Coming Home

In the past two days, there was a bird coming into my room late at night. I think it was coming through the hole in the wooden carved plank on top of the door. It was flying here and there trying to find a place to rest. It went to the cupboard, to the ceiling and above my bed. I thought it was lost its way in the night. I had opened the door and curtain to give it an exit way to fly free instead of being caged in my room. But it didn't go away. In the first day, I didn't really see where it found its way out. It just disappeared. When I didn't see it flying here and there, I thought it must have found its way out. But when it appeared again the next day in my room, I couldn't help but wondering what it was all about. After it flew here and there, finally I saw it disappeared in the wooden-carved frame of the mirror.

Oh soul, you worry too much.
Your arms are heavy with treasures of all kinds.
~ Jalaluddin Rumi ~

Bird in the Sufism world is the symbol of a soul. And a soul being sent down to earth was always trying to find its way home, its true home. Some will find while others will get lost. And souls were made in pairs (QS 81:7), just like any other creations such as night and day, man and woman (QS 36:36). That is why there is a thing called soul mate. And soul mate isn't about husband and wife or man and woman, it can also be in a form of man with man or woman with woman. Because a soul has no gender. It only has a quality that defines its identity to be called an entity. Though it can happen that when woman and man love deeply under Divine decree they're made husband and wife, but soul mate is not about husband and wife partnership. It is about the fulfillment of its quality that people called as emptiness by the existence of its mate. Blessed be to those who find their soul mate while living their life and understand the meaning and its significance of their union.

Exalted is He who created all pairs - 

from what the earth grows and from themselves 

and from that which they do not know.

~ QS 36:36 ~

Understanding a Soul

As I said when the bird disappeared in the mirror, I can't help but wondering. Because a mate is about being a mirror that reflect the beauty of the soul quality. So often people are blinded by the physical and worldly things and can't see the deeper aspect of their own soul. They see themselves as bad and ugly while their soul mate find them to be good and beautiful. How could that be? It is a different mirror that they used to look into themselves that cause this difference. It's like when you look into the mirror, your left hand will be the right hand, your nearness will be your distance.

And sometimes you find your soul mate to be in a state of unknowing of your existence. It was in a hatred kind of state because of some past trauma. So he/she rejected you and deny your existence. Yet, she/he find no solace from other because it has been specifically made that you two are soul mates. That's when people settle to whatever they have for the sake of peaceful mind. I can understand their reasoning. Because there are so many responsible that they have to do to care rather than listening to their inner voice, there are so many distraction that will keep them busy doing things, thinking so many things that's going on to avoid one thing; that is to listen to their inner voice.

With love you don’t bargain. 

There, the choice is not yours. 

Love is a mirror, 

it reflects only your essence, 

if you have the courage to look in its face.

~ Jalaluddin Rumi ~

I remember very clearly about the man who I know is my soul mate even without meeting him in person and know his past experience. How so? It was during our short encounter that I realize that. Or I can simply say 'It's the message from the Divine.' And somehow, he rejected me in thinking he was bad and ugly. Yet, I saw his beautiful soul as the mirror of mine. And I understand how this could happen. It happened because of his past experience. When he wrote a poem about someone damned his soul for his choice of being a Muslim I knew it was his wife who did it. She had wronged his fundamental rights as well as ripped their soulful union in marriage. Though formally they're still bonded under marriage law and surrounded by his family, his soul was left alone. Without knowing this nature, he will feel inferior to himself as if he had failed in his marriage and life thus will not find solace in his solitary. His soul will wander to find something that he once felt but no longer there. It was the joy of the moment when his soul was in communion with his soul mate, doing nothing but feeling the proximity of the soul though physically so far away. I also know that he will never be able to accept me without accepting his deeper part that he dislikes/hate. Because I'm the reflection of the part that he denies, rejects and feels inferior with. For that reason, I also know that he will not come to me and face me if he hasn't resolve his inner turmoil and be free of all the inferior feeling he feels and to see his beautiful reflection in someone else.

To understand more of soul characters and its searching, I think people need to understand their own soul, how it deals with things around them and see the reflection of their own self in people around them. Look at it this way: To all animals when they see their own self in the mirror, their first reaction are between curious, alert and alarmed. And they keep coming back to that mirror to see who is that in the mirror. And they stopped only to that. Well, they may do something funny or stupid after that. I don't know if they finally develop some understanding that it was their own image to make them stop doing things we consider funny or stupid . But human being is different. They're reaction varies from following their animal instinct to humanly instinct to understand who is the person in the mirror from physical aspect to spiritual aspect. This is a great challenge to human being. Because if only they can see the deeper aspect of the one in the mirror, they will see the aspect of Divinity that is hidden in their being. One may want to understand my point here by reading the book written by Farid-ud-din Attar under title of Conference of The Birds. I won't elaborate more here.

