How does the Soul reveal itself through you?
I rise in the dark. It is so early in the morning it is still nighttime. The dark of the moon and the mist reveal no brightness. Yet my Soul stirs me to take up the pen. Who is doing the talking here? I wonder. I want to write a poem but something else is being requested. I submit and write the first sentence…
“Every single one of us comes into this life as we are.”
From there the pen flows without stopping, as energy moves into form, organized in black words on a white page. I co-create with the life force flowing through me. I want poetry because of the liminality it brings, but instead I get the hard questions, the provocation that challenges beliefs, and the call to more awakeness than we had before.
Here are this morning’s pages, perhaps they may be of service to you in your own discovery process, and always in service to the Great Work being lived out in each of us, whether we are conscious of it or not.
~
Every single one of us comes into this life as we are.
This is what we call our Soul, our innate ‘us-ness’ seems to ride in with our incarnation. We come in with our own flavor and sass and sometimes a bad attitude and sometimes an innate call to do the work of saving ourselves and others.
All of us are carrying innate qualities, like imagination and identity –and the soul in which our being has being-ness. A conversation with our Soul is something we all need to have… But how do you do that?
How does each one of us navigate arriving here and not really coming in with a map of where to go and how to get there? Well. That is THE Question of Questions. How do we navigate this thing called life? How does it work and who lives in here?
How I experience my relationship with my Soul is how I live my life – yet it is through a veil – sometimes clear and at other times hidden. I always say that being awake means: As awake as our soul is willing to be at any given time. To me it seems as if soul moderates what we can handle, and safely integrate. Kindness seems to be the mode of the soul towards us, and…creativity.
Self-expression is one of the ways we can get to know our soul-stuff. When we create, who we are gets revealed in the visible world and we can take a look. Soul cannot be understood in abstraction and the mental constructs only – our body is the prism through which the currency of soul is reflects true colors.
The idea that the Soul is carrying information specific to it, seems possible. But can we say for sure? Do we need to assert surety? Can mystery be included when we speak of the Soul? For me, mystery must be included whenever we are speaking of soul, and the work of the soul.
When we are born, we inherit a cultural familial framework and dna package that we did not choose. Or did we? What is your belief about it? Whatever it really is, my belief is that no one here really knows.
Do you think we have access to knowing if we have pre-destined choice?
I always feel unease when someone asserts that they know we agreed to whatever it is our soul is experiencing. Maybe for some of us, but for all of us? Is it true universally that we chose our challenges this life? This belief feels rigged and life doesn’t feel rigged to me. There seems to be much more organic influence happening – less control – not more.
I know I want to engage with coherence with what is possible for me. How can I learn the power of my own soul without needing to assert I know what is going on here?
Some assert there are pre-destined agreements about specific family, as in we chose our parents and our incarnation. That said many of us do not have an experience of having agreed to this particular circumstance we find ourselves in. Being told that we do, can sometimes make us feel like even more of a victim of fate – you mean – I somehow agreed to this harm? Wait. What?
In my case, I really do feel a sense of rightness with my three parents – but how can I really say? I can play in the mytho-poetic framework about it, but not assert a truth. Truly I am the child of three, and each one of them has informed who I have become in this life. Do I believe I have had other lives, do you?
I have no idea, but at the same time I feel I am carrying specific teachings that came in with me and my life is about sharing them. The teachings feel way bigger than me and connected with Soul and I didn’t invent them. They are coming through me because I am available to them….but they are not mine. I am theirs. I belong to the teachings of my Great Work, the teachings do not belong to me.
Where does free will factor into this? If I agreed to this, how can I alter my path and have influence? If I grow spiritually will less harm come to me, can I transcend this fate? We look to channels, to astrology, to eras and ages and stories for confirmation for our beliefs. And mostly we can find someone who agrees with whatever story we have brought into and bought into this time. Who can say? What do you say?
What if we don’t know? Can’t know? What if there is more choice and chance and chaos? Can there still be intelligent design and divine order if everything isn’t all mapped out? Is there really a soul map and we just don’t have access to it yet because we agreed to forget? Then some of us, start to remember and then things happen that are good – and we say – OH I remembered who I am. Then something bad happens, and it is like a punishment. We say things like “I must have had to learn that lesson” Maybe. Maybe not.
What if it doesn’t work the way we think it does? Could you surrender your attachment to your beliefs to open to something fresh? Could there be a grace and a mercy and also chaos and chance?
My belief is that we don’t know. I work with a lot of people who are recovering from thinking they do know.
If we surrender knowing what might become possible?
To think for ourselves, to evolve and not just revolve over and over – work must be done on beliefs about incarnation and what the soul is carrying. Being in inquiry of this depth can be destabilizing for a time, but I feel it is worth the ride to ask the questions. To see what comes up. To see where we are attached and where beliefs in the old ways threaded with taboo are still influencing us.
Where is taboo acting in your life? Where are you afraid to look. Look there. I am not saying poke at it with a sharp stick. Well maybe a paintbrush is a sharp stick, but it is not used to harm but to reveal. The paintbrush is the tool for soul archeologists.
~
Personally I am in such a deep and rich and wide place of inquiry about choice and will. About what is mine to do and not do. About the future of myself and our work here. To do Great Work, deep work is necessary. Deep work is done through looking at fixed beliefs and inviting the Muse to tea.
I encourage us not to think of this body as just a vessel or a place our soul is passing through. Perhaps you can think of this body as the soul experiencing itself through this form. What an opportunity and pleasure is here that I haven’t been allowing myself to experience based on how I treat this body. Yes, body is finite and yes, we think of soul as infinite. How AMAZING that we get to be in an experience of both that which is never-ending while at the same time living in this sacred bone-house of being.
I don’t feel what I am carrying has been given to me by choice, but by grace. The question is how will I share what I am carrying. When I share what I am carrying do I change my destiny potentials? How accountable am I willing to be to what is possible for my Soul while I am here? What will make me want to ‘be here now’ in a new way?
Great Work requests you invite your Muse to tea. Today’s topic? The soul stuff that lives in this stardust. Who is it that is really living in here and what does you long to express in this living myth called life?
For me, to do the work of getting to know the true nature of my soul, I must ask answerable questions without striving for answers. Asking the question invites a supple field of exploration. I might even say, sharing this inquiry with you was prompted by my soul. But I can’t say for sure. I was awoken in the middle of the night and it was clear, get up and light the fire when all is quiet and see what arises…listen…shhhh… the soul has something to share with you…..
Does the outer space
into which we dissolve
taste of us at all?
Do the angels absorb
only what's theirs
what streamed away from them
or do they sometimes get
as if by mistake
a little of our being too?
Rilke
Sent with. much love, to all of you, an in particular the students of Intentional Creativity® who I continue to ask to go deeper into belief, into taboo, into possibility, into inquiry and with the hope that in so doing, the Great Work is ever more revealed.
Each of us is our own great work being revealed.
Shiloh Sophia
The images above are a blessing of the evolution of a painting created over the weekend. We had an incredible teacher here at MUSEA offering her gifts, Shakti Durga. The way I particiapted was to paint the energy of the teachings as I perceived them through my framework and to work with the energy of the group. We were all in inquiry about the song of the soul and how it expresses itself. Sometimes I think of Soul works in the way way I think of painting - one layer at a time. Each layer reveals the next layer….
Soul-Stuff and the Revealing of Great Work