Love and Soul-Making: Searching the Depths of Romantic Love

Excerpt - Stacey Shelby

Romantic love is the ultimate transformer. It enthrals with a sip of love potion or enchants with the prick of Eros’ arrow. Who can resist? But as romance unfolds, we are enticed into greater awareness of self and other— sometimes through a crisis that ensues. The only way through is one tentative step in front of the other. The old idealized life dies away and a new life gestates quietly. With each step, we are invited to look into our deepest recesses, to discover what we didn’t even know existed. Each revelation is a mirror and a glimpse of our own soul. We come to marvel at the person we are getting to know, the one who is looking back at us with a new gaze— and who is giving us a new view of ourselves. Something within us doesn’t follow societal rules, but has its own, which are only revealed to us a bit at a time. This ‘Other’ within us challenges us and brings out the best and worst in us— our fullness. She is Psyche, the human soul. She pursues what she loves, which is beyond all logos and rational safety. Psyche follows Eros, who is the immortal god of love. He is Love as the sacred connecting principle. We encounter these two most poignantly in the arena of romantic love. As we walk with them, we get to know paradox, including the paradox of knowing sacred, divine love through the experience of embodied human love. In embracing soul as life’s muse, we come into relationship with, indeed we fall in love with, Mystery. In following what we love, we follow soul, and experience enchantment in our own unique and precious life.

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