INTRODUCTION
When I began writing The Five Soul Mate Principles, I had done more than ten thousand tarot and astrology readings for clients worldwide. As I'm sure you can guess, many of the readings were about this very subject: soul mates. People wanted to know how to find - or heal - a relationship with a soul mate.
I discovered over time that there were five areas of concern for most of my clients. They were: self-love; relationships; work; home and spiritual path (or purpose).
• Most people want to know how to boost their self-esteem, and why they repeat self-destructive or painful patterns in their lives.
• They want to find their soul mates, or know if the person they're married to or dating is a soul mate; also, how to heal relationships with lovers, family members and friends.
• What are they supposed to be doing to make a living? Why do they have blocks around doing things they've been yearning - but can't seem to commit - to do? This runs the gamut from being a full-time artist or musician, to being self-employed or solving problems for a major corporation. Why do they go from job to job, unfulfilled or under-earning?
• Are they living in the right home and in the right city or state? When will their house sell, so they can move to another? Many feel displaced. Some of my clients are nomads, wanderers, dissatisfied everywhere they land.
• Finally, what their purpose? What is their spiritual path or task? They feel empty; they want to know why.
As a psychic advisor and astrologer, my job is to read and interpret cards and horoscope charts for my clients. This I have done with more or less satisfactory results, and I currently have a base client list of about two thousand people world-wide, who seem to like what I offer and return again and again for my services. However, from my twenty years of what I now understand has been spiritual research, I began to put together the idea for a book on a subject I considered an overview of my service as a professional psychic advisor; what I came to think of as "The Five Soul Mate Principles." Every one of these categories, I have come to realize, has its roots in past-life experience. I believe that if you go back hundreds, even thousands of years, you will find the source of your present-day dilemmas.
My research for this project, as I've said, involved intimate communications - or communing with more than ten thousand people, including the hundreds of readers who wrote to my column, "The Psychic Advisor," in New Woman Magazine, or saw me on the television show, "Unsolved Mysteries." People tell me their most cherished secrets, their deepest pain. They confide things in me that they would not tell another soul, not even their spouses, their children or their best friends.
For this sharing, I have felt very privileged. In our world of instant messaging and small talk, it's rare that a person is allowed to see beneath the surface masks of others for any prolonged period of time. I've read for housewives, executives, Mafia wives, call girls, teachers, heirs to fortunes, embezzlers, physicians, construction workers, truck drivers, actors, moguls, paupers, and, in a couple of cases, murderers posing as friends of their victims, wanting me to tell them what the police knew.
In communing with so many from such a variety of cultures and lifestyles, I found myself uncovering truths that went beyond the moment of crisis or trauma revealed by a client, and that is what The Five Soul Mate Principles is about: those truths, which I consider a spiritual gift to me from my Universal Higher Power.
You don't have to believe it. You are welcome to hear what I have to say, journey with me to my own - and others' - past lives, and read about the lessons I've learned. Then, make your own decisions about whether or not this philosophy rings true for you.
We are all soul mates, and everything that is happening to us is a soul mate experience.
We are migrating souls from multiple incarnations. Each lifetime contains a "community" of souls. These are the people you are destined to meet and interact with in future reincarnations. In some lifetimes, we meet with small communities; in others we are literally swamped with fellow souls.
This twenty-first century is crowded with soul mates. The information age gave each of us media coverage of world events that has let us see, up close and personal, millions of soul mates from every corner of our planet. Thanks to photojournalists, we see them every day, marching in protest, celebrating a mass in St. Peter's Square, praying to Allah or at the Wailing Wall, strutting the runway during Paris Fashion Week, dancing, skiing, swimming, acting, feasting, starving, waging war and giving service - doing all the things we do, and more.
Our interactions with soul mates here and abroad may be intimate in the cases of some; with others we merely touch and go. Some of the intimate ones may end sharply or traumatically. Some of lesser duration may be quite profound. Look around you the next time you dine out. All of the other diners are soul mates - even potential life partners. If you save the life of one of them because he or she is choking on a chicken bone, you automatically move to another level of intimacy with each other.
