Home Articles Channels Daily Retreat Inspiration Classroom Boutique Community Singles Resources Contact

SoulfulLiving.com :: Personal Growth, Spiritual Growth, Self Help and Self Improvement

Your #1 Online Resource for Personal and Spiritual Growth Since 2000.
Mandala and Chakra Pendants
New Age Gifts and Products, Buddhist and Tibetan Jewelry, Meditation and Yoga Supplies
Mandala Art Prints

  Welcome!

 

Our Sponsors:

The Mandala Collection :: Buddhist and Conscious Living Gifts
Inspirational Gifts


Energy Muse Jewelry
Energy Muse Jewelry


Body of Grace
Eco-Friendly Gifts


Yoga Download
Yoga Download


The Mandala Collection
Give a Gift with Soul


Soulful Love
November 2001

by Rev. Laurie Sue Brockway


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.


The Romance Reverend Interviews "Love Doctor" Daphne Rose Kingma


What is the Future of Love?

Can you tell me … what is the future of love? How can any of us continue to go on as we have? Searching for a soul mate seems so trivial now. What is the most important step for soulful singles in healing our hearts and the heart of our planet? -- Paul, Denver, CO

Dear Paul,

It’s time for all of us to live from the soul. Although we must acknowledge our pain, and our fragile humanity, we must also acknowledge the gift we are being given: The turbulence of these times is cracking open our hearts to reveal our true souls.

This is an extraordinary time on earth. We are living a profound human experience that deeply touches us all. It makes us want to do better, be better and do more to make the world a better place. And it makes us want to love from a deeper place in the heart. We have to trust in our higher selves, our souls, if you will, and allow them to lead us. This is what will secure our future, and bring us to soulful love.

Even if we have been disappointed or devastated by relationships in the past, most of us still yearn to feel the power of love in our lives. We have spent years and years trying to find the "right person" to experience it with. In these changing times, I think we will find the future of love will come alive by loving in a more expansive and inclusive way; that we will search not only for soul mates but also for our "soul friends," "soul families," and community that is home to our souls.

*  *  *  *  *  *

In 1999, I had the pleasure of connecting with Daphne Rose Kingma –  author, poet and psychotherapist – who in my opinion is by far one of the nations most soulful relationship counselors. Her book The Future of Love had just come out and she shared her insights on love, marriage, intimacy, community and relating. Given the compelling questions of our day – and our deepening desire to connect with others in the spirit of love, community and family – I wanted to share with you this interview.

The Romance Reverend Interviews "Love Doctor"
Daphne Rose Kingma

Daphne Rose Kingma has spent more than 25 years as a psychotherapist counseling couples and writing books with groundbreaking insights on how to make sense of our relationship experiences. They include Coming Apart: Why Relationships End and How To Get Through The Ending of Yours, Finding True Love, Weddings From The Heart and most recently, The 9 Types of Lovers: Why We Love The People We Do & How They Drive Us Crazy (all from Conari Press). Her fans range from Mary Ann Williamson, who wrote the introduction to The Future of Love and Neale Donald Walsh, who raved about it in Conversations With God III. Yet she has taken on her mission to heal our hearts and relationships with much devotion and little media fanfare.

Daphne offers a truly unique and useful look at how spirit moves us into the house--and houses--of love in, The Future of Love: The Power of the Soul in Intimate Relationships (Main Street Press, January 1999). I think this book means even more to us today, post September 11, as we truly stand on the threshold of the transformations she discusses. She brings good tidings about the emergence of the conscious, loving and solid partnership between people who are committed to utilizing relationship as a vehicle to evolution. And she validates our suspicions that something larger than our human personalities is at work in our romances. Yet she warns that, as the status quo shifts, intimate relationships may be in for unprecedented intensity; and we may be shocked and pleasantly surprised by the many ways love will manifest in our lives.

"The real undertaking of relationships is to have an experience of love and we can’t force love to have a particular form of relationship," she said in our interview. "I think we’re going to be surprised by the forms and the people we are being given to love. And we may also be surprised by that the forms are many, and extraordinary, and they all can be a container for love."

