“Beauty is the illumination of your soul.”
– John O’Donohue

Soul

What is a soul? Do I have a soul? What is MY soul? These are some common questions asked of me and ones I asked of myself along my own journey. The answers are my own based on my own understanding and experiences. These answers may not be yours or anyone else’s because the journey is your own and their own to take.

If you asked me these questions 10 years ago, I would have looked at you with a puzzled face and probably answered, “I don’t know”. If you ask me these questions now, I would answer:

A soul is the wisest, kindest part of you. It is the essence of what we are born with untainted by external influences. I believe that everyone has a soul because we are all a soul droplet of a universal sea of spiritual energy, much like a snowflake from a universal source of water. My own soul is what makes me, ME. It is related to my identity of who I am, and not what I do. My soul is my energy fingerprint in this universal energy. My soul always has my back, and champions and believes in anything that I am. My soul speaks to me in dreams, visions, creativity, intuition, this inner knowing, this gut feeling, and comes from the heart. It does not speak to me through thoughts or mindset. The soul is always present but is invisible to the untrained eye. The soul sees from a place of beauty, hears from a place of positivity, resilience, and gratitude, and feels from a place of love. The soul is our spiritual being having a human experience in physical form. The soul doesn’t exist in physical form but in energy form. The soul grows in awareness and goes through growth, just like our physical form ages with time. Our soul is never eliminated nor destroyed even when our physical human form dies, instead our soul continues to evolve with experience. The soul can be buried by its enemy, the ego or otherwise known as our gremlin or saboteur. But the soul is never eliminated, even if it is the needle in a haystack of gremlins.

Sharing with you my own experience:

How did I come from “I don’t know” to this answer today? First, I was searching, and always curious. Curiosity invites newness in. While skeptic at first, I was not a cynic and that kept me open yet unaware.

I also thought about energy from a scientific view as I was educationally trained in the sciences. In science class, we learned about the mitochondria which is the powerhouse of the cell. We also learned about the Kreb’s cycle and the pathway in which ATP (adenosine tri-phosphate is formed) – a unit of energy. I recall reflecting about cellular energy use and formation and Einstein’s understanding that energy is neither created nor destroyed. Well, once our physical body dies, and ie the cells die, what happens to the energy? Could it be the energy is released as our soul? Is that possible? In my mind, it was possible, and it became one of my first portal into the possibility.

I recall thinking about TV shows and books where it entertained my curiosity about our soul or energy. I thought of Star Trek and about being “transported”, or The Celestine Prophecy where the concepts of seeing the energy field in colours around the physical body form captured my interest. Suddenly, terms that used to mean nothing to me, brought on meaning. “The Force” from Star Wars made me hear the spiritual lessons in a science fiction movie. Even the stories that my grandfather told me about ‘seeing’ my grandmother who had passed away weeks earlier had come to ‘visit’ him sparked my curiosity that afterlife is possible. There is just too much in this world that I don’t know, but I believe is possible.

