What is Your Soul Requesting?

Eleven years ago I went through a real rough patch. Real rough. I had a major medical procedure, an intimate relationship ended and my dad died. This is what was happening on the visible realm. On the inside of my being, the way I saw and interacted with the world was getting torn down, thought-by-thought, belief-by-belief, projection-by-projection, judgment-by-judgment and experience-by-experience. And it was rough and tough.

The only thing I could do was enter into silence, meditation and prayer and listen to myself while feeling so much unprocessed old stuff and crying often. I had to close out the outside world and go deeper in order to hear the Depths of my Being. I had to. My Soul wouldn’t let me do anything else. I assigned myself a year to do this internal sabbatical, but the “I” that gave myself this timeline wasn’t my Soul. One year turned into two years. Then two years turned into three and then close to the end of the third year I finally said to God, “okay, you’ve got me. If you want me in contemplation and support for the rest of my life I surrender. No more time frames, and I free fell into a devotion of God while learning to love myself completely.” Then at the very end of the third year I attended a Buddhist Silent Meditation Retreat and on the second day while sitting on a pillow following my breath, I heard the Inner Voice that said, “you are done. Go back into the world and live from this new place.” I knew this was the start of my next chapter of being in the world, but NOT of it.

For years I had a rough time with noises, being around lots of people in one place, and integrating what I’d learned with the daily functioning of my life. And this awkwardness showed me Grace and deep compassion as I followed my inner guidance into unknown areas. And as a contemplative I spend time every day in this silent, Soul realm and continue to embrace awareness and live from the guidance.

Based upon sharing my story with a friend, she got the idea in her head that a silent retreat was a romantic idea and she was going to undertake it so she too could access her Soul. She had never given herself over to silence, but she was determined. She rented a cabin in the mountains of Arizona, packed food and supplies for a weekend and headed out to go in. She returned the same day. Bless her mind for thinking it knew what she needed. She arrived in the mountains and immediately bored decided to go hiking on a trail close to her cabin. She fainted. The altitude and dehydration had taken her down. When she fell she hit her head. She wasn’t gravely hurt and the caretaker of the cabins found her quickly, but she returned home to realize she had a different path than mine at that time.

I LOVE this story because as humans we do this SO often. We think someone else knows better than our own guidance. We are certain the answer is “out there” and we are determined to find it. The head looks for fixes. It wants to know. It talks from the past and survival. Its instruction is shallow. The Soul, in comparison, rises up from within, beckons, resonates, pushes or pulls us forward — it is from a deeper place that most likely isn’t rational and isn’t trying to “get.”

Meditation allows us to differentiate our thinking voice from our Soul’s voice. We learn to access different aspects of our being and cultivate an awareness to know from where we are coming. As we are heading into the holidays, now is a good time to increase a meditation practice.

Sending you a Soul Wave,