Soulful Love
Featuring Articles by Our Love & Relationship Authors
Our Valentine’s Issue of Soulful Living is a celebration of “Soulful Love,” honoring love in all its many expressions. The articles in this issue explore love as something that connects us deeply to ourselves, to one another, and to the world around us.
Within these pages, our authors share their reflections on romantic love, self-love, and deep soul-to-soul connection, as well as the relationships we share with soulmates, friends, and family. You’ll also find writings on compassion, universal love, and divine love, reminding us that love is not limited to a single relationship or moment, but is something that flows through every aspect of our lives.
Together, these soulful offerings invite us to see love as something we live and practice each day, both in our relationships with others and in the care we extend to ourselves. ❤️
Love as the Constant
Ah, Valentine’s Day—how can we avoid it? A holiday that is soft, fuzzy; full of hearts, flowers, candy, and maybe, if we are lucky, something sparkly. It is also the day when you feel unloved if you don’t get any of those things. In the movie Fatal Attraction, Alex Forrest sits turning a light on and off after her married lover never shows up for a date. Later, she tells him, “I will not be ignored,” creating chaos after her love turns obsessive and dark. Commercials and greeting cards have us thinking love is neatly tied up in quotes. Your love wraps twinkle lights around my heart. I’d give you all the marshmallows in my cereal. You make me all melty. Is this love? For some people, it is. And it suffices. Love manifests in many forms—from love of nature, music, art, to the sexual love we have for a partner. There is the love between friends, and the love we have for our children. We love our parents, brothers, and sisters. We have divine love for a higher power. We enter love through so many doors, while others remain closed to us. Love as the Quiet Constant There are seasons when love feels distant—something we once knew but can no longer touch. Yet beneath the noise, beneath the fear, beneath the stories we tell ourselves about being alone or unworthy, something steadier endures. Brianna Wiest’s reminder echoes here: “sometimes the love that saves you doesn’t feel like love at all until you look back and realize it never left.” Love’s constancy is often invisible in real time. It...
Choose Yourself: A Valentine’s Day Practice
Here’s what most people don’t know about Valentine’s Day: it started as an act of rebellion. In 3rd-century Italy, Emperor Claudius decided that single men made better soldiers than married ones. So he outlawed marriage. Young men were forbidden to commit to the women they loved—all to make the army stronger. Enter Valentine, a Roman priest who said, essentially, “No.” He continued performing marriages in secret. Love, he believed, was more powerful than empire. More sacred than war. And he was willing to risk everything for it. He was imprisoned for it. And the legend goes that he and the jailer’s daughter exchanged love notes—reminding people that love is an act of courage, especially when the world tries to crush it. Fast forward to medieval France and England, where a beautiful ritual emerged: a single man would draw a woman’s name from an urn and commit to caring for her for an entire year. He would literally wear a heart on his sleeve—yes, that’s where the expression comes from—as a public declaration of his devotion. This wasn’t just romance. It was sacred commitment. The practice of showing up, day after day, for another soul. When Valentine’s Day Feels Lonely But here’s the reality for so many of us: Valentine’s Day has become one of the loneliest days of the year. We’ve been sold a fantasy—roses at ridiculous prices, impossible restaurant reservations, Instagram-perfect romance. We wait for someone else to make us feel special, to prove we’re worthy of love. And if we’re single, or in a relationship that doesn’t match the fairy tale, we feel the weight of what’s...
Love, Soul, and Who Did I Fall for Anyway?
I realized last night, poised to rinse out the blender, that I really love my husband. As his voice intercepted my domestic tasking, I heard words that were meaningful to him but that I would have to translate and unravel. It was, nevertheless, clear to me that I love without question the man I married 28 years ago and the man he is today. The only thing is, they’re different. William has aphasia, destruction of parts of his brain that deal with words and, in his case, numbers. It is the nasty souvenir of a 2023 stroke and several smaller CVAs and seizures, not at all small, for the next two-and-a-half years. They have now figured out the meds that, knock-on-wood/fingers-crossed/prayers-said, will prevent more seizures from happening. He even has a detection watch that would supposedly call my phone if he were having a seizure when I was out or in another room. I trust that it would work. It seems these days that I’m trusting quite a bit. Communicating with a person who has aphasia is like attempting to converse with someone who knows something of a language you speak—maybe they had two years in high school thirty years ago—but not enough to make for a seamless exchange. In William’s case, small talk is doable—just like those high school language classes: Ola!…Bon jour…Ni hao…. But coming up with specific terms or, heaven forbid, proper names involves the substitution of a term that bears no relation to the one he’s looking for, or he makes up a word altogether. It’s frustrating to me because words are my portal to...