"It’s all in the process of transforming," she said. "Something larger than us is breaking up the relationship pattern. Its not as if we all woke up one day and said lets make mayhem in our relationship lives. This transformation really is to show us that, no matter how diverse the forms, love is still operating. I think we’re being shown that, through awareness, we can honor love -- wherever it occurs. If we can expand through our prejudices and limitations, more love can occur."

Reverend Laurie Sue: Relationship issues are a national obsession. It’s tough to be in them, tough to be without them. Why are so romantically challenged?

Daphne Rose Kingma: I think in a way it's because we’ve been sold a mess of pottage. We believe relationships are supposed to be perfect, that partnership will always be ideal, that marriage is the one thing in life that can’t corrode or corrupt. But the purpose of relationship is to really grow our souls. It’s very hard to keep that in mind because we are so romanticized about relationships.

It’s confronting to think intimate relationships may challenge us even more than they already do.

We’re just so engaged with our emotional lives that to find out that they too are going to go through the chaos (of the times) is very disturbing. Looking at the whole phenomenon of our relationship lives in a spiritual context really is the only way that the suffering experiences of relationships make sense. I think we’re all trying to make this transition from personality to spirituality. That’s a very big step, a huge step--and we’re not certain we’re ready to take it. It’s very scary--in this culture, especially--because we’ve really elevated relationships to the level of a God. So, to not have them be absolute in our lives--absolute fulfillment, absolute security, absolute comfort, absolute witnessing of who we are, absolutely indestructible and forever--is every challenging.

When people get a whiff of what relationship can be from a highly spiritual perspective, it’s sometimes tough trying to ground it in the real world.

The human experience is an interesting tension between the material and mundane world, and, on the next level, the emotional. It’s a mixture of those levels with the transcendent spiritual. We are uniquely called to continue to move back and forth in this reality where we get to experience it in terms of great awakenings, soul connection and divine love, along with Saturday night dates, co-parenting the kids, socks on the floor, red roses, car accidents, hospitalizations. We’re being invited to experience love as it is infused in this material plane.

That is so true… and whether we are tuned in or not, the soul is busy helping us to grow?

Consider that beautiful image of the Kundalini and the two chords interwoven. I think people need to know we are always simultaneously personality and spirituality and the development of those aspects may be parallel and synchronistic or it may be very uneven. People who are "seeking" are more likely to have the soul opening through their personality experience and vice versa. People who are just watching television are going to have a harder time in general. Awakening is a combination of a divine gift --and it’s purely a gift--and ones own movement toward it.

Isn’t it possible to have soul friends who are not romantic prospects?

In general, there is a great movement toward soul connection. In the American culture we tend to romanticize it. We’ve elevated the relationship to the level of soul mate, as in you’re going to find your soul mate and live happily every after. I think more and more soul connections are being made and acknowledged and it’s not just lovers or marriages. It’s more like people crossing paths with kindred spirits and recognizing they’re undertaking something together.

But soulful, passionate romantic love is here to stay, right?

Absolutely and I call that "Illumined relationships." But I think what we need to realize is sexuality is the divine attraction and romance is the Spirit’s way of inviting us into the relationship which will then invite us to grow. American consciousness is stuck at the romance step.

When the tinglies die down and reality bites, we get nervous and think "this isn’t working."

Exactly. We mistakenly think that it should be a 45-year romance as opposed to a 45-year journey of spiritual evolution or of psychological evolution--and hopefully both. The romantic myth is held in a container with very specific attributes: It must be daily, domestic, exclusive and forever. And we really believe that these are the four tent pins that will hold up the romantic myth. In fact, they don’t. They hold up daily life and a lot of times they don’t hold up daily life that well. Romance imagines the 100 per cent connection. It really is like God: You’re going to make all my dreams come true, be the perfect partner, protect me, be the great lover, the perfect parent. It’s the expectation of perfection. That is what the high energy of romance is. Its like you’re the one, forever true, only you, it has that quality of ...

