My Journey into a Magical Love and through Utter Desolation, into Non-Attachment

My Journey into a Magical Love and through Utter Desolation, into Non-Attachment

In 2019, life gave me the chance to experience a new kind of love; something I hadn’t anticipated in the least, being someone that had already had more than one very deep “soul-based” connections in my life (not just romantic). What impressed me the most about it was the love I personally felt for this person. I can’t explain it other than that it was incredibly beautiful… it IS incredibly beautiful. It’s so massive, dare I say unconditional…

It was what I call a kind of “soul resonance” with another person that I had never experienced before in my life. It is simply not possible to put into words and have it properly capture the feeling. I have tried several times. You simply have to experience it.

The deepest parts of us resonated with the other in such a way that it was almost as if I literally heard music when would communicate. And this was a two-way street; he felt it too, and would say things like “I swear we have the same soul.”

I also found that we were what I called “entangled” in a way where it felt like my energy was inexplicably and inherently connected to his. Like anything I do or feel will be immediately responded to by his energy in a way that was first, subconscious. I could immediately predict and pick up on things he was feeling and doing in a way that I hadn’t experienced with another.

For me, always having a very well-attuned spiritual part of me, I felt all of this strongly to say the least. It felt like something that I was always looking for but didn’t consciously know actually existed (how would I, without having experienced it or having heard of anything like it?).

As a result…. in came in an incredible level of attachment. This experience, this connection, gave me and my life so much meaning, that the idea of living without it was unfathomable.

Yet in his case, he was not as spiritually attuned. A lot of the specific things he felt with the connection were foreign to him, whereas for me, some were foreign but some were not. And at the very least, my mind was already more open due to having consciousness-breakthrough experiences multiple times throughout my life.

It was clear after some time that we were not on the same page in terms of our personal development, and that this would get in the way of us being able to see eye-to-eye on certain things, but primarily for trust to exist, as he had been betrayed to a high degree in previous relationships. Not to mention, I was already in a relationship myself.

He decided to cut off contact, because not being able to be together while having these sort of feelings was too much to bear.  It was difficult for me to accept, but I understood. However, immediately after cutting off contact, I got the sense that he wasn’t just cutting off contact, it felt like he was stomping on the connection. As though he wanted to throw it away, pretend it never existed; “get love out of his system.”

Here was the most beautiful love I had ever experienced, a love that took me to new levels…showed me that someone with the same soul blueprint (for lack of a better way to say it) existed here — with me, and felt it too. Like we were wrapped in a cocoon of our own world and finally felt complete. And then months later, it is like he is doing everything he can do to pretend it never existed.

This gave me a pain that five years later, I still don’t think I’m fully over. Something that brought me a new level of meaning and completion to my life, the next minute left me out in the cold, writhing in pain, utterly suffering.

And after years of suffering, it produced an anger in me that at times is difficult to quell. Especially because I had reached out to him so many times afterwards (which I was very ashamed of) due to my pain, yet not once in 5 years could he respond anything at all, which built up a bit of resentment in me. That he could not step out of whatever was in his own mind for a moment to at least answer me once. To at least reassure me he still cared.

On the other hand, I did realize that I was potentially expecting too much by expecting any response at all in this situation.

The most important point I want to mention in this is… that learning to detach from this connection in a way that still honors it has been one of the most painful journeys I’ve been on, yet it’s done something positively to my character that I do not yet know how to articulate.

It is like within the utter, sheer pain and weight I carried on my shoulders for years and still to some extent carry, I have learned to stand stronger on my own two feet, to do more inner work to understand the true nature of my attachment and my longing, to allow the pain of loss grind away slowly at my ego a little bit as time has gone by.

The experience affected me in such a major way that I’m almost not the same person after that. It is as though I have gained twenty years of wisdom within a few years.

