The Golden Thread of Soul
Image: Souling by Anahata Giri
The Way It Is
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
William Stafford
What is the Soul?
I love the poetic image of the soul as a golden thread that we hold close and follow, that guides us well, that is unchangeable and robust, yet is hard for others to see. The language of soul is based on image, symbol, metaphor, myth. What follows here is a mythopoetic exploration of soul, to inspire our experience of souling and of being ensouled. Fundamentally, the soul is porous to both self and the world. As we discover and deepen our relationship with our own soul, we are returned to our place of belonging and participation in the world and the web of life. Soul is never ours alone. Soul is a porous, permeable relationship with all of life.
Soul as Mystery
May we step through the portal of mystery, shed the outer garments of the known or habituated small-self, to experience how the membrane of our naked soul-self is permeable to wonder and curiosity, to revelation, to being ensouled. In this excerpt of her poem Bone, Mary Oliver describes her experience of both not-knowing and of being guided by the felt beauty and grace of soul:
1.
Understand, I am always trying to figure out
what the soul is,
and where hidden,
and what shape
and so, last week,
when I found on the beach
the ear bone
of a pilot whale that may have died
hundreds of years ago, I thought
maybe I was close
to discovering something
…
..what the soul is, also
I believe I will never quite know.
Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving,
which is the way I walked on,
softly,
through the pale-pink morning light.
Mary Oliver
We go about our lives, trusting, touching, seeing, listening, feeling our way, loving. These are verbs, words of action, that bring us into the way of soul as a journey and process, more than a destination or thing. Perhaps we need a made-up word for this attuning process: souling.
Souling
“Work with soul is process - alchemy, pilgrimage and adventure.”
Thomas Moore
Just as we know love by loving and being loved, we know the soul by souling and being ensouled. Souling is an experiential way of attuning to a self that is essential, that is underneath the viewpoint of the small self. Souling is an ongoing, embodied, heart-based, revelatory process of conversation and communion. Souling happens through our body and heart, through our lived experience, through deep emotions and feeling, underneath and through our biography and wound, through our joy and longing. Souling is a conscious, living, intelligent presencing that happens through (not beyond or seperate from) our immediate and emergent life’s edge.
Souling arises from the current edge of life’s unfolding. If grief calls, follow that. If dormant creativity whispers, follow that. Souling is found in the here and now, in the immediate felt experience. We turn to what arises and draw on the deep inner resources of the body, heart, soul, spirit and nature connection, to connect with that emerging edge.
Souling can happen in small, subtle daily experiences, as we slowly deepen and maintain our souling connection. I call these soul whispers or soul glimmers. It can also happen in powerful soul encounters and initiatory experiences. A soul encounter is a revelatory experience of a soul image, symbol or story, something sacred, at the very core of one’s life. The compelling truth of this revealed image can initiate us into our deepest life, the life we have not lived, until now.
Souling is not a head-driven, analytical process. Embodied, heart-felt insight is very different from mentally derived ideas. We put aside the cultural overemphasis on mental investigation and step into the deep feeling undercurrent of soul.
We also put aside the small self’s habit of pointing toward external experience, whether joyful or wounding, as the cause of one’s own response. This linear explanation for our inner world is deeply pervasive in modern culture and contributes to a perpetual loop of blame, fear, disempowerment, avoidance, stuckness and a diminishing of our inner knowing. It is a one-way process, a dead end. Souling is a much larger conversation, an interdependent co-creative dialogue between self, soul, spirit, world and nature.
To step into the intuitive slipstream of soul more fully, we may need to work with the small-self’s habitual patterns, often based on unhelpful messages we have absorbed from family or culture. Each of us will have our own conditioned script and ego-habits: the self-effacing behaviour of the person who has learned to hide; the unfinished, abandoned projects of someone who was abandoned as a child; the aggression of someone afraid to show vulnerability; the critic of the world who was betrayed as a child.
These survival strategies are played out in small daily events that seem to confirm this script - until the soul steps in, with tender curiosity. Between the small self and the everyday world, is a third realm, a third way of being, the underlying presence of the flow of soul who calls us into deeper meaning.
