they buried this teaching inside every love story.

what if the one you’ve been waiting for was always you

my seven-year-old drew this. opposites but the same. children know things before we have words for them.

there is a longing many of us carry so deep it is often mistaken for the hunger to be loved by another person.

we call it loneliness, we call it the search for a soulmate, we call it finding our twin flame.

and we build entire lives around the hope that someone will arrive and finally make us feel complete.

but what if that longing was never about another person at all?

what if it was your very own soul, calling you home to yourself?

carl jung spent his life studying what lives inside us. and his conclusion was that the psyche is not unified by nature, but it contains opposites:

masculine and feminine.

light and shadow.

conscious and unconscious.

psychological maturation is bringing those opposite forces into relationship.

the work becomes holding the tension created until something new can emerge.

jung called that new thing the ‘Self’ with a capital ‘S.’

distinct from the ego, which we could think of as the ‘little self.’

this ‘Self’ is what becomes possible when the opposites stop fighting and start integrating.

the sufis built their mystical tradition around it.

the soul’s longing to return to union with god, they described it not as doctrine, but as love, eros, or the beautiful ache of separation seeking wholeness.

rumi is the most famous voice of this. but his poetry is almost universally misread in the west.

we put it on greeting cards as romantic love poetry.

yet what if the beloved he is writing toward is not a separate person at all?

what if it is actually the divine within and beyond us all, the source the soul recognizes and cannot stop reaching for.

in this way, rumi’s poetry can be seen as an endless love song to the divine beloved within.

this becomes the inner teaching.

this teaching is the same one taught by all the mystics, yet it became flattened into something easier to sell and easier to co-opt to create a feeling of powerlessness.

the mystic’s union with the divine became the romantic’s search for a soulmate.

just like in the radical inner gospel of mary magdalene, where she spoke of a journey through inner powers toward wholeness.

mary magdalene’s gospel got buried under two thousand years of her being cast as sinner or consort. but in reality, and according to other gnostic gospels, she was one of jesus’s closest disciples. she and jesus spoke of finding heaven within.

i believe this understanding is what they were pointing us towards.

another example of this can be found in our classic fairytales.

tales such as cinderella, sleeping beauty, beauty and the beast, were never just instructions for finding one’s ‘true love.’ they were maps of an interior journey.

the prince and princess always two aspects of the same psyche moving toward union. but somewhere along the way, every single one of these teachings got turned inside out.

we hand children fairy tales and tell them to seek the one who will complete them.

this is the false matrix at its core.

the systematic externalization of everything that was always meant to point within.

look for it ‘out there.’

find it ‘out there.’

chase it ‘out there.’

always just beyond reach, dependent on another person’s arrival.

in my own life, since finn died, i’ve been dreaming the same dream for years now.

in them, a dark haired man, who is maybe indigenous, and who has a wise and grounded shaman energy... he arrives each time and there is always an intense attraction.

in my dreams he is kind, capable, protective, oriented toward me specifically, and always working to find me.

he appears in forests, dancing with me, or as a competent doctor in a dreamlike hospital corridor, as a man standing watch as i lie on a massage table. or he appears as a presence above me sending me a message through a shaft of light.

always the same presence wearing different forms.

and so it took me this long to finally ask the question:

what if he is a part of my soul, instead of a vision of a future person?

what if he is, at its essential nature, the part of my ‘Self’ that carries this divine masculine quality?

and what if this feminine life i inhabit, as a body, as a mother, as a teacher and a writer, and as the one who feels everything all the way down, what if she has just been waiting to be found by her own depth, her own sovereign, protective, powerful and luminous interior masculine?

we seek our own completion in another person’s face and mistake it for destiny. and sometimes the outer person is real and the love is real.

but the projection is still happening.

and when that person leaves, through death, through ending, through the slow erosion of what was, the wholeness seems to leave with them.

hence the heartbreak.

oh, do i know about heartbreak.

i’ve been so deeply heartbroken in this life by all the men i truly loved.

my daughter is actually going through an intense breakup right now.

finn was my soulmate and before he died of cancer, he held that energy for me.

but when he died i thought i’d lost it with him, and so i went looking in the wrong places, in the wrong people.

i searched in connections that were more about filling an absence than genuine recognition.

i have had visions of people i briefly dated, and in them i could see clearly what i could not see in real time. someone standing in front of a golden light, blocking the view of something radiant behind them. i could feel the hunger underneath the charm. the taking dressed up as giving.

after one such vision the spell was broken.

what i’m understanding now, slowly, in grief, in the particular devastation of losing finn, my beloved and the person who felt like home, is that the union was always the point.

not the person, not the partner, but the union itself.

and every tradition that ever tried to point us there kept getting turned into an instruction to look outward.

because a humanity that knows how to find wholeness within is much harder to sell things to, to control, to keep hungry and searching.

so i’ll say it plainly:

what if you are the greatest love story you will ever live?

what if you are your own twin flame?

what if the answer was always you?

the longing is real, the love is real, and the soulmate is real.

it’s just that they have been inside you this whole time, working to find their way home to you and you to them.

finn visited me through the veil one time and he was showing me myself, holding up a mirror to gaze into.

your next great love is yourself, he said.

i thought he was being poetic. but he was being literal.

so here is your invitation:

begin the greatest love affair available to you,

the one with your own soul.

who knows where that love story will take you?

thanks for being here.

i love you.

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i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