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What Are Twin Flames?
10.10.2017
For the YouTube video that goes along with this article, click here.
Maybe you’ve seen this term around the internet. Or maybe you’re in the same boat that I was about four or so years ago — completely dazed and googling a cocktail of symptoms in an effort to figure out just what on earth you’re experiencing. Either way, it’s likely that you’ve seen ‘twin flame’ in the context of a list of signs or stages along with a definition that read something like: “this is the other half of your soul,” or “you both have the same soul but you’re living in two different bodies.” Given that both of these are a bit difficult to really grasp and that the average list of signs includes at least 11 items, it’s incredibly easy to become confused and start applying this term to just about anyone you feel a very strong connection to. At the time I did exactly that—and I hadn’t even met my twin. So let’s clarify things.
We’ll start with love — what this whole thing is about. Love is energy, and sound is energy in motion. Thus we could say love is energy is sound. Each of us come into this life a unique expression of love – creating our own sound – just by virtue of living. For the sake of simplicity, let’s just say that each of us is playing our own instrument from the moment of birth.
Friends and acquaintances are people who belong to the same family of instruments as you do. So if I play the guitar and you play the violin that makes us both strings. We have a category in common. In life this looks like someone who works at the same place as you, goes to the same school, has the same interests, shares the same religion, comes from the same hometown, etc. The relationship doesn’t really go beyond these arbitrary groupings.
Then there are soulmates. Whether playing the same instrument as you or a different instrument from you, a soulmate comes into your life to help shape a part of your song and you theirs. So let’s say that on the grand album of your life each song represents a life lesson—without the soulmate coming in and lending a bit of their sound to yours the song would be incomplete. Soulmates are so integral to one another’s life lessons that they are featured on those songs on each other’s albums. Think We Found Love — on Calvin Harris’ album we find Rihanna and on Rihanna’s Calvin Harris. It works like this.
We could also say with a soulmate relationship that the element of time is present. Though the bond might feel timeless, soulmates come and go. It could be the briefest exchange, maybe a few notes on each other’s songs, before you both part ways. Or it could be that you collaborate together at different periods of your lives on a number of different songs. Either way, soulmates come in and out of our lives in a very natural way, fading in and out of our consciousness as they do.
We might also experience resistance to a soulmate when we first meet them. If we consider that the people we encounter who most attract us and who most repulse us always have some fragment of ourselves to be recognized and integrated, soulmates will likely inspire an intensity of feeling on either end of the spectrum. So let’s say this person is playing a really strange instrument and you take one look at it and all you can think about is just how ridiculous it seems. It’s off-putting. But then maybe you listen to this person play it and you hear something in their sound that helps you to discover a previously unknown element in your own. Growth occurs. At this point, we’ve shifted from a space of perceived difference to one of perceived similarity because we’ve better understood some part of our own sound in relation to theirs.
So what about twin flames? Whether or not a twin flame is playing the same instrument or a different one is completely irrelevant — it’s not what, but how. Twins play with the same feeling tone, the same nuance, the same inflection, as we do. This is why we say they resonate deeply. We use this word ‘resonate’ whenever something makes sense to us or feels right to us intuitively — but what is resonance? It is “the prolongation of sound through reflection.” We are literally saying that our twins sustain – support, give energy to – our sound – our expression of love – by reflecting it – mirroring it back to us –perfectly. In essence, twin flames are energetically exact expressions of the same unique love frequency.
Let’s look more closely at this phrase ‘energetically exact’. Let’s say somehow I acquire Jimmy Hendrix’s guitar and I play one of his songs with it and I have some serious skill — would I sound like Jimmy Hendrix? Exactly so, it'd be impossible. There’d still be that intangible, unnameable something missing. In this case, that Jimmy Hendrix energy. We’re not talking about the instrument. We’re not talking about the sound. We’re talking about the quality of the sound, its characteristics, its essence — that something that isn’t discernibly perceptible, which is to say that something that exists beyond the material world and, thus, beyond time.
So while a soulmate comes along and helps to shape the song of one of our phases of growth, a twin flame (while certainly doing so as well in periods of togetherness) ultimately is the song as much as we ourselves are because they share the very same essence of the sound that creates each and every song. This is why past moments before even having met them point towards them, why we are able to see and feel into our shared future — twin flames are constantly a part of our awareness, whether consciously or subconsciously. They are always.
It is because the twin flame relationship is not bound by time that twins are able to mirror for us both the truth of our essence – our purest expression of love – and the reality of where we are right now in relation to that essence. And because they are able to do this, a contradiction springs up — a time paradox, if you will.
It is exactly at this point that the stages become relevant, most especially the running and chasing phase. You can read more about that in the next part of this series by clicking here.
*Author's Note: When I conceived of this analogy it was a helpful way for me to make sense of things outside of the descriptions that I had found up to that point, and to explain to those who haven't met their twin flames what exactly the distinction is between flames and soul mates. I recognize now, though, that I only had need of this conceptual understanding at that time because I hadn't yet felt or seen the "twin within." I'll be speaking more to this experience, and of a more direct knowing, in the 3rd installment of this series. Until then, you can check out my About Me page for a different spin on this question, one which was born of an entirely new viewpoint.