice – we do not have Souls whose purpose is to cause pain to another Soul.

I think connecting with your Twin Flame isn’t achieved in every lifetime, it depends on where we our with our Soul growth and what contract we make with our Twin Flame before embarking on our next life, but when they do occur they are profound. Meeting my TF has changed my life even though we are no longer together.

People ask how you know if you’ve encountered a Twin Flame and the truth is some people don’t recognise TF Souls as they are too closed off, or they may recognise a TF Soul but not be spiritually ready to embrace them. The amount of human beings who live in fear boggles my mind – what is it, exactly, they’re afraid of? For me personally, when I met my TF I had an instant connection and a ‘knowing’ that this was different from any connection I’d had before. He felt like home. He experienced the connection too the first time we slept together, but immediately shut it down for reasons known only to him.

Twin Flame encounters will include:

• The primary aim of Soul growth and spiritual oneness
• A mental, physical and spiritual connection
• Intensity &/or obsession
• Strong physical chemistry
• Yearning to be together (this is the Soul pull)
• Telepathy or other psychic phenomena
• ‘Knowing’ or intuition
• Signs & synchronicities outside the norms for coincidence
• Challenges & obstacles, at least in the beginning

My personal experience with my Twin Flame

The relationship I had with my Twin Flame was, for me, completely ‘other worldly’ and I had experiences with him which I’d never had with anyone else. He dumped me about 4 weeks into our relationship and I reacted by taking him for a walk in a local Bluebell wood and acting like he hadn’t even spoken – looking back it was bizarre behaviour but it was almost like I was taken over and wasn’t even in control of my actions. During that walk I told him two things:

• Firstly that I saw his inner child.
  As we were walking I’d had a very strong vision of the two of us, around 7 years old, holding hands in a school playground as all the other children played around us. I had childhood wounds at that age and I believe so did he. My trauma led me to become empathic because that’s how my current body is genetically wired, his to becoming narcissistic because that’s how his current body is genetically wired. I still strongly believe that we had a Soul contract to heal each other from our child-hood wounds.
• Secondly I said I knew he was tired of holding the wheel and I was strong enough to take it from him for a while.
  I thought, at the time, I was picking up his exhaustion from dealing with the sudden death of his Wife a year earlier, however I now think it was the fact that he gets tired of pretending to be someone he’s not. Narcissists hide behind a mask, but on a Soul level it’s not who they are and it must be exhausting not being your authentic self.

Bearing in mind we barely knew each other he must have thought I was bonkers and looked at me like I’d grown two heads 😂

On our way back to my house in the car I asked him if he knew what he was doing, because our relationship was rare and special and only comes along once in a lifetime. I remember he laughed and said “why, do you think you can give me something someone else can’t?!” He was clueless about the extent of our connection.

After the dumping and the walk he went home, then rang me to check I was OK. I shocked him by saying I was absolutely fine because I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that it was not the end of our relationship. I was quite correct.

All this, of course, could be fanciful made-up nonsense in my head but other aspects of our relationship suggest otherwise.

He dumped me 5 times (Narcissists are abusive and he was, of course, cheating on me not that I knew this at the time) and acted so badly towards me that he forced me to dump him twice. He’s since told me that during pivotal times in his life I would reconnect with him – the synchronicities were consistent, it happened far too often to be coincidence, yet he refused to really look at what it meant.

The signs alerting us that we had a Soul connection were strong:

• His dog was called the same name as my first pet.
• His eldest Daughter had the same name as my Nan.
• My Dad’s family name is the same name as his Son.
• His youngest Daughter has a fine art degree and I’m a fine art photographer.
• I reconnected to him at one time because I knew his dog was ill, thought it had to do with her stomach and asked him to take her to the Vet. He told me she’d just been and was fine, then a few weeks later she was diagnosed with Colitis.
• I wrote him a letter one day after we hadn’t been in touch for months and as I was placing it in the post box a message appeared on my smart watching saying “great job, well done!” for absolutely no reason.
• He took me to the Church where his Wife is buried to show me her grave, and I sat in the exact spot in a pew where he always sits.
• I was able to manifest text messages from him, even when he was in another country.
• He used to obsessively think about me and I knew when this was happening. I tested this out with him and it was not imaginary.
• I knew when he was experiencing strong emotions. Again, I tested this out with him and it was not imaginary.
• We both had the same dream one night, where we were at a house party and saw each other there. Shared dreams are actually a thing, even though neither of us had heard of them before.
• His pet name for me was Lovely Soul, long before I ever mentioned I knew we were soul connected.

In addition, I meditate in an afternoon and for weeks he appeared in my mediation as a young boy clinging to my legs. In the end I told the grown up him that I would never leave him and the visions of him during my mediation ceased.

Also in my meditation I had very clear visions of one of our former lives, where we were married and had 2 young children. He was violently killed and my Soul carries that wound still. Honestly, the grief I felt during our relationship was insane, even when I was really happy, and clearly wasn’t rational or related to my relationship with him in this life.

We also both, at times, had paternal/maternal feelings towards each other which I’ll explain a little later.

Despite all the signs, synchronicities and weird psychic stuff he refused to accept we were TFs, so he booked a reading with a competent Psychic and gave her our relationship to analyse alongside the relationship he was having with another woman. She confirmed that we really were Soul connected and in that one of our previous lives I had been his Mum. That explained the maternal feelings I sometimes had for him. And I’m sure in another life he was my Dad, which would explain his paternal feelings for me.

We had both been on a lifelong spiritual quest and both felt intense loneliness at a Soul level, yet despite his wanting spiritual oneness and all the evidence that we were Twin Flames he couldn’t bring himself to even explore, let alone commit, to spiritual union. Instead he chose what he himself described as a ‘surface level’ relationship which he knew didn’t provide him with Soul growth. His human narcissism, of course, muddied the waters.

Recognising our Twin Flame is rare, as most of us have no recollection of our previous lives, though we will be guided by signs, synchronicities and ‘other worldly’ experiences. The connection is not new – it has always existed and will always exist. If you reconnect with a Twin Flame it’s a beautiful, if often initially challenging, gift and can be truly transformative. Treasure it and be thankful.