'What matters is how quickly you do what your soul directs.'
Rumi
Our subjective experience often leads us to speak of having a soul as if it were something that we possess. Another way of thinking about the soul, however, is to see it as a particular dimension of our selfhood. From this perspective, soul is not something we have. It is something we are. It is a particular way or quality of being which I call soulfulness.
What then does it mean to live soulfully? First and foremost, it means learning to live as fully as possible from the core of our being, from the deepest, innermost part of ourselves. In part, this is a question of turning our attention to our inner lives, of making time for soul. Most of us spend so little time attending to soul, listening for that quiet voice that speaks to us from the very core of our being that we have 'lost the habit of soul' as the writer, John O’Donohue put it. Even in midlife, it is perhaps rare that we spend much time pondering those deeper questions that take us beneath the surface of our lives. Who am I? Why am I here? What is the meaning of my life? What is mine to do? Though such questions may visit us from time to time, more often than not, we pay them little mind. So preoccupied are we with the outside world, that rather than immersing ourselves in such existential questions, we often brush them away. Gradually, the questions we most need to ask ourselves fade into the background and the promptings of our soul go unheeded.
To search for the answers to these questions is to respond to the call to ‘know thyself’ that philosophers, theologians, wisdom teachers and more recently, psychologists have been hearing for over two thousand years. At its deepest level, the process of coming to know ourselves is the search for soul. It is the search for that which lies at the very core of our being, the essence of who we are, the source of our uniqueness and individuality. And the spiritual journey is not a just a process of discovering this deeper self, of coming to know it as it truly is, but also one of ‘realising’ this self. The word ‘realise’ comes from a French verb which means ‘to make real’ or ‘to bring into existence’. In seeking to realise our inner self, we are engaging in the process of becoming this self. And once we have begun the process of coming to know and realise our own soul, living from this deeper place within us is also about learning to trust that it is a faithful and trustworthy guide, that if we listen to its voice, we can depend on it to lead us where we need to go. As many of us have discovered, when we are willing to listen to the intuitive wisdom of the soul and to trust its authority, it becomes a reliable inner compass.
When we are living soulfully, we are also able to draw more freely on a number of capabilities that I call qualities of soul. Firstly, we are able to trust and draw more freely on our intuition. When we speak of listening to our gut instinct, of feeling or knowing something ‘in the gut’, it is this intuitive knowing, this ‘knowledge of the heart’ as it is sometimes called, that we are drawing on. We are listening to ‘the whisper of the soul’ as the Indian philosopher, Jiddu Krishnamurti called it. It is, I believe, our most important source of wisdom.
It is a form of knowing that is conscious of the oneness and inter-connectedness of everything and is open to entering into a meaningful dialogue with that which we seek to know. To draw on the philosopher, Martin Buber’s words, it requires us to enter into what he called an ‘I-Thou’ relationship with what we seek to know. He distinguished between two very different types of relationship. In an ‘I-it’ relationship, we relate to the other as someone or something to be analysed, contemplated, observed, reacted to or used. In an ‘I–Thou’ relationship, we are drawn into a deeper, more intimate relationship or communion between two ‘thous’. This is a much deeper way of coming to know the other.
These more instinctive and intuitive ways of knowing come naturally to the soul and if we are open to listening to its voice, it becomes the wisest of inner teachers. Embracing this way of knowing is, however, a particular challenge in the West where we have come to see analytical, logical and scientific ways of knowing as more important and advanced and where education focuses primarily on enhancing these so-called ‘left brain’ skills. All too often, we are taught to mistrust or dismiss intuitive and experiential ways of knowing, to see them as unreliable or inferior. As Rumi put it, however, ‘The soul has been given its own ears to hear things the mind does not understand.’
When we are living soulfully, we are also able to draw more freely on our imagination and on our inherent creativity. Human beings are image-makers. Our minds produce a constant flow of images, symbols, and fantasies. They surface both when we are awake and when we dream. They inhabit our art, our architecture, our literature, our music. We spend a great deal of time and money producing and engaging with the many products of this fertile imagination – films, plays, novels, poetry, paintings, sculptures, crafts amongst other things. And yet we seem to be somewhat ambivalent about the importance and value of the imaginative process. Too often, we disparage our own imaginative capacity and do little to nurture its development. But imagination does more than build castles in the air. It does more than generate fantasy worlds which allow us for a time to escape the reality of our existence. It is the source of our inspiration as artists of any kind. Imagination fuels our creativity. To imagine is to look through the eyes of the soul. It is to break through the boundaries of the known to seek the not yet known. It is to look beyond what is to what could be. It is to embrace new possibilities, to create new realities.
When we are living soulfully, we are also able to tap more easily into our inherent creativity. Creativity is in our blood. To be human is to be creative. It is a fundamental aspect of our essential nature and of our spirituality for it springs from the soul. We are all artists in the broadest sense of the word and we are always engaged in the process of creating in some way or other. Whenever we make or produce something, whenever we bring something into being, whenever we give birth to something, whenever we cause something to grow, we are expressing our creativity.
The tragedy is that many of us do not see ourselves as being creative. We do not recognise or value our own creativity because our definition of it is far too narrow and restrictive. When we create beauty in our surroundings, when we design and plant our gardens, when we offer others our hospitality, when we conceive, parent and teach our children, when we offer others our caring and friendship, when we take the time to be with and listen to those who are hurting, when we bring them a measure of healing, we are being creative. And even more importantly, when we are engaged in the process of bringing forth what is within ourselves, we are being creative.
Finally, to live soulfully is to love deeply. When we are living from our soul, then our capacity to love is at its greatest for as John O'Donohue put it, ‘Love is the nature of the soul’. We do not love solely in order to receive love; we love because at the core of our being, it is who we are. The kind of love that O’Donohue spoke about has, I believe, a number of special characteristics which set it apart from other forms of love. I call it soul love. Soul love is first and foremost a profoundly unconditional, generous and unselfish form of love which, both in early Greek philosophy and in the Jewish-Christian spiritual tradition, is known as ‘agape love’. It is, moreover, a love that is passionate, hospitable and gracious. It flows out of an attitude of reverence for every human being as a sacred presence in the world. It is compassionate and tender and profoundly intimate. It is the kind of love that enables us to embrace the freedom to be who we are, or perhaps more accurately, who we are becoming.
©Copyright Kaitlyn Steele 2024
Kaitlyn Steele
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