by Mama Val Promise
Sometimes we get this love business backwards. We think we want to have a deep spiritual feeling about someone on the material plane, reaping our rewards in blissful and harmonious interchange in our every meeting.

But what if we’ve got it backwards? What is the point of finding a soulmate–someone to whom we experience a powerful and inexplicable attraction, and who seems like “relationship material?” Is it to have a buddy with whom to do the trench work toward ultimate enlightenment?

Mahayana Buddhists–which includes most Chinese and Japanese schools like Zen–believe that enlightenment is not just for the individual, but for all of sentient creation. The individual who achieves enlightenment can opt to return to the flesh again and again, with the purpose of assisting the rest of creature-kind from his or her exalted state. This in-between Buddha-being is known as a bodhisattva.

What cozier relationship could there be but that of buddy-sattvas, a coo-some twosome who consistently choose to relate to each other’s higher being, and in so doing, learn to look past every instance of small-mindedness and limited thinking in each other? Some say that the adult’s desire for the significant other symbolizes the infant’s yearning for mother, which in turn symbolizes the soul’s yearning for God.

No instance is too small. Will you see the dirty dishes and mis-squozen toothpaste tube, or will you see the One? Will you trap your love for them, or their love for you, in a tiny little treasure chest somewhere deep in your heart, or will you let it be the starting point of a love that encompasses the universe? A soulmateship is a sadhana, a spiritual practice, which in showing us the divine in one, shows us the divine in all.