'I am always trying to figure out what the soul is, and where hidden, and what shape…’
Mary Oliver from 'Bone'
In her poem, ‘Bone’, Mary Oliver acknowledges her ongoing struggle to sense the shape and colours of the soul, to grasp its nature, to discover where it may be found. She speaks of playing ‘at the edges of knowing’ while sensing that she will never fully grasp what the soul is. For the soul cannot be defined. It cannot be tied down with philosophies and theories. However hard we may try to catch hold of it, it will always slip out of our hands. Our scientific, rational and logical ways of knowing will always fail us for they cannot ever penetrate its mystery or grasp its depth and complexity. The soul can, however, be felt, touched and experienced. When something stirs or moves us deeply, when we are gripped by an inexplicable conviction in our gut, when we sense those deeper longings that seem to arise from the very core of our being, we are experiencing soul. When we are gripped by the need to find ourselves, to know who we really are we are, to be all that we have within us to be, we are hearing the inner voice of the soul. And when our imagination and creativity are flowing freely and our senses come alive as never before to the wonder, beauty and sacredness of this extraordinary world that is our home, we are drawing on those qualities of soul that enable us to 'live deep and suck out all the marrow of life' to draw on the words of the philosopher, Henry David Thoreau.
Soul and the true self
‘The great law of life is: be yourself.’
John O’Donohue
From the very core of our being, there flows a profound longing. Though it may subside from time to time, it is always there. In midlife, it clamours for our attention as never before. It is the longing to be the self that we truly are. There are many ways of naming this self. Some call it our original or birthright nature, some call it our inner light, some call it our true self, our deeper or higher self. And some call it the soul. Soul is the self we become when we choose to embrace our full personhood, when we begin to find our way home to the deeper self within us that has languished in the shadows for too long. It is the self we are meant – some would say are destined – to be. It is the self the world sees whenever we are willing to come out from behind the masks we wear, whenever we refuse others’ expectations or demands that we are who we are not, whenever we make the decision to live life as we want to live it, whatever the cost.
There are undoubtedly some who would argue that there is no such thing as the soul, that its existence is an illusion. We are, they say, nothing more than the product of our genes, our experiences, the society into which we have been born. But the very fact that the concept of soul has been so widespread for so long tells us that there is something about it that resonates with our human experience. And it is only when we learn to listen to the voice of that experience, when we come to trust our own intuitive grasp of the way things truly are, that we may come to a place of certainty. In her poetry, Mary Oliver writes of her own intuitive knowing that there is such a thing as the soul. ‘This is,’ she says, ’the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know: that the soul exists.’ In time, I too have found my way to that place of deep knowing, that inner certainty that cannot be shaken.
Soul and individuality
‘You… are utterly unique.
There are gifts you were born to give.
Songs you were born to sing.
Stories you were born to tell.’ Carrie Newcomer from ‘Showing Up’
The soul is also the source of our individuality. Too many of us live in a culture that is in some way or other trying to suppress our individuality, to encourage or even force us to conform to some imposed norm, to make us other than we are. Our individuality is drowning in a sea of conformity and the world is undoubtedly the poorer for it. For each soul has its own unique light, its own shape, its own strengths and gifts, its own path to tread and one of our most important callings is to learn to inhabit this individuality. The psychologist, Bill Plotkin speaks of the soul as ‘the vital, mysterious and wild core of our individual selves, an essence unique to each person.’ He likens the soul to an acorn. In the same way that the acorn instructs the oak as to how it should grow and what it should become, the soul, he says, is a kind of spiritual blueprint that shows us how we are meant to develop, who we are meant to be and what kind of life we are meant to lead.
In similar vein, the writer, Parker Palmer speaks of the soul as our original ‘birthright nature’. Each of us, he says, contains within us ‘a seed of selfhood’, ‘the spiritual DNA’ of our individuality. We are born knowing somewhere deep within us our true nature and the particular gifts that we are meant to offer the world. But to take the risk of expressing this individuality in a world that prizes it so little is hard and so we often make the choice to fit in rather than stand out. We sacrifice our individuality on the altar of conformity and thereby lose sight of the uniqueness of our being. The loss is hard to bear. In his book, ‘Tales of the Hasidim’, Martin Buber tells this story about the celebrated Jewish Rabbi Meshulum Zusya. On his deathbed, he began to cry uncontrollably and his disciples asked him why he was weeping. ‘In the coming world’, he said, ‘they will not ask me: Why were you not Moses? They will ask me: Why were you not Zusya?’
Soul and depth
‘… the dimension of soul is depth… and the direction of soul travel is downward.’
James Hillman
It seems that for many if not most of us, the word ‘soul’ is strongly associated with such words as ‘core’, ‘essence’, ‘heart’, ‘innermost’ and ‘centre’ as it is for me. My experience of soul has led me to think of it as the essence of my being, the innermost core of me. It is what comes to light when I am able to let down my defences, take off the masks I wear and risk being more fully who I am. If you were to ask me where I might locate the soul bodily, I would point to my gut. There is an association here with depth, a sense that the inner landscape of the soul is to be found at the deepest level of our being and that connecting with soul requires us to dive down inside ourselves.
Soul is the essence of me. It is what is deepest and truest in me. It is the self I long to be, the self I am meant to be, the self I am called to be. It is the unique and beautiful self I - and only I - can be. To live from the soul is to live this deeper self as fully as we can in every moment of our lives. It is to claim the freedom we have always had to be who we have always been. It is to live with courage, hope and a deep and certain knowing that this is the true meaning and purpose of each of our lives.
©Copyright Kaitlyn Steele 2024
Kaitlyn Steele
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