Soul Work

What does it mean to do our soul work?

Ah, there’s a question that takes some pondering; a juicy question for inquiry.

You could say soul work is a lifelong process of inquiry because there’s always more to discover as we ask questions about life’s deeper meaning and purpose, and listen for and observe the answers as they show up in our daily experience. And this process of discovery can become an adventure when we’re bold enough to follow the call. And the soul does call to us and arrange things most cleverly.

When I contemplate soul I see a series of doorways, one leading on to another, so there’s a sense of opening into new  spaces. And when you step through the doorway into the new space, you see differently, you know something you didn’t know before and there’s no going back. It’s a bit like losing your virginity, whether you first taste of the apple is ecstatic, mediocre or traumatic, it’s happened and your initiated and you’ll never be the same again.

I remember feeling like that when I set off for a ten day Gestalt residential in Italy, or a week long meditation retreat at the ashram in Denmark, or an 8 day dialogue circle at Lake Taupo, in New Zealand; I’d lock my front door knowing that when I returned home I wouldn’t be the same person, I would have shed an old layer of identity, died a little death and be newborn. There was risk in this stepping into the unknown but I had to do it. Certainly at the beginning this stepping through the doorway could be disconcerting, confusing, even deeply troubling. You thought you knew how the world worked and what the rules were and how to navigate through life, now suddenly there’s a new dimension, and at the beginning this new dimension is the inner world. There isn’t just a world “out there”, there’s also a whole world “in here”.

At least that’s how it was for me, around the time of the Saturn Return, aged 27 and 28, I started to wake up and the huge tension that had been building inside me flooded out in images and poetry that spoke to me about depths of being my conscious mind didn’t yet know and was amazed by.I’d been feeling desperately confined and now I was released into a bigger space.

Thus began the Soul Journey; the heroes quest to reconnect with all our powers. Fourteen years after this first awakening, my soul journey became a physical journey taking me to the elemental North West Highlands of Scotland, then to New Zealand and now here I am in Virginia, USA. Who would have thought it?

There’s a restlessness in the soul journey, a sense of something missing, lost fragments that need to be recollected and reconnected and pieced back together into the wholeness we know we are, were, can be. We are driven by this specter of more, yet it is not an appetite that can be quenched with material goods. For me, there were also long years of feeling separated from others, in a cocoon which I couldn’t breach, as I dreamed of being the butterfly.

The soul is a mistress of paradox because she fills us with longing and yearning and calls us out to the quest and yet, in the end we find, everything is inside, right here and now. I say “she” because to me the soul is Yin, the Feminine: the receptive, the container, the deep, the dark, the mysterious, the connection with the Earth Mother, Gaia and with the evolutionary history of suffering humanity. But maybe I experience soul like this because I am a woman, maybe for a man it is different?

Right at this point I stopped to go and talk to Woods and get his take on soul and I was wondering what my special friend and mentor in England, Bryce Taylor, would have to say about it because I knew he was a man who would deeply understand what I am writing about. When I returned to my computer I had received  a message to say that Bryce had unexpectedly collapsed last night and died. He was my age and just at the beginning of a whole new phase of his work, developing learning communities for evolutionary spirituality in England. He was a Soul Weaver and an innovator in the fields of peer learning and inquiry. A space has opened up where a very special being lived and loved and created and learned and made a difference in the lives of many people . It feels important to bring him onto the page here and honor him.

I have much more to say about the soul and soul work, yet today the unexpected has entered in and I want to be with it.

Namaste

Rose

Photo by Femininelure, Flikr