Read more in http://sufibooks.info/Sufism/The_Conference_of_the_Birds_Fardiuddin_Attar.pdf

Letting Love in

The other day as I was searching through my files folder, I came across this article from O Magazine that I had placed there sometime ago. I can't remember when but it's there. The title is The key of Letting Love in. The article highlighted intimacy in term of man and woman relationship. In a way it is applicable to anyone in soul-mate-relationship. Because a soul is the closest thing to us - human being - than any other thing in our life. It is hidden in our living being. It's like wherever, whenever and however we are, it is there witnessing our ups and downs through life. As I read through it, I knew the article highlighted my point about 'his ability to accept me lies on his ability to accept his inner self'. I wished I could send it to him to make him understand, but I couldn't. I had promised him and myself that I would leave him alone to respect his wish.

I think I will share the article here so anyone can have more understanding about their soul and how to deal with it when they find their soul mate in the same situation:

Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
~ Jalaluddin Rumi ~

Keeping your guard up in a relationship is guaranteed to keep the love out, too. Couples therapists Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt share the dazzling revelation that saved their own marriage—and could help anyone's.

"When it comes to love relationships, things are often not what they seem," Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt write in their book Receiving Love—and you might say the two of them, marriage therapists married to each other, are their own best object lesson. Seven years ago, although they were writing best-selling self-help books, training therapists, and leading couples workshops throughout the world, their personal union was crumbling.

On the verge of divorce, they tripped over the snaky root of their discontent. "One morning, when we were most troubled," Helen says, "we were in our bedroom and I asked Harville, 'Do you believe that I love you?' Harville thought about that for a couple of seconds and said, 'No, I don't think you do.' I was distraught. I could only respond, 'Given all that I do for you and our life together, how could you not know how much I love you?'"

Harville understood that his feelings were irrational, he says, but alienation was stubbornly entrenched. No matter what Helen gave him emotionally, it had little impact because he suspected there were strings attached. "Only with time and reflection did I realize that I was not able to recognize genuine love when it was offered," he says.

As they began to contemplate the problem, in much the same way that the minute you think about having a baby, you see pregnant women everywhere, Helen and Harville noticed that a sizable number of couples they'd worked with were stuck in the same cold place. For instance, there was the wife who told her husband she needed him to express more affection—then resisted his kisses and kind words because, she said, they didn't feel genuine. Another husband admitted that when his wife offered verbal support, he shut down and didn't respond. And when a new father took time off from work to help his exhausted wife with their twins, she refused to let him do his share. "As far as I could see, she was undermining my gift of love," he complained in therapy.

The struggle to understand and ease this kind of self-inflicted isolation grew into Harville and Helen's book. "The common wisdom," they write, "is that romantic relationships would stay happy if people did a better job of giving to each other. But that's not what we've discovered. We've found that many people need to do a better job of receiving the gifts their partners are already offering. It's surprising how often the compliments, appreciation and encouragement of a well-intentioned partner make no dent in the armor of an unhappy partner.

Harville ticks off the ways we deflect what we secretly crave: by devaluing praise; by assuming the other person is insincere; by criticizing the sender of a positive message for not getting it right, not doing it on time, or not doing it often enough; by not listening; or by feeling embarrassed. We also block loving words by hardening our chest and stomach muscles.

Only the soul knows what love is so be with those who help your being.
~ Jalaluddin Rumi ~ 

These are difficult habits to break, say Harville and Helen, because they're often the tip of an iceberg of unconscious self-hatred, going back to childhood. Our parents invariably rejected some aspects of us, either through criticism ("Don't act that way") or inattention (ignoring, say, our anger or ambition, or even certain interests and talents). "When this happens," Harville says, "we split off those parts of ourselves and hide them in our unconscious." But although we seal them off as dangerous and bad, they never go away; instead they form what Harville and Helen call a missing self.

Over time, we deny our needs and replace them with defenses. "Then when someone values us, we have to reject him or her," Harville says. To let ourselves be cherished for who we really are would be to violate our parents' edict that we are flawed, and to arouse our fear that if we do, feel, or think certain things, we'll be neglected and abandoned—in the most primal sense, left to die. "So to receive love is to risk death," Harville says. "This drama plays out because the part of our mind that holds the parental injunction is timeless—today is the same as yesterday. None of this is conscious, but the bottom line is that we reject love in order to stay alive.