Why is there so much confusion today around the question "Who is my soul mate?"
I contend that this confusion stems from the fact that we now have more soul mates than ever to choose from. You can be intimate today with someone from China while sitting at your computer in Boston. A person from Las Vegas can fall in love with someone from Argentina without ever having seen them in person.
When I was growing up, in the 'fifties and 'sixties, for most of us the number of souls with whom one was likely to connect was limited, and I grew up in a big suburb outside of a huge city. Imagine what it was like to live in a small town in Kansas. Yes, you had TV and newspapers, but in those days there were only a few channels, and news was not an all-day affair. Most local papers had one or two international stories, the rest were about people from your community, often people you knew.
In the "old days," where soul mates were concerned, we made do. We married people at hand, and yes, they were soul mates, but we didn't expect to find the "Perfect One," because there were only so many available partners nearby. We "settled," and often it turned out perfectly well. Many accepted their situations, made the best of them, and even came to love and admire people with whom they would share satisfying lives full of significant events. Many of us have snapshots of parents and grandparents celebrating fifty years of wedded contentment and good-natured acceptance, if not bliss.
Though we have always existed in a community of souls from past lifetimes, there are degrees of closeness among soul mates. Some are so compatible, so harmonious with us, that they seem to require little or no effort on our part. These are usually our long-lasting marriages, memorable, romantic love affairs and best friends.
Others are more difficult.
"I just don't like him (or her) for some reason I can't put my finger on," we declare, confused and dismayed by our negative feelings for another person.
Or we enter into lustful, exciting relationships that end, abruptly, when one or both fall out of love.
"I don't understand it. We were so close. I thought it would last forever. I thought he was The One!"
Some people become stuck in these difficult relationships. Actually, they are being urged by their own spiritual yearning to complete with the other person, to learn the lesson that, for one reason or other, did not present itself in a previous incarnation. It may take several incarnations to complete the learning experience with another soul.
One of the ways to understand and gain peace around a difficult relationship is to have a past-life re-creation. (I prefer to call it this, rather than the more commonly used term,"regression"). There is something about knowing, on an experiential rather than a cerebral level, that sets us free. A past-life re-creation is simply a tool. One is put into a light trance and taken, by a therapist, through a guided meditation to a past life. What we "view" in the past allows us to understand why a person is in our present life. Armed with this knowledge, we may then better know how to proceed to complete the journey with our soul mate, whether to go or stay, and how to approach the difficulties with more objectivity. (I like to think of this process as the ultimate "time travel.")
• • • • • •
For example, I did a past-life re-creation around a friendship with a woman whom I had known for several years. Lynn was eight years younger than I, and lived in a neighboring town. She was married, with two sons, and we visited back and forth regularly. We were each addicted to food and shopping. We owned our own businesses, so we were free to come and go as we pleased. We would throw caution to the wind and end up spending far too much money, eating rich foods at expensive restaurants and racking up bills on lavish shopping sprees.
Because we shared the same profession, we coached and encouraged each others' ambitions on many occasions. We loved to while away time talking about our clients problems, our spouse and family issues on the phone or in person almost every day. As time went on, however, I felt trapped in what I sensed was a codependent relationship, and longed to detach from it. I wanted to save money, lose weight and stop frittering away my time. I wanted to get back to my writing, and I feared that if I stayed in the relationship, I might never attain my goals. I also felt guilty and confused about my feelings. How could I pull away from a dear and generous friend, someone I loved like a sister?
In a past-life re-creation, in which I focused on the friendship, I was taken back to late nineteenth century New York City. I was a young girl of eight whose mother had died giving birth to my younger sister, and left me to be caretaker and housekeeper for her and for our father, who owned a butcher shop. We were not poor. However, my life was consigned to the home.
