On Soul’s Revolutionary Road: Witnessing Another’s Unfolding.
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To support each other’s soul’s uniquely messy and ravishing unfolding, it’s vital to know that our soul needs to be witnessed.
Our soul is, in many ways, a troublemaker, and does not run from trouble. But the egoic nature of the psyche does not like trouble, discomfort or messes of any kind.
The soul, in contrast, seeks trouble of the best kind, not gratuitously, but with an aim, a telos for authenticity. And in this way, the soul angles for trouble to shape it and temper it strong. To make it reveal more and more of its natural-born essence, until what was once wrapped tightly on the inside, becomes the gifts we reveal on the outside and deliver as fiercely compassionate service to others.
So, our soul does not want, ever, to be straightened around. Normalized. Fixed. Toned down. Changed or contorted into something more manageable or comfortable for ourself or others. Or worse, manipulated into being well-behaved, posing a real threat of altogether ducking the soul-rending difficulties of mere existence.
On the contrary, our soul aims to deepen its deliciously odd particularity and essentiality. Into our soul’s wounds to heal them and through that healing, into what was encoded in our soul — carrying the gift of our soul’s purpose on the earth.
This, our soul’s gift we carry, is the mythopoetic image with which we were born. And the vehicle through which we are destined to inhabit our true nature, on this unruly and gorgeous adventure.
Soul needs to be acknowledged free of saccharine sentimentality, with the force of fierce yet warm and loving eyes that behold all that is our soul. And here’s what so many don’t really get:
Soul shows itself
in every emotion,
every embodiment
and deep sigh,
every tear,
soul reveals its telos, its aim
toward making wholeness,
especially in our expressions
charged strong with feeling,
perseverant and seemingly relentless.
For soul’s aim is to fully embody
on the earth,
in you, as you,
presenting itself
as an animal does,
soul shows stripes first,
explanations not needed
when we have the eyes to see soul
and the heart — the coeur-age — to feel,
to feel into another’s depths
of beauty and suffering,
knowing that one begets the other,
the flower and the scent
are in sacred reciprocity.
Soul wants to sink us down into the ground of our being, where it’s fecund and rich, damp and ripe, ready for flourishing, continually opening and deepening into more of who we are, and what we are here for. To do so, our soul needs a witness in the other. An empathic, fiercely loving, solidly present, yet soft, warm and open witness.
A witness that knows our soul is also feral, that it does not present itself front and center like the egoic aspects of the psyche do.
Soul is moon-like,
softly glowing
silver in its depths,
subtle in rich darkness,
not of the demanding,
blazing heat of the sun,
bright in your eyes,
but rather cat-like,
soul watches,
tracks the scent of the real,
and discerns the difference
to guide and inform
the trajectory our lives,
tracking true.
So when we love somebody and they’re struggling, our approach to our loved one often must be as we would approach a moonlit, shimmering wild thing.
We approach the ever-shaping soul of another loved one with raw reverence, our broken-open heart in our hands, knowing where we end and the other begins, knowing we are in the presence of what it is to be authentically human. Messy and depthfully beautiful. So tenderly and dangerously ensouled.
As a very present witness, we might find we spontaneously bow our head, hand over heart, tears in our eyes, feeling it’s just that sacred to empathically witness another soul’s unfurling. It is, actually, a revolution.
***
Melissa La Flamme is a visionary artisan of cultural evolution. As an author, poet, Jungian & shamanic psychotherapist and troublemaker, she kindles soul’s smoldering longing for everything real. She helps hack and track the smell of our longing to fully inhabit our life. She shows us how to enact our own prison break, from the inner and outer lockdowns we have unknowingly built. Melissa teaches the soul’s clandestine trade. The trade of the code-breaker of our one authentic life. The way of the Holy Hacker of our soul. The one writhing alive in our glistening, raving heart, vulnerable, ravished, undone and messy in a world where anything but is the safe way to belong. Visit her at her website, and on Facebook.
***
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