Stalking the Soul

Our soul does talk to us; it’s not without a voice. We just have to learn how to listen, and that’s not so easy. We’ve been listening to so many other voices, sometimes for so long. We can easily get confused about making contact with the depth and creativity of our soul, what Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls ‘”the river beneath the river.” If you feel yourself to be something very fluid, a movement of energy and consciousness, then the soul is the deeper current in your river, a current that moves underneath the waking state of your everyday identity.

We get so wrapped up in survival, and what others expect of us, and what we expect of ourselves, that the voice of the soul can’t reach us, in all that noise. So it often speaks to us in other ways: through our dreams, through music, or writing, through nature, or through the body. In the beginning, when we first make contact with the soul, it can feel like a strong bright clarity that moves through the vertical core of the body.

When we first connect with the soul, the heart of what is communicated is something like “Wake up, Hello, I’m here.” Many people I have worked with expected something more, like specific instructions on their life mission. I think we’ve passed around a lot of lovely fantasies about the soul; and it just doesn’t seem to work like this. The call of the soul doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll receive a manual for your next steps in life. This is not actually how we use the word ‘call’ in English. At first, the soul is simply calling you to attention, asking you to notice the existence of this deeper current in the depths of your being. To awaken to the presence of something essential, true, and much larger than your current identity. Once the soul has been recognized, then the next stage of getting to know it unfolds. It can feel like you are stalking something in the wilderness.

 

It’s strange how we do recognize the soul; and it also remains a great mystery. I have noticed, over and over again, that when someone speaks from this depth in themselves, everyone notices it, responds to it, even if they don’t know what it is. When you speak from the soul, from essence, people lean forward, they sit up straighter, they take notice. There is a whole different quality to the energy, the vibration.

When the soul calls us, the same thing happens. We take notice, and that’s all we need to do in the beginning: keep paying attention, keep listening, inclining ourselves toward this mysterious current that is running deep, right through the centre of our life. It takes a lot of quiet, a lot of abiding interest, a lot of curiosity, to get to know the soul. It’s tempting to give up, to get caught up in all the other things that call for our attention. It can be hard to stay connected with this energy, the intense aliveness—it’s another dimension than my egoic identity. I can get lost, frustrated and very discouraged, when I am stalking the soul.

It helps to remember that I can’t expect the soul to fit neatly inside the life I have been living. Its values, its pleasures, its motivations are not the same as what I have known up until now. The presence of the soul is not necessarily comforting! Sometimes it can be very disruptive, a force that turns our life inside out. It’s not always like this, but we have to be prepared for some changes, if we are stalking the soul.

When I work with people who are drawn to the soul, I often feel the presence of this higher energy in the room. The soul is there, and it wants to be embodied. It wants to come down into your life, if you are ready. It’s not passive; the soul has its own drive and intelligence. And often there is no space for it in the body-there’s too much trauma, too many imprints from the past that don’t allow that much light to descend into the nervous system.

We need to learn to make space for the soul, so it can actually come down and live here, in the body, on earth. There are practices that can help us with this process, which is a great blessing. Once the embodiment begins, then we have a much stronger sense of the specifics, of the directions we are being called in. But before that, we have to learn how to love, and listen and trust, without knowing what our soul wants to do, beyond just saying “Hello, I’m here. Are you?”

 

with love,
Shayla

 

art credit: Admittance, joycehuntingtonart.com