Dear friends, dear men and women, I am Mary Magdalene speaking. I am a like-minded friend who is not elevated above you, but who is intimately connected with you through your heartbeat that transcends the ages. That is exactly what soul connections do: they transcend centuries and the many lives you have led here on Earth. The soul is of a different dimension than the earthly personality with which you have to deal in everyday life.

It is normal for you to be anchored in your earthly personality that is formed by so many external influences. For example, your genetic predisposition, with its current form, is essentially something you inherited from your parents when your soul came to Earth. Then in your early childhood, your parents also helped shape you by their energy, their views, and their background. Their reactions to you, their emotional openness and the degree of their presence, or the lack of it, formed you into who you are now. Later, still more influences affected you: your family, your native soil, the society in which you grew up, your education, your peers. You took in as your own so many outside influences from the earthly atmosphere around you that they overwhelmed what you naturally are.

However, when you are born on Earth, you are starting something entirely new. Even if your soul has wandered on Earth many times and gained many experiences, yet each birth is a step into the unknown, a new branch on the tree of your soul. What is new and unknown is what makes a child so special; you can feel that even with a newborn. Parents, and those who observe the child, are filled with deep wonder, with reverence and awe, for the grand miracle that takes place when a new child appears in the world: unique, a blank slate. Yes, and also a human being with a complete soul history; but, at the same time, with a totally new openness toward experience, and that is something the soul, as the heavenly parent of the child, has already decided.

Admire the courage of every newborn child, and that of the child you once were, who took the leap into this world. You knew you were going into the unknown and that you would become immersed in external influences, which were certainly not all beneficial, but you did it. In the world that you lived in as a child, and in which you now live, there is still a lot of fear and pain from the past. People carry emotional trauma: parents, family members, friends – everyone has to cope with that. The structure of your society, although changing, is still not open to love, to the voice of the heart, to the voice of the soul. There is still a lot of impotence, anxiety, and miscommunication between people, and all this influenced you while you grew up.

You are here to bring something new to the Earth and to humankind; something that is unique and is even new for your soul. Although your soul has a wealth of wisdom amassed from past lives, you can now, with what is available from your soul, experience and give something special and new to the Earth that in turn enriches your soul. For if your soul already knew and understood everything, why would it begin a new life? Value your own courage and know that you add something to your soul.

But this process of giving something to the world, of making a unique contribution, is certainly not without its pain. In order to get in touch with the experience of your soul, to come to realize who you really are, and to give something new of yourself in turn, you first have to shed everything that is not you. You have to let go of that which you have absorbed without question from your environment. And certainly sensitive people – and many of you are that – have absorbed so much of these environmental influences that they often can no longer discern what is of themselves and what comes from the outside world: from parents and others. It is thus a great undertaking, an in-depth search, when you attempt to restore the connection with your soul and intend to live from that source.

I will now turn to the theme of relationships. Each of you longs for connection, for understanding, for warmth. You want to be seen by another for who you are, although at the deepest level you are longing for soul connection. You know that if your soul comes into connection with another soul, you become more alive. You then radiate from within, you become excited, you are inspired in many areas of life. Soul to soul connection awakens something within you; it is like coming home to yourself. It is what is awakened and encouraged when you connect with another.

However, the problem with human relationships lies in that not everyone is also fully connected to their own soul, and this lack creates a void inside them: a nostalgia, a longing, a craving for connection. From that void, you begin to see the other as an almost superhuman being who comes to your rescue, because someone finally fully understands you. The other is seen as divine, the primal mother or primal father whom you never had in your youth, the god or goddess who remained beyond reach in your prayers and mediations.

Love – romantic love, sexual love, the love between partners – presents itself to you as the ideal that will liberate these ultimate desires of your soul. And this ideal love has a sound basis, because to discover your soul behind the earthly veils of illusions and fear is precisely what you are here for. However, if you are not at home within yourself, and you are searching to fill the emptiness within you with something outside you, then a negative spiral may take place in an intimate relationship, a love affair, and this can lead to enormous pain, which is something you see happen regularly between love partners. They clamp on to one another like two drowning persons, both broken and tormented by an inner void that, initially, they were hoping the other person would fill. But that other person is also struggling with their own inner emptiness. So idealized love can lead to misunderstanding, disillusionment, and hurtful behavior. Therefore, it is essential that you get in touch with your own soul.

A relationship in the form of an encounter, a heart connection from soul to soul, which can happen in all sorts of areas of life, can help you. So intensely can a great love, certainly an erotic love, touch you that it can bring you into connection with your own soul, which means you can come to feel you are sparkling and full of life again, fresh as a newborn child. You are then completely on fire!  And this happens, essentially, because you remember your deepest self, your soul, and that the reason you were born was to express that joy.

I would now like to say something about the role, the connection between romantic love and sexual attraction. Love and sexuality belong together. The original intention of sexual attraction between two partners is that they open each other's soul. Surely, you remember what it was like to fall in love and to experience how everything in you opened up. The other touched you so deeply that you released all kinds of securities and preoccupations. You were open in complete wonder for the being, the face, the thoughts and feelings of the other. It as if your own thoughts were turned off.

