Love: My Story (PART 2)
What love unexpectedly taught me
Soul Wisdom is a weekly newsletter. Please feel free to share parts of this letter that connect with you, or send to someone you love. A special shout out to all the new subscribers who joined since the last newsletter. Thank you for valuing my work when there are so many things that can take your attention online. I appreciate you. It means everything. 🖤
A song I listened to during writing:
You can follow the lyrics and read the Sanskrit translations of the song here.
A Spiritual Love
“A soul connection is a resonance between two people who respond to the essential beauty of each other's individual natures, behind their facades, and who connect on this deeper level. This kind of mutual recognition provides a catalyst for a potent alchemy. It is a sacred alliance whose purpose is to help both partners discover and realise their deepest potentials.” - John Wellwood
Last week I shared the story of how I met my beautiful life partner. How love found two old souls when they least expected it.
If you haven’t read it yet I recommend reading it before diving into this one. Read here.
In this letter, I share what I’ve learned about love and relationships so far.
I ended the last piece by saying I did a medicine journey that changed my idea of love altogether.
Let’s start there.
The memories that were unlocked were surreal.
A series of past life memories blew through my mind at an incredible speed. So much so, that I was struggling to contain the abundance of ecstatic energy flowing through me.
As these images flashed through my mind I felt a tsunami of orgasmic love. It’s hard to explain but I knew without a doubt these memories were about Hannah.
Everything in my memories were shown in pairs.
We were two grains of sand,
Two drops of water in the ocean,
I was the entire ocean floor and she was the whole ocean,
She was the sun,
I was the moon,
I was the sun,
She was the moon,
We were two petals on the same flower,
Two wings on the same bird,
Two roots on the same tree,
Then it moved to body parts.
Two fingers on the same hand,
Two eyes on the same face,
Two teeth in the same mouth,
Two testicles.
Two breasts.
Then it was body parts of two separate humans.
I was the lips on one person, she was the lips on the other—we kissed.
Like this, it went on and on and on for eons.
Then finally a voice said,
“You have now both been given the gift of a body so you can experience everything you have already been.”
Woah.
Clearly these weren’t memories from my human brain.
They were memories from the soul.
A flood of awe bursts through my veins every time I think about that.
We’ve always been of service together. Now it’s time for us to be of service in another way.
I saw the below clip on Instagram a few months back. The words blew me away. It is a beautiful description of divine love that you can only express if you have truly experienced it.
Note: If you’re reading this in email it won’t let you play the video. Click on the video to be taken to a web browser or even better, download the Substack app and view it there (highly recommend).
rEVOLution
“We need a r/evolution of the mind. We need a r/evolution of the heart. We need a r/evolution of the spirit. The power of the people is stronger than any weapon. A people’s r/evolution can’t be stopped. We need to be weapons of mass construction. Weapons of mass love. It’s not enough just to change the system. We need to change ourselves.” - Assata Shakur
As you can imagine after that experience I wasn't the same.
I began to question what this was between me and Hannah.
Once you experience something like that, it alters you.
I was even more curious about this love and even more suspicious about what I’d been taught.
This love had become my truth and no one else needed to believe it, support it, or understand it, because it is my path.
This is my divine journey to honour.
Honouring a bold truth takes courage, especially when others question your decisions—and even your sanity.
The more I walk this path I realise I’m sane in an insane world. Lol.
“There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” - Aristotle
Love takes courage because you will have to feel more deeply than you have ever felt before. Our ability to feel love is in direct proportion to our ability to feel in general. When love enters your life it will shine a light on your darkness and you’ll come face to face with any discomfort that lives within you.
Michelangelo didn’t create David, he chipped away at all that wasn’t David. David was already inside the stone. The stone took the form of the beholder. He carved it to look the way he wanted.
Similarly with love, it is always available to us. We have the ability to access it in all of its forms. But we only experience it in a limited way.
Why?
Because we have to carve ourselves by doing the inner work to remove any limitations we have about love.
Hannah and I met at a time when we’d already been doing years of inner work individually. Now we get to do it together. This relationship is showing me blind spots that I couldn't have seen on my own. I had suffocated love by placing it into a tiny box of conditional acceptance. I would only recognise it if it looked a certain way. She inspires my heart to come out of the shadows to experience the medicine of love.
