Moving Forward When You Still Love Your Soul Mate

I’ve been there. A place where there is nowhere else to go with love. That’s what happened when I found myself sitting alone somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Sedona, Arizona, with all my feelings, hopes, and dreams scattered around me. Yes, that was me.

I remember crying until I felt empty. Like a fallen angel, I had fallen hard from something I once believed was real, only to find myself questioning whether I had made the entire thing up in my head. This was someone I deeply believed was a soulmate, someone whose presence in my life felt meaningful beyond what I could easily explain. Just a few weeks before, I could picture something beautiful with this person. I could see what this love could become. I could imagine where it might take us. And suddenly, all of that was gone.

That same night, a protective, motherly grizzly animal spirit visited me. I was completely lost in my own heart, and her presence felt significant. It felt like she had come to find me in one of my lowest moments, almost as if I was being reminded that even though something inside of me had fallen apart, I was still being held through it.

After that road trip, I went home different. Changed. Empty. I was also carrying a realization I wasn’t quite ready for. I was going to have to accept this love for what it was now, not for what I had imagined it could become. And if this love was going to remain in my life, I would have to allow it to take whatever shape it was meant to take in the future.

I didn’t know how to stop loving this person. The truth is, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to. But maybe stopping the love was never what I was being asked to do.

I Thought Moving On Meant I Had to Stop Loving Them

When I got back home, I felt transparent, almost as lonely as Casper the Friendly Ghost. My energy had shifted so drastically from one end to the other that, for nearly two weeks, I wasn’t functioning like myself.

I continued to feel everything so deeply. I kept wondering if this person I had fallen in love with even cared about me. Deep down, I knew they did. But I also knew love wasn’t supposed to leave me feeling this way if it was true and healthy. Something felt off.

More than anything, I didn’t like the person I had energetically succumbed to becoming. It wasn’t me. I had always known myself as strong, resilient, and a warrior at heart. I had been through loss. I had been through heartbreak. I had survived things I once thought would break me. But I had never experienced anything quite like this. 

It took me a while to understand what had happened to me. Somewhere along the way, without even realizing it, I had started begging this person to choose me. And that realization hurt almost as much as not being chosen.

After that entire month had passed, I was still a mess. But with the resilience I had left in me, I kept going through my day-to-day life because, somehow, we have to keep going for ourselves. I learned something during that time that I never really understood before. You can feel completely broken and still reach for your dreams. Those two things can coexist.

You can wake up with a heavy heart and still show up for your life. You can cry at night and still accomplish something the next morning. You can miss someone terribly and still build something beautiful for yourself. I never knew I could do that until I had no other choice but to learn. It was harder. Nothing about it was easy. But life doesn’t stop simply because someone doesn’t love you back in the way you hoped they would.

As I continued moving forward in my everyday life, I slowly realized I was also beginning to move on, just in a way that worked for me. I wasn’t ignoring my feelings. If anything, I felt everything. At the end of each day, I faced my shadows. I sat with the hurt, the rejection, the questions, and everything else that surfaced. Then I would wake up and spend another day connecting with clients who were experiencing their own versions of heartbreak, longing, and complicated love. Suddenly, I understood them in a way I never had before.

I wasn’t only listening to their pain anymore. I knew what that kind of pain felt like. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I started understanding what moving on actually meant for me. We can move on while we are still hurting. We can move on while we are still processing. We can move on while we are learning to accept what happened. And perhaps the hardest thing for me to understand was that we can even move on while continuing to love someone who rejected the love or connection we were offering. In my case, I know they didn’t reject me as a person, but they did reject the deeper connection and closeness I was offering. And that was still a form of rejection.

Moving on didn’t require me to stop loving them. It required me to stop abandoning myself because they couldn’t love me the way I wanted them to.

Sometimes Love Has to Change Form

After several weeks, I started to notice the love changing form. At first, I had a really difficult time with it. My ego would get in the way, like that little devil sitting on my shoulder whispering all sorts of negative things into my ear. Rejection has a way of triggering the deepest parts of us. It can bring up insecurities, fears, old wounds, and thoughts we didn’t even realize were hiding inside of us.

But I wouldn’t fight what was coming up. I let it come. I let myself feel angry, rejected, hurt, confused, jealous, sad, or whatever else decided to surface that day. I knew I was purging something much deeper than what was happening on the surface.

There were moments when I felt grateful for being a bit of a magician when it came to this sort of thing. Sitting with the shadows and finding meaning inside of pain came naturally to me. I knew it didn’t come naturally to everyone. Truthfully, it probably only came naturally to me because I had lost so much over the years that grief had become a teacher I already knew very well.

As time passed, my perspective started to shift. I began to realize that love taking a different form didn’t have to mean something had gone wrong. There could actually be something beautiful in allowing it to become what it was, instead of continuing to fight for what I wanted it to be. I think one of the hardest things to accept about a soul mate connection is that recognizing someone as a soul mate doesn’t necessarily tell us what form that relationship is supposed to take. We can feel deeply connected to someone and still have to release the future we imagined with them. The connection can remain even when our expectations of it have to change.

The hurt doesn’t disappear overnight, but it starts losing some of its power over you. You begin seeing the person you love from a different angle. You start understanding them outside of what you wanted from them. You forgive them. You forgive yourself. And perhaps most importantly, you forgive yourself for all the moments when you were so busy hoping they would choose you that you forgot to choose yourself.

I think we need more of that kind of transformation in this world. Time and time again, I see two people hurting each other because neither person knows how to put down their armor long enough to heal. Sometimes we’re so busy defending our wounds that we forget there is another wounded human being standing across from us.

But I want to make something very clear. If someone is mistreating you, that is not the kind of love I am talking about here. Changing the form of love does not mean accepting disrespect, abuse, manipulation, or repeatedly allowing someone to hurt you. If the other person has no desire to meet you in growth, accountability, or mutual understanding, you cannot do that work for both of you. Sometimes the only place left to go is back to yourself.

In my case, something different happened. We were eventually able to meet somewhere in the middle. Not necessarily in the place I once imagined for us, but in a place where we could choose peace, grace, understanding, and growth, wherever that might lead. I found something meaningful in that. I also learned to find beauty in the days when I fall completely out of that perspective, because I do. I am not perfect. There are still days when something hurts again. There are moments when my ego gets loud, when an old feeling comes back, or when acceptance doesn’t feel nearly as peaceful as it did the day before. Healing doesn’t give us perfect days.

But somewhere along the way, we began to understand one another in a way we hadn’t before. For me, that was better than continuing to hurt each other while desperately trying to force the connection into a shape it wasn’t ready to hold. It was movement. It was growth. It was progression. And sometimes progression is the most beautiful form love can take.

Maybe moving on from a soul mate was never about leaving this person behind or convincing myself that the love wasn’t real. Maybe it was about accepting that even a love this deep can change form, and learning how to keep walking without leaving myself behind.

TAKE ACTION: If you’re navigating a soulmate connection, learning to let love change form, or simply trying to understand what your heart is asking of you, connect with Tori Shadows for a personalized love reading.