..Dating Your Shadow
While we often use the word “partner,” this doesn’t require to you identify the person in question as the love of your life.
….. This is because—from one crazy, cosmic, perspective—you are only and always and forever and indissolubly in relationship with your soulmate.
If you’re single and dating, or merely rifling through Tinder on occasion, or scoping out people on the street—consider the fact that every single person you encounter, and especially in the context of dating, is revealing some aspect of your soulmate—precisely because they are revealing some aspect of you. Especially if you consider them to be “definitely wrong for me in some way,” or massively triggering. In fact, the more you get down with the people you consider bad, wrong, shameful, and totally dysfunctional to like, the more rapid this process tends to be.
Basically, you can think of this process as “dating your shadow,” or “dating your own unconscious,” or “getting to know all the parts of yourself and your soulmate that your ego would rather not be.”
The more deeply, powerfully, and effectively you learn to love all the “wrong” people, the sooner your “right” person is likely to reveal themselves —often hiding in plain sight, in our experience at least.
And when they do, you will be super glad you practiced loving all the wrong people, because this insanely fabulous magical person of your dreams is, inevitably, going to appear as someone totally wrong and unlovable and your worst nightmare, on occasion—that is, the love of your life will also be a perfect match for your shadow.
Thus, the more you’ve practiced radically, joyfully, ecstatically loving all the wrong people, in whatever way you choose, the better equipped you’ll be to transform those nightmare moments instantaneously into bliss. Really. .
Carolyn Elliot and Carolyn Burns (both PhDs)
GreatCosmicMothersUnite 