Soul Searching
Once a friend was popping the cork on a champagne bottle and laughingly called it a “critical life skill.”
Other critical life skills might include building a fire, changing a tire, and making an omelet. How about making a budget? Making a friend? Making an apology? The list could go on and on. Yet there’s one critical life skill that floats high above the rest, something that affects everything else in life and in fact is infinite. It is our ability to connect with that place inside where love resides: our sacred center, our spark of the divine, our essence. Some people are really, really gifted at this. We call them saints. For everyone else, it’s about developing soul awareness and practicing, practicing, practicing.
A yearning to learn.
If you feel restless, lost, or empty, connecting to your soul is the way forward. If you feel excited and inspired but aren’t quite sure about the next steps, your soul knows the way. If you want to bask in the miracle of being alive or simply rest in the palm of Love’s hand, returning to your soul center is positively the way to do that. This is where we reclaim lost and forgotten parts of ourselves and claim new possibilities. When we circle back to our soul, life is meaning-filled and purpose-full. The wonderful thing is, you can do it right here, right now. What in the world keeps us from this sacred work?
A is for Awe.
For one thing, the idea of soul is very abstract. It is beyond words. How do you “return” to something you can’t grasp or picture? Here’s a simple way in: think of an early moment in time when all felt right with your world. Maybe you were collecting pecans under your grandmother’s tree, riding bikes with your best friend or making huge tissue paper flowers for the school carnival. Perhaps you’re licking an ice cream cone or the dog is licking your face. In this single moment, everything felt alive, joyful, perfect. Wherever this memory takes you, just settle in with that feeling and with that little person. She is your soul.
Another thing that keeps us from our soul is the world itself. The here and now has a habit of edging out the eternal if we’re not intentional. I urge you to spend time in and with your soul. Nurture it, love it. Let it love you!
It’s about grace, not grades.
The soul is forever offering us things to ponder. I recently came across my “First Grade Readiness Evaluation” from 1967. My kindergarten teacher described a girl who “plays happily with others . . . expresses her ideas clearly but in a soft voice . . . is attentive at storytime . . enjoys music and rhythms . . . accepts any change in the daily schedule without frustration. And, as someone who cares deeply about the soul, this precious nugget: “she is reverent and participates in Chapel.”
There’s nothing more important to learn, or a more critical life skill to acquire, than how to connect with your soul. How lucky I was to have Mrs. Helen C. Smith observe, record, and bless me those many decades ago. And help me find the way back to my soul all these years later. I’m going to take excellent care of her.
- Julie
Julie Marr is a WF&S Partner see her bio here.