In the midst of a global pandemic, political, public and planetary disruption, my family and I managed to find a pocket of profound peace, love and joy this week when we met our sister we never knew we had.

A recent DNA test revealed a sister of 47 years abandoned in Vietnam, left behind by my father who took his other three daughters (me included) back to the United States during the fall of Vietnam. My two sisters and I grew up not knowing we had another sister who had been looking for us her entire life. We don’t know if our father knew about her or not but we can’t imagine he would’ve left her behind had he known. You can read my post about it and watch the ABC news story here.

This week, despite quarantine orders and concerns for Covid-19, we each traveled from four different states with our husbands and kids to one location to meet in person for the first time ever.

While home, we all comply to the mask and social distancing ordinances, but during our reunion, we could barely comply to one inch distancing as our hearts, souls and bodies collided in a divinely orchestrated homecoming that the writer in me struggles to describe.

Words fail me as I try to adequately express what happened this week but I’ll do my best to come close.

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO MEET A SOULMATE

Imagine living in the same house for 49 years. You love the house, knowing it inside and out, and have taken great care throughout the decades to keep it clean, functional and thriving, fixing and updating things here and there as they become outdated. Then one day you go into the attic and stumble across a box tucked away in a corner. You’ve never seen this box in all your years of living in this house, nor do you have any idea how it got there, the history of it or what’s inside. But in the same moment that you see the box, a key appears in the lock. You twist the key to unlock it and inside is a part of you, an energetic extension of who you are, that merely by discovering it, makes you more whole than you were moments before. You’ve become more of yourself, fulfilling a potential YOU that might never have been had you not found and opened the box.

Meeting my sister, Margaret, in person for the first time was like discovering a locked place in my heart that I didn’t know existed but evidently was reserved just for her and could only be found and unlocked by her. When we embraced, a part of me became not only unhidden, but also alive, and I became more than I was before we hugged.

I expanded.

It felt as if my soul opened wider and the Universe became bigger. I became more of me because of her, and I surprisingly discovered in that box that I’ve known and loved her soul long before I ever knew or met her in person.

When I first met my soulmate partner, Joe, I felt an electrical current run through my body. Even though we were both in different relationships back then, every time I saw him, my lower lip quivered and I could barely speak. It was embarrassing and I didn’t know what to make of it, let alone how to hide it when around him. It was as if being physically near him was too much for my body and it had to shake the energy out through my bottom lip and jaw. Why it couldn’t shake itself out through my foot discreetly where no one could see is beyond me, but instead, it was right there in plain sight on my face where neither of us could deny.

Despite the intensity and mystery of the electrical pulses, I dismissed them since I was in a happy relationship with someone else, not thinking much about Joe other than when I physically saw him every few months or so and my body did its weird uncontrollable shaking thing. It was only when we were in physical proximity that I reacted that way and paid any attention to it or him. We had met at work and were platonic co-workers in different departments long before we became friends, after both of our relationships ended, and then, finally, partners.

To this day, my body still shakes sometimes when I see him.

When I physically hugged Margaret for the first time, a similar electrical pulse ran through me. It wasn’t nearly as intense but it was there, nevertheless, and I felt a warm homecoming, as if we had both arrived home after a long, treacherous journey apart. It was like coming home to a part of me I didn’t know was missing and I felt energy flow through my body.

Meeting soulmates doesn’t always result in feeling powerful energetic surges. Sometimes there’s a subtle sense of recognition as if you’ve met them before or you feel a connection to them even though you can’t explain it, and sometimes you don’t notice anything different. The extent to which you feel is a combination of how open and present you are in the moment of meeting them along with the depth of your soul contract with them.

WHAT IS A SOULMATE? 

I believe that soulmates aren’t only romantic partners, but also those we have soul contracts with before we came here to this particular life on earth. It could be a father, mother, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, friend, lover, husband, wife, co-worker, boss, elementary school teacher, anyone we come into contact with who we’ve mutually agreed to:

1) learn from, for any lessons, big or small

and/or

2) experience life with, for any duration, short or long

WHAT IS A SOUL CONTRACT?

While it may appear that Margaret and I are two different individuals, separated from one another, each of us having our own varying life experiences, thoughts, feelings, bodies and journeys, the truth is we are all one, and Margaret and I come from the same source, the same divinity and light that you and everyone else also comes from.

