Soul Ties and Chains

For the last month, I have been thinking about soul ties and after four hours worth of YouTube - I was left with two questions.

 What made my soul choose to have these people in my life? 

 What made their souls choose to have me in theirs? 

 These two questions drove me crazy for a little bit because I over-analyse things to bits and then I realised that at that time and place, the people who have come and gone out of my life, by their choice or mine, that my soul chose them because at the time it resonated with something in them and there were lessons I needed to learn and conversations I needed to have. 

 Sometimes the hardest lessons in life are taught to us by the people we love, what the hurt teaches us from those lessons is how we will love ourselves and other people better. When I see things in these relationships begin to unravel and I know the end is nigh, I always ask God. 

"Why did it have to be this person to teach me this lesson? Couldn't I have learnt this lesson from somebody I already disliked? It would have made this experience so much easier!" 

Alas, if we didn't lose people we love one way or another, we wouldn't be able to do a better job at loving the people who were meant to come into our lives.

 If you asked me what soul ties look like, my reply would be a gold thread tied to my wrist and no matter how long I go without seeing the people I am connected to, that gold thread reminds my heart what I shared with them regardless of whether I want to be reminded or not.

 There was this amazing quote that I found and shared on Facebook this past week and it summed up everything that I needed in one paragraph. 

 “when you meet that person. a person. one of your soulmates. let the connection. relationship. be what it is. it may be five mins. five hours. five days. five months. five years. a lifetime. five lifetimes. let it manifest itself the way it is meant to. it has an organic destiny. this way if it stays or if it leaves, you will be softer. from having been loved this authentically. souls come into. return. open. and sweep through your life for a myriad of reasons. let them be who. and what they are meant.” ― Nayyirah Waheed 

 It is amazing how one paragraph can help heal the cracks in your heart, since finding that quote I Googled Nayyirah Waheed and found more incredible poems and quotes by her in Good Reads and fell in love with her work. 

 Even with this short explanation about soul mates, I know there is more I need to learn and understand about soul ties and the significance they have in my life and how they have shaped me into the person I am today.  

While the most popular ideal for soul ties and soul-mates is romantic, they also come in the form of friends, close family members, co-workers, spiritual teachers and any communities that we belong to. 

The bond that I share with my husband Alan is extraordinary in the way that sometimes we buy the exact same groceries on the same day and we have a laugh. 

This Thursday just gone I came home with groceries and I said to Alan. "I brought home a treat!" I showed him the big block of Toblerone I had bought and he smiled and said. "Wait until you see what I got!" It turned out to be two packets of Tim Tams!

One thing I have learnt through sharing my life with Alan is that true intimacy is knowing and anticipating what the other person needs in that moment, whether it is their own space to do what they need to, seeing something you know they will love at the shop and bringing it home to them, sharing your stories, or you both think and say the same thing at the same time and laugh together. 

There are all kinds of ties and connections that we share with people, all of them will be special in their own way and if for whatever reason time moves us on or we decide that having these soul-ties is not healthy for us, there is still something that binds us to them. 

We might be out shopping and see something that we know they would love, we walk down the grocery aisle and hear a song that reminds us of happier times or when we lost that soul tie. I was in Bunnings the other day in the wood section, one day I dream about building my own tiny house or renovating an old bus or container for my writing studio and a song came on that took me back in time and I was caught up in the grief of the loss of that soul tie, even though it happened so many years ago it felt so painfully raw. I have learnt that when something reminds you of a soul tie, the best thing you can do is send up a silent prayer or send them best wishes for their health and happiness. 

Depending on what happened when we lost a soul tie or a soul-mate, we may be harbouring a lot of anger towards them because of what they put us through and it is easy to get swept up in the negative emotions and send all your angry, bitter vibes to them because they broke your heart.

 It's because you don't want to love them but you do, the longer a soul tie stays in your life it makes it all the harder to let them go because one of the first questions you ask yourself when you contemplate what life will be like without the physical presence of that soul tie in your life and though it is hard to picture it, you close your eyes and you think back to the time before you met them, or when they were not as present in your life and you ask yourself. 

"When ____ wasn't here. What did I do?"

"What was my mind-set? Did I like who I was?"

 "What did I do back then that I don't now? What do I want to do now that I have learnt the lesson?" 

"Who am I without this person in my life? Who can I be that I wasn't when I was with them?"  

Soul ties are incredibly powerful in the way of influencing us, we may find ourselves imitating their traits, mannerisms, expressions and truth - that is why we don't give our own self identity and power away, I have been caught out doing this a couple of times and what I have to say about it is that it is one thing to admire a person, it is something else entirely to be them. You are already loved for who you are, so there is no need to go out and play the part of someone's doppelganger. 

There are soul ties that sweep into our lives for a short amount of time - a couple of years ago when Alan and I lived at an address we affectionately refer to as Fawlty Towers, I used to catch the 175 outbound to Garden City.

 This bus was not very crowded of a morning and sometimes I would find myself sitting near a Kiwi guy called Ricky. 

Ricky used to work in security and he's tall with a strong build, what draws people to him is his kind eyes and how he would make everyone around him feel like they were part of the conversation.   

When I moved suburbs I knew I was going to miss Ricky's philosophy sessions and one day he popped into my mind and BAM, one day he was waiting for a ride in my suburb! "Hey Ricky! What brings you here?" I ask as I reach out to return his fist-bump. 

"Sarah! I'm visiting my girlfriend. She lives around here." He replied with a smile like a piano, wide and white.

That is something that is comforting about positive soul ties, where ever you go, they find you now and again and inevitably, you stumble across them too. 

These past couple of weeks I have been shaking up my playlist with The Ramones and Fleetwood Mac. There has been one Fleetwood Mac song that has really resonated with me and that is called The Chain, I did a bit of research on how it came about and it carries the essence of every Fleetwood Mac member, a heady mix of old ideas and demos adapted to create a whole new song that is now Fleetwood Mac's opening number. 

For me personally, The Chain represents a surrendering of what you want another person to be for you and accepting that too much has changed for you to be the way you were, but there is always going to be this bond between you regardless of whether they are in your life or not. 

The very last line in The Chain is 'Chain, keep us together, running in the shadows'. And hearing that lyric hit my heart in a way that is bittersweet.

Because once we connect with someone on an emotional level and have walked the journey we are meant to share with them, we can't trick our minds into thinking they never existed.

That is why music is universally loved, because the songs we play on repeat are the love-child of the soul tie two or more people share.