Twin Souls vs Twin Flames and the Confusion with Soulmates

In this Soul teaching on Twin Souls vs Twin Flames and the confusion with Soulmates, you will learn:

• The different types of soul connections and the way they show up in your life
• The origins of the Twin Soul and Twin Flames concepts
• The truth about Soulmates
• Why the soul label isn’t as important as you think
• And more….

What type of soul connection are you experiencing?

There are many different soul connections that we can experience in relation to others, that aren’t always romantic in nature. In this teaching however we will focus on the soul connections that are romantic or stir our romantic desires. In order to do this I first want to go briefly through all the different types of soul connections and explain them a little bit.

As we are all ONE ultimately, these are more human interpretations of soul concepts but they help us understand what we otherwise have difficulty grasping the deeper meaning of.

Soul group

This is the group of souls that you belong to and that you keep running into lifetime after lifetime. They incarnate in the same timeline to help each other in the incarnation period. This can be strangers, bosses, neighbors, good Samaritans of all kind including family members. The people that show up in the right place, at the right time to help you or vice versa seeking your help. Karma can be involved, in the sense that we owe them one or they owe us and the current life encounter allows the ‘score’ to be settled.

Soul group members can also be contemporary agents of change, we often see this in the arts, science, literature, philosophy, and so on that there are multiple people bringing in the same or similar new input that affects the world at large. This is because these people belong to the same soul group, even when they do not know each other in the physical – in their human forms.

A soul group member can also be soul family, a soulmate or your Twin Soul as this is simply the first split from source that contains the largest group of souls. Because the Twin Soul is the final split in the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine aspect of the soul, you always belong to the same soul group.

There are multiple soul groups, although there doesn’t seem to be a general consensus on how many soul groups there are seven (rays) or more. Yet even though there are multiple soul groups, they all split off from the same one source which is why ALL is ONE.

Soul family

This is a smaller group of souls within the soul group that you incarnate with over and over again to work through individual themes (transforming the individual), soul groups on the other hand are more focused on collective themes (transforming the whole). Someone in your human family can belong to your soul family, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Your soul family can be incarnated at the other end of the world and be scheduled to meet you later in life.

You may not feel a big charge meeting someone of your soul group, but when you meet someone from your soul family in the human form – you deeply feel it and recognize this person as such. Soul family is always part of the bigger soul group and you will experience many soul family connections as Soulmates. Your Twin Soul is of course also part of your soul family, as this is the final split of the soul prior to entering the incarnation process.

Because you incarnate together with your soul family over and over again, there is often past life karma between you that wants to be healed and resolved. Soul agreements executed correctly, but forgotten in the human form often lead to misunderstandings and trauma which is the essence of karma (unresolved past life energies).

Soulmates

This can be souls that belong to your soul family, but that doesn’t need to be the case. Soulmates can also be part of your soul group or even other soul families or other soul groups. Soulmates can be lovers, but don’t have to be. They can be part of your human family, or they can be friends, clients, bosses, teachers, students, business partners, landlords, professionals that you hire and so on.

Something I always hammer on is that even the so-called ‘karmic’ partner of your person is your and their Soulmate assisting you in your growth and healing process towards true union, which is the inner union with the soul.

Soulmate relationships are seen as loving, supportive and harmonious which does not mean that they are devoid of karma. Karma does not always have to be experienced as toxic, karma isn’t something bad. It’s past life residual unresolved energy, seeking to be harmonized or released.

A part of a Soulmate contract may be to take care of someone for life for example, if this is the case it may result from the soul desire to balance another life experience – to make things right on a soul level.

One thing I often see with clients in the Soul Embodiment® Therapy Journeys®, is that when they were killed by a current life parent (mother or father) in a previous lifetime. The taking of that life then has to be balanced, through the giving of life which is why they are now born as this person’s child to balance the acts from the previous lifetime.

Twin Souls (Twin Flames)

The Twin Soul is the final soul split into the feminine and masculine polarity, which is why there is only one Twin Soul and not multiple. Everyone has a Twin Soul, but we do not meet up with our Twin Soul in the physical in every incarnation. Of all the past lives I have uncovered in my own journey, only one third were together with the Twin Soul, the rest were lifetimes where we may have been incarnated at the same time but did not meet each other in the human form.

Among those previous lifetimes we were not always lovers, we have been brothers, mother and daughter and comrades (brothers in arms). In all of those lifetimes however we were not ready for the unification process, not even when we were lovers because we were still so ensnarled in our own karmic ties to the past. Consequently those lifetimes were full of very painful karma clearing experiences that we played out, even in our two most recent lifetimes that both ended badly for us – one of them even ending up in death.

