Becoming Soul

I’ve started to notice the language of Soul re-enter the field. About 5 years ago, I didn’t hear that word very often. Or if I did, it was spoken as a term, a foreign concept. A shift seems to be underway in the collective field. I’m hearing many people speak the word soul from a place of knowing it intimately, sensing their world with soul. Folks are using it in many different ways, from a range of lineages and understandings. Its return feels somehow very auspicious.

My Journey to Soul

I grew up in San Francisco, immersed in a pool of New Age ways of looking and developed quite an aversion to the bedlam of spiritual language that felt superficial and unintegrated. I used to associate the word soul with these New Age territories. My spiritually starved body finally found its doorway onto the spiritual path in my early 30s through Buddhism, in the Vipassana lineage, where the word soul was never mentioned.

About halfway through my six years at Insight Meditation Society, although the practice had saved my life, I became aware that something felt off. I was hearing desire spoken about as if it was a dirty word, an aspect of our humanity that would inevitably lead to suffering. The message was that we best learn how to tame the wild beast of our desire, or it would drive us. I somehow knew deep down that this wasn’t a helpful instruction for my body. I had been unconsciously trying to control and repress my desire for my whole early life and it wasn’t going very well. I had a suspicion that this may be a misinterpretation or flattening of the dharma and I went looking for a more sophisticated understanding of desire. Someone pointed me to Rob Burbea and my entire life changed.

Rob’s talks on Opening to the Current of Desire catapulted me on a long winding adventure down the path of Rob’s teachings. A group of friends decided to listen to his talks together and form a practice group. I proceeded to gobble up his transmission. His teachings are called Soulmaking Dharma and here is where the language of Soul re-entered my life.

At first I had a distinct allergy to the word. While the whole of what he was saying was landing in a big way, my body would cringe and try to repel that particular piece. It felt like an out of place and somewhat discordant visitor. My mind was confused. “That’s not part of this landscape.” There was a phase of gradual acclimation, slowly playing with letting it in. Over time, the word started to change shape and sound new to me. It had been re-contextualized in a cosmos where I felt more at home than I ever had before. Rob’s Soulmaking Dharma and Imaginal practice became one of my primary lenses for experiencing my reality.

I then happened across Bill Plotkin’s, Soulcraft. This world too, was deeply familiar. It was interesting to hear him describe another cosmology centering Soul that was resonant but slightly different than Rob’s framework. Even though at that point I was very devoted to Rob’s framing of Soulmaking, I appreciated receiving another way of looking at Soul. It expanded my sense of what Soul could be, revealing that it wasn't something to be captured by a single definition. It opened up the sense that I, each of us, had the right to feel into our own exploration and knowing of Soul.

What Soul Means to Me Now

Many years later, I find myself intimately entangled with Soul. It’s a word I use all the time, an idea that feels like a limb of my body, a perspective that has been woven into the way I sense my life unfold. It is completely entwined with my sense of self and my cosmology, how I perceive the universe I live in.

In the communities I am currently co-creating with others, Soul is a central wayfinder, a common language. We are still in the discovery process of discerning what Soul means to each of us. There is something that feels right about bowing to Souls mysterious nature, allowing it to remain open-ended and unbounded. When I speak of soul here, it’s from an experiential place, from how it feels in my life, in my body. My soul is hungry to know how each of you experiences soul. Soul takes great joy in celebrating its myriad forms.

These days, I’m understanding Soul as a bridge body between the Self and Spirit. Soul feels like a shapeshifter, a malleable energetic vessel that is attuned to what is surfacing across the depths of reality, but is distinctly connected to a particular being's unique unfolding. It can hear the reactions of my parts and is listening to the continual and connected unfurling of my being and the world’s. It is tuned to the loving receptivity of Presence and the vast oneness of all things. I feel it in its listening, its highly refined attunement. It is also delightfully playful.

The posture of Soul is tangible on a somatic level in my body and I sense it in spaces of highly attuned beings. This posture of listening in and listening out, as if that balance of attention is not dual, is not split, but is one thing, one ceaselessly attuned and responsive act of listening. Always listening.

How Soul is Showing Up in My Life

As I've committed to my healing work and become less afraid of my depths, I've grown a deep tenderness and love for this body, this Self. This means less consistently chattering parts and more clear open space in my being, feeling connected more often to a sense of Presence. When it's quieter internally, I can sense an inner alignment and it becomes more decipherable what feels important to me. This clarity is what allows me to sense with soul, which has completely reorganized how I make choices. There’s an oscillation between listening to my inner voice and sensing out to what is needed of me - most often an intuitive dance rather than a conscious process, where choices naturally flow from integrity with my deepest values.