We all have stories about love that need to be unraveled and let go. We’ve held onto them because they have defined us for so long. They feel comfortable. We’re afraid to step outside the lines because the familiar feels safe.
We subconsciously do what we see our parents do or what we believe will make them happy because we want to be loved and accepted by them (and avoid being shamed/judged).
Alternatively, we can be determined not to be like our parents and make choices from that space (wanting to breakaway for fear of being the same as them). Either way, we’re operating from fear, not love or inspiration.
If you aren’t taking action from a space of love or inspiration, is it really your truth?
Lies have lived in our mind so long we call them truths.
A spiritual mentor once said we are hoarders.
Our work is in letting go of the generations of lies we carry within us so we can be free to truly be ourselves and make new choices.
As I began to let go of my expired stories around love I was birthing a new love.
I remember one evening Hannah and I were on a date. Whilst we were waiting for our food to arrive I held her hand, looked her in the eye, and said;
“I can’t believe I would’ve missed out on this magic if I believed my mind instead of my heart. If I chose to believe that because you didn’t look the way I expected and didn’t arrive when I was ready, you weren’t for me. I would’ve passed up on this love because I didn't recognise it.”
I smiled and shook my head. I felt so foolish.
How arrogant of me to think love would appease my ego by placing itself at my feet in the way I desired and when I desired it.
You don’t tell love when to find you and how it should look when it does. If you are open, humble, and have faith, she will find you and bless you.
When she found me, I had to have the courage to let her transform me by devouring my old self.
The shift I made was from seeing only with my eyes to feeling with my heart. That’s how you recognise love when it knocks on your heart. You don’t recognise it with your eyes because it can look a million different ways. You’ll only notice it when you’re truly feeling with your heart.
There is a lot of conditional love on the planet right now.
We expect people to be a certain way to make us happy.
To break the chains of this we must step outside of where we think love exists. This means exploring partnerships we may not have considered before, and may even seem controversial to family/society.
What if unconditional love is waiting for you outside your comfort zone?
Let’s be honest, me and Hannah aren’t the norm (yet).
How often do you step outside and see an inter-abled + inter-racial couple?
Note: Inter-abled means one person has a disability and the other doesn’t.
When people see something different they’ll talk, judge, criticise.
The way I see it is simple:
Why make decisions based on others’ expectations when in the end they’ll all die and I’ll be the one having to live with the decisions I’ve made? Even if I die before them, I’m the one living with my choices day-to-day so I need to be happy with them.
Our ideas of love need to change.
To me, a revolution is a radical transformation of existing order to create change infused with a higher harmonious order. The word ‘love’ is embedded in rEVOLution.
I wonder how many people have settled with someone they think they should marry to avoid causing drama versus who they actually want to marry?
Love is a strange thing.
It doesn’t look a certain way.
It’s a feeling, not an appearance.
Yet, some of us choose partners based on what would make our parents happy or would fit the narratives in society.
We avoid being shamed, judged, and criticised.
We make choices about love from a place of fear. Lol.
What Is Love?
“Love gives the heart without expectation” - Miguel’s Mother, This Is Us
I sat with what the difference between love and lust.
Here’s what I came up with:
Lust is an activation of your lower chakra. You’re only drawn by external surface level beauty. You’re driven by an animalistic urge to have sex.
Love is a heart chakra and above activation. It is a feeling of union, calmness, stability. It is nurturing, grounding, and expansive. It inspires you to recognise the deeper beauty hidden from the eyes.
For me, love wasn’t an instant connection. It was a gradual remembering of the truth. I’ve made love a daily choice. I choose to lean in and discover it over and over. The act of choosing it consistently is defrosting my heart.
Our illusions of love need to be destroyed.
That can only happen when our dreams, ideals, and expectations of love crumble.
I think thats what Rumi meant when he said:
“Your heart must break over and over until it is fully open.”
My relationship is giving me the opportunity to surrender in a much deeper way. To fully let go of my old self and become a new version. The old me wouldn’t have recognised this love. That’s why I had to let him go to be reborn into a new love.
We’re looking for love whilst still identifying with the pain and suffering of our past. From that place how do you expect to be in a relationship that will lift you higher when you’re stuck in loop of your past stories?
You look at this picture and think “they look really happy”.
We are.
But there’s a lot of inner work that has happened (and continues to happen) behind the scenes.
