Seeking Soul: 7 Ways to find Depth in a World Defined by its Surface.
{Photo via Pinterest}
By Claire Boyce
What is soul? And why is it valuable? After all, aren’t we taught that life is about accomplishment, competition, and success?
Isn’t spirituality about transcendence of the material world? It certainly doesn’t have to be. There is a quality of lively stillness, that lurks beneath everyday trappings and distractions, that I call soul. Yes, we each have a soul, but it is also a property found in all things.
The connection with soul can be an incredibly fulfilling experience, taking you out of the world of striving to just discovering what is already there and realizing how beautiful it is. As an artist, I find it helpful to get out of the rat race mentality that drives so much of consumer culture, and to feed the soul.
But how do we go about doing that? Here are some suggestions as to how to get in touch with the deeper qualities of your human-ness.
1. Be still: This is probably the most important. To quiet and calm the mind is essential for being able to experience the world around you instead of just focusing on what your mind churns out, which is usually repetitive and often insane.
Meditation is one way to accomplish this, creative practice another, and contact with nature yet another way to access the deep peace that resides at the core of all things.
2. Take time each day to notice things that are funky, strange, or different in some way: The soul loves idiosyncrasy and imperfection. Observe the world around you from the perspective of wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic that finds value in all that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.
Ditch the mall and find a funky area housing antique shops or main-street in a small town. Find the mystery in the nuances of daily life. And pay attention to small things, hidden places, and subtleties. Soul thrives on the things most easily overlooked.
3. Live through your senses: Much of modern life is head-centered, meaning we are constantly drawn into a personal drama that is self-created and probably not very positive. This generates constant strife, not to mention distraction from genuine interaction with the world around us.
Notice the various sights, sounds, smells, and even tastes and textures that surround you, and use them to bring you a deeper sense of presence. Even smells and sounds that may be unpleasant can be interesting and stimulating to the imagination, which the soul loves.
When we withhold judgment about something being good or bad, we can cultivate a sense of curiosity about it. And to engage the soul, curiosity is key.
4. Be introspective, but with heightened awareness: If you are cultivating stillness and living through your senses, it should bring you to a place of more awareness. But there is also awareness of yourself, your thoughts, your beliefs, and your feelings.
Perhaps you see a leaf on the street, and it reminds you of a pleasant day when you were a child. Pay attention to these thoughts, as they might be inspiration for something later on, may bring about self-understanding, or just result in a sense or joy or nostalgia.
5. Enjoy material pleasures: So many on spiritual paths seem to think it necessary to deny themselves physical pleasure. But certain traditions that don’t reject this essential part of earthly existence, such as Hinduism, hold that physical pleasure is sacred.
Food, sex, fine wine, art, and fine clothing, are all amazing joys of living on this planet. To cultivate soul fullness, it is necessary to mindfully appreciate these material indulgences.
And the key is definitely mindfulness, not to engage in gluttony or excess, which are addictive patterns that deny the present moment.
6. Be in touch with your emotions: The soul communicates to us through emotions and intuition, not logic or reason. Our emotions are always a more honest and accurate barometer of what is going on inside of us than our thoughts.
And through understanding what our emotions are telling us, we can more easily access our intuitive capacities, which can guide us and lead us to happiness and can also alert us when something is awry.
I believe that intuition is an inner knowing that cannot be proven, but also cannot be questioned. It just is.
Accessing intuition is essential to the higher levels of creative work, whether poetry or science, which is what I believe caused Einstein to make his famous comment, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
7. Find a supportive community: It may seem that because so much about connecting with the soul is about going inward, that community and engagement with others would be unimportant.
But without community, any wisdom gleaned from such soul-searching would not have a chance to impact others, and to benefit the one sharing by getting a chance to expand on their personal experiences.
It is difficult to remain grounded without the support and contact of other humans, and it can be easy to detach from the world too much or go into a spiral of depression, isolation and arrogance.
Connecting with others around food, creative projects, or just to talk about current goings-on in life can nourish the soul like nothing else. Make sure to focus gatherings on connection, instead of competition and to find others who want to cultivate soulfulness in their lives.
Being able to share our deepest thoughts, feelings, and experiences with another human being is one of the most valuable bonds that can be experienced, and suffice to say, it has amazing healing potential as well.
Taking the time to nourish soulful connections with others will be a boon in stressful times as well and can create a safety net for rough patches.
In doing the above seven practices, you will feed your soul.
What are the benefits of nourishing your soul, you may ask? Well, a sense of inner peace can certainly be one. Inspiration, for writers or artists is found through cultivating a more soulful life. It can lead to more contact with your intuitive intelligence and a sense of harmony and flow in the creative process.
Everyone’s path in connecting with the soul is as unique as each soul and bound to unearth qualities and experiences that are special and specific. Do you feel as if something is missing? Connecting with soul is one way to stop searching and listen for the answers that lie within.
Soulful practice, to me, is essential to finding balance in a world on overdrive, to let go of the constant pursuit of happiness and success, and to find the serenity and peace that have always existed within each of us.
To help you start connecting with your soul, here is a poem to inspire peace within.
Be Here, Be Now
Be here,
Be now,
It matters not
When or how,
Be here,
Be now.
The farmer knows
When to milk the cow,
The farmer knows,
Which fields to plow,
Be here
Be now.
The birds fly
Without thinking how
The oak tree grows
Without a sound
Be here
Be now.
The only secret
Is to allow
The breath breathes you,
In and out.
Be here
Be now.
It matters not
When or how,
Be here
Be now.
*****
Claire Boyce is a poet, artist, musician, wanderer, dreamer, fashionista, composer of her own graceful and absurd reality, and explorer of both conscious and unconscious realms. She possesses a creative soul, artistic eye, and intellect that hovers delicately somewhere between genius and insanity.
#BeHereNow
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