Although the Twin Soul connection is often experienced as highly romantic, it does not need to lead to a romantic outcome (despite being deeply desired). The romantic outcome may also be delayed, in order for the true purpose of the connection to be fulfilled first – a unification process of the ego and the soul within the human experience. Also known as Ascension, which starts with a descension of the soul into the body which is only possible after clearing out a certain amount of residual past life unresolved energy.

Some Twin Soul couples are brought together in a physical union fairly quickly because they need to be close in order to release these past life energies. For the majority however, distance (separation) facilitates this clearing process which is why they are held apart in order to trigger this unresolved pain that they carry within their energy field (aka karma).

In my own journey my biggest challenge has been to embody the feminine, while my Twin Soul counterpart’s biggest challenge has been to embody the masculine – despite him looking and being masculine in this lifetime and me looking and being feminine as well. You do not need to be butch or a feminized man in order to have a wounded inner feminine or inner masculine.

Twin Soul vs Twin Flames, what’s the difference?

There is NO difference, it’s the exact same concept.

There are many varying opinions about the differences, to some the Twin Soul is more advanced and to others it’s the Twin Flame that is said to be a higher evolution of the Twin Soul. Even within the Twin Soul or Twin Flame concept, there are many different distinctions being introduced to create a sense of hierarchy. Think of monadic twins, Twin rays, Blue ray twins, Seraphim twins, Rod and Staff twins and so on.

One has to understand that such hierarchy or seeing one as more advanced than the other is ALWAYS coming from ego. Because the ego thinks in these terms, but the soul doesn’t. This reveals that they are human concepts and not soul concepts.

When we go back historically the concept started as Twin Souls:

“Like the biblical story virtually all the ancient myths reference creation as involving the split of polarities from an original state of unity. The Chinese story of P’an-Ku, separating the unity of yin and yang principles. The Egyptian Atum myth where the air God Shu separates Geb and Nut from their initial love embrace. The Sumerian story of creation and the uncoupling of the god Anu and goddess Ki from their commingled state. The Akaddian story of Marduck splitting the goddess Tiamat. The New Zealand Maori story of creation and separation of Rangi and Papa. (Ranginui and Papatuanuku.) Aristophanes in the Symposium references how the Greek God Zeus cut the souls of humankind in half. “Man’s original body having been cut in two, each half yearned for the half that had been severed…..Love is simply the name of for the desire and pursuit of the whole. Plato in the Symposium: “The original human nature was not as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two.” Source: Soul Mates & Twin Souls

This is not simply a New Age concept, it’s been with us since the beginning of time. “Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” — Aristotle. The theme stays the same, the two coming from one even when it may not have been called what we call it today.

Who coined the terms Twin Soul and Twin Flame?

When we fast forward to more recent times, we have the teachings of Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) that call it a Twin Soul in the period prior to WWII and then later in the 1970’s and 1980’s Elizabeth Clare Prophet (1939-2009) and her husband Mark L. Prophet (1918-1973) talk about Twin Souls/Twin Flames.

But in between these two and linking them together is Guy Ballard (1878-1939) from the I AM Movement which is an offshoot of Theosophy to which the Edgar Cayce teachings belong to. The Church Universal and Triumphant also known as the Summit Lighthouse was founded by Mark L. Prophet and his wife Clare, Mark had been a follower of the teachings of Guy Ballard in the I Am Movement.

It seems that the original modern day concept of Twin Souls was reintroduced by Edgar Cayce. It’s currently erroneously filed under the term Soulmates in Wikipedia:

“According to the esoteric religious movement Theosophy, whose claims were modified by Edgar Cayce, God created androgynous souls—equally male and female. Later theories postulate that the souls split into separate genders, perhaps because they incurred karma while playing around on the Earth, or “separation from God.” Over a number of reincarnations, each half seeks the other. When all karmic debt is purged, the two will fuse back together and return to the ultimate.”

Edgar Cayce was referring to Atlantis when he was talking about the soul split into separate genders. We also know that he used the term Twin Soul, because it is stated as such on the Edgar Cayce ARE website which means it’s coming directly from the Edgar Cayce archives.

It is then Guy Ballard that potentially introduces the term Twin Flame in 1937 when channeling Ascended Master Saint Germain. This could be that Saint Germain was using flames as an analogy (see link above for the exact text) or it could be that Ballard wanting to differentiate his movement from the Theosophy from which it originated, coined it as a new term.

Then in 1999 Elizabeth Clare Prophet first publishes her book Soul Mates and Twin Flames. I grew up in the Church Universal and Triumphant and attended the churches private school together with Elizabeth’s daughters. I left in the mid 1980’s but I know that Elizabeth was already teaching the Twin Flame concept back then, even though I was too young at that time to understand it. Because of this 15 year gap I checked the ISBN number to make sure that this was the first edition as the book was published long after I left, but there are no earlier publications.