“The real work you have to do is in the privacy of your own heart.” - Ram Dass
Our connection is cultivated with daily effort.
Does that mean you could be in a relationship with anyone as long as you put in the effort?
I’m not so sure.
Of course you could date whoever you want, but if the energy between you two isn’t aligned then it won’t last very long. It’s like running on a treadmill—you’re exerting energy but not getting anywhere.
I’m no astrologer but I do believe that there needs to be an alignment of planetary energy in both your charts for there to be some potential.
A spiritual teacher said;
“I don’t care about what you look like, how old you are, or what you believe. There has to be alignment in your planetary chemistry. That’s the only thing I’m concerned about.”
Think of it this way:
Each of us is made up of a group of natural forces. When two people interact, it’s two forces of nature interacting. They will either clash or have the potential to collaborate.
But that’s not all.
You must also have similar values in life.
Without that you’re two people going in two different directions. If you value similar things then you’re heading in a similar direction. It's no longer a game of tug of war where one is trying to dominate and control the other to do things a certain way. You’re harmoniously walking the path together.
Here’s some values that me and Hannah have. We individually value these with or without each other:
Committed to the inner work. Looking at where our emotional patterns are keeping us stuck so we’re not projecting our past onto the world. We’re committed to vulnerably communicating things that bring us discomfort. Having the hard conversations means life will get easier.
“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” - Sigmund Freud
A friend once said to me “Foundation takes the longest to build, but you see it the least.” Tough conversations build the foundation of the ecstasy you feel later.
Open mindedness and curiosity for life. We are naturally curious about different things in life. We’re open to trying new ways of doing things. We try not to believe that there is only one way to approach something. We read lots of different things, have lots of ideas to discuss, and want to travel to see different parts of the world.
Spiritual growth. We are both spiritually inclined so our daily lifestyle, conversation, and overall direction in life reflects that.
Orgasmic Love
“Intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them and their response is ‘you’re safe with me’, that’s intimacy.” - Taylor Jenkins Reid
I’ve learned so much about the bedroom.
The quality and depth of the orgasms you experience in the bedroom have a direct correlation to the quality and depth of the emotional connection to yourself and your partner.
If you’re not feeling connected to yourself or to your partner, how will your body feel safe to fully open during sex?
If there are parts of you that you keep shut down and hidden from your partner, there will inevitably be parts of you shut down and hidden in your body too.
Just because you’re naked doesn’t mean you’re open and available.
Just because you’re going through the motions of having sex doesn’t mean you’re feeling deeply connected and experiencing the fullness of bliss available to you.
How many times have you had an orgasm that has felt mediocre and other times had mindblowing ones?
Imagine, there are infinitely more levels to how much more your mind can get blown. But it takes work to get there.
The deeper you can connect to yourself and surrender to your partner, the more you can trust and open to them emotionally, the more orgasmic your sex will be.
Sex starts outside the bedroom.
Its in the way your energy interacts day-to-day.
Love In Disguise
“A God defined is a God confined.” - Ram Kir
One day a boy met a girl that he really connected with but he was confused. His heart felt connected but his eyes deceived him. The image in his mind was different to the feeling in his heart. This wasn’t supposed to be a match and yet it felt like it was.
He sought the Masters wisdom:
“Love does not look a certain way. You have been taught to love in a very limited way. Ticking boxes about who the right person is based on external expectations. Love does not work in such a restricted manner. It flows effortlessly between two open hearts. The heart knows the truth, the mind can be easily manipulated. Hearts all look the same. They see no difference. Only your mind does.”
Whilst I was reflecting on our relationship one day a thought came:
Sita is disguised in many forms.
I’m hiding inside her this time.
Context: Rama and Sita are two central figures in Hinduism in the story of the Ramayana. They are a couple that represent unconditional divine love.
The thought made me laugh.
Yet again, I felt foolish.
I was being limited in my view because Hannah didn’t look the way I expected.
Who was I to decide how Sita should look?
We tend to choose partners from a place of feeling lack—like something is missing from our lives that only they can fix. That is an unhealthy burden for the partner to carry. It is healthier to approach love from a place of feeling whole and complete. Then your partner expands your world, not fixes it.
A conscious partnership is about helping each other heal. To expand and grow together. You serve yourself, each other, and humanity. The relationship becomes a container for divinity to express itself more fully.
