Kindred Friends and Spiritual Alliances

We all cherish our true friendships. Friends that stick with us through thick and thin, enjoy our company, and with whom we can confide in and trust beyond a shadow of a doubt are few and far between. And if you are lucky enough to have found someone who you can truly call your friend, your life is enriched by the constant companionship and connection you share. Soul brother, soul sister, “true blue” and alike, they are the one person in the world you know is there for you.

What makes you good friends is sometimes hard to pinpoint. Yes, you agree on most subjects, enjoy the same activities, identify with each other’s pain and issues and admire each other’s qualities, ones that complement your own. And, no, you can’t imagine life without them. But there is an invisible dimension to your friendship that can be difficult to explain – a soul bond. It is the soul bond that brought you together in the first place and ties your hearts together in a lasting friendship.

I always envied my mother’s friendship with Fern. So important was their 60-year friendship that Fern died on my mother’s birthday. The night before she passed, my mom dreamt Fern had moved on. They were “soul sisters”, never tiring of each other’s company, going to the movies every Friday night, talking on the phone incessantly, and sharing just about everything short of their toothbrushes. Their bond of friendship began in the 1950’s when mom, Fern and Fern’s husband Joe all worked together in the same building. As fate would have it, Joe died within a few years of their meeting and that loss bonded Fern and Mom (who was divorced) even more. They both shared a common personality trait – shyness. As a result, they almost never dated. Instead, they proved faithful and loyal friends to each other, a marriage of souls, so to speak. Their bond was karmic, meaning that they had something to reconcile from another lifetime. This life was meant to set the stage for redemption, to make up for that past life and the sorrow it brought. By supporting and encouraging each other’s growth they had formed an important spiritual alliance to further the consciousness of each other and bond as dear friends.

The individuals who enter the stage of your life are there because they are connected to your soul. They are kindred friends, who as members of your soul group, share a commonality of purpose to further the consciousness of each other and add something special to this world. This kinship grew out of lifetimes of experiences shared and you evolved growing more and more in tune with each other and hopefully more and more bonded through love. As “kin” (family), there is an ease to your relationship and a familiarity that punctuates the fact that you are merely reuniting after a period of separation.

Kindred friends enter your life according to plan at a pivotal time. Some may take center stage for only a brief period, just long enough to complete a promise they made to influence your life positively, turning you towards your higher purpose, helping you to learn an invaluable lesson or perhaps even introducing you to your mate. They touch your heart and life in a way that you deem “meant-to-be”, opening a door to new experiences and nudging you to grow more into who you authentically are.

Often times, kindred friends are like mirrors, offering you reflections of hidden parts of your own personality. The pieces they possess may be less actualized in your personality and even deemed opposite. You may only wish you could possess the same qualities or hold a virtue they have mastered. In this way, they coax you to embrace another style of approaching life. For instance, your friend may be vivacious, energetic, talkative and flamboyant while you consider yourself a shrinking violet, preferring to disappear in a crowd and remain silent until spoken to. All the while you marvel at a style that gets her noticed and seems to make things go the way she wants them to. If so, your friend is a great teacher, helping you to integrate a bit of her energy into your personality. She is your healer, pulling you out of your shell and helping you realize you can have it all too, if only you could step out more and shine. The relationship is, of course, mutually valuable because your friend gains experiences in positively impacting someone’s life, discovers more about herself through your reflection and gets kudos for just being a faithful friend at the end of life’s journey.

Anïas Nin, the bohemian French author said, “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”

Some kindred friends open us to a whole new world and to destiny they share with us. You form an important spiritual alliance to fulfill a plan that brings meaning and rewards beyond just the emotional bond you share as friends. You and your friend each hold a piece of the destiny puzzle and it’s not until you meet that you gain a grand view of the work ahead. Such is the case when two creative people collaborate to create a film, publish a book, or create a software company. They team up not only because their talents complement each other or it seems like a good idea because they enjoy working together, but because their destiny depends on each fulfilling their part. The collaborative work was based on a karmic agreement and they co-created the opportunities to fulfill their destiny.

Friends ultimately teach us about the human bonds of love: how to move through the tests of friendship and grow closer rather than apart. Friendships are not without their challenges, especially when conflicting personalities make it difficult at times to see eye to eye. Also, defeating patterns from previous lifetimes are often repeated in this life so that both learn the valuable lesson they had intended to learn. To choose love over betrayal, anger, judgment, or detachment is what your souls yearn to accomplish most. And each life you chose was perfectly designed to learn about the choice of love. It is through the bonds of friendship that we have the greatest opportunity to open our hearts to the power of love.