Our beloved is our inner soul-mate. Our sacred vessel of divinity, our own uniquely crafted blend of masculine and feminine love in it’s fullest, most divine expression.  The concept of beloved was birthed from Jungian depth psychology, which explores our psyche, or soul (for those of us who believe in the concept of soul), as well as our deepest human emotions. To embrace this concept of beloved is not necessarily easy nor at first look does it even seem desirable for those of us who prefer to hold a more conventional view of what being “in love” is. This is because to embrace our beloved asks of us, to a certain degree, to leave our comfort zone of believing that there is a “magical other” out there who is the source, or key holder of this deep love that we are all desiring.
It is essential here to realize that embracing one’s own beloved in no way takes away from our experience of deep love and intimacy with our romantic partner. In fact, embracing our beloved allows us to experience a deeper intimate connection with our partner. This is the natural evolution of love as we experience a deeper intimacy with ourselves, embracing our shadows and the projections that once blocked our intimacy with others, especially our romantic others. This is because the path of embracing our own beloved involves looking at why and where we have been blocked from our divine masculine and our divine feminine. We must look at the ways in which our patriarchal culture with it’s prescribed gender conditioning, our family of origin experience, our experience with our peers, our past experiences of romantic love, and our physically and or emotionally traumatic experiences have, for both men and women, blocked our divine feminine nature and masculine natures.
The best approach to take, since each of us has our own sacred and unique experience of our soul, and of romantic love, is to just try to be open to this concept of our inner beloved/soul-mate. Rather than trying to embrace a one-size fits all definition of what it precisely is, just allow yourself to be somewhere on the spectrum of being in touch with your own beloved. This is major paradigm shift that can help us to alleviate abandonment fear and bring that wall down so that we can love more deeply: the idea that to a certain degree, this magical state that we refer to as being “in love” is actually our experience of our own beloved within.

Christine Dufond, MFT