Ideally, we'd be able to pull the curtain on this inner opera and deide to accept ourselves whole. Unfortunately, that doesn't work. "You can't consciously achieve self-love by loving yourself. To end self-rejection, you have to learn to love in another what you hate in yourself," Harville insists. "If you don't know what that is, you can find out by noticing what you project onto others, what you criticize repetitively and with emotion." If, for example, you accuse your partner of being an angry person, you may have submerged your own anger. When you learn to accept the hated trait in your partner, "you will simultaneously accept it in yourself," he says. "Self-love is born out of love of another."

Simply put, what goes around comes around: You learn to love your partner, which allows you to receive more love. Heady stuff, and, as with most things worth having, there's a price. You have to give up your identity as a victim and let go of whatever payoff you've been getting from hopelessness and despair. You also have to surrender your emotional dependency on your parents and their judgments.

"This is a complicated process," Harville says, in a bit of an understatement. It's also a joint project because "when one partner rejects love, the other does also, but in different ways." That's because we tend to marry someone who is our emotional equal (with a similar childhood wound), but who has developed opposite defenses. If you wall yourself off by yelling or finding fault, he says, your spouse might distance himself by sullenly withdrawing.

Harville suggests learning to listen deeply and empathetically. "You can say, 'Tell me what happens inside you when I express love.' Then listen without criticism," he says. You might hear "I feel anxious" or a surprisingly self-deprecating remark. "If you understand and empathize—'I can imagine this feels scary to you'—a paradoxical thing happens. Your partner will view you as safe, in contrast to the unconscious memories of his caretakers as dangerous, and be more open."

Speaking as the proverbial physicians who've had to heal themselves, Harville and Helen have pronounced their marriage stronger than ever, and appear to have reached a new high. Mature love, they write, comes when each person has grown with the other's help, and when both people know how to give and receive—"it's the lifetime achievement award."

Read more: http://www.oprah.com/relationships/Whats-Your-Intimacy-Quotient

Freeing the bird

Freeing the bird is a symbol of unconditional love. Knowing that when we free the bird from its cage is like freeing our soul to find its way home. Freeing the bird isn't about goodbye. Because those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation. This is the essence of love between Prophet Ibrahim AS and Hagar RA, Prophet Yaqub AS and Prophet Yusuf AS, Rumi and Tabriz, Radha and Khrisna. Both loved their soul mates very dearly yet both were separated by circumstance to prove their love to the others.

Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes.
Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation!
~ Jalladuddin Rumi ~

Their heart had been filled with love so pure and divine that their submission to the greater cause in their life had made their humanly love to be immortal. It's like a phoenix that reborn from the ashes, so is the soul that has found its identity as a lover and be with the Loved one.

So what of me? I am as I am. I did as I did to the bird that flew into my room. he had the freedom to come and go as he wished. Though tears couldn't be avoided, but as understanding was given and Love and Peace remained supreme, everything was made sense. Something is understood. He may come and he may go as he wishes, but Love remains.

Yet if it's like the bird, he chooses to return and stay, I will accept him with kindness knowing that I can only be in peace when I can accept the whole of me. That in my knowledge of him as my soul mate, in accepting him I am also accepting myself. How I treat him will be how I want to be treated. How I see him will be how I want to be seen. I treat him with kindness because I want to be treated with the kindness. I see him beautiful because I want to be seen beautiful. That is how a mirror does its job, isn't it? It is as simple as that.

A heart filled with love is like a phoenix that no cage can imprison.
~ Jalaluddin Rumi ~ 

Now, to get this aspect of coming home into reality is a matter of having a conviction. I mean what do you think would happen if Hagar lost faith to her Lord thus to her husband? What would happen if Yaqub lost faith to his Lord thus to his son? What would happen if Rumi lost faith to his Lord thus to Tabriz? or Radha lost faith to her Lord thus to Khrisna? There won't be anything called devotion. Because devotion is about keeping faith and conviction to Lord, the Beloved one regardless their circumstances. Hagar kept her faith to the promise she received when she was taking flee from her husband house. Yaqub kept his faith to the promise he received through his son's dream. And so were Rumi and Radha in their devotion to their Beloved. And I learn my lesson on having conviction to my Lord through this. Either way, I'd like to think that the bird experience is as if his soul has reached me though physically he doesn't present before me; understanding his circumstance in living his life and keeping his family happy.

And worship your Lord 

until there comes to you the certainty.

~ QS 15:99 ~