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A post shared by M U H A M M E D S A L A H (@muhammedsalah_) on Jun 28, 2020 at 1:31pm PDT

There are probably about a thousand lessons I have learned with and from my twin flame. 

Some I would never ever want to repeat and others I wouldn’t mind experiencing again, but I have been reflecting on my journey thus far and all of how I have grown. I thought about all of the negativity that comes up between twins as they navigate this experience, and I thought I would share some positivity on what the twin flame connection can teach us if we are willing to be students.

So, here we go:

1. Space in a relationship is a necessity.

When I met my twin, I was deeply entangled in a codependent marriage. I am used to men who “clip my wings” and sometimes suffocate me to gain control. Don’t get me wrong, my first husband was terrific in a lot of ways, but I was so unhappy with myself that I relied on him to bring me happiness (word to the wise: don’t do this…ever). My twin was quite the opposite of what I was used to.

He would take space from us, and for someone who comes from the wounds of abandonment, this felt like a death sentence for a long time. This time apart forced me to learn how to nurture my scared inner child and love her better. It taught me that I am my own source of happiness and that no one outside myself can give that to me.

I learned how to be alone and focused on healing the gaping wounds that showed up when the metaphorical Band-Aid was ripped off. Best of all, space allowed for growth between us and time for the wounds within me to air out and heal.

Have you ever planted anything? 

If we were to plant a seed in some soil and then constantly dig up the seed and check on it and over water it, we would kill it, or it would simply never have the chance to grow. If my twin had been sitting there babysitting my process and holding my hand through my wounds, I would still be relying on him to make me better. Don’t get me wrong; I didn’t give him space without a fight! 

Did I hate him when he would block me? Yep! 

But I found over time that it served. If he hadn’t blocked me, I wouldn’t have been forced to go within and dig into the root of the issue, which by the way, had nothing to do with him.

2. It’s okay to take up space.

So this is different than the previous lesson, I promise! My childhood wounds left me feeling like the less space I took up in this world, the better and the more likely I was to attain love. I often stood in the back, I held my breath (a trauma response), and I was incredibly quiet. I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with this as I still don’t jump right into new situations, but my reasoning behind it has shifted.

I used to not want to be seen while at the same time begging for someone to love me. Whereas now, I don’t mind being seen, and I am happy—I love myself, so it doesn’t matter whether anyone approves of me. Being at both ends of the spectrum has taught me that regardless of whether I am not taking up space or shining brightly in this world, not everyone will like me or approve, and that’s okay.

I have learned that there is more than enough space to go round. There is more than enough oxygen to breathe, more than enough money circulating in the world, and more than enough love all around and within me. I have learned that it’s okay to take up space in this world and that I wasn’t created to play small. None of us were. 

There is more than enough room for us to pursue our dreams and our soul’s purpose and mission. And there is more than enough room for all of us to shine brightly. Your success does not take away from anyone else’s, just like the amount of money you earn does not take away from anyone else, which leads me to number three.

3. I am enough.

Have you ever stopped to think about why you live the way that you do? Do you live the life that you want to live, or are you living through your parents’ lens and their stories around what is possible for you? Are you living from a place of fear with feelings that you’ve “failed” in the past, or the universe didn’t pull through? Do you feel a lack of trust that you, too, would be supported? I get it, believe me, I get it. As someone who has reinvented herself and her business more times than I care to admit—I get it. 

I also gave up. I gave up on my dream of becoming a writer because deep at my core I did not feel I was good enough to do it.

Here’s the thing though, those feelings around “not enough” run deep for a lot of us twins. Most often, it would seem that twin flames come from broken homes or grew up in environments where they had to go through a lot of sh*tty experiences. Many twins have disorganized attachments as they did not receive the proper love and guidance from caregivers. Most of us were told we were not enough in some way, shape, or form. I don’t know about you, but my twin’s decisions to keep choosing other people over me made me start looking at my feelings around being enough; he always seemed to leave me feeling that I was not good enough.

So I had to start hard-wiring a new belief system within my subconscious. I had to start seeing all of the places within me that believed I was not enough and start correcting it. And not because I wanted him to “choose me,” but because I was so tired of feeling like sh*t every time he would walk away. 

I am happy to say that I have finally gotten to a place where I feel enough within myself—he can stay or go. 

This is what I believe we are here to learn. I believe we are here to learn how to love ourselves so much that we can love another person (yes, even our twin) with an open hand instead of clenched fists.

4. My gifts.

The first thing I started learning about when I got on this twin flame path was the necessity of finding our soul’s mission and purpose. So I just want to say this to start: I believe that our purpose is to heal. When we are just beginning, there is so much pressure to determine what we are here for that we somehow miss the mark. We skip the lesson of becoming self-sustained, and oftentimes, we focus on all the wrong things in the process of finding ourselves (i.e., obsessing over what our twin is doing). But I digress.

If you come from a place of no sense of self, discovering your soul mission can feel frustrating. It’s only recently that I started tapping fully into mine, and I have been on this path for about six years. I’m not saying it will take you that long, but some of us have to find ourselves first before we can walk the path of sharing our gifts. I am grateful I have been allowed to understand and share mine with the world. Knowing our gifts and our soul mission and purpose is one and the same if you ask me.

5. How to be authentically me.

There are things within all of us that we wish maybe weren’t there or are hard to look at and embrace. I used to want to hide the fact that I came from a less than ideal home. I wanted to appear normal so that people would accept me and validate my existence. I have decided that the part of me who grew up feeling ugly, unloveable, and unworthy needs a voice. She needs to be embraced by the only one who can embrace her fully, which is me. My thought is that if she can talk about how she used to feel within, maybe she might help someone else out there who might be feeling similarly.

I have come to understand that I am not normal, and I never will be. I march to my own drum. I don’t do what mainstream tells me to do or how I should look or act to be considered a valuable human in this world. I have worked damn hard to heal old limiting beliefs, and I fully intend to celebrate my authenticity. I am valuable in this world because I am me—just as you are valuable in this world because you are you.

Perhaps this journey is the greatest love story of all time. It just looks vastly different from the stories about a knight in shining armor or princess rescuing us. We learn how to save ourselves, sustain ourselves, and hopefully learn how to shine brightly in this world where many of us have felt like outsiders.

This post was written to remind you of the gift of your twin flame connection. I hope you, too, choose to see the beauty in its purpose and remember that this experience is happening for you, not to you.