The Souls Path
I feel my soul stir, as I breathe in the early Autumn morning air.
There’s a deep gratitude in sensing its come back home.
Or perhaps, what blocked my connection, has left.
There’s still a quietness to it.
I revel in feeling it flicker in response to the awe, evoked by the land during this season.
Autumn, associated with melancholy and acceptance.
There’s something about this season’s attunement to my own inner state.
It feels similar to the aftermath of an angry storm.
When the winds have passed and the rains have slowed.
My soul became a stranger during that storm.
Like a young adult who’d moved out tumultuously.
And I was the empty space they used to inhabit with their words, dancing, joys and sorrows.
A forced estrangement from what filled me from the inside out.
But it was more than the cement that fills a frame.
It’s what held the mystery.
A depth of connection and trust in the greater journey of this life.
Soul is what made the simple and the mundane reverent.
Without it, there was an apathy to life itself.
It had left a hollowness.
Like a hunger I tried to fill with various activities, substances and things.
It’s what many of us do when our system is in survival.
You see I’ve learned that the overwhelm of multiple losses will surface what’s unhealed.
That it can be easier to fall back into the old neural pathways that helped you survive when you were young.
There’s a familiarity.
And yet. it’s not that your previous healing was unavailing.
We can try to feed soul hunger with many socially accepted behaviours and substances.
But I can feel the difference between a behaviour that just is, versus an overwrought grasping to feed something that only soul can nourish.
Dr. Gabor Mate talks about addiction as an attempt to feed our hungry ghosts.
He points out; “Many of us resemble the drug addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void at the centre, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirits with those sources of meaning and value that are not contingent or fleeting. Our consumerist, acquisition, action, and image mad culture only serves to deepen the hole, leaving us emptier than before. The constant, intrusive mind-whirl that characterizes the way so many of us experience our silent moments is, itself, a form of addiction- and it serves the same purpose. One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove the emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for it's incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily.”
So then, when soul has left, what are we to do?
How do we retrieve it?
I imagine there are many ways and for me, it always comes back to being with what is,
Instead of fighting it.
Feeling the depths of it all.
Yet, soul has left because of the inability to do just that.
The shock has fragmented soul.
From the nervous system lens, we need support in regulation, resourcing and growing our capacity.
From a more Jungian psychology lens, we trust the descent of the dark nights of the soul.
We know the descent is a required part of the souls evolution.
That there’s wisdom to being lost in the darkness.
And like Dr. Bayo Akomolafe says,” When we are stuck, we must learn to get lost.”
I’ve found that when I stop fighting the uncertainty, and let myself become suspended in the unknown,
Like a buoy in the ocean,
There can be a kind of moving stillness found here.
Stillness not unlike our resting bodies.
The heart still beats, the lungs still expand and contract.
Molecules in the cells are still active.
Yet at rest, there’s a form of stillness.
One in which we can feel our inner rhythm like the waves of the ocean.
Where we can feel held in this ocean of the unknown and still unravel what we thought to be true.
And open to the mystery of what we’re yet to discover.
Letting the descent root us into soulfulness.