It is as though the universe gave me the one thing in the world I would desire most, one of the most pure loves I had ever experienced, something I didn’t know could exist and that had some of the most mysterious properties, then snatched it away from me in what felt like an instant. For a long time, this could felt like nothing but an utterly cruel joke.

Yet through this, day by day, I am still learning the virtue of nonattachment and the reality of impermanence, in a major way. There is not one day that has gone by in 5 years that I am reminded of what I felt that I had lacked, and the weight I was bearing with me.

It is only in the last few months that I have realized what I have gained through this process of pain, and it may be so much more significant than what I would have gained otherwise, because the love itself has never been lost.

Learning to Live Your Truth: Believe in Yourself!

Learning to Live Your Truth: Believe in Yourself!

Maybe I wasn’t meant to be a mother, wife, or hell even a partner. I realized I’d be happy, after all, just continuing to explore all my hobbies and live and die by my ideas and personal discoveries.

My first love in life told me I had an artist’s mind, we were maybe only about 15 or 16 when he said that. But I never forgot it. And he’s right. My imagination is actually extraordinarily entertaining and I never run out of ideas or things to do.

One thing I know for sure though is I’m pretty good at following my heart and I’ve been blessed to have a lot of unique experiences that people can easily look at me as crazy for, really shocked to find out that I did it all drug free lol but anyhow what I wanted to really say here is that if you have a different path in life than most, it really CAN be scary to follow it. It can be easier to just sweep that shit under the rug and ignore some of your deepest feelings. I’ve done it, and it surprised me that I did it. I’ve never been that type. I don’t suppress my emotions. I vent things, I address them, I’ve never run away from my emotions. Until…the fear or uncertainty associated with them was simply too much. I thought I could just ignore it til it resolved itself….until it didn’t. Sometimes it becomes easier to live a “practical” “normal” life. Everyone else around you seems to be doing it. And you have all those reinforcers around you all the time. People and their gatherings, their cozy families, their secure jobs. All seeking the same thing. But what if you have a different calling?

In all my past spiritual experiences, things people often never heard of were happening to me. I followed them because all I felt then was fascination. But once fear became involved or obstacles I didn’t have clarity on? Well that’s easy, I’ll just cover that up for now with my day-to-day goals and activities. But something kept nagging at me. Year after year after year. Nagging at me not to ignore it. Til I was like god, fine – what do you want? And realized something had to change. I had to try to conquer my fears and what other people were telling me was best.

I had common fears of ending up alone or wanting kids but then it being too late. Another fear was that I’d end up suffering alone in old age, lonely, in pain, with no resources to help me. I honestly have no idea where that fear came from (or any of these really), except maybe that that’s more or less what happened with my dad, and I saw his suffering, and naturally, it affected me greatly.

Of course, you want to live in a practical and smart way, but the cost of doing things out of fear or because “you’re supposed to” comes at the cost of living your truth and potentially paving a very unique path that will light the way for others. For me, this would be an extra big mistake because the intuition I have that calls me is so strong. I don’t know exactly what it means, but the callings always feel significant. And despite my fears, I can’t ignore them. You have to drop all expectations and be open and ready for anything. So — here’s to living your truth and facing your fears. Happy 2022!