As my friend
beautifully put it:
The more Hannah and I work out our blockages, the higher the vibration of our relationship container becomes, and the purer the energy between us is. Only in that space will Source/God feel safe to manifest even more. It can flow through our container to heal us and others around us.
Thus, the evolution of consciousness is carried forward.
Seeing more pure partnerships like this will lead us toward a transformational destiny for humanity.
Can you recognise God in disguise?
Love As Spiritual Evolution
“Everyone’s a mystic until you ask them to surrender to life as it is. Most people spend their entire life running away from emptiness and the concept of being nothing. The mystic runs towards it.” - Maryam Hasnaa
The most important thing in my life is spiritual evolution.
What if this relationship was a spiritual gift?
What would it be helping me with?
To lessen the intensity of my samskar’s and free myself of karmas that don’t serve me. To have a regulated nervous system. To create a reality rooted in love which helps me thrive. To not be pulled by my old thoughts so easily. To live with courage, compassion, and passion. To be led by the curiosities of my heart. To trust my intuition and see Source/God in everything.
Samskara is deep conditioning that takes place within your mind. It is repeated thought patterns and behaviours that have become habitual. It keeps you stuck in a reactionary loop to life. Instead of creating anything new, you’re always reacting to life. If you’re in reaction all the time you’re not creating/experiencing anything new.
This creates a karmic loop that keeps you stagnant. Playing out the same shit over and over again. Karma is not bad. It’s about the type of karma you have. Is it helping you spiritually evolve or keeping you stuck where you are?
In Joseph Selbie’s book The Yugas he describes four eras that the world is split into:
Satya
Treta
Dwarpa
Kali
Satya is the purest era in which conflict is at its least, connection to the divine is at its peak, everyone is living in harmony with nature. From there each era gets progressively disconnected from Source/God.
Selbie says we’re currently between the 3rd and 4th, in Kali.
This means illusions, false ideas, greed, manipulation, violence, fear and control, are reigning right now.
We are easily distracted.
Eons of wisdom live within us. But we must take the time to get quiet enough to sense it. And to be able to sense, you have to be able to FEEL. We’ve become disconnected and numb from really feeling our body. We spend too much time in our mind. The mind can easily be programmed with a variety of false ideas.
How many programmes are currently active in your mind that don’t serve you?
The spiritual journey is about removing these illusions.
“In the long run it is far more dangerous to adhere to an illusion than to face what the actual fact is.” - Dr. David Bohm
So you see, our story isn’t about us. Not really. It’s about how love danced through time. How it wore different disguises and tried to find itself. It played hide and seek with itself like a child. Because love is innocent, unconditional, unbounded, like a child. It knows nothing but play.
Leela.
Love is Leela.
Divine Play.
What if this was Shiva and Kali playing hide and seek with each other through the ages?
What if love was my guru?
Being in these human bodies gives us an opportunity to spiritually evolve. When we’re born, duality begins. It’s the beginning of this game. Our journey is about going back home to recognise unity. Back to oneness. As Ram Dass once beautifully said,
“We’re all walking each other home.”
Silly me.
How did I forget?
You were always my muse.
Why Relationships Struggle
“Love is a feeling of connection that gets forgotten about and the relationship becomes stale because it requires work. A relationship is a separate entity that requires consistent attention and nurturing.” - Me
A relationship isn’t about either of you. When you come together you’re forming a third entity called the relationship which needs to be nourished.
We don’t nourish it because we don’t heal, so we can’t move past our own wounded needs.
We project onto each other.
We try to suppress our issues hoping they disappear, but they don't.
Unfortunately, we don’t have many healthy masculine or feminine role models so we’re having to figure it out ourselves.
We don’t need to be fully healed before going into a relationship. That’s impossible. I’m not and she’s not. But we’re committed to helping each other feel seen, heard, and acknowledged.
Relationships are mirrors. They will show you where you still haven’t healed. It is a beautiful place to heal should you use it to do so.
Here’s some thoughts on why relationships struggle:
1. We don’t know who we are.
We haven’t taken the time to understand who we are and what our wounds are. We start looking for a partner when we get to a certain age (usually 20 to 30) to start settling down. We feel the pressure from family and from our peer group. We go on multiple dates and are left unsure who to go with and how to even choose. We choose the wrong partners because we aren’t clear on what we value because we don’t know who we are.
