We all have a soul, we are created from sacred stuff. But many of us struggle to make a connection to it.
We may even be seeking that soul connection with our new year’s resolutions, craving more spiritual order in our lives this year, and that’s great!
But often, when we get a few weeks into the new year, we find that our energy seems depleted, the spark has left the agenda. We get busy with our lives, the demands of our current reality. We feel bogged down by the state of the way things are in our world, sucked into the gravitational pull of chaos. Connecting with soul slips way off the list, down into the netherworld.
When you spend any time in the news or dwelling on our current reality, it’s easy to become overwhelmed, here’s my brief synopsis of what I call the dark stew we’re all swimming in.
The Dark Stew:
Anxiety over unstable political environment.
Fear over increasing violence and disaster in the world.
A sense of aloneness, lack of support or community.
The feeling that you will never become who you were meant to be, that the odds are insurmountable.
Restlessness over a lack of resources such as health insurance, medical attention when needed, job, financial, etc.
Collective trauma
It’s really not our fault that we feel the invasion of the dark stew. We’ve been trying to control it for a very long time, and that tactic just doesn’t seem to work anymore. Sometimes, we even make our new year’s resolutions from a determination to control the chaos in our lives. From a young age, we are usually taught that we can gain the upper hand on chaos if we just learn techniques of control. And maybe for a while, it has worked.
But the stew is out of control.
More often than not, controlling the chaos through the various tactics we learn, working harder, becoming a huge success, being good at producing more, consuming more, etc., may help us “get ahead.” But we discover, eventually, that more is never enough. We have to work harder to keep up, our modern lives often leave us feeling depleted, experiencing identity loss and wondering where our promised sense of peace, hope and future lie. These traits may make us good producers in the world but often fail to bring us the deep sense of wholeness we crave. What’s even more confusing, is that these traits make it inside of our religious experience where they prevent us from connecting with the spiritual core.
What are we here for anyway?
We all may have had moments when we have glimpses of the sacred or soul within, like an elusive fox crossing the road in our headlights. We often ask, did that really happen? What was that? A moment of natural beauty or joy. Our instinct is to follow it, but we often have to just keep driving on, we have somewhere to be, something to do, we have an agenda, a set list of goals, or a plan we must follow. Or, if we don’t stay distracted, we are afraid we might get swallowed up in the experience of the dark stew. It’s so ironic, we often miss the soul journey because we are too busy making plans to thrive in the world, all the while thinking we are headed in the right direction. Or keeping ourselves distracted from our feelings. But the blueprint for our thriving is already within us, if only we would take the time to go within.
Our little glimpses of soul are often lost as we get sucked into the gravitational pull of chaos.
Consider these teachings about the soul from ancient traditions:
Lakota spirituality teaches us that we all have a story written upon the walls of our souls, our lives are about living out this story. The story is given to us by the Creator for the good of our community and the betterment of the world. As a young child, the soul is brought before the Great Spirit to discover its path. The role of the family and community is the help the child nurture this soul journey into the world, along with spiritual practice, rituals and traditions.
In the Christian journey, we believe that we all, at one point, are to experience the soul’s awakening to the Divine power within, this is the presence of God to which Jesus referred when he said, “the kingdom of Heaven is within” (Luke 17:21). Jesus’ presence in the world is the Holy Spirit, giving us the power to enter into and sustain a life lived from the soul’s purpose. “Abide in me and I will abide in you” (John 15:4) is an invitation to experience life from soul center. Jesus becomes the stabilizing force within you as you let go of the “learned” survival traits (control over the dark stew) and awaken to your gifts and talents for the betterment of the world. You take on the Spirit that is Christ, unique in all the world. Christ’ teaching on love, radical love that transforms hatred, is utterly unique and transformative.
This time of year, we all become particularly vulnerable to the urge to control chaos in our lives, or distract ourselves to distraction sickness. We crank down on control to make a new start, get the upper hand on the disorder or perhaps take the bait on that old sales pitch that “get the life you always wanted.” But the pathway to the soul is one of surrender, letting go of control, awakening to the wholeness within and experiencing restoration to your natural self.
