Have you ever encountered your own soul? It’s the weirdest experience really. It’s never what I think it’s going to be. I imagine encountering some beautiful and vastly wise being who has words of wisdom for me and magically makes everything better.
When it really happens it is more profound and intense than that.
The other day I was teaching at the Rhys Thomas Institute of Energy medicine and it was heart chakra weekend. So we were doing a lot of heart opening exercises and I was feeling all mushy and squishy. The heart is also odd territory, not what you think it would be. I used to think when I opened my heart that I would be happy all the time. But mostly, I just cry, feel tender hearted and vulnerable.
At any rate, Rhys was doing a crystal bowl meditation and I was sacked out on the floor with the students not thinking of anything, just feeling the energy flow and I slipped into a dream. It came on me very suddenly and unexpectedly. In my dream, I was walking into the basement of a house and it was a sort of dirty, nasty basement. In that icky basement, I saw a beautiful object. It was a glowing egg of energy, pulsing and vibrating. It was made of light and sound and it was talking to me.
It was made of colors I have never seen before, and can’t even really remember, never mind describe. The noise it made was something between a song and a word and I knew in that moment what it was saying. It had the answer to all my questions. It held the secrets of the universe and my life purpose. It was vibrating too, quaking really.
I felt total awe. Waves of love washed over me and also fear. I think that is what “awe” is really, a combination of love and fear. I adored it and was also terrified of the message, it made everything I had to do so clear.
Now in real time, this all took only a second and then my mind kicked in and I thought, “Hey, wait a minute, I think this is me! I think this is my own soul!”
And in that second, the egg and it’s song vanished. It disappeared. The odd thing was that I knew it was still there, I just couldn’t see it or hear it anymore. And I gasped, as a feeling of loss, longing and joy overwhelmed me.
So funny how our consciousness works. As soon as my mind started up, I lost my ability to perceive my own soul. That is why so many spiritual traditions focus on getting the mind out of the way. And yet somehow in that moment, everything aligned so that my mind did get out of the way for about thirty seconds and my own soul peeped through that curtain of consciousness.
I carried the joy of that experience with me all that day and still feel it.
My soul moments never happen when I want them to, they can’t be ordered up. They just occur spontaneously. And what came through was so much simpler and purer then anything my stoopid monkey brain can invent. I knew with absolute clarity in that moment then every ounce of suffering I have ever experienced in my life has come about because I was not accepting myself for who I really am. It was so simple. When I try to be something I am not, when I lie to myself and others about who I am, I suffer. I suffer deeply and painfully. And when I just surrender to being me, magic, love, energy, wisdom flows through me into the world on a wave of joy.
I still feel shaken and moved by that experience. I guess a little ounce of pure soul energy is the best tