Every month, our Soulful Singles "Romance Reverend" shares her sage insights on relationships and getting ready for soulful love!  Send your questions to RomanceRev@SoulfulLiving.com.

Some Day Your Mystical Soul Mate Will Come

Tony from Arizona asks, "How can I tell when I’ve met my true spiritual match – i.e., my soul mate." Cynthia from California asks, "How can I be in the right place, at the right time, for love?" Rosemarie from New York City wants to know, "What soul mate theories do you believe in?"

I believe meeting our spiritual match often requires a combination of consciousness and conscious effort, making choices and allowing things to happen as they are meant to be. In an effort to shed more light on the soul mate questions so many soulful singles have, I will from time to time offer the views of experts who have important insights to share. During this merry month of May, I share an interview I did with my friend Arielle Ford, who brings good tidings about true love in her new book, Hot Chocolate For The Mystical Lover: 101 Stories of Soul Mates Brought Together By Divine Intervention (Plume, January 2001). This is the fourth book in her popular Hot Chocolate For The Mystical Soul Series.

Arielle, a top-selling author and successful publicist, set out to find real-life, modern lovers who felt they were brought together through the magical hands of fate. Her book is filled with true accounts of contemporary love, told through the words and experiences of couples that consider themselves lifetime soul mates. The cool part is Arielle is more than just the storyteller—she's also a subject in the book. She share’s her own spectacular tale of meeting her soul mate and husband, Brian Hilliard.

Arielle’s personal soulful love story really is an inspiration to us all, and is especially significant for soulful singles who are consciously preparing themselves for true love. She took a proactive and conscious approach to meeting her soul mate, and yet she also allowed fate to do its part. She's convinced that a prayer and prophetic dreams set the stage to bring her together with her beloved. It began one night when she whispered her prayer for true love into the ear of her spiritual teacher, Ammachi, and asked to be healed of anything that might be standing in the way of love. Soon, she had dreams that gave insights about the man she would soon meet and fall in love with.

A few weeks later Arielle, then 44, was sent on business to Portland, to work on a project that involved Brian. Although they had never met, they had both had dreams that told of finding each other. A year to the day of whispering her prayer to the Divine Mother, they were wed. Hot Chocolate For Mystical Lovers features 100 more hopeful stories of how spirit can bring mystical lovers together.

"Some prayed and found their prayers answered," she explains. "Some had prophetic dreams that led them to recognize their soul mates when they finally met. Some swear that Guardian angels helped. Some used Feng Shui and love altars, or were aided by meditation and visualization. Some conducted love rituals that they believe brought true love closer. In every case, there was some form of what we consider divine intervention and when the couple came together they all felt something very important and profound had happened, as if it were an act of God."

Rev. Laurie Sue: Did couples in the book share a common thread, or experience one telltale sign that the truest of loves had arrived?
Arielle Ford: There is almost always a distinct moment when soul mates recognize each other. Sometimes it's simple, mutual love at first sight. And sometimes one or both parties hear a small, still voice confirm: she's the one or this is the one your will spend your life with."

RLS: Have you always believed in soul mates?
AF: Long before I knew what they were called, I "knew" my soul mate was out there. My grandmother always used to say, 'there's a lid for every pot.' So I grew up with the image that just like there is a perfect lid that fits snuggly on top of the pot, that somewhere there was a person who was the perfect fit for me. I think it was a pretty common thing for Grandmother's to say! But it did instill an image in me that the perfect person was out there, somewhere, and that he was probably looking for me too.

RLS: How would you describe a soul mate?
AF: To me, a soul mate is somebody who is really your mirror, your other half, the person who makes you more whole than you already are, and who you have karmic ties to from past lives and future lives. When you see them there is just a spark between you that lights you up and lights them up. And the world is a better, happier place to be when you're with them. It's not grounded in science. It's just my personal belief.

RLS: There are so many soul mate theories; they may all be true. Do you have a personal favorite?
AF: I think there is more than one path to your soul mate, but I highly agree with Deepak Chopra's explanation. In the forward of my book he offers the "spiritual mechanics" on this topic and he says, essentially, that soul mates are beings that are vibrating at the same frequency of consciousness and evolving at the same rate. Since all souls come here to work things out based on karma, soul mates work many of their lessons out together.

RLS: Do you think we all have soul mates?
AF: I believe that there is, at the very least, "one lid for every pot." For some people, there are probably a number of potential soul mates; for others, there is that one great karmic love. Overall, I'd bet soul mates are together in more than one lifetime, and yet they are not necessarily supposed to be together in every lifetime.

RLS: Then again, not every soul-to-soul relationship is destined to be a romance.
AF: Soul mates may come in non-romantic varieties. They may come as a parent, a child or a pet. I think JB, my cat, is definitely my soul mate. He kept me company for a very long time before I met Brian. One of my favorite stories in the book, "Mystical Bluebirds," is about two cancer patients who find one another at the end of their lives, in time to experience solace and companionship. It is a beautiful story that proves love is stronger than death and that a soul connection doesn't have to be sexual to be intimate.

RLS: Did you have many love challenges to master before true love found you?
AF: (Laughs) Many of them... like most people... until I realized there is nothing any of us can do to hurry a soul mate long. Soul mates have their own schedule. I believe it is pre-ordained and pre-arranged, long before we come into this physical world.

RLS: And yet ... soul mates would seem to happen rather quickly. A reporter once asked Bette Middler why she got married so quickly, knowing her husband for only six weeks. She said 'yes, it happened quickly... but those soul mate things always do." Do you agree?
AF: I totally agree. Once you meet and you hear that little voice in your head saying: "this is the one," yes, it can "happen" quickly. But I think it really just seems sudden. That's because you have a visual, human recognition of a soul who is so very familiar. But that recognition can only come when both people a ready.

RLS: So it's love at first sight... following a lot of personal growth and learning through relationships that didn't work out?
AF: Yes. I believe there's timing involved. You can't force it. You can't make it happen a moment sooner than it's supposed to. For example: Years before I met Brian I used to meditate in my living room every evening, with candles burning, listening to nuns singing chants. There was a week where everyday I would sit down and I would actually feel my soul mate around me. I would feel waves and waves of unconditional love around me. And I knew he was nearby but I didn't know anything more than that. But it was this very real experience. About a year after Brian and I got married we discovered that during the time that was happening he was living down the street at a hotel on an extended business trip. So he really was in the neighborhood... he really was nearby. But this was not the time to meet. If we had met at that point we wouldn't have recognized each other.

RLS: Even though you use the word "mystical" to describe the stories in your book, it seems that these are not experiences out of the reach of the average person.
AF: A lot of people are having mystical experiences everyday and they just don't see it as that. They just call I coincidence. Or Chance. Or think of it as being in the right place at the right time.

RLS: What do you say to people who feel frustrated that they haven't yet met their soul mate?
AF: I say, "If I can do it, they can do it." I didn't meet my soul mate until I was 44. I consider myself the poster girl for later-in-life marriage. You never know what's around the corner! The whole point of the book is really to give people hope that it can happen for them. No matter what their age, no matter what their circumstances, no matter where they are in life, or what's happened to them in the past. And there are enough stories here to prove that ... at least 101 people have gone through it!

© Copyright 2001 Reverend Laurie Sue Brockway  All Rights Reserved. 

Read Reverend Laurie Sue's Current Column

Read Reverend Laurie Sue's Past Columns:

April 2001 - "Enjoy the Merriment and Fun of An Ancient Love Holiday"

March 2001 - "Nourish Yourself On a Date for One"

February 2001 - "Get Ready for Soulful Love"