Awakening to soul: hearing the Call

‘There is no place so awake and alive

as the edge of becoming.’

                                                     Sue Monk Kidd

The journey of awakening to our deepest, truest self begins with what has come to be known as 'the Call.' The Call is an invitation to the journey of becoming. It is a summoning, a beckoning. It is the voice of the soul urging us to wake up to that which is waiting to be born within us. It is rarely a dramatic one-off event. More often, it comes a number of times and may take many different forms. For most of us, it is more of a journey, an ongoing process which manifests itself in quieter, more subtle ways. The Call may come to us, for example, through an image or symbol that speaks to us; through a painting, a sculpture or a piece of music that moves us; through a film or a book that opens our mind; through a sacred text that challenges us; or through a dream that haunts us.

For writer, Sue Monk Kidd, it was an encounter with a butterfly chrysalis that took her a little closer to the edge of becoming. One day when she was out walking, she noticed a chrysalis hanging from the branch of a dogwood tree and was suddenly overcome by a deep sense of reverence ‘that made me want to sink to my knees’. She had a strange sense that the chrysalis was somehow hers, that incubating within it was her own soul. And for over a year afterwards, images of the chrysalis would appear to her time and time again – in books, cards, drawings, jewellery and in her dreams.

The Call may also come to us through those experiences in life which force us to confront the darker realities of loss, pain and suffering – a major set-back, a serious illness, a significant loss that shocks us to the core and brings us to our knees. As our past life falls apart, we come to the realisation that our old way of being is no longer work for us. We begin to ask ourselves who we really are and what really matters to us. For writer, Dawna Markova, the Call came when she was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness in midlife. She speaks of coming to see her cancer as her soul’s last-ditch attempt to compel her to pay attention to her deeper needs and longings. For her, living with her illness brought to the surface a deep-seated longing to live what she calls ‘a loved life’, to live it to the full ‘as if life matters’.

Or the Call may take the form of an unsettling inner tension and restlessness, a desire for change, a deep yearning which seems to come out of nowhere. Even when life appears to be good, we may come to feel that there is still something missing, that we are hungry for something more, that we are living a life that is too small. I was in my late forties when I first became aware of a puzzling inner disquiet that haunted me. At times, I experienced it as a kind of internal pressure which seemed to surface from somewhere deep within. I struggled to make sense of it and to identify precisely what it was I was longing for. There was so much that was good about my life as I approached my fifties and yet it felt as though there was something awry. It was as if I was being gently but persistently pulled towards something new or different, albeit something that I could not yet name. For Oriah Mountain Dreamer, this inner restlessness was a ‘soft-bellied whisper’ with ‘an edge of urgency’. For John O’Donohue, it was a force that builds 'inside the heart, that leaves us uneasy as we are.’

Sometimes, if we fail to pay attention to this persistent tapping in our spirit as the Bushmen of South Africa describe it, the force that is building within us takes us into into an experience of ‘midlife darkness’ as Monk Kidd called it. There are many ways of naming this descent into darkness. Some speak, for example, of a desert or wilderness experience; some of a deep sense of alienation, meaninglessness or nothingness; some of a mid-life crisis; some of feelings of deadness or emptiness. For me, it felt like being half alive. I wrote in my journal of living life ‘in the trenches’, of being ‘trapped in a cul-de-sac’ from which I could see no escape. I vividly remember how disturbed I felt when I first came across Henry Thoreau’s assertion that most of us lead ‘lives of quiet desperation’ because somewhere deep inside myself, I knew that at that time in my life, there was more than a grain of truth in it for me. I was experiencing what I later came to think of as my own ‘dark night of the soul’. 

At such times, the soul ‘shouts’ to us through the emotional distress we are experiencing. It is demanding our attention. It will not let us rest easy, it seems, when we are only half living, when we are not being all that we have the potential to be, when there are unlived parts of ourselves that are hidden in the depths of our being. And if we fail to listen to its voice, the slide into darkness begins. Perhaps if our survival self were less resistant to the gentler promptings of the soul, such sledge-hammer tactics would not be necessary to get our attention. All too often, however, we fail to heed its whisper or to understand what it is saying to us and the dark night of the soul descends.

The Call to awaken is an invitation to go deeper, to step outside our comfort zone, to entrust ourselves to the unfolding of the inner journey wherever it might lead. Some quiet but insistent inner voice will not let us linger in the shallows. There is, it says, still more to the person you are than this, still more to being than this, still more to the spiritual life than this. Embrace the journey for it is the most important journey you will ever make.

Bibliography

Oriah Mountain Dreamer 2003) The Call: Discovering why you are here. Element

Sue Monk Kidd (1990) When the Heart Waits: Spiritual direction for life’s sacred questions. HarperOne

Dawn Markova (2000) I Will Not Die an Unlived Life: Reclaiming purpose and passion. Conari Press

John O’Donohue (2007) Benedictus: A book of blessings.  Bantam Press

Henry David Thoreau (1995) Walden: Or, Life in the woods. Dover Press

©Copyright Kaitlyn Steele 2025

Kaitlyn Steele

www.insearchofsoul.co.uk

kaitlynsteele16@gmail.com