A Little Taste of Spiritual Love, a Piece Written by Sophie Bashford

A Little Taste of Spiritual Love, a Piece Written by Sophie Bashford

“If you choose to love an awakened woman, understand that you are entering into new, radical and challenging territory.
If you choose to love an awakened woman, you cannot stay asleep.
If you choose to love an awakened woman, every part of your soul will be aroused, not just your sexual organs or even your heart.
Frankly, if you prefer a normal life, stick with a normal girl.
If you want a tame life, seek only a woman who has allowed herself to be tamed.
If you only want to dip your toe into the flowing waters of Shakti [Shakti is the concept or personification of divine feminine creative power in Hinduism], stay with the safe, tamed woman who has not yet plunged into the wildness of the sacred feminine ocean.
It is comfortable to love a woman who has not yet activated her inner sacred powers, because she does not push your buttons.
She will not challenge you.
She will not press you into becoming your highest self.
She will not awaken the forgotten and numbed-out parts of your spirit that urge you to remember that there is more to your life here than this.
She will not look into your weary eyes and send a lightning bolt of Truth through your body, jolting you awake and stirring long-lost desires for Soul Love within you.
A safe, unawakened woman will be wonderfully satisfying and soothing to your ego, heart, and body. She will walk quietly beside you and make you feel needed, responsible, like you are fulfilling your manly role.
If this is enough for you then accept it, love her with all your heart, remain faithful to her and thank her daily for the gift of her mild, un-threatening feminine presence in your life.
If this is not enough for you – if your heart, body and spirit is only craving the ‘other kind of woman’, the wild one – then know that you are on the cusp of soul-shifting transformation.
Know that you are making a serious choice with karmic consequences.
If you choose to step into the aura and body of a woman whose spiritual fires are blazing, you are accepting that you need a certain level of danger and risk in order to grow.
Once you begin to love a woman of this nature, you must accept total responsibility for the life-changes that will then ensue.
Your life will not be sleepily comfortable all the time. Your life will not allow you to stay stuck in old ruts and stagnant routines. Your life will take on a radically-new flavour and scent. You will be ignited by the presence of the wild feminine, and it will begin to send electric shock waves of spiritual light through your entire chakra system, attuning you to the call of the divine.
Choosing to be sexually and romantically-intimate with an awakened woman takes masculine courage to walk fearlessly into the Unknown. But it will reap rewards beyond your mind’s comprehension.
She will take you into undiscovered worlds of mystery and magic.
She will lead you, mesmerized and half-drunk with love, into the wild forests of sensual ecstasy and wonder.
She will show you sacred skies so full and burning with stars that you will start to wonder if you are still living on the same planet that you were born on.
She will break and tear you open so that your fierce, passionate heart drives you half-mad with longing. You will want to consume and penetrate her on every level so that your masculine essence can consume and penetrate the world – illuminating the universe with your devoted Love.
She will see you like you’ve never been seen before.
She will trust you.
She will appreciate you.
She will acknowledge your efforts to make her happy.
She will value everything good that you do, and everything good that you are.
She will not run from your darkness, because your darkness does not scare her.
She will embrace, kiss, caress and love you back to life. She will speak words that your soul understands. She will not punish you for your mistakes.
It is a monumental risk to love an awakened woman, because there is suddenly no place to hide. She sees everything, therefore she can love you with a depth and presence that your heart and body have yearned for so hard, so long, so fiercely…that you wonder whether you have actually been alive for all the time that she has been away.
Loving a woman like this is a choice you make to start living with your soul on fire.
Your life will never be the same again once you’ve invited her energy in.
Take this risk on yourself, or step back, stay with the “normal” girl and accept a different, safer, more comfortable and somewhat calmer life.
Just make sure that if you choose the latter, you don’t spend the rest of your days with your eyes looking back over your shoulder, straining to see once again the hazy vision of feminine mystery that has now disappeared from view.
She has long gone..spiraling back up to the Stars, the distant Galaxies and the Heavens…from where she came.”

–Sophie Bashford

The Chandogya Upanishad: A Lesson On Our True Natures

The Chandogya Upanishad: A Lesson On Our True Natures

The Chandogya Upanishad tells as story about Svetaketu, a young man of ancient India who, on returning to his home after twelve years of studying the Vedas, appeared to his father to be as somewhat set up about his vast learning. The father therefore set out to teach him some homely but profound wisdom not necessarily learned from books.