There is no secret tunnel, no hidden formula, and there are no short cuts, just a lifetime of daily practice and surrender to what is already within you. Someone once said that the soul journey is about subtraction, letting God remove the barriers to God’s presence in you.
We don’t ever get rid of life in the stew, the gravitational pull of chaos will always be there, but we don’t have to be swallowed up by it or live at the pace it demands. As we learn about the Power that brings sanity, sustainable peace and manageability into our lives, God, Creator, Higher Power, we come to experience a new way of living in the world. We learn to surrender and let the internal blueprint take over. We become more connected to all that is sacred in us and in the world. This connection stabilizes our lives over time as we become less and less attracted (and attached) to the chaos, and more drawn to the peace available to us through our connection with God. Ironically, because we are changed, miraculously, by our experience of God, the world around us changes, too.
So why not take a close look at those new year’s resolutions that call for more control, or setting unattainable goals that force you to enslave your body and spirit to impossible amounts of work. Why not be guided by a higher cause, the soul’s journey? Perhaps your deeper yearning, what you’re really searching for, is a deeper connection to your very own soul.
If you’d like weekly resources to help you on your soul recovery journey, take a look around my site and sign up for my email list below, I’ll send you once a week inspirations to help you on your soul journey. If you’re interested in the 12 step spirituality, check out my recovery blog, leadkindlylightblog.wordpress.com.
And, if you like this blog, share it with others! Send me your thoughts below. What do you think about soul? Are you finding ways to connect with your soul journey this year? Share your inspirations!
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Grace and Peace,
-Sherry
Rev. Sherry Cothran is the pastor at St. John’s West UMC, Nashville. An award winning singer/songwriter, former lead singer of the popular late 90’s rock band, The Evinrudes, and upcoming author, Sherry writes about soul, recovery, women and faith, and the spiritual journey. Sherry’s new CD, due out in early Feb., 2017, “Hundreds of Ways to Kneel and Kiss the Ground” contains her alternative interpretations from the spiritual wisdom of Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Egyptian, and Native American practices. Her writing and music can be viewed here: www.sherrycothran.com
“Everything has been said already, but not yet by everyone.” – Karl Valentin
In our world today, it can feel impossible to do a very simple thing such as finding your own voice amidst all the competing forces. We often feel as if an inner critic lives in us that agrees with all the criticism we hear in our daily lives, in the news cycles, in Presidential campaign rhetoric, and even in religious experiences where we may have felt toxically shamed.
Often the hopeful and imaginative voice that was alive in us as children goes into hiding as we become the adults we need to be to make it in this world. But, along the way, we may begin to receive messages from our Inner Child, or our True Self, a nagging, a symbol that keeps re-appearing in our lives, or something that continues to speak up. Some even believe panic and anxiety are messages from our Inner Child, reminding us that we need to get back on the path she was on. This voice within may be telling us to go back and rediscover the one that believed in goodness, love and dreaming. However, it is difficult to give ourselves permission to seek out this Inner Child, but it can be done, even in today’s culture, and it is one of the most rewarding journeys you will ever take. Not only that, but it is a critical moment in our time. Now, more than ever, we need to dig deeply within the depths of our own souls and manifest the love that is hiding there in our Inner Child. For ourselves, for others and for a Divine, Higher Power many of us call God.
One of the main challenges to connecting with our authentic self in the world is that we all seem to be swimming in a stew of constant criticism and it’s confusing as to what we’re supposed to be. We live in a culture in which most people do not feel truly valued, have few intimate friendships and lack the support systems needed to cultivate the kind of trust and love it takes to mine the voice within. We often feel that we connect more deeply with ourselves whenever we are experiencing nature, nurture or an experience of self-love but may find it difficult to bring these moments into our every-day lives, moments where we feel connected to ourselves.
