Roxana and Vincent have travelled a wild and rocky road on their soul mate journey to a place of bliss, expansion and growth. This is their beautiful story.
Roxana’s soul mate journey
What is evoked in you when you think of the concept of soul mates? Happy ever after images of true bliss between lovers? A sense of longing from the root of your heart? Cynicism, disbelief or even laughter?
For me when I was a young woman in my late teens I basically did not believe in love. Yes, I’d seen a million movies and read all the fairy tales I could lay my hands on. I still didn’t believe in what the images depicted: some infatuation that would overtake my senses and lead me into a rose-tinted vision of happiness and perfect union.
In my twenties I despaired, having tasted unrequited love, always at a distance never materialising into anything real. Then a decade later just when I was least expecting it I met Vincent.
Did I recognise my soul mate at first sight? No.
I was in a foul mood and filled with negative judgements at the unfairness of life having brought me to this state of affairs (attending a night of speed-dating in the chill of mid-February 2004). The signs of magic were there but I had a poor radar system. I found him handsome and intelligent, sweet, butterflies fluttered in my stomach when we accidentally brushed up against each other and to top it all I had a powerful sensation of my whole auric field softening and opening up to him (when all evening I had felt like an ice queen – totally frozen, impenetrable). Despite all these signs and portents, I missed the point. It was only when he responded to something I said about Rudolf Steiner that my brain finally kicked in. Oh wow! He’s cute and he knows who Steiner is, now this I can work with I thought. I tore my name tag off and scribbled my phone number and thrust it into his hand before leaving abruptly.
Eight years later I laugh at these memories and can honestly hand on my heart say Vincent is my soul mate. Currently, over the last twelve months in particular a whole new dimension has been opening up in our relating; a profound confirmation of our souls choosing this mission of life on earth together. It’s a daily yet always spontaneous occurrence that feelings of immense gratitude surge up in me for his presence in my life and the relationship we have forged together with intense commitment.
Soul mates I now see, do exist. I sense that they exist as profound resonances seated at the core of our sacred human hearts. To actualise the soul mate relationship and live this path is the most challenging and rewarding accelerated path to spiritual growth, emotional fulfilment, personal freedom and ecstasy.
We humans are somewhat myopic and because we live in this era of relationships arising through love we assume we will know how to maintain and nourish them until death do us part. If we take a step back and look at the span of human civilisation the romantic relationship doesn’t feature. Unions were created by and for societal, family and religious purposes. The individuals were often pawns in the body politic of their world. We in recent centuries have the enormous freedom to choose. How are we doing? The divorce statistics seem to suggest: not very well.
What happens when two people meet and ‘fall in love’? How can the sense of aliveness, joy, connection and sexual spark remain potent, fresh, scintillating? These are the questions many live with today. I as a woman newly ‘in love’ in the most tender and precious relationship I had experienced also pondered over these questions. Nothing in my life had touched me as deeply as this bond, I rejoiced and shone. Within the light of this love my whole existence took on new meaning and a vital spirit of wonder permeated my days. I believed in this and wanted it to endure. This desire triggered in me an old memory of wishing to explore Tantra. And so within months of meeting, heads still lost in the intoxicating sparkle of love’s aphrodisiac nature, Vincent and I almost nonchalantly wandered into the couples Soulmate Tantra Training with Sarita and Geho. This naivety served us well: Tantra seemed to be a joyful path where love, sexuality and spirituality interwove – of course we wanted to participate!
The powers that be must have giggled at our innocence and of course drenched us in blessings. And boy did we need them! Little did we know that Tantric practice would shine a light so bright that it would unearth everything in us that stands in the way of love. You know, the places where we feel unworthy, the places of old conditioning, past hurts, childhood wounds, misperceptions, the ego personality: it’s strategies and defences, and so much more. The light of Tantric practice is a dynamic blend of love and awareness which relentlessly reveals every aspect of our being that keeps us from total union with love, with our own self, with the divine, with the beloved. Love is a demanding task mistress and calls for these parts of our being – to dissolve and reform much like a caterpillar’s journey into the mushy liquid world of the cocoon before it’s beauty and freedom rises to the sky as a butterfly. This becoming butterfly-like is the realisation of a soul mate relationship.
So yes I do believe in the soul mate phenomenon and have been living this path of relationship as spiritual practice with Vincent daily for the last eight years. The new phase I spoke of in our relationship is an entirely different territory – from the ground of my lost, deeply wounded history I continue to allow the force of love to melt me, re-forge me. She gives me flight.
Vincent’s soul mate journey
My experience of the soul mate relationship over the last eight years can be likened to riding a great beautiful wild tiger! Maybe you can imagine the exhilaration and exuberance I felt while riding this mighty speeding beast through the jungle of self awareness. Now maybe you can also imagine the moments when thorns and briers brushed past me and tore at my skin. Or that inevitable moment when the tiger leaps over boulders, I lose my grip on her thick mane, and fall with a painful thud on my backside!
I feel that whether we are riding the tiger of awareness or not, we are invariably in the jungle of life. And this with an ego that suffers from a myriad of delusions that prevent us from relating from our souls depth.
Before Tantra I was well aware of the sad and painful pitfalls of love lost and the mistakes I made supposedly in the service of love. I was also aware of the great spontaneous ecstasy that came with sexual union. Before Tantric practices that fostered new perception, new awareness, I was like a ship without a rudder, let loose on the sea of love’s stormy chaotic nights and pure sunny bliss-filled days.
My wife, Roxana, and I came to Tantra because somewhere in us (unbeknown to our ego selves) we were both ready to dive deeply into the accelerated path of awakening that a Tantric relationship undoubtedly is.
Tantra offers tools through which we can, if we apply them with dedication, evaporate the poisoned ground of past hurts, known and unknown that we have deep in our souls. It is an alchemical path, transforming poison into nectar. For us, dedication to this path has turned the heaviest lead into the gold of heart opening connection a hundred times over. Tantra is an exact science through which we can realize the astounding possibilities available to us human beings. It does, however require several key ingredients.
The first key has to be an unrelenting commitment to love and awareness, complete dedication, no matter what this unveils. This commitment has guided me; sometimes it’s been as easy as getting on an elevator to the stars, and sometimes so intensely challenging, requiring infinite delicacy to hold the spider-web-fine thread of awareness in the most challenging of situations.
The second key to deepening in union is steadfast determination. I remember early on in my relationship with Roxana when the apparent slings and arrows were being fired and I was hiding behind my high castle walls of passive aggression. Through it all, I knew that whatever I was facing, I was in fact facing this with my chosen love, I chose to make a stand for this love.
What I soon discovered was that whilst my wife’s troubles were expressed through intensity, passion and fire, mine were ‘expressed’ in cold dispassionate ways and through withdrawal.
Which brings me to the third important key on the soul mate path – Risk.
We must be willing and able to risk ourselves, to communicate our most intimate feelings and desires. Many times we have clashed, when in fact there was a simple and innocent misunderstanding at the heart of the matter. Needless to say we talk a great deal, and have gone from three day all out nuclear war scale arguments in the past to these days where five minutes of drama will arise and then laughter or a hug.
Sarita’s couples soulmate training has literally guided and coached us out from the arduous waters of our dysfunction in relationship, to a land where we feast on splendid fruits like King and Queen.
Roxana and Vincent teach the first three levels of the Soul Mate Training, starting with Level 1 at Croydon Hall, 7-12 August 2012.
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