Bringing our soul into our everyday lives, relationships and workplaces fills a deep need. Living soulfully is both a longing as well as a place that we inhabit. It is a journey and destination. Soul is revealed in the choices we make about the qualities and values we want to express in our lives. In a mobile society, moving from place to place, from one job to the next, we often live through our thoughts, and make our choices based on what "makes sense," rather than on what feels right, intuitively. Paying attention to our soul needs and making room for them in our lives requires being thoughtful about ways we can invite in to our everyday lives.
Soul finds home in the particular, in home, friends and our attachments. It inhabits our interior. Its medium of expression emerges as intuition, feeling, and ritual. Feeling connected to people and community around us is an expression of soul longing. Establishing a routine, making Saturday night a ritual gathering for a family barbecue, or popcorn and DVD night, and rotating who gets to choose what to watch, is an expression of soulfulness in community. As is repeating the same holiday rituals and observances with the same foods, activities, music and other activities year in and year out. Community rituals feed the soul.
The soul lives in what we love and gives us pleasure, and in what changes and grows in cycles. It also lives in the dark places, where we feel empty, lonely, lost, disoriented, even depressed. Soul has no problem hanging out in the dark for a while. Cocooning describes how the soul likes to live: inside, private, connected to self and relationship, giving distance, perspective and meaning to what is "outside."
Culturally there's been a resurgence of inquiry into matters of the spirit for some time, but the spiritual search for connectedness is different. The home of spirit is the sky. It lends a sense of divine interconnectedness and purpose and an unfolding of a plan of cosmic proportions. Soul is more earthbound. It is particular, individual, and sometimes hidden, revealing itself in small and often circuitous ways.
It's easier to relate to living soulfully, because the soul operates in a dimension that is closer to everyday experience. Spirit always seems to be a striving for something higher: to be less judgmental, more patient, or less arbitrary. Soul feels what it feels, and makes no apologies for it. It asks only that we be authentic, that we tune into our intuitive and dream life. It is closer to how we experience our own lives -- in its cycles of glory and pleasure, alternating with periods of uncertainty, darkness or confusion, and with long fallow, even boring periods in between.
Of particular significance to soul is the trend towards accepting the value of simplicity, of being idle, and finding ways to bring balance into daily life, and even of accepting depression as perhaps a symptom of a longing that needs to be listened to and heard. The truth about everything we see around us is that there is light and dark, pleasure and pain, beginnings and endings. To deny any piece of those experiences is to fiddle dangerously with the way nature has designed us to move from one phase of our lives to another. Soul is the place she has provided for us to wander, experience and integrate the "down" times, and to discover what wants to be born next.
How can you bring soulfulness to your life? Start by paying attention to the small things, the details, of each moment. Soul is in the details. Washing dishes, housework, or driving your car can become soulful activities when you appreciate them for what they are, an opportunity to let your mind wander and meander down memory lane, observing what it sees. The way the light hits the water, the shine on the wood as you polish it, the new building on the block that you never noticed before.
Inviting soul into your life is less about adding new activities to your day than it is about entering into relationship with what is already around you. Learn to live in the present moment, not in your thoughts, or the list of things you will do, but in your body, exactly, deeply, and firmly experiencing yourself as you are right now. Let things be exactly as they are, and explore them.
Bring soul to your relationships. Listen and appreciate people for who they are, and for who you are with them. You don't have to do anything. Just listen, observe, respond, be who you are.
Soul isn't present in your work life if you feel don't feel connected to your colleagues, your daily flow of tasks, or the product you produce.
Soul loves fantasy: do you fantasize about the possibilities in your work, where it might take you next, how you can improve your product? Apply your thinking to how you might bring these forth, right where you are. A harmonious marriage of soul and spirit.
A friend recently opened a query letter for consideration for a new job with the words, ..."your advertised position for Deputy Director put a skip in my step and fire in my blood..." Now there's work that puts a skip in the step of her soul!
Kathleen Daniel, MS, L.Ac. writes about change and transition from the inside out, combining insights and experience from a life lived internationally, with a lifelong yoga practice and work as an acupuncturist, organizational consultant, educator, and life and personal leadership coach. She is an alumni of Johns Hopkins Women's Leadership program, and the creator of the Wellness for Women and Pausing at Midlife retreats. Website: http://www.aheadofthecurveatmidlife.com
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By Kathleen Daniel
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