Souling as Meaning
Souling gives us access to experiential, embodied meaning - inside-out meaning. Through souling, we digest events or happenings until they are meaningful experiences. This meaning is both from deep within us, but also in communion with the world around us. This requires an internal shift, a conscious choice and willingness to step into the receptive, perceptive flow of soul. With practice, we can step into the perspective of soul, and ask: what would soul say or do? What is the world soul showing us? When we step into this souling process, we perceive the unique symbolism that is there for us in every event or experience.
Alone in the wilderness for the first time, with night encroaching, it doesn’t take much to trigger my fear and the broken tent pole does it. Even though I manage to set up the tent, the fears come. At first I resist what is here and now. I want to feel or hear the voice of soul, not Fear. Ok, this is it, trust what arises, welcome the fear in. I sit with Fear for hours and it is a kind of torment, but it feels strengthening to open to it.
The next morning I feel light, like a layer has been released and I am returned to the soul-stream. Walking, I sense that my claustrophobic tent of fear last night was like a cocoon and that Fear is the Cocoon that transforms me. At the moment I think that, I see a fat, very hairy, energetic, striped caterpillar crawling quickly across the path in front of me. I give thanks to the reassurance of this lively caterpillar.
What a dance there is between the psyche and the soul, between psychology and soulology, between soul-self and world-soul, the two deeply entwined. The challenging events of life, physical or psychological ailments, crumbling relationships or loneliness, lack of meaning or purposelessness can bring us into deep feeling and insight. During life’s strong or catalytic experiences, the habituated small-self, if we allow it, can soften and surrender to the inner guidance of the soul. On the edges of our own becoming, the soul guides us.
In deep souling work, there is a sort of collapse or eclipse of the small self or ego-self’s monolithic hold on reality. This can feel profoundly disruptive and scary as we open to other ways of being and seeing. It can also feel deeply empowering as we open to a deeper well of knowing, as we follow the thread of souling. The raw material of the felt sensing of soul includes all aspects of the self such as psychological, somatic, mental, emotional and imaginal aspects. In the flowing stream of soulful experiencing, we do not need to rely on maps or externally defined paths. We make our own path by walking it.
Pathmaker, there is no path,
You make the path by walking.
By walking you make the path.
Antonio Machado
The Soul and Spirit
My soul is the bridge between spirit and body and, as such, is a uniter of opposites. Without soul at centre, I would either transcend into spirit or become mired in matter.
Marion Woodman
Many of the people I guide, perhaps who follow a religious or spiritual path, see soul as part of spirit, where soul mediates between the human individual and the greater spiritual whole. This is eluded to in the following poem excerpt, where in the infinite night sky of spirit, of sacred oneness and wholeness, the soul is a star with your name on it:
93 percent stardust,
with souls made of flames,
we are all just stars
that have people names.
Nikita Gill
Perhaps soul is a bridge between cosmic wholeness and animated, breathing life here on earth. Spirit can be seen as the infinite, luminous, sacred animating force within the cosmic web and animating the web of life. Spirit is here, incarnate, through all of life’s forms. The soul is an expression of spirit, yet that spirit inhabits and animates human form, embedded in place, entangled in all life forms, here on earth. What could be more enspirited than the living wonder of all of earth’s plants and creatures?
“ Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
Spiritual and soulful experiences often overlap. Spiritual experiences gives us a foundation of identity that is vast, luminous, whole, unified with presence itself. Our spirit-soul is a luminous self, that brings gifts such as universal love, wisdom and oneness. Our soul-self unites this spiritual oneness with earth-based loving entanglement, showing place, belonging, love, purpose, all understood in intimate relationship with the web of life. Soul gives us a foundation of identity that is embedded in our unique place, intimately woven into our life. Soul is perhaps an intermediary between spirit and self, a powerful and unique messenger, bringing messages from both spiritual oneness and from the intimate relationships of the web of life.
Soul likes intimacy; spirit is uplifting. Soul gets hairy, spirit is bald. Spirit sees, even in the dark. Soul feels its way, step by step, or needs a dog. Spirit shoots arrows; Soul takes them in the chest..Spirit likes wholes; soul likes eaches.”
James Hillman
The Language of Soul is Image
“What is to come will be created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself. Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfil the way that is in you.”
Carl Jung
Image: Heart, River, Woman, Soul.