As I'm shifting into a more aligned way of moving through the world, I'm discovering what feels like a different quality of energy - clearer, more focused. I’ve been calling this Soulfire, but I'm still learning what that means. There’s Eros here too, a robust aliveness that feels intricately connected to soul. (I could say a ton about eros - it's another one of my favorite subjects - but I'll save that for another time.) I feel like I'm glimpsing what's possible when we come into deeper relationship with Soul, this sense of being more alive and connected to lifeforce. I imagine this looks different for each person, depending on where they are in their unique journey.

The Soul and the Descent

Trauma has been a big part of my human experience. There are long lines of mental illness, abuse, addiction and fragmentation on both sides of my family. My father wasn't part of my early life and I developed a belief that something must be wrong with me. My interior life was most often a tangle of parts and I became afraid of inhabiting my depths.

Once I stepped onto my healing path, I found that it takes a long time to heal, and that healing is quite entangled with one's spiritual path. There have been many cycles of intensified pain, catharsis and grief - dips down into the Underworld where some piece of material was asking to be seen and worked in my psyche. Usually, this process of going down then allowed new space to open, insight to bloom forth. These journeys initiate us, make us stronger and carve out our depths to make space for greater joy, more intimate love and a deeper knowing of the cosmos.

My time on the dharma path focused on transcendence from the wheel of samsara. My exposure to Bill Plotkin, animism, and medicine work opened up the terrain of the descent in a balancing way. I now hold the ascent and the descent together as beautifully interwoven.

It has been essential for my being to find a spiritual path that holds reverence for both light and dark. Soul has reverence for the shadow and can see its beauty. But Soul is deeply committed to LIFE, to eros, to potentiality. It holds the darkness as an inherent part of the fabric of generativity.

Pregnant with Soul

I’m 44 and folks ask me somewhat often these days if I want to have children. Such a tender, ever evolving question. In my younger years, I was very much looking forward to that journey. Over time, it’s become clear that I don’t want to parent alone, so meaningful partnership needs to land in my life as a foundation for the possibility to become viable. My current answer is that I am listening to my life. Sure, I have personal desires around the matter. I think I would be a good mother. I’m guessing I would thrive in the experience of surrendering my life energy to another body, being stretched and sculpted by dimensions of love that only parenthood can transmit. Those desires are dwarfed though, by the movement to remain attuned to the mystery of what is unfolding out in front of me. How to best honor and serve what my life is presenting. I trust that if a child is not what ends up coming through this body, that something else is being incubated, is wanting to use that mothering energy towards a different form of life. And that it will not be lesser. That giving myself to that calling is also the profound activity of creation, just as sacred as mothering.

I will grieve not having that experience, if it's not part of my path. As I watch so many of my dear friends grow life inside of them, roar through the act of bringing that life into this world, and then learn to offer themselves completely to tending that life, some part of me aches for what I am missing. But Soul has taught me well how to allow the grief to move through this body and I am at peace for now with living the question.

Following Beauty

Tonight I will host an event called Portal. My friend Bodie will play a lofi set and folks will lay in a circle receiving the sound. I will build a mandala in the center of the space. To do this, I quiet my system, open to trust, and follow the beauty of the flowers. By listening, remaining attuned to the space and the bodies in it, a pattern comes through. It's an architecting of the cosmos, a portal to Sacred World.

My Soul knows how to stand in this posture, listening in, listening out, listening to the flowers, to the bodies in the space, to what is unfolding in the field. It knows where to place the next petal and the next until this small constellation of radiant beauty appears. We sit and behold this fractal, invite this mirror of the circle to absorb into our bodies as medicine. Creation is the Soul's endless activity. This is what feeds the Soul - beauty, ritual, prayer. Transforming energy into form.

Portal is unique but I don’t think it’s random - it's part of Soul's movement back into our collective awareness. There is a larger pattern of emergence revealing itself.

The Timeliness of Soul’s Return

This shift in my own life from an individual, ego-centered self to a soul-centered sense of self seems connected to the consciousness shift that may be underway in the collective field. How curious that Soul is re-entering the scene at this moment, as our world is in the shattering and shapeshifting moment of finding its next form. Perhaps Soul is arriving to help us find our way through the dark, to help us listen to what is trying to move through us, to help us understand what life wants of us in this moment. It seems to know something of the greater picture, of what is possible here. I also sense that it knows something about what lies underneath, in our culture’s unconscious, the tangled distortions that are ready to be revealed, understood and loved. Soul is here, alive in each of us, whispering through our hands as they write and build, through our voices as they rise up, through our hearts as they break and fall in love.

Soulfire burns strong in my body and I feel other souls lighting up, out in the field, at an astonishing rate. My soul celebrates, gazing out at the flames all around. It glitters as it reflects this radiance, as it sits across from a friend and shines their beauty back at them. Soul sings to us about where we are headed, and beckons, “this way…”