...A devotional.

A devotional, yes. And because we haven’t made the distinction between that spiritual longing--the longing for God, for absolute union--we are continually disappointed in our relationships.

What does it take to make a relationship strong and long lasting?

A conscious awareness that these relationships are a spiritual as well as a psychological undertaking. And that the tests and crises within them are always an opportunity for spiritual expansion. Which means, put in simple terms, a greater capacity for love, and a more inclusive love. It’s like this: Can you love the person who’s driving you crazy? It’s always a question of can you expand your capacity for love?

That’s the great test … but how many of us can pass?

In this culture, we have not seen many examples of: what does a relationship look like when it’s really about love? We’ve seen it when it’s about keeping up with the Jones’s, when it’s about healing the wounded child. We haven’t seen it when it’s really an embodiment of love. We need to see what it is to treat your partner as a king or queen, to lovingly hold the person you love, to live your sexuality as an experience of opening consciousness as well as physical passion, to live in an environment that is peaceful. I know a number of couples who’s spiritual work, I believe, is just to hang around and show people what love looks like; to embody what marriage looks like when it’s lived on the spiritual level. And that takes consciousness of saying: We are undertaking this. And we choose to go through those rites of emotional and spiritual passage in a relationship that will bring us to a larger place.

Do you believe all relationships are gifts?

I believe a relationship is a very profound spiritual gift. Think of it this way: You cannot insist a relationship into your life. You can’t say, "This is Friday. I’m going to go downtown and buy myself a relationship." You can buy yourself a shirt, a car or a bottle of orange juice but you can’t do that with a relationship, so it is a spiritual gift.

I have in recent years seen an extraordinary trend of people finding love where they least expect it. When we drop our expectation of love having to "look a certain way," it really opens up the door to great relationships.

At the soul level we are open...to that person who is a different color, speaks a different language, or is deaf. This is about surrendering. We are brought the experience of love that our soul needs. The nature of the soul is it’s so powerful that it draws us off our ego, off the path where we think we are in charge, and surprises us about the nature of love.

Are these relationships easier or more comfortable?

The truth is, very often, soul connection relationships are the most demanding because they come into our lives to require us to let go of something that we’re really entrenched in or to transform us in a way that’s very difficult. The soul is trying to bring--and bring and bring--home the lessons.

How does the soul speaks to us and move us in relationships?

The soul uses the personality--aspects of the personality, such as passion, need, childhood wounds, and hormones--to take us to a lesson. It’s like you walk by the bakery, and smell the fragrance of the fresh bread. That’s what draws you in. That’s why some relationships are such a surprise: oh, why am I with this woman who doesn’t speak my language? Why am I getting married when I swore I never would? I don’t know if we actually know where our souls are taking us, in the moment, unless we are very conscious. We may have that ineffable feeling that says my soul is telling me to be here, but a relationship is always an interplay of the personality and the soul. They are both always growing but it’s hard to see what the soul is teaching is until later.

People often wonder, "How will I know he/she is the one?" What is your spiritual Litmus test for knowing the soul has delivered us to the "right" place.

Whenever we feel love, wherever we are changed by love, the soul is at work. But in a given time frame, it may not look right. You can say, "Well this is the last guy on earth I thought I would of fallen in love with, but I am feeling love here." That’s the soul at work.

On the other side of the spectrum, how does the soul let us know with certainty when it’s time to move on?

You know when the relationship is finished. It may go through a process to get to that point but you move toward it and there’s a poignant understanding of "Oh, I guess we’re not supposed to set up housekeeping together" or "I guess we really have finished what we came here to do." Sometimes there simply is no energy in a relationship. Sometimes it’s announced by another person showing up and sort of holding a lantern: oh here’s the next step I’m supposed to take. Many people find that difficult because of the notion that we can only love one person in a lifetime.

So should we follow our hearts to love, or should we follow our souls?

