Accessing the Wisdom of the Soul

You see, when weav­ing a blan­ket, an Indian woman leaves a flaw in the weav­ing of that blan­ket to let the soul out. — Martha Graham

Mat­ters of the soul have been the focus of my writ­ing here  since I first began blog­ging nearly four years ago. Many of my arti­cles are cross-posted over at the Huff­in­g­ton Post, where I’m a fea­tured con­trib­u­tor on the Mind­ful Liv­ing page.

What a delight to learn that Huff­Post has just launched an entire sec­tion devoted to mat­ters of the soul!  And right­fully so, for one might say that we are now liv­ing in those “inter­est­ing times” of which the ancient Chi­nese proverb speaks. And in these inter­est­ing times, we often find our­selves rud­der­less and in need of some kind of guid­ance system.

I find this idea of using tech­nol­ogy to help us get and stay con­nected with the soul and learn how to nur­ture it in our daily lives an inter­est­ing con­cept, for I’ve always thought of the soul itself as our inter­nal GPS. This con­cept expands the enve­lope of how we humans can relate to the soul, but some­thing in me is not quite ready to jump on the tech­nol­ogy band­wagon when it comes to address­ing the needs of the soul.

I may be slow in com­ing to this party, but not because I auto­mat­i­cally reject new ideas. Quite the con­trary! I’ve always been an early adapter/adopter, at least for my gen­er­a­tion. How­ever, when it comes to tech­nol­ogy and mat­ters of the soul, for me, the jury is still out. What I do delight in, how­ever, is the impor­tance being placed on the place of soul in our lives and cul­ti­vat­ing one’s abil­ity to be informed by the soul’s calling.

The idea that the soul expresses our true nature is not entirely accu­rate. It would be more accu­rate to say that the soul serves as a con­duit to our true nature and thus, when we attend to its needs, we will be brought into align­ment with its agenda. And the soul’s agenda is always about evolv­ing in the direc­tion of our high­est pos­si­bil­i­ties. In this way, the soul is the guid­ance sys­tem that is always seek­ing align­ment with its own true North.

But often times, per­haps even most often, the soul will take the deep­est path to get to its des­ti­na­tion. The soul is about deep­en­ing, for in the depths is where we’ll gain access to the wis­dom it seeks.

Wis­dom is to the soul what health is to the body.

The wis­dom your soul seeks is the very rea­son for your exis­tence. What if we are not bod­ies with souls but rather souls with bod­ies? Kind of gives it a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive. Con­sider that you have taken on a body as a vehi­cle for your soul’s jour­ney. In this con­text, you are here to carry out your soul’s agenda, which is to real­ize your true nature and to live in align­ment with it.

Wis­dom is essen­tial for the soul’s evo­lu­tion and is rarely found at the sur­face of things. If that were true, we’d all be very wise souls and the world would be a much dif­fer­ent place. If wis­dom were easy to gain, we’d have already fig­ured out how to solve the great­est prob­lems fac­ing mankind.

Wis­dom might not be easy to gain, but the soul’s wis­dom is always avail­able to us. The thing is, we’re not always avail­able to it. And this may be the very jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for using tech­nol­ogy to nudge us in the right direc­tion when we’ve got­ten off track. I’m open to that possibility.

Cross­ing the Spir­i­tual Desert

In my own expe­ri­ence, how­ever, there is a pur­pose to be served by the very act of “being off track.” It’s not an acci­dent. In truth, being off track is part of the awak­en­ing process. It’s the soul’s way of let­ting us know we’ve fallen asleep, made a wrong turn. It’s the soul’s course-correction process. There is wis­dom to be gained in the desert of our jour­ney. When we feel most lost and rud­der­less is when we finally can stop grasp­ing for answers and solu­tions and become still. The soul finally gets our attention.

Granted, tech­nol­ogy might be able to has­ten the process so we end up spend­ing less time in the desert. But there is some­thing to be gained in that expe­ri­ence that a “quick fix” can­not heal. There in the desert, in the moments when you feel like you don’t know where to turn, in the times when you’ve lost your moor­ings and all the things you’ve relied on to keep you going no longer work, is when you’re required to deepen in order to dis­cover what lies beneath all the old patterns.

For more about this aspect of the soul’s jour­ney, please ready my ear­lier post, “Cross­ing The Spir­i­tual Desert.” This post, writ­ten two years ago, still gen­er­ates con­sid­er­able per­sonal email from read­ers, inquir­ing about their own process. It seems we all find our way to the desert at some point in our lives.

The soul thrives in the deep waters of soli­tude and still­ness. It thrives in the dark­ness. It thrives in con­fu­sion and doubt. This is the very place where the soul can best emerge. Thomas Moore, who wroteThe Care of the Soul said:

“It is only through mys­tery and mad­ness that the soul is revealed”

Con­sider that the soul will even craft the flaws in order that it might emerge. It’s those “flaws” the ego con­sid­ers mis­takes. To the soul, cracks and flaws are just open­ings for new pos­si­bil­i­ties to enter and blos­som forth.

So if tech­nol­ogy can help guide us to the places where the soul can best be heard, sign me up. The trick is, how­ever, when we’re most in need of a tap on the shoul­der point­ing us in a new direc­tion, is usu­ally the very time when we’re the least avail­able to receive it. Ask me how I know.

In my own expe­ri­ence, when I’m out in the desert and on that lonely stretch of the soul’s jour­ney where no life seems to exist, I don’t want to be con­tacted by any­one or any­thing. I need to give my soul a chance to grieve what­ever is being lost, what­ever I’m being called to release. And frankly, the last thing I want at times like this is an elec­tronic device nudg­ing me to move in another direc­tion. The work is to trust and honor the call of the soul and fol­low its river wher­ever it leads. Can a gad­get teach me to trust? I’m skep­ti­cal, but open to dis­cover what lies down this path.

Tagged as: GPS, GPS system, Metaphysics, Soul, Spiritual Desert