In this book Elizabeth also starts off as:

“Each one of us has a twin soul, or twin flame, who was created with us in the beginning. God created you and your twin flame out of a single “white fire body.” He separated this white fire ovoid into two spheres of being—one with a masculine polarity and the other with a feminine polarity, but each with the same spiritual origin and unique pattern of identity.“

Having had a challenging relationship with Elizabeth myself as a child, I have to admit that I have never been able to read her work. A great portion of my forgiveness work has involved Guru Ma or Mother as she was called within the church. Me as a little Dutch girl ending up in California with my recently divorced mom seeking to start over, was of course because Elizabeth and I had karma to resolve and because we are part of the same soul group.

For the purpose of writing this teaching, I finally sat down and read her book on Scribd.com and couldn’t help but smile that her teachings and what I have been shown about the truth of this journey are very similar. Although Elizabeth has passed and is even said to have reached Ascension, we are an example of contemporaries of a similar thoughtform and teachings.

This may have been due to subconscious influence of the grueling hours lasting dictations we were made to sit through even as kids, it certainly has not been from my conscious efforts to understand her work as I was too young while I was there and later as a teenager too angry with her to even care. More accurately I think we are both tapping into the same pool of etheric knowledge on this subject as we both experienced meeting our Twin Soul in the physical. Mark and Elizabeth, were Twin Souls themselves.

However, since Elizabeth and her love for the Violet Flame decree, there are more powerful healing tools available to us now to help us release the past life karma that is standing in our way. Healing tools that work deeper and quicker than the Violet Flame decree can take us, despite it being a tool that we can still use to support us today.

My mother has said the Violet Flame decree daily for the past 40 plus years, it does not and cannot replace the deeper work of making the subconscious, conscious in working with healers.

In conclusion to answer this section’s opening question:

From the research I have done it would seem that Edgar Cayce coined the term Twin Soul after probably hearing it within the Theosophy where it was used in a completely different context by Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891) co-founder of the Theosophical movement.

It was then most likely Guy Ballard (Edgar Cayce’s contemporary – they were practically the same age even) who coined the term Twin Flame (around 1937), that was popularized by Elizabeth Clare Prophet being one of the first authors to write about this concept and calling it Twin Flames in the title of her book published in 1999. This accelerated the popularity of the term Twin Flame by the internet in the 1990’s and by Social Media in the late 2000’s.

It wasn’t until circa 2014 that the concept of Twin Flames spilled over from the spiritual communities into mainstream publications. Source: Medium

I can verify this as I started my Twin Soul journey in April 2014 and there were no credible resource sites available at that time. I started writing about my own journey in 2015 and finally started my own website around the concept in late fall of 2016.

Another source on Twin Souls is Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov (1900-1986), but we know from his own saying that he was familiar with Theosophy and visited the Indian Theosophical Society in 1959-1960.

“Every human being has a twin soul, a spirit which is his twin. When humans sprang like a spark from the heart of their Creator, they were two in one, that is, two parts that complemented each other perfectly, each one being the other half of the whole. Yes, humans were originally both male and female, androgynous beings, with both the negative and the positive poles within themselves. During the course of their evolution, humans lost this perfect unity, the two parts divided and separated; this separation of the sexes meant that each one sought their own evolution. If they still recognize each other from time to time during their evolutions it is because each one bears the image of the other within the depths of their being, each one is marked by the seal of the other. Everyone has the image of their other half inside them, maybe only a vague image, but nonetheless there. And each soul that comes on earth hopes to meet the complementary soul who will give them what they need: perfect harmony, perfect union.“

An earlier published book (1995) on Twin Souls by Patricia Joudry and Maurie Pressman, M.D. describes Patricia receiving this information intuitively but in the intro she also states that both authors studied Theosophy which probably explains why they use the term Twin Soul instead of Twin Flame.

If you know of any Twin Soul or Twin Flame books that predate the 1990’s and that are not based in either the Theosophy or I AM Movement, please let my team know.

The confusion with Soulmates

The term “Soulmate” first appeared in the English language in a letter by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1822. Source: Wikipedia

“A soul mate is different from a twin flame. Soul mates come together because they are working on mastering the same type of karma and developing the energies of the same chakra. So soul mates have an attraction that is based on the sacred labor and on the path of self-mastery. A soul mate is like the echo of oneself in Matter working at the same task to fulfill a blueprint for God.”
Source: Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Soul Mates and Twin Flames.