We are extensions of that one source, each person, each soul a part of the one.

Before we agreed to come to earth to expand and explore, we made soul contracts with those soul extensions to unite and walk parts of our journey together. Some soul contracts are made to help one another learn things we wanted to learn, and grow in ways we wanted to grow, and some are made purely for the joy of experiencing parts of this life together. And sometimes it’s a combination of both.

Some soulmates cause nothing but pain and torment if we don’t learn from them, while others bring joy and depth into our lives.

That’s why some soulmates cause you the deepest grief and pain, but also teach you the most profound lessons and create tremendous opportunities for inner growth. These are often family members or romantic partners. My soulmate father was my greatest tormentor and my greatest teacher. Through my journey with him on earth, I learned how to love unconditionally, forgive fiercely and stand powerfully. The day he died, a heavy part of me died too, and I felt a lightness of being, as if a long-standing contract had finally been fulfilled.

Every soul contract has its own level of difficulty or ease.

There are soul contracts that are fulfilled in an easy, short or chance encounter, like when you read an author’s words that changes your life, or a high school counselor veers you in a positive direction away from a destructive path you almost took, or when your first boss sticks her neck out to give you a job despite your lack of experience. Neither of you have any idea why she believes in you after only meeting you once for a few minutes, but she “just has a gut feeling” about you or sees something in you that others don’t.

And there are soul contracts that take a lifetime until they’re fulfilled, if ever, depending on your willingness to learn the lesson and the depth of your karmic relationship together.

SPIRITUAL TETHERS

We are spiritually tethered to those we have open soul contracts with.

If you’ve ever been in a toxic relationship with someone and have long since broken up but find it nearly impossible to let them go (or they won’t let you go), even though the relationship was unhealthy in every way, and there’s something binding you to them like a child or a financial or legal obligation, or even your thoughts and emotions, this is usually because you haven’t yet fulfilled your soul contract with them. Despite your attempts to move on and live your life in peace, the tether binds you together energetically. If they’re physically out of your life, you may still find it difficult to undo the damage that’s been done emotionally, mentally and spiritually and move forward.

By the way, a sure sign that you still have an unfulfilled soul contract with someone is that you have a manifested contract with them, like a legal agreement in some way, shape or form (financial support, business commitments, shared child custody, etc). The sooner both of you learn the lessons you came here to learn from one another, the sooner the contracts will end, on a spiritual level as well as an earth level.

But not all contracts were created to end. My soul contracts with my mother and sisters are for a lifetime of learning and enjoying this life journey together. I love being spiritually tethered to them, it helps me feel divinely connected, stronger and more whole. I learn alot about myself through them and we lift each other up when one of us is down.

I had an inner battle with one of my sisters growing up. I was always in her shadow, people told me I should be more like her, tougher, more vocal and outgoing, and I resented her for it. I was jealous of her and it took me well into my twenties to learn the lessons I came here to learn from her. To not only be confident in myself as I am, and embrace my own sensitive, quiet qualities, but also to be able to see her independent of my perception of her as “the popular sister”.

She flew from her home in the east coast to visit me in California for a weekend in my twenties, and I spent the entire time resenting her, being angry at everything she said and did, thinking she was putting me down and dismissing me because she felt better than me. But those were my internal issues that I projected outward onto her. It wasn’t until she left and I missed her that I suddenly realized I had been seeing her through my lens of “shy little sister who could never be as good as popular big sister” and everything she said and did was skewed through that filter.

For the three days that she was with me, I never once saw HER, as a person, outside of my big sister/little sister filter, and I cried for days after she left because I wasted our precious time together stuck in my own past perceptions and stories, and was never fully present and open to her as an individual person outside of me, with her own life, her own struggles and her own journey completely independent of me. In the time after our childhood years, she became a wife and mother, and had her own learning journey, and yet all I could see was a big sister who was always better than me.

I wrote her a letter and apologized, and from that moment on, every time I see her or any of my family, I remember to be fully present to them, as they are now, not who they were or who I was and not through the lens of any unresolved issues, but to let it all go, and love and enjoy them exactly as each of us are in this moment, because our time together on this earth is short and our tether proves that we made a pact to be together, to walk together and experience this complex, beautiful and brutal life together.

Our soul mates help us become more of who we are.

Our soul contracts ensure we have the adequate motivation, determination and inspiration to get there, should we choose to honor them.