I think when we follow our hearts we’re being led by the soul. We can trust love. Love is always a journey and people want it to be a destination. Its like, okay, I’ve got that nailed down, now I can go and work n my career. But the real experience of love is a continually unfolding journey.

What do soulful singles need to know about coping with the trauma and drama of relationships in tumultuous times?

The important thing we need to realize is we are in a time of great change and upheaval in our relationships and this is not a disaster. But it’s an opportunity...to expand our capacity to love and to expand our experience of love. If we can relax into that and trust, we can actually experience more love and the more vast experience of love that our souls are leading us toward. They are not leading us to specific relationships; they are leading us toward ever-expanding experiences of love. Much bigger than we ever imagined. The ultimate goal of all our relationship experiences is to deliver us to a place of pure love. No judgment, no ax to grind, no needs to whimper over or insist on being fulfilled. Just love. Pure love."

Books by Daphne Rose Kingma:

Love          The Future of Love          Weddings from the Heart

© Copyright 2001 Reverend Laurie Sue Brockway  All Rights Reserved. 


What kinds of relationships will you include in your Future of Love?

 

Read Reverend Laurie Sue's Current Column

 

Read Reverend Laurie Sue's Past Columns:

October 2001 - "Getting to Know 'Lakshmi' the Goddess of Good Fortune"

September 2001 - "Can't Hurry Love... It Will Happen in Its Right Moment"

August 2001 - "Family Rituals Help Us Grow Into Loving Beings"

July 2001 - "Dreams Warn It’s Time To Own Your Power"

June 2001 - "A Fun Visual of Your Favorite Romance"

May 2001 - "Someday Your Mystical Soul Mate Will Come"

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"


Reverend Laurie Sue Brockway is an author, teacher and contemporary clergy person who specializes in matters of the heart and soul. As an ordained interfaith minister and non-denominational wedding officiant, it is her honor to regularly marry couples in love.

Prior to becoming a minister she enjoyed a successful and colorful 20 years in media as a widely published journalist, editor and author of several books on relationships and romance—as well as being a noted spokesperson on those topics. She was editor-in-chief of two national magazines and several regional publications, and her articles have been published around the world and in many newspapers and national magazines, such as the NY Daily News, The Washington Post, Women’s News, New Woman, Ladies’ Home Journal and Child. She evolved years of specialized reporting in the field of male-female relationship dynamics into a more spiritual pursuit that led her to train to be an interfaith minister, and then establish her wedding ministry along with a number of popular relationship enhancement programs. Her wedding ministry is based in New York.

She is also dedicated to bringing about a deeper awareness and understanding of the Divine Feminine. As a graduate of The New Seminary in NYC, the world’s premier seminary for interfaith ministers, she was educated and trained in the tenants, spiritual practice and worship of many faiths. She became a specialist in the feminine aspects of God in all the world’s religions. Today, she is widely recognized as a minister, teacher and scribe specializing in women’s spirituality and The Divine Feminine from an interfaith and all-inclusive perspective. She is on the board of directors of World Light Fellowship, heading up their Feminine Faces of God programs, and is Founder of Our Mother’s House, a cyber ministry at www.OurMothersHouse.org.

Long devoted to helping women access the "Goddess Within," she is currently working on two books that bring the wisdom of ancient archetypes to modern women. Her newest book, A Goddess Is a Girl’s Best Friend, is due out in Fall 2002.

To be placed on a mailing list for information about A Goddess Is A Girl’s Best Friend: OurMothersHouse@aol.com

 

Visit Reverend Laurie Sue at:
www.weddinggoddess.com


BACK TO SOULFUL THOUGHTS



Daily Soul Retreat at SoulfulLiving.com
Soul Retreat Goodies!


Support SoulfulLiving.com
Show Us Your Love ♥

 
 

Energy Muse Jewelry
Energy Muse Jewelry


Wild Divine Meditation Software featuring Deepak Chopra
Meditation Software



Energy Muse - Sacred Yoga Jewelry

Copyright © 1999-2014 Soulful Living®.

Soulful Website Design by The Creative Soul®.