I was intelligent, and picked up a rudimentary education, cobbled together from books purchased when I was out shopping for our food or clothing. I had few friends, went almost nowhere without my sister, and was, in my own mind, a slave to my family's needs. In other words, I never had a proper childhood, and was old before my time. I scrubbed floors, cooked, mended, shopped, tended my sister when she came down with childhood illnesses, walked her to school and back every day and saw to it that she did her reading and spelling lessons, and her sums, on time. I was frustrated, resentful, angry. She was getting the education and social life I did not have, and she was a happy child who got to be young and carefree, thanks to me. Despite my resentment, I adored my sister, and petted and fretted over her like a real mother.
• • • • • •
At age sixteen, a young door-to-door Bible salesman began courting me. He brought me flowers, books and the promise of escape from my bondage. When he proposed marriage, I was torn. How could I leave my sister behind? She was only eight years old, the same age I had been when I lost our mother. I had done everything for her. Who would look after her while our father was at work?
When I told my father I wanted to marry and live with my husband in another state, he slumped in his chair, holding his head in his hands. However, he soon looked up and, with tears in his eyes, gave me his blessing.
"You've been so good to us," he declared, and assured me that he was in a position to hire a housekeeper who would do the same duties I had performed. For a moment, I felt a stab of rage. Why hadn't he done this earlier, and relieved me of the burden of keeping house for a grown man and a child all these long, exhausting years? I held my tongue, however. I didn't want to mar my new happiness with angry words.
My sister, upon hearing the news of my leave-taking, was beside herself. She sent up a lamentation of grief that lasted for hours, and lapsed into a fever that weakened her little body. How could I leave her? I was the only mother she knew. She felt abandoned, rejected, cast aside by me, and declared over and over that she loved me more than anyone in the world. How could I choose another - a stranger - over her? Her illness frightened me, and heaped guilt upon me. However, my sister recovered in a few weeks, and I found myself packing my belongings. 
She came to me with tear-filled eyes and leaned heavily against me, her thin arms a noose about my neck. I felt I might suffocate if I did not leave the house that instant, and within the hour I was out the door. I glanced back once, to see her sorrowful face in the open window. She didn't wave to me, just opened her small mouth and released a wail that followed me all the way down the walk and into this life, where she re-emerged as my friend, who, though I loved her dearly, made me feel trapped by our mutual addictions. It was no wonder that I felt guilty for wanting to go my separate way.
The realization of how these past-life events impacted my present life helped me to separate eventually from my friend, but not, alas, without some recrimination and regret. However, I know that if or when we come together again, it will be with much greater understanding.
What I learned from an understanding of past-life experience is that when I have an unhappy, brooding relationship in this life, the cause of the unhappiness is probably rooted in the past (and yes, that includes the past years in this life as well, because all our dramas, until completed, simply repeat themselves again and again).
I learned, finally, that I can complete the healing of a relationship by myself. I don't have to have a "final" interaction with the other person. By viewing the relationship from afar, and thus understanding on a deeper level the message of why it is unhappy, and then forgiving both myself and the other person, I can put the negativity and confusion between us to rest.
I have an intrinsic faith in the belief that when one person forgives, the other will one day follow. I have never experienced it any other way, and I have done dozens of past-life recreations on troubled relationships in my own life, which I include in further chapters of "The Five Soul Mate Principles."
Books recommended by Martha:
• The Power of Now; A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle
(click here to learn more): http/www.eckharttolle.com/
• The Four Agreements by Miguel Ruiz
(click here to learn more): http://www.miguelruiz.com
• The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron
(click here to learn more): http://www.artistsway.com/
• You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay
(click here to learn more): http://www.louisehay.com/
• Lazaris - all books and audio CD's
(click here to learn more): http://www.lazaris.com/
• Note: More about this book will appear on a new web site now in progress. "The Five Soul Mate Principles" addresses self-love, soul mate relationships, work, home, our life purpose and spiritual completion.
• If you would like to learn more about how the five soul mate principles apply to your life, and make an appointment with Martha for a reading, call (702) 866-6682
or:
click here to email her at Martha@ConfidentialPsychic.com.