“Bring me,” he said to his son, “a fruit from a banyan tree.”
“Here is one, sir.”
“Break it.”
“It is broken, sir.”
“What do you see there?”
“Some seeds, sir, exceedingly small.”
“Break one of these.”
“It is broken, sir.”
“What do you see there?”
“Nothing at all.”
The father said, “My son, that subtle essence which you do not perceive there – in that very essence stands the being of the great banyan tree. In that which is the subtle essence all that exists has its self. That is the true, that is the Self, and you, Svetakeu, are that.”
“Pray, sir,” said the son. “Tell me more.”
For the second lesson the father gave his son a bag of salt, saying, “Place this salt in a vessel of water and come to me tomorrow morning with the vessel.”
When the son appeared the next day the father commanded, “Bring me the salt which you put in the water.”
But the salt of course had disappeared.
“Taste the water from the surface of the vessel and tell me how it is.”
“Salty,” said the son.
“And from the middle?”
“Salty.”
“And from the bottom?”
“Salty also.”
Then the father said, “Here likewise in this body of yours, my son, you do not perceive the true, but there in fact it is. In that which is the subtle essence, all that exists has its self. That is the true, that is the Self; and you, Svetaketu, are that.”

-Changdogya Upanishad

Looking Within: Understanding the Journey of the Soul

Looking Within: Understanding the Journey of the Soul

Admittedly, there are a lot of things I’ve experienced that I wish I could just show people. Not use words, but rather send them a download telepathically that they can play and absorb with their minds in order to understand it. For some of the most memorable experiences in life, words either fall short or do not suffice at all.

In this case, they may barely suffice, but I will try.

The Nature of My Own Spirituality

For most of my life, I thought of myself as something close to an atheist, though I was born with a strong spiritual sense. Spirituality, as I define it, is as simple and inherent as self-awareness. It does not constitute a belief system of any kind. It stems off of senses and experiences as one learns to explore and uncover their own selves.

Therefore, exploring spirituality was always a natural experience for me and did not have any external influence. It was and is a personal journey and also as natural of a part of me as my own leg or eyeballs.

I also have never been one to just believe things without personal experience or evidence backing it, no matter the social pressure or any other reason. And, to look or cling to anything external would be to entirely ignore the messages and discoveries that I was finding by looking within.

However it wasn’t until about a year ago, at age 31, that I came to some major realizations that my mind had previously somewhat sensed but not fully realized.

It came as a result of years and years of being introspective. Of exploring the nature of the identities we develop on Earth all the way down to extraordinarily subtle clues my intuition picked up on as I continued my exploration of the soul (I won’t and can’t get into debates of reason on what the soul is and why, for to do so would lose the message in details that won’t get us anywhere).

“I wish I were a real girl”  Me at Age 6

Part of it stemmed from the fact that I’ve always had a sense of not feeling like this body, or me as I was experiencing myself, was the full “me.” In my day-to-day experience of this life for as long as I can remember (even reaching far back to as young as 5), there has ALWAYS been an undertone of feeling like the part of myself I identified with the most was not the one interacting here on Earth on a daily basis, or doing anything that I do here  working, talking, writing, being a human, and so on.

All of these things felt (and still feel) secondary to me, but for most of my life I didn’t know why and I didn’t pay all that much attention to it. They just felt like things I had learned to do and that I was doing what I needed to do to live.

But overall, this life for me has always felt like a dream.

It has always had a sense of surrealism to it, for me. I’ve always had a sense that beyond just being involved with it, I was kind of just watching it and trying my best to fit in.

This persistent underlying feeling is what led me to delve even deeper then to ask the question, “where then, am I?” or what part of my being or what circumstance do I need to experience myself in to feel like I am fully expressing or being “me?”

The answer came to me, but it took a long, long time.

I don’t think I will ever feel like fully “me,” until the death of this body. What I realized is that I am very in tune with my soul or “higher self”, and have been able to feel its presence strongly throughout my lifetime.

Exploring the Soul Deeply Requires a Specific Understanding of the Nature of Our Identities

What can seem mind-boggling through all of this is that to be able to explore the soul’s “identity” requires a very specific and important harmony of almost what I see as two separate identities (that are also essentially one) at once: our identities/personality as created by our Earthly lives as well as our soul identity.

