| I’ve never really bought into the whole "soulmate" thing.
I mean, what if your soulmate lives in Fiji and you never leave Kansas? Are you just shit outta luck?
OK, sure, there have certainly been people in my life with whom I’ve felt I shared an otherworldly connection – the kind that strikes with lightning speed and intensity and usually ends up burning out and knocking you on your ass with equal speed and intensity.
Certainly, when I met my husband, the connection was immediate. And there is definitely something eerily kindred about us – like he’s the male version of me – that does make me wonder if there isn’t something to this whole idea that we’re like a bunch of single socks wandering around looking for our match.
Then again, on the many occasions I find myself digging through the drawer looking for a sock’s match, I usually give up and end up wearing a mismatched pair.
Or maybe we have several soulmates, scattered around the globe, making the odds we’ll stumble into one in our neck of the woods – or in my case, across the street from my apartment – a little greater.
Well, according to registered nutritionist and soulmate specialist Jeanne Marie Martin, we actually have exactly 144.
Martin says the average person meets 50 of these 144 in a lifetime and that, at age 50-ish, she’s already met 45 of hers.
According to Martin, and others who espouse her theory, when "God" created the universe, he/she/it? divided us up into clusters of "souls." These clusters broke off into smaller and smaller clusters until we ended up with billions of clusters of 144 soulmates.
Why 144? I dunno, maybe it’s God’s lucky number.
Then, with each lifetime (yes, not only do you have to get on board with the cluster business, you’ve gotta buy into reincarnation, too), you keep running into your 144 cluster mates over and over and these are the people you share that instant connection with, thanks to all that time hanging out in the same cluster together and all.
I know, it all sounds a bit wonky, which is why Martin warns you not to run up to someone you think is your soulmate and start yakking about how you met back at a bar in Atlantis (the lost city, not the place in Georgia) several lives ago and that, while you said you weren’t ready for a relationship back then, you’ve been working on yourself for the past several lifetimes and are finally ready for "the one."
Because that’s the key, says Martin. Anyone can meet a soulmate, but you have to be ready for it if you want it to actually work out as a long-term relationship.
In fact, she says, you can even "order up" a soulmate and one will arrive in 40 minutes or it’s free. OK, more like 24 hours to a week, "as long as you don’t cancel the order," she says.
"The minute you put out a desire, people respond," Martin insists. "But a lot of people run away from what they really want because they’re scared, so we decide the person is too fat or too this or that."
Part of the reason we freak is because soulmate connections are so powerful, says Martin.
"These connections can have so much energy, they feel too great," Martin explains. "You feel so high you can’t sleep or eat and this brings up fears and doubts."
She offers an analogy. Imagine your subconscious is a glass of dirty water and when someone turns on a tap of pure water – i.e., someone who turns our crank likes us back – it flows into the dirty water, i.e., our subconscious. The dirty water gets cleaner, which is great and feels wonderful at first, until it forces all that dirty water – crap from our subconscious – to spill out all over the place and make a mess.
Martin encourages people to work on cleaning up our own water (baggage from all those past lives) as much as possible so we don’t make a mess when someone starts pouring some nice pure love water into us.
Karmic soulmates help with this.
"Karmic soulmate relationships have the intensity but aren’t meant to last," says Martin. "They’re meant to help us clear up something or work through something from a past life that will help prepare us for our Dharmic soulmate."
Dharmic soulmates are the real deal. These are the ones that have to do with fulfilling your life’s purpose, rather than your ego, she says.
If you’re really lucky, you’ll work your way up to your Twin Soul, or if you get your own water really clean and you’ve taken lessons from your Karmic relationships, you’ll land the ultimate prize – your Twin Flame.
You only get one of these, says Martin.
And you only get it once you’ve got the whole shebang together, she adds.
But don’t despair. Besides 144 soulmates, there are hundreds of people we can have a relationship with, offers Martin.
You might not be able to swap stories about the good old days back in the cluster, but you can still have a pretty good time.
And who knows, maybe in a few lives, you’ll discover you’re soulmates after all. |
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