Relationship Tips for Highly Sensitive People
As I write about emotional empaths in my many books, I describe them as a species unto themselves. Whereas others may thrive on the togetherness of being a couple, for empaths like me, too much togetherness can be difficult and may cause us to bolt. Why? We tend to intuit and absorb our partner’s energy and become overloaded, anxious, or exhausted when we don’t have time to decompress in our own space. We’re super-responders; our sensory experience of relationship is the equivalent of feeling objects with 50 fingers instead of five. Energetically sensitive people unknowingly avoid romantic partnerships because deep down, they’re afraid of getting engulfed. Or else, they feel engulfed when coupled, a nerve-wracking, constrictive way to live. If this isn’t understood, empaths can stay perpetually lonely. We want companionship, but paradoxically, it doesn’t feel safe. One empath patient told me, “It helps explain why at 32 I’ve only had two serious relationships, each lasting less than a year.” Once we empaths learn to set boundaries and negotiate our energetic preferences, intimacy becomes possible. For emotional empaths to be at ease in a relationship, the traditional paradigm for coupling must be redefined. Most of all, this means asserting your personal space needs — the physical and time limits you set with someone so you don’t feel they’re on top of you. Empaths can’t fully experience emotional freedom with another until they do this. Your space needs can vary with your situation, upbringing, and culture. My ideal distance to keep in public is at least an arm’s length. In doctors’ waiting rooms, I’ll pile my purse and folders on...
Soulful Soulmates
Happy Valentine’s Day to all readers of this special Valentine’s Edition! Regardless of whether we already have that special someone in our life or not yet, today is a great day to be particularly joyful and happy, feeling romantic and loving. As is every day really, but that is perhaps a subject for another day. To feel tuned in to the many aspects of love is always a great idea as it makes and keeps us happy! Longtime readers of my books or previous articles here know that I have written quite a bit about love, the many kinds, among souls in human form or not, universal love, its active and passive forms, and so on. But love can be painful too if it is not experienced with a grain of wisdom—by keeping the big picture in mind and remembering the perennial perspective of who we really are and what we came here to learn, experience, do and enjoy. To celebrate this auspicious day, let me share a short excerpt from my first book in 1999 (Yes I Am Happy Now!), parts of a subchapter called My Mate. Begin excerpt: “Most of us look for a partner with whom we can share our life with. A person we can love and who loves us back. A person we can come to understand and who understands us. A person we can trust and who can put his/her trust back into us. A person who supports us and we can give support. Somebody with whom we are happy being with. This is a very natural drive we all share. Everybody wants...
The Flower & the Hummingbird: What Love Actually Asks of Us
Years ago, I told a woman in my practice: “You are the flower. He can come to you for the nectar. You don’t need to be the one constantly going after him asking, ‘Do you need this now? Can I give it to you in this way?’” She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. She was exhausted—pursuing her husband for years, managing his moods, anticipating his needs, chasing his attention, decoding his silences. But she believed this was what love asked of her. “You need to be a radiant magnetic pole,” I said. The look on her face. • • • • • Recently, in a conversation she raised about indigenous perspectives on the unconscious (yes, we have deep and meaningful conversations in our sessions), something landed that brought this teaching back to me—and deepened both of our understandings of the content from years ago: Indigenous peoples don’t think they dominate the planet. They live in harmony. Things are speaking to them all the time, and they are listening for it. Most tribal rituals are about listening to the world around them. They are the flower in the garden, and the world comes to them. Bees pollinate. Birds drink. Weather comes and goes, but their roots remain. This is the view of our humanity that we have lost. And this is where relationships fall out of balance too. Think about what it does to the nervous system to always be conquering, grasping, pursuing. And what it would mean to refrain from that. What would you be doing then? Receiving. If you think about trees, they are entirely...
The Valentine’s Joy of Small Kindnesses
Getting ready for Valentine’s Day!? We, Jim and Judith, do hope so — most especially if you are involved in any kind of romantic partnership! Are you celebrating the differences between you? If so, that is romance at its best! For instance, Jim loves dogs, while Judith keeps dogs at a distance (having been jumped on too many times in her younger years). However, on a few occasions for Valentine’s Day, Judith celebrated who Jim really is by giving him little stuffed dogs with a heart somewhere on the little “stuffies.” There is something so romantic in our differences! Think about it. How important are your differences to you? It’s been in our differences that we’ve discovered the romantic power, the sweet little passions in what we call “small kindnesses”… the tiny little endearments that continually rekindle romance and keep love ready to move you forward. Think about it. How do you want to be remembered on Valentine’s Day? Sure, candy and roses are nice. But don’t you want to know that you’re special in the eyes and heart of the one you love — especially for your differences? Exactly! That’s why small kindnesses are so important. And that is why we encourage you to weave them into your everyday life. One of our friends packs lunch for his wife every workday and also includes a little love note in her lunch box! She, in return, hides silly jokes around the house that she knows her husband will enjoy. Another woman we know always greets her husband, who travels a lot for work, with a special pastry upon his...
Valentine Love: What Is Real Love?
We all want to experience real love, but how do you know when what you are experiencing is real love? Valentine’s Day is a great time to express love to your beloved. Yet many people are confused about what love really is. Most people want to both express and experience “real love,” yet often they have no idea what this is. Take a moment to think about how you would define real love. Defining love is like defining a particular color to a person who has never been able to see color — you have to feel it to know what it is. The reason why it’s hard to define real love is because you cannot experience it with your mind, and definitions are of the mind. Real love is of the heart and is a feeling that is the result of your intention to be loving. This is very different than the intention to get love. The desire to get love comes from the ego-wounded part of ourselves, the part that believes we need to get love from others in order to feel filled and worthy. Real love is something we get rather than something we are and something we share. This is what creates the confusion regarding love. This Valentine’s Day, are you focused on what you will get from your partner, or on what you want to give and to share? Real love is what you are — what your soul is — a spark of the Divine within. Love is what God/Spirit is. When your deepest desire is to be loving to yourself and your...