Romantic love is an initiation, a gate that opens, so you gain access to another who looks at you without judgment in radiant wonder. But that gate swings both ways. Romantic love also opens your eyes to your own possibilities, for that which has been hidden or covered over by the dust of convention and the daily grind. Love, the amorous encounter between two souls, throws doors wide open, and in that sense, it is an initiation to help you experience your own soul at a deeper level.

You could say that each special meeting between two people holds an element of romantic love. You can see it even with a father or mother who just had a baby. What they feel is something akin to romantic love: they are fascinated by the infant, the wonder, the immediacy, the freedom from conditioning. And there is something similar to the flow of romantic love even at the level of your work, when you are doing something creative, inspired, something that fulfills you. It is a stream of ecstasy, of being uplifted, which awakens everything in you, and that is good – that is the power of your soul.

When you feel that flow in the presence of another – for example, a loved one, a partner, a child – things can and will go wrong if you become so attached to the other person that you think you cannot live without them; that you feel yourself dependent upon that person in order to have that feeling, that reinstated connection with your soul. In this dependence lies a danger, because if you have to depend on another outside yourself, you will eventually want to possess that person. Or you have such a fear of losing that person that you build a wall and distance yourself. Separation anxiety and fear of relationships are both defences against dependence on someone outside yourself.

So you see that the very love that once brought you into ecstasy, can also bring utter despair if that person is not completely available to you, or if your love is not reciprocated in the way you had hoped for. Or – and this can also happen – the romantic love develops, but you also meet the dark aspects of each other, characteristics that call up judgements or fear or anger. Romantic love is a gateway through which you enter into a relationship, but when that love becomes more down-to-earth, it can also lead you to dark, unconscious aspects. When these come to the surface in a relationship, things can become confrontational and throw both partners back into an inner void they can only fill themselves. Love, and romantic love, are prompts; they cause you to wake up, to open up to more possibilities. But in the end, they also force you to look into the deepest darkness within yourself, to investigate that which still remains hidden.

It is not only a matter of dependence, but also a desire for power that wants to possess the other person and to be completely secure in the other. Because in all forms of dependence, there is also a need for power, a need for control, a not being able to let go, and also a deep pain that lies behind it: the fear of being alone, of being separated not only from others, but from the wholeness of life, from God. That is substantially the deepest fear that lives in you: to be cast away, to be outside the Whole, to be dead. Access is life: a deeply felt connection that springs eternal; a source of creativity and joy. I define death as being the absence of a living connection, which is also the absence of the soul and this is what frightens you most deeply. Romantic love creates such an intense desire, but it also has the potential for creating an intense feeling of being lost.

I invite you to now call upon your soul, to imagine that your deepest core is alive in you, even though your earthly consciousness may not always be able to access it or it is not felt immediately by you. The child that you once were, who came into this world, fresh and new, with its own gifts and unique contribution, still lives in all your body cells. Call on it! Say your own name and inwardly feel your original face behind it. That is what you are really looking for: the living link with your own divine core. If you connect with that inner core, with that source of joy and happiness, life becomes more abundant. You need not prove yourself so much and you have less need for dependence upon other people. Then you are sufficient unto yourself.

You love yourself, not because you have achieved all kinds of things and you have been successful, but because you see yourself with the eyes of wonder, in the way that does someone who falls in love. You are interested in yourself; you are engaged, curious. You know that God lives within you! If you engage the world with that basic feeling, relationships with others can enrich, inspire, make you happy, without dependence upon them; you feel connected to your own essence, your own core, and you rest within yourself. In the end, this is the aim of all the soul encounters in this life, whether they are short-lived or long lasting; that you are wide open to your own capabilities, your own inspiration, and that you take them up fully within yourself. Which means you do not become dependent upon the other who has called up these feelings in you, but that you experience these feelings as your own legacy – they are you. A true romantic love is always a love for yourself, for the inner child – the original child – who stands in direct connection with your soul. 

If you desire to feel the inner child once again, and to relate to yourself with wonder, with compassion, with confidence that life is good, then remain open to life. Life will constantly wake you up by shaking you up through situations and encounters with other people and events. They may not always be fun, but such happenings function as a gate: something is opened. Trust that these happenings have value; stay open for the miracles in life. In order to receive a miracle, you sometimes have to go through deep dark valleys, which is undeniably the case. Pain and suffering in people can be enormous, but what can help you is that you are going to arouse the consciousness of your soul. This gives the pain a grounding and surrounds it with gentleness.

Your soul carries a wisdom in itself, which reaches far beyond the earthly horizon. Put your trust in that! You can create and nurture a connection with your soul in silence and stillness. And do not judge yourself: you are a beautiful human being, perfect as you are. Look for a moment at yourself with our eyes. Feel the energy gathered here around you, in which are present so many guides and helping energies who love and cherish you. You are so valuable to us, so precious. Every human being is like a pearl, unique and irreplaceable. Believe that you are such a pearl. Be gentle with yourself.

I greet you with love. Thank you for your presence.