The Third Essene Mirror: You Are What You Have Lost
Our world is a complex set of mirrors, in which each of our relationships reflects aspects of ourselves back to us so we can see who we truly are.
This includes relationships with partners, parents, strangers in the street, nature, the universe and money. We are in relationship to everything that surrounds us.
A mystic Jewish sect called the Essenes, who lived around 2000 years ago, believed there were seven types of mirror of relationships. These are known as the seven Essene Mirrors, and I’ve been fascinated by them for many years since watching Gregg Braden’s amazingly ’90s workshop on them.
I have always wanted to understand these mirrors more deeply, so this series will explore what each of these mirrors really reveal to us and how they guide us to align more truly with ourselves.
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The third Essene mirror reflects what we want to be and don’t believe we are. Whereas the second mirror shows us where we say ‘no’ to the parts of ourselves that we learned were ‘wrong’, the third mirror reveals the parts we loved and then gave away in order to survive or fit in.
This is often seen as the mirror of falling in love, or soul mates, but I understand it as the mirror of positive charge and longing. We can see and feel it in a person, a place, a group, a purpose, in art. We know we’re experiencing this mirror when something draws our attention, feels big and consuming, it lights us up and feels somehow more than what it is. It may feel like all the things we are not.
This kind of relationship might feel really good, but when we don’t understand how this reflection works we can give it too much power. Then, it can end up making us feel bad instead of good, and become a destructive force.
This could look like an addictive relationship, where you sacrifice your own autonomy, or other areas of your life, in order to keep the person about. It could also look like being part of a group or cult that someone offers up all their money and self-empowerment to. It could look like obsession or idolisation. It could also have the opposite effect, of making you want to avoid anything that reflects this powerful energy back to you — maybe you avoid intimacy, or connection with anything that feels like too much of what you want.
This more extreme reaction happens when we’ve disconnected from the part of ourselves that is powerful and all the things we want to see in the world. The more disconnected from this part of ourselves we are, the more painful or destructive the relationship with this mirror will be — either we will chase it obsessively or shut down to avoid it entirely.
For example, we may be attracted to someone who has the quality of being very free, or wild and independent. Subconsciously we want to cultivate this energy in ourselves, we want to be around it and feel it so that we can feel more whole. This person gives us that energy, reflects the part of us that is free, wild and independent that we have cut ourselves off from.
We’ve cut ourselves off from it because at some point we felt it was the safest thing to do. Maybe we grew up in a controlling environment, where our more liberated qualities were taken away. Or maybe codependency was encouraged so we gave up our independence so we could feel more loved.
This doesn’t just happen in childhood but throughout our lives. We learn how to behave around people, how to get positive responses, how to fit in to different environments — and as we do this we lose and give up different parts of ourselves. A bad relationship can take our confidence, school can take our rebellion, a job can take our idealism, the media can take our optimism.
Then, because we can never lose these parts entirely, we see them in other people or things. Often, we see them in a way that’s magnified, intense and vivid. We want these parts back, to rediscover them in ourselves.
We are drawn to relationships or situations that give us that feeling until we have entrained to their vibration enough so that the charge is gone. We can do this just by spending time with them and letting ourselves grow within the relationship. The more aware we are, the more spacious and fun this can be. When we’ve embodied the freedom, confidence, innocence, strength of the other enough, we no longer feel that they’re our only means to accessing it.
When this happens, the relationship becomes more grounded, more based in choice and a love that doesn’t come from need or lack.
This mirror explains why our attraction to people and things changes over time, as we learn to integrate these different parts of ourselves and then are ready for another reflection of a new part of ourselves we want to experience.
The most empowering thing to learn from this mirror is that the huge energy we may feel in others — that can feel both addictive and repellant because it shows us our own perceived lack — is our own. It’s our own feelings, sensations and imagination. The person we are projecting onto is having their own subjective experience which is probably completely different.
When we understand this, we can claim that energy back, draw it back to ourselves instead of continuing to give it away and project onto others. We can spend time in intense relationships whilst also staying centred, aware of our own magnitude, and aware that what we love or crave in the world is also alive within us.
Springboard:
Which people/groups/things create this charge in you — where you ‘know’ their energy better than your own? What does it feel like? List the qualities. Notice if your energy wants to chase it or run away.
Connect to that energy and then open up to the idea that that energy is yours. Draw it closer to you and feel it settling into your body.
Practice feeling that you can be intimate with this energy without needing to chase, sacrifice or change something outside of yourself.
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I offer alignment coaching to help you navigate your relationship with yourself and your world ~~ visit http://www.river-meets-sea.co.uk
