Gay Landeta
A challenging relationship the greatest gift? Really? YES! Read on….
The challenge of the search for a soul mate is well known… so many think that once they find ‘the one’ they will be happy forever. The nice little fairy tale ending. But soul mates come in all shapes and sizes and are not always the perfect love match. Sometimes they are friends or relatives. And sometimes they come into our life for us to explore our dark side.
These soul mate relationships can be very intense, painful and even harder to let go of than the perfect love match. I once heard these challenging soul mate lovers called the ‘Dark Lover’…. And ohhh, don’t they feel like that?! Very often we feel as intense the pull towards them as the push away.
So what do I mean by exploring the ‘the dark side’? Well, as soon as I mention this I immediately see Darth Vader. And to be truthful, he is part of this archetype.
The dark side is our shadow. It is often the part of us that we don’t particularly like or even want to acknowledge. We often try to overcome this aspect of ourselves and even can consider it a character flaw. However once we explore it there is wisdom there – but also danger if we misuse it.
For example for all us Virgo’s out there – yes I am coming out as a Virgo – we can be super critical and judgmental. (And, by the way, any criticism you may hear coming from a Virgo is probably a quarter of what is going on within). So that critical nature may become our ‘dark side’. Kept hidden and hated, it can start to be expressed as ever increasing criticism. But acknowledged and transformed, it becomes the ability to discern – which is part of the higher purpose for a Virgo.
So how does the shadow relate to our ‘Dark Lover’? Well, there you are, trotting along with life, doing your absolute best to hide that yucky bit. And you meet your Dark Lover. Oh, so very attractive. Dark Lovers are all we are not and yet exactly the same. We feel complete with them. They have rescued us, or so we hope. Or maybe we wanted to rescue them…. But, therein lies the downfall (kind of like for Darth Vader I guess). We are rescued / rescuing instead of being responsible for our Self and our own journey.
And so the relationship goes, often developing into an incredibly painful love/hate, a messy emotional or even physical violent experience, the drama triangle in full tilt. But, once we can get a perspective on a difficult relationship (and we can’t do this while we are still inside the pain of the relationship) we can just settle into recognizing what we have learned in the relationship. One of the ways to let go of that pain is rather than spending time trying to understanding the situation or figure out who did what to whom just realise that it was what it was and the learning – the really gift of the relationship – can come. Once that gift is accepted the relationship can be finally let go of. Sometimes this takes years after the relationship is over – especially if we are stuck in the blame game.
This gift will not be the ‘backward gift’ (e.g. never to love again… that men / women are really totally untrustworthy… to never share again, etc) but the true gift, for example the gift of inner strength or re-aligning with our True Self or of listening to our inner wisdom or one of million other magical learnings that those challenging relationships can bring. Once we recognize the gift we can forgive and release the other with the highest kind of universal love (instead of the hormone driven extravaganza it may have started with).
May the Force be with you.
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