It’s outside of the spiritual and New Age circles that the terms Twin Soul and Soulmate become conflated. Wikipedia for example has a page on Soulmates, which contains Twin Soul descriptions. There is no page on the Twin Flame concept and the Wikipedia page for Twin Souls redirects to the Soulmate concept. It’s clear that people outside the scene just don’t get it.

On Google or other platforms that auto-translate it gets even worse as the word Twin Soul often gets translated to Soulmate or Twin Flame despite it literally meaning Twin Soul.

This is true in for example:

• The Spanish Alma Gemella which literally says soul twin
• The Dutch Tweelingziel which is twin soul
• The Arabic توأم روح taw’am ruh which is again twin soul
• The French Âme soeur which means soul sister and is the correct term for twin soul

I have not tried to look it up for every language, but it is a strong indication for why the term Twin Flame has become more popularized as it is less easy to confuse with the term Soulmate.

Personally I resonate more strongly with the term Twin Soul and recently became highly intrigued by the question:

How did the term Twin Flame come into being?

Why are we suddenly talking about flames instead of souls…..?

It’s somewhat ironic to find that the term originated within the roots of the spiritual community in the US that I was briefly raised in as a child (I was there 4,5 years in the 1980’s). Which is probably why my higher self started me chewing on this question, to show me everything I found while researching this teaching. Another full-circle moment for me, as I did not know what Elizabeth’s teachings were on Twin Flames.

Although the concept has been around since the beginning of time, it wasn’t until the last 100 years give or take that we started calling it Twin Souls or Twin Flames.

Why the soul label doesn’t really matter in the end…

“In this century of our souls’ acceleration toward Aquarius you may experience more than one relationship of both kinds. We are winding up the loose ends of our karma with a number of people in this cycle of history.” Source: Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Soul Mates and Twin Flames.

Although our human purpose to enter a relationship is most often to have romance, security and physical intimacy, our soul purpose for entering any kind of relationship whether that is a so-called ‘Karmic’, Soulmate or Twin Soul relationship is to achieve self-liberation from death and rebirth. The soul enters every connection with the intention to heal and grow, and to release any residual unresolved energies from the past (karma).

It therefore DOES NOT matter who the person is who you are with or what type of soul connection you have with them, inner union (the union of the ego and the soul) is available to everyone. You do not need to have met your Twin Soul, you do not need to have special love to be able to come into inner union.

The problem is that most people externalize the Heaven on Earth they internally seek, by searching for ‘The One‘ outside themselves in so called special love. This craving for special love or special relationships is defined within A Course in Miracles as any relationship that we use as a substitute for Oneness with God.

This is the point of our human existence to manifest Oneness with God, our own Divinity in the physical. Achieving this does not depend on a special someone who gives you access to this state of consciousness and state of being. It depends on your own efforts to return back to Oneness from within.

This does not mean that you will not or cannot have soul-satisfying love as well, but as long as you do not address the unresolved energetic residue that you carry with you from previous lifetimes it will continue to want to be played out in your physical reality which is what often interferes with love everlasting in our romantic connections.

The more we become who we truly are on a soul level, the deeper we align to the soul-satisfying love that is ours by Divine right.

At the dawn of the new Aquarian age, it is a time of special dispensation in regard to tying up loose ends on various soul contracts. It is a time where we are ready to evolve into the next evolution of romantic partnerships (read more about these new paradigm relationships here). But in order to do this, we need to do the internal work that is needed to align to these higher dimensional and higher vibrational unions that are becoming available to us.

We create Heaven on Earth from the inside out, it’s not something that we can chase down in the external reality through a romantic union with the person we want to be with. This state of consciousness and state of being can only be unlocked from within ourselves. This may or may not lead to a physical union with your person, but this outcome is believe it or not insignificant within the grand scheme of things. Our true inner reason for feeling pulled towards ‘The One‘ is the deep desire to come home to ourselves and the Oneness with our own soul.

Once that Oneness is achieved ANY romantic relationship we have will be more successful.

I pray this teaching helps you understand the difference between the Twin Soul (Twin Flame) and Soulmate concept, as well as give you insight on what this journey is truly about. You have to remember that much that is written on the Twin Soul subject is written by people on the journey themselves, which means that the information is not always pure or devoid of their own attachments to a romantic outcome. In other words people tend to write what they want to believe about the Twin Soul connection, because they are being blinded by their own desires to be in a physical union with their person. As much as we want to believe that this is about a romantic outcome with the beloved, we have to accept that it is initially primarily a process of inner union within oneself. Even when this seems anticlimactic and disappointing because we can clearly see what we seem to be ‘loosing’ but can’t yet imagine the bliss of being one with ourselves.