One of the deepest longings of the human soul is the longing to be seen. In an ancient myth Narcissus looks into the pool, sees his own face, and becomes obsessed with it. Unfortunately, there is no mirror in the world where you can catch a glimpse of your soul. You cannot even see your own body completely. If you look behind you, the front of your body is out of view. You can never be fully visually present to your self. The one you love, your anam 
ara, your soul friend, is the truest mirror to reflect your soul. The honesty and clarity of true friendship also brings out the real contour of your spirit. It is beautiful to have such a presence in your life.
THE SOUL AS DIVINE ECHO
We are capable of such love and belonging because the soul holds the echo of a primal intimacy. When talking about primal things, the Germans talk of ursprüngliche Dinge—original things. There is an Ur-Intimität in der Seele; that is, a primal intimacy in the soul; this original echo whispers within every heart. The soul did not invent itself. It is a presence from the divine world, where intimacy has no limit or barrier.
You can never love another person unless you are equally involved in the beautiful but difficult spiritual work of learning to love yourself. There is within each of us, at the soul level, an enriching fountain of love. In other words, you do not have to go outside yourself to know what love is. This is not selfishness, and it is not narcissism; they are negative obsessions with the need to be loved. Rather this is the wellspring of love within the heart. Through their need for love, people who lead solitary lives often stumble upon this great fountain. They learn to whisper awake the deep well of love within. This is not a question of forcing yourself to love yourself. It is more a question of exercising reserve, of inviting the wellspring of love that is, after all, your deepest nature to flow through your life. When this happens, the ground that has hardened within you grows soft again. Through a lack of love everything hardens. There is nothing as lonely in the world as that which has hardened or grown cold. Bitterness and coldness are the ultimate defeat.
If you find that your heart has hardened, one of the gifts that you should give yourself is the gift of the inner wellspring. You should invite this inner fountain to free itself. You can work on yourself in order to unsilt this, so that gradually the nourishing waters begin in a lovely osmosis to infuse and pervade the hardened clay of your heart. Then the miracle of love happens within you. Where before there was hard, bleak, unyielding, dead ground, now there is growth, color, enrichment, and life flowing from the lovely wellspring of love. This is one of the most creative approaches in transfiguring what is negative within us. You are sent here to learn to love and to receive love. The greatest gift new love brings into your life is the awakening to the hidden love within. This makes you independent. You are now able to come close to the other, not out of need or with the wearying apparatus of projection, but out of genuine intimacy, affinity, and belonging. It is a freedom. Love should make you free. You become free of the hungry, blistering need with which you continually reach out to scrape affirmation, respect, and significance for yourself from things and people outside yourself. To be holy is to be home, to be able to rest in the house of belonging that we call the soul.
THE WELLSPRING OF LOVE WITHIN
You can search far and in hungry places for love. It is a great consolation to know that there is a wellspring of love within yourself. If you trust that this wellspring is there, you will then be able to invite it to awaken. The following exercise could help develop awareness of this capacity. When you have moments on your own or spaces in your time, just focus on the well at the root of your soul. Imagine that nourishing stream of belonging, ease, peace, and delight. Feel, with your visual imagination, the refreshing waters of that well gradually flowing up through the arid earth of the neglected side of your heart. It is helpful to imagine this particularly before you sleep. Then during the night you will be in a constant flow of enrichment and belonging. You will find that when you awake at dawn, there will be a lovely, quiet happiness in your spirit.
One of the most precious things you should always preserve in a friendship and in love is your own difference. It can happen within the circle of love that one person will tend to imitate the other or reimagine himself in the image of the other. While this may indicate a desire for total commitment, it is also destructive and dangerous. There was an old man I knew on an island off the West of Ireland. He had an unusual hobby. He used to collect photographs of newly married couples. He would then get a photograph of that couple some ten years later. From this second photograph, he would begin to demonstrate how one member of the couple was beginning to resemble the other. Often in a relationship there can be a subtle homogenizing force, which is destructive. The irony is that it is usually the difference between people that makes one person attractive to another. Consequently, this difference needs to be preserved and nurtured.
Love is also a force of light and nurture that liberates you to inhabit to the full your own difference. There should be no imitation of each other; no need to be defensive or protective in each other’s presence. Love should encourage and free you fully into your full potential.
In order to preserve your own difference in love, you need plenty of room for your soul. It is interesting that in Hebrew one of the original words for salvation is also the word for space. If you were born on a farm, you realize that space is vital, especially when you are sowing something. If you plant two trees side by side, they will smother each other. That which grows needs space. Kahlil Gibran says, “Let there be spaces in your togetherness. Let the winds of the heavens dance between you.” Space allows your otherness to find its own rhythm and contour. Yeats speaks of “a little space for the rose breath to fill.” One of the lovely areas of love where space can be rendered beautiful is when two people make love. The one you love is the one to whom you can bring the full array and possibility and delight of your senses in the knowledge that they will be received in welcome and tenderness. Since the body is in the soul, the body is illuminated all around with soul-light. It is suffused with a gentle, sacred light. Making love with someone should not be merely a physical or mechanical release. It should engage the spiritual depth that awakens when you enter the soul of another person.
The soul of a person is most intimate. You meet a person’s soul before you meet that person’s body. When you meet soul and body as one, you enter the world of the Other. If a person could bring a gentle and reverent recognition to the depth and beauty of that encounter, it would extend incredible possibilities of delight and ecstasy within lovemaking. It would free in both people this inner wellspring of deeper love. It would reunite them externally with this third force of light, the ancient circle, that actually brings the two souls together in the first place.
THE TRANSFIGURATION OF THE SENSES
The mystics are among the most trustable in this area of sensuous love, and they have a lovely theology of the sensuous implicit in their writings. The mystics never preach a denial of the senses, rather they speak of the transfiguration of the senses. They recognize that there is a certain gravity or darkness in Eros that can sometimes predominate. The light of the soul can transfigure this tendency and bring balance and poise. The beauty of such mystical reflection on Eros reminds us that Eros is ultimately the energy of divine creativity. In the transfiguration of the sensuous, the wildness of eros and the playfulness of the soul come into lyrical rhythm.