A catalyst that shook me to my core, happened about 5 years ago (2013) during a meditative exercise that was performed on me by a 28 year old PhD student who has no idea to this day, the profound influence she provided for me in her innocence. It took part in my life coaching exercises. We had to speak about our dreams and how life of fulfillment would look like. As I spoke describing my thoughts in answer to the question, she stopped me and asked me to close my eyes. I closed my eyes and I continued to follow her voice. She told me she sensed fear, and she asked me to imagine bundling up the fear as she extracted it out of my body and placed it into an imaginary cage beside her. I could feel the pull of fear coming out of me and I imagined the word “FEAR” with arms flailing and swinging get placed inside a cage as she locked the word up inside. I heard her through my imagination of the sound of locking a cage jail, and the sound of the key thrown onto the floor. What happened next has profoundly affected me to this day and drives me to do what I am doing now. Behind my closed eyelids was initially darkness, but slowly I saw a lightening of the darkness about the size of a pinhole in the centre of my vision. The lightness began to grow in intensity and diameter size in my visual cortex. At first I thought I was imagining it, but it began to become so real that it made me watch what was unfolding in awe. I watched behind my closed eyelids, as this light seemingly appeared to rise towards me, as if I was staring down a tube, and a light was traveling up the tube towards me. The light became brighter and brighter and so close to my face that I suddenly had a sensation that I was going to ‘drown’ in my own light. I did drown in light like putting a face under water. This light continued in my imagination to spout out the top of my head and lit a torch that I appeared to suddenly hold. Like the Statue of Liberty, the torch lit a person beside me and I could see the translucency of the light rise from the feet to the head within the human shell of the person next to me, and the light that ejected out from that’s person’s top, lit the person next to him/her. And just like an audience of cell phone lights that light up at a concert arena, the world’s stage was lit up of translucent human beings all over. The sight of this incredible display of soft yet powerful light, left me with this sudden knowing that this is what “God’s love or unconditional love looks and feels like”!! It was an image of what I always knew what was possible for the world if we extracted out our fears and left with a divine light of love. I believe it was a divine message – a powerful imagery that left me crumpled in tears of every emotion because it was such a humbling experience. It was such a metaphoric visual of a lesson that is at the crux of humanity – Love grows in the diminishment of Fear.

I believe that my soul is represented by the light that engulfed me internally and my inner gremlins is represented by the word FEAR with the flailing arms that was extracted out externally.

Love is the ultimate medicine. It trumps fear. The soul is the energy of love. Love accepts us as we are without condition and without need for perfection. The soul has a tender energy of cradling the baby within us all – the baby of innocence and beauty. Our soul is our unique expression of a divine and universal spiritual energy that is present everywhere.

Believing that we all have a soul is a core belief that we are born from a universal source of love. While we may make poor choices in life that leads us towards challenges, difficulties, harm, and even evil, there is still at the core of every human existence, a light where our soul resides in even the smallest amount of light. Seeing humanity from this belief holds a space for compassion for all people no matter where they are along their soul journey. It is not for me to ‘fix’ a ‘broken’ soul, because it is never broken, it is just buried, and it is not for me to change or force another against their will because it will be met with resistance. Every human soul being has the choice to grow in their internal soul awareness no matter what their external circumstances may be. Some will use external life challenges to be their greatest teacher, while others will use it to be their greatest excuse.

The soul journey is represented in many different aspects of our pop culture. It is found in story (ie. the yellow brick road within the popular children’s classic tale of The Wizard of Oz). In this tale, Dorothy is looking for an external help from the Wizard to find her way home. Along the way, the characters she meets along her journey include the Scarecrow (whose character represents Wisdom), the Tin Man (who represents A Gentle Soul with a Heart), and the Lion (who represents Courage). Upon meeting the Wizard of Oz at the end of their journey, it is the words, that ‘the answers are all within you – you just have to trust and believe’ – that is the language of our soul if our soul could speak in words. It is found in movies in epic movies such as Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings which speaks of a Hero’s journey which must face more villainous characters representing our inner demons before arriving ‘home’. The concepts of “The Force” or “The Dark Side” can be thought of as metaphors for what is found within each of us as we become more aware of our inner gremlins that dims down our birthright of light. When we can see another and look beyond their shadow and into their light, we see through a lens of possibility and positivity and trust that there is beauty amongst the beast.

Turning it over to you:

What does the word SOUL mean for you right now?

How do you connect with your soul?

What is that 1 step you can take towards meeting your soul?

What if the dark side of yourself stayed more in the shadow of your light, what infinite possibility happens there?

Tips and tools to hopefully help you:

1. If you give your soul a name that is different from your name given to you, what name would you give?
2. Stay open and curious…even if it feels skeptic. Cynicism will close the portal to meeting your soul, but anything else will allow whatever is meant to come to you, come to you in time.
3. Whenever you are hard on yourself, know that it is not your soul speaking because it is not from a place of wisdom or love, it is your ego gremlin speaking.