I had made a mistake at age 21 when I still had much to learn and I was pursuing my soul (or higher states of consciousness) through consistent meditation with the aim of “getting somewhere.” I had already had a prior spiritual experience and thought I needed to bring another one on to “get farther” in my understanding of my existence.

My problem was that I was not yet ready for the lessons I was seeking, and I was bringing them on by force and by a very linear perspective of progression.

We bring on our own understanding by the willingness to have an open mind and also to seek, but the right perspective is also absolutely necessary.

We have to be truly ready. And reason for this is that the soul is massive.

Our souls extend far beyond what we understand ourselves as here on Earth, and being able to understand yourself as a soul means you are ready to not just understand, but EXPERIENCE your connection and your core to all of creation itself.

This often means letting go of what you think you are. Of what you have learned to define yourself by, which has influences from everything we can think of. From school and peers and how they define us, from how our parents might have defined us, what society has told us is important to measure ourselves by, to more subtle things like what our ideologies are and how they match with others’. The list goes on.

Most people may not have even thought of beginning the work of erasing these ideas (why would they if they don’t question it too much, or are too busy to question it?) and do not understand what it would require.

Many people take recreational drugs to experience a brief period of opening up to other experiences of themselves or of life. To learn new lessons and gain new spiritual insights. I totally understand the draw (meditation did the same for me  it was my drug); but here too, I feel as though more often than not they are not doing the legwork to be able to bring these experiences on through their own intellectual and spiritual development.

Therefore, the experiences of themselves in these new realms are fleeting. When your intellectual, conscious, spiritual development does not match that of the experience you are having, your understanding will ultimately be limited and you may not even get the results you desire.

The Soul Contains Knowledge and Memories Beyond Time and Space As We Know It

Soul Memories

Receiving messages and discoveries from this part of me often felt like they came from a timeline that was not anything I would ever be able to put my finger on. I believe it’s because these realizations came from a part of me that this knowledge was already IN, and were not only relevant to this lifetime, but I was only now in my lifetime uncovering it.

However, it’s clear to me now that the knowledge was not just coming from a linear time frame such as “before” this life or what have you, but that my brain was interpreting it as such.

The nature of the knowledge was timeless, deeply buried, yet always available. It was only the contrast between this fact and the point in time of being able to be consciously aware of it that gave it a sense of being from a long, long time ago.

Every time I would uncover something it also felt the opposite of mystical. It felt natural, normal, and completely made sense. It would feel like I was simply remembering something I already knew, but not from any definable point in my current existence.

Some of What I’ve Learned  In a Nutshell

  1. The soul has had a journey of its own, that is separate yet also one with the journey we have in our current lifetimes.
  2. I still don’t personally know for sure if we live multiple incarnations. Previously, I was never one to believe in past lives (again, what reason would I have had to believe that? How would I be able to really know?), but it was by journeying within my soul over years of time that I saw, and experienced memories and knowledge that led me to understand myself in an infinitely more massive way. I do know that our essence, our energy does not die. We do not exist in the Earthly shell we have defined as ourselves forever. Our essence exists as a form of energy that is one with a palpitating whole, and it is beautiful, vibrant, and full of love.
  3.  The soul has its own store of knowledge and memories, that are also separate yet one with our current lives on Earth. It’s no wonder they are so difficult to remember; as this knowledge and memories are not recalled in the same way we would recall any other knowledge or memories from our lives on Earth. So for many of us, we wouldn’t know where or how to look for these soul memories.
  4. We have to learn to listen to ourselves and realize how much external messages might be detracting us from what’s within. The more we get in touch with our own selves, the more we will realize our true nature and begin to remember things that are buried what seems to be infinitely deeply within our essences.It is by doing this that we will reach heightened levels of compassion for all of creation as we realize that although we have separate manifestations, at our core we truly are all one.

 

 

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