Carl Jung believed that while the soul was unknowable, we could receive the expression of soul and of the psyche through images. Jung’s active imagination process involves actively engaging with images that arise from deep within the psyche. The ego does not change the images, but treats these images as real unto themselves. Here images includes symbols, archetypes, poetry, sensations, movements and metaphors, that arise in our dreams, art, meditations, responses to nature and in everyday circumstances. We do this through evoking reverie or meditation, then letting the images speak through us in a stream of consciousness, that may be written, spoken, drawn, danced, enacted or sung.
It is important to distinguish here between active imagination and fantasy. Cynthia Bourgeault describes the imaginal process as “direct perception through the eye of the heart, not through mental reflection or fantasy.” Active imagination is a way of engaging with what is already present within us, though it may be buried.
The work of the eyes is done.
Go now and do the heart-work
on the images imprisoned
within you.
Rilke
In the process of souling through active imagination, the arising images are exquisitely attuned to the self’s unfolding and are often recognised viscerally, emotionally and deeply. Significant and unique meaning can be powerfully coalesced into a single image or we may receive many images in a lifetime. As we consciously engage with these images, this evokes psychological growth and integration, and a deepening relationship with the sovereignty, wisdom and love of the soul.
As soon as Magpie walks into my mind, intellectual doubt vanishes and my heart pounds. I am worm-sized and mute. I am deep in the fertile, dark soil, as Magpie stabs and kills a worm next to me. He looks at me with an intimidating and piercing eye and says: “Surrender your humanness.” The next time Magpie comes it is the day before my vision quest. I am the worm. Magpie stabs me and I am dying, while the magpie stands over me as he fiercely and fully inhabits his place. In my journal I summarise this in two words: dying and seeing. On the first day of my vision quest, I die to all in my human story that holds me back. On the third day a profound vision comes. Dying and seeing.
Soul as Belonging
“The home we are looking for in this world is within us all along.
The lost home that we are seeking is ourselves; it is the story
we carry within our soul.”
Michael Meade
Bill Plotkin defines soul as a person’s ecological niche within the web of life. This does not mean that all humans as a species have the same eco-niche. Rather, each individual human will have their own true, unique place in creation. This is a place where the soul is fully alive, radiantly occupying the fullness of the deep, essential soul-self, in profound relationship with the web of life.
The process of coming to know our own soul is an ecological, psychological and spiritual journey. We come to know the soul through what Plotkin calls our own mythopoetic identity, a mythical archetype of our own soul-self, revealed through symbol, image and metaphor. The mythopoetic identity is not the soul itself, but is how our human consciousness communicates our unique eco-niche to us.
On the third day of fasting and questing, I had wept and sung my longing until I was left empty, bereft. I feel raw, lost. I look up and the dead branch over the river shape-shifts. I see a hooded cloak, a holy woman. When I see that she is holding a stick, just like the one I had been beating with for two days. I sob, knowing she is me. She is me. I am here to protect and love the sacred river of life. I feel stunned as I weep and laugh on the river bank.
The soul shows us the larger, deeper story we are living, the archetypal myth that underlies our personal biography. The myth shows us who we are on a level much deeper than any social or vocational role. Soul points to our essential ways of being in relationship with life. It may be that we have reached a level of social, personal or vocational success, but something feels unmet inside us. When we turn to the soul, we may realise we hardly know ourselves at all. This is the journey that soul takes us on, to live the myth within you and through this myth, to particpate in the unfolding world myth..
Soul gives us Purpose
…To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others…
David Whyte
Alongside its unwavering love, the soul brings a great gift: the exquisitely unique inner purpose that lies within each one of us. As is the way in fairytales and myths, we so often need to become lost before we are found. Yet the soul knows the way through and is waiting for us to catch up with it.
I see us each holding a lit up soul-thread, luminous in the surrounding darkness. We walk, accompanied by the light and dark, by insight and mystery, knowing and not-knowing. As we take each step, we contribute to the morphic field of soul’s beauty and possibility, entangled in the beauty and possibility of all life. Here and now, step by step, we attune to our own unfolding edge, as we walk in the inspiration of the light and in the wild and fertile not-knowing of the darkness. We do not let go, but follow, follow, the golden thread of soul.
Anahata Giri June 2022