2. We don’t talk about the hard stuff.
We shy away from the things we really want to voice. Don’t let resentment build up because you can’t express yourself. Take time to build safety and security in your relationship. No need to rush to the next steps simply to show commitment or progress. A ring doesn't signify progress. The level of safety you feel in your heart does.
3. We don’t listen deeply.
Most people are preparing what they want to say when someone else is talking. Rarely do you find someone who is present and is fully engaged in what you’re saying. Our souls are craving someone to really hear us.
4. Men don’t lead and women don’t soften.
There is an unhealthy power struggle going on. We’ve not been taught what it means to be a healthy man or woman. We get into a relationship and expect the other person to be the father or mother we never had. From that place a man cannot truly lead and a woman cannot feel safe to follow his lead if she doesn’t trust him.
5. We don’t show appreciation.
Show appreciation for the small things that you would otherwise take for granted. If Hannah does the dishes I thank her. Before we indulge in dinner, she always thanks me for cooking it. There’s a million other things she does for me. However, something doesn’t need to happen for me to show appreciation. I randomly write her notes and leave them on her side of the bed to simply make her smile.
6. Forcing our partner to change.
We make the other person feel like they need to change in order to make you/the relationship happier. Always making it their fault. It can happen in more subtle ways too like if you’ve learned something new and are trying to preach it to your partner telling them it’s “positive”.
7. We stop making effort.
Doesn’t matter how far along you are in your relationship, you have to keep dating like it’s day one. Sometimes dress up and be fancy. Sometimes stay at home. But make effort. Hannah needs to be nurtured because otherwise she falls into the role of nurturing everyone else and gets exhausted. I think most women do. I’m here to let her feel it’s ok to let someone else take care of you too.
8. We lack curiosity.
Your partner had a whole life before they met you. Hannah had a whole life before she met me, as did I. Its important that we both ask questions to understand who we were before we met because it is part of our story. Never feel like you know your partner. Continually get to know them.
9. Lack of other healthy relationships.
Healthy friendships outside of our relationship is important. It is important we don’t dissolve our identity just because we’re together. It’s important to have other relationships to nourish other parts of yourself. She can’t be everything and everyone for me. It’s important for me to have other friendships and mentors who I can lean on.
10. We don’t know their love language.
What is your love language? It may look different for each of you. You may put in effort thinking you’re putting in effort because that’s your definition of effort/love, but it may not be theirs. So in their heart they still don’t feel it as love. Maybe you buy them gifts, but they prefer words of affirmation. Get to know yours and theirs.
11. We don’t give each other space.
Couple don’t give each other space. It is vital that we have our own alone time away from one another. That boundary is important. This doesn’t have to be a trip away somewhere. It’s as simple as wanting 30 minutes to myself in the morning to drink tea and journal in silence whilst she does her thing in the other room.
Love Beyond Duality
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.” - Rumi
We’re two souls who have travelled through multiple lifetimes to understand love in all of its forms. Two souls who begun a journey long before this one.
We have been unconditional love for the world already.
Now we get to be it for each other.
And we get to be a human example to the world of what love in action looks like.
This love is not only healing us, but we hope for it to heal the world in some way too. We hope the Earth becomes a little more balanced in its vibration with us present.
This is a love that sees you beyond all stories and narratives. A love that pulls the light out of you and alchemises the darkness in you.
A divine union. An emanation of Shakti and Shiva in human form to be an example of what happens when you choose to go beyond your ego.
I know now we’ve been placed together for the good of all. This is beyond just me and her. This is a divinely timed cosmic chess move by the Divine Mother to show the world what love is.
When I hear her speak, its like hearing my own soul speak back to me.
Her love is helping free me from my conditioning to ascend my soul into higher realms of divine love.
When she gazes into my eyes she’s actively clearing my karma.
Time falls away.
My body falls away.
Our souls become wrapped in a warm glowing cocoon of ascension.
When I look into her eyes, I feel the truth.
“This” I think.
“This is it”
Love,
V
even the bible talks about -the power of two or more coming together "in my name" (love) is something that people really don't fully understand the power of our manifestation in unity. :) Big hug and thank you for sharing the lessons!
Stunning. “And we get to be a human example to the world of what love in action looks like.” Indeed. Thank you for sharing
Vipul.