In recovery groups for trauma, addiction and dysfunction, this voice of criticism that is constantly running is known as the Critical Parent. We use a Loving Parent within to silence this Critical Parent and help us develop the dreaming of the Inner Child, where our true voice lives. As we take our painful experiences and begin to address the voice of the Critical Parent with the voice of the Loving Parent within, we see a little tunnel of beauty open up inside of us. We lovingly raise the goodness, dreams and imagination of our Inner Child to the surface of our lives, allowing our voice to come to life.
In indigenous peoples, a child’s dreams were a special way of living out the story written upon the walls of our souls. A dream was given on behalf of the community to each person to be lived out in the world so that others would benefit. It was a parent’s responsibility to bring the child’s dream before the Great Spirit as a sacred thing, to be nurtured, cultivated and lived out in the tribe. This is an action of love. But in our culture, we seem to have taken the idea of a dream and turned it into a commodity, something that should be profited from or should bring us fame, glory or success. In doing so, we’ve actually created a kind of trap or snare for a dream in which we may feel if it doesn’t produce or make us money, it’s not worth pursuing. But nothing could be further from the truth. Though dreams may lead to profit, the purpose of a dream is to bring one closer to God, others and provide something useful and beautiful for the community. Pursuing a dream is about falling in love with one’s own true voice and life itself and sharing this with others for the benefit of all.
St. Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is a person fully alive.” As we apply the voice of the Loving Parent to our Inner Child within, over time and with much practice and diligence, we begin to become fully alive and see the beauty of our inner world shining out from within. We mine the depths of what God has placed in us already, love. All the saints remind us, Jesus, too, that love is the highest form of praise and the most important thing we can do, for ourselves, for God and for one another. What’s interesting is that, as we do this, we find others that are on this journey, too, or perhaps they find us. As we resolve to love, love becomes that force that connects us more deeply to the sacred in the world.
We live in a time when there is an enormous amount of information available to us but not a lot of wisdom. Wisdom travels beneath the surface of things, is usually passed down through stories and can be quite slippery at times. Yet, if we have any hope for catching a glimpse of our authentic self, that soul self that guides us to purposeful living, then somewhere along the way, we have to make an appointment with Wisdom, herself, and listen. Or, we might just ask the foxes.
Reasoning with the foxes is a great place to start. One can learn a great deal from observing foxes and the way they hunt for prey beneath the surface of things. This fox has a technique of hunting in the snow in which he must get very, very quiet and listen for the smallest of movements.
Not only that, scientists have discovered as told in this article from Discover magazine, that the fox uses the earth’s magnetic field as a kind of “rangefinder,” pinpointing a north easterly direction. When he is pointed in the right direction, the fox catches its prey 73% of the time, otherwise, the odds are around 18%. Just like this fox, if we want to find our purpose in this life, we also must be pointed in the right direction and be willing to take the leaps and accept and learn from the failures that occur along the way. It takes a good portion of our lives for most of us to get ourselves pointed in the right direction and a great deal of grit and surrender to keep trying.
How do we know when we are pointing in the right direction? Like the fox, we must become very quiet and listen to what is going on beneath the surface of our busy lives, we listen for the sound of what is moving within. We use the region of our heart to guide us, just as the fox uses the earth’s magnetic field to position ourselves in our true direction.
I often think it would be so much easier if we could just take a stethoscope and hear what our hearts are saying, but this is a different kind of listening, we are learning to observe with our spiritual senses. As we do, we become re-grounded to our roots, to the ground of our being, our spiritual life within, through slowing down our breathing and breathing deeply. We begin our meditation with a focused prayer. We listen to the field of our hearts to hone in on our spiritual purpose for being in this world. We focus on God alone, which is focusing on the deep reserves of love moving within us, some call this a Higher Power.
We can trust that God’s purpose is hidden deeply in our hearts, waiting for the right time to emerge in our lives, waiting for us to get pointed in the right direction and open our hearts to the Divine will. Just like the subtle sounds of vibrations moving beneath the heavy snow, Wisdom will guide us as we become more and more willing to surrender our own will to what is moving deeply within us, the Creator. We may make many nose-dives beneath the surface before we come up with anything that resembles a direction, but we keep practicing, trusting Wisdom to guide us to our true north.
In my tradition, centering prayer is a very effective tool for listening for the heart to speak, for God’s will to be made known more clearly than all the other competing noises. Once we are pointed towards this, we continue to ground ourselves in that alignment. We learn what it feels like, what our breath sounds like in these moments where we feel re-grounded, and we seek this out again, each day until it becomes a practice. Over time, we begin to experience the world through the senses of our hearts.
There are many centering prayers available online, some really beautiful ones from the Native American traditions as well. Here is one of my favorite centering prayers from St. Teresa of Avila:
“Let nothing disturb you, let nothing make you afraid. All things are passing. God alone never changes. Patience gains all things. If you have God, you will want for nothing. God alone suffices.”
Recently, I heard film producer, Steven Spielberg, speak about dreams to a class of graduating seniors. He was encouraging them to follow their dreams and gave them some clues about how the dream communicates to us. “Not in a loud screaming voice,” he said, but in “whispers from within.” This is a beautiful thought, I said to myself, but even before I could relish it my mind flashed back to a man I had just met, one of the patrons at the free community meal hosted by the urban church where I serve as pastor. We had spent about half an hour together as I took him to get his prescriptions filled following the meal. Since I became a pastor in an urban area, I’ve heard stories like his many times. Enough to know that just beside the soul’s whisper lives also, the voices of human suffering in our midst.
His story is not uncommon and represents at least 20% of our population, if not more. A 52 year old man whose life had been largely sacrificed to the diseases of poverty and lack of opportunity. Stabbed, shot, abused as a child, and without resources as a teenager. Still, he said, he believed God had a purpose for his life, he got off the streets and now lives in an apartment, barely making it, though he is hoping to move away from his roommate who is still drugging. He told me he did not understand why God would allow human beings to suffer so much and to this, there is no answer. I have always struggled with this lack of connection between the soul’s dreams whispering to us and the vast suffering in our own nation of our brothers and sisters and children going hungry, growing up without opportunity. Why, when the soul whispers its dreams does it not follow up with the tag, “for everyone?”
In Native American culture there is the practice of a vision quest. The reason for seeking a vision is so that you might discover the dream God has planted in you, bring it back to the tribe and work within the tribe for the sharing of this dream for everyone. The dream is not just for you, it belongs to the tribe and it belongs to the Great Spirit who has dreamed in advance for the good of everyone. The belief is that the dream was given to you, a unique individual, so that you might express a facet of the whole in a way that only you can, for the good and care of your people, so that everyone might also dream.
But in our culture, we have turned the dream inside out and learned how to exploit if for profit. We have come to believe that a dream is for us alone, something we must leave our tribe to achieve, go off and make something of ourselves in the world, and if we’re lucky, even find prestige and fame. We seek a dream when perhaps it is a vision we are craving.
The Apostle Paul had a vision for the early church, and his vision was different than that of some missionaries who came along, with the influence of the larger religious establishment. With one of the churches he planted in Galatia, we see the struggle playing out that is not that different from our day. There was the religious establishment that had become stuck with its strict rules, regulations, political structure and constant need of funding that these missionaries seemed to represent, an establishment that seemed to treat human souls more like property than sacred beings. Then there was the undercurrent, the early church who followed the radical teachings of Christ, the Divine revelation, the ability to seek the soul’s freedom in the world, which was always connected to the well being of all, not just loving one another but helping one another. It was based on Paul’s radical, converting vision when he stopped persecuting people and began loving. It was a vision that told the early Christian community that they existed not just for the care of one another, but for the sake of love in the world and for the sake of those who suffered.
In a day and age when fairytales are exploited into blockbuster hits, vision questers are warehoused onto impoverished reservations, and Christianity seems to focus more on the power of the institution than on the radical, converting power of Christ, it is no wonder we turn our dreams into something unholy. We want our dreams to pay us something for living in this world. It is perfectly normal that we would feel this way. After all, we are often a people without a tribe, alone and picked off easily by whatever gleams on the horizon, promising us gold.
But I am still haunted by the connection between the soul whispers and this man’s suffering. Parker Palmer said that your truest vocation is found “where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” Maybe the great dream that God whispers to us all is not just to love one another but help one another, and maybe in this, we find our belonging, that our tribe is everyone. There is a Divine purpose for every soul in the world, not just the ones who are lucky enough to follow a dream.
Perhaps our dreaming is not just for us, but for everyone, and down that pathway, we might just find what we were looking for all along.
What is God dreaming in you?
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Trickster figures are stock characters appearing in myths and stories from all over the world. Like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, the trickster moves across traditional boundary lines, causing chaotic events to unfold by exposing what is hidden, often through reprehensible behavior. Trickster figures can appear in real life as well, some say we all have aspects of the archetype within us, we see the trickster looming large in the persona of Donald Trump.
Tricksters generally come onto the scene when there are important decisions to be made and something big is at stake. They challenge the main characters of the story to reconsider their views, question the journey they are on and become reconciled to their truest path. Tricksters expose the dark realm within us all where fear lives, namely, the shadow. Trump represents this trickster figure who has come into the story of our culture for such a time as this and we are the main characters, each one of us. He forces us to either ignore or examine, at the shadow level, what we really believe about issues that have largely remained hidden, particularly what we believe about women.
While we might be outraged at his perspective on women, if we look at the statistics of violence against women, (1 in 3 women have experienced violence against them) we see that his degrading views actually support the statistics. This is how the shadow works when it is ignored inside of us, it begins to have power over us and becomes extremely uncomfortable with the truth, rationalizing or intellectualizing the facts and protecting its power through responses of hatred, rage and control. While we may feel that the ways in which we devalue women in our culture are unacceptable on the surface, we still somehow have enabled the system to function as our dominant state for whatever reason. Perhaps we feel helpless to change it.
But, strangely, the key to changing the treatment of women and examining our core beliefs about women resides less in our common responses to people like Trump, such as anger, outrage, blaming, shaming or doing nothing at all, and more in the shadow he brings out in all of us. The question is not necessarily, do we support, are we afraid of, or could we ever believe in Trump, but rather, what do we really feel about women, daughters, mothers, grandmothers and sisters? Do we really expect them to be subservient to men? And if we feel this statement is off base, then why do our statistics not support it?
We are engaged in an epic battle for a woman’s voice to be her own. We are in between two systems, the old and the new, the known and the unknown woods, where the action takes place, where the shadow is revealed, sometimes dressed up in grandma’s pajamas. The question is not what will we do with Trump, but what will we do with us? How will we invite change into our own hearts to produce the kinds of leaders who value us, all of us?
The shadow is always shocking when it is revealed, tooth and claw, exposing our core beliefs about women. Women are even shocked when they get to the bottom of what they believe about themselves. But the truth doesn’t have to be paralyzing and it doesn’t have to jump up and swallow us for lunch. Trump, with his big-ness, though he seems to have paralyzed half a nation with fear, has actually done us a huge favor, he’s brought the shadow out into the open, named the elephant in the room. And now the choice is ours, what do we really believe about women? Our answer to that question could change the world.
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What do Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Egyptian and Native American traditions have in common? Wisdom, the music of the spheres. I recently received a grant to write ten songs inspired by ancient wisdom literature of several religious and spiritual traditions. What I discovered was that there was a ground within these traditions, a central root system that unites us all as human beings seeking to live from a place of meaning, from four thousand years ago to the present day, our collective wisdom.
Much of this collected wisdom can be found in the poetry, prose and story of ancient traditions, the spirit keepers of the ancient world. I’ve written ten songs inspired by these traditions.
