The Way Of The Soul: Why Is It So Painful?

 

 

                           

                       Every­one should know that you can’t live in any other way than by cul­ti­vat­ing the soul.” 

                                                                                      - Apuleius, Roman writer

Sev­eral read­ers responded to a pre­vi­ous post, How To Know The Way Of The Soul, with obser­va­tions that their own soul’s process was extremely painful. One reader asked, ” Does it always have to be so painful?” while another won­dered, “How can I stop this pain?”

Thomas Moore, author of Care Of The Soul, writes:

Care of the soul speaks to the long­ings we feel and to the symp­toms that drive us crazy, but it is not a path away from shadow or death. A soul­ful per­son­al­ity is com­pli­cated, mul­ti­fac­eted, and shaped by both pain and plea­sure, suc­cess and fail­ure. Life lived soul­fully is not with­out its moments of dark­ness and peri­ods of foolishness.

 

Soul is the font of who we are, and yet it is far beyond our capac­ity to devise and to con­trol. We can cul­ti­vate, tend, enjoy, and par­tic­i­pate in the things of the soul, but we can’t out­wit it or man­age it or shape it to the designs of a will­ful ego.

 

So we can see that the very ques­tions, “Why is the soul’s process so painful and how can I stop the pain?” are ques­tions of an ego want­ing to be in con­trol. To the soul, this human life is a class­room, filled with oppor­tu­ni­ties for gain­ing wis­dom, and as such, every­thing that occurs in our lives is sim­ply “grist for the mill,” as Ram Das would say.

By try­ing to avoid our human mis­takes and fail­ures and by want­ing to side step neg­a­tive moods, emo­tions, bad life choices and unhealthy habits, we “move beyond the reach of the soul” says Moore. The work of our soul is found, not by see­ing our life’s cir­cum­stances as prob­lems to be solved or tran­scended, but by embrac­ing pre­cisely what is right in front of us.

“The way through the world is more dif­fi­cult to find that the way beyond it.” -poet Wal­lace Stevens

Renais­sance philoso­phers have said it is the soul that makes us human. We could also look at it as when we are most human we have the great­est access to soul.

Thus, the voice of the soul can most often be heard through our symp­toms. When the soul is not tended, we feel its “long­ings” issued through emo­tions and feel­ings we con­sider most painful:

Empti­ness

Mean­ing­less­ness

Depres­sion

Dis­il­lu­sion­ment 

Loss of val­ues

Unful­filled

Hunger for spirituality

The soul begs us to turn toward our pain, not away from it, for there in the midst of our suf­fer­ing, lies the path to lib­er­a­tion. “The only way out is through” could be the mantra of the soul.

Life offers up the raw mate­ri­als the soul uses to craft our very being. Thus our expe­ri­ences of loss, dis­ap­point­ment, betrayal — all anath­ema to the ego — con­sti­tute the very stock from which our human quin­tes­sence is lov­ingly cooked and care­fully ren­dered. We gain depth, char­ac­ter and wis­dom through this rendering.

The way of the ego vs. The way of the soul

The ego seeks cure. The soul seeks care. The ego seeks under­stand­ing. The soul seeks mys­tery and imag­i­na­tion. The soul invites us to bring our imag­i­na­tions into the mys­ter­ies of life, where the out­comes are unpre­dictable and sur­prise is on the menu. Pain arises when we resist this process. Life is painful when we fol­low the dic­tates of the ego, which requires a cer­tainty and guar­an­tee of the out­come before we choose. The soul requires that we expose our­selves to the rich depths of life’s mys­ter­ies again and again.

“Never again. Been there, done that” is the ego’s response to emo­tional pain. The soul, on the other hand, is your inner “poet in res­i­dence,” hun­gry for the next line that will make its poetry part of a mean­ing­ful life. To live from the soul is to choose its path.

Think of your pain then, as fla­vors and spices to add to the stew of your life. The Chi­nese got it right with the cre­ation of sweet and sour soup. All sweet and no sour would be a pretty bor­ing con­coc­tion, as soups go. So would all sour and no sweet. It’s the blend of the two “oppos­ing” fla­vors that cre­ate the mag­i­cal elixir we all know and love. So it is that the soul is busily work­ing to cre­ate a mas­ter­ful stew called your life, fla­vored with enough loss and pain, joy and laugh­ter to make it delicious!

What is required of us is that we learn to love and care for our soul, not as a sep­a­rate entity or “thing,” but as the very essence of who we are.

At the end of the day, when your life is over, what do you want to be able look back and say about it? That you stayed close to the shore and made it through your life intact? Or that you nav­i­gated the rapids, allowed your heart to be ripped open, shred­ded into tiny pieces and given away?

Mary Oliver, from her poem “When Death Comes”

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride mar­ried to amaze­ment.

I was the bride­groom, tak­ing the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to won­der

if I have made of my life some­thing par­tic­u­lar, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sigh­ing and fright­ened,

or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up sim­ply hav­ing vis­ited this world.

And so my friend, we can choose the care­ful path, the one of “vis­i­ta­tion,” or we can take the world into our arms and embrace the mystery.

Both paths have pain involved. The pain of the “care­fully lived life” is the pain never being fully expressed or know­ing our own depth. The pain of the soul­ful life is the pain of let­ting go, the pain of trust­ing in some­thing we can­not see, the pain of break­ing through fear, the pain of being seen and of lov­ing completely.

Your soul knows the path it must travel. Your job is to align and fol­low. You will suf­fer if you don’t. You will suf­fer if you do. For as the Bud­dha taught, “life is suffering.”

Rather than ask “How can I stop this pain?” ask your­self: “Do I choose to suf­fer in ser­vice to my ego (false self) or in ser­vice to my soul (essence)?” How you view life and your role in it will deter­mine which path you choose.

 

 

Tagged as: dr. judith rich, Human Interest, Mary Oliver, Metaphysics, Pain, Philosophy, poet, Ram Das, Rx For The Soul, Soul, Suffering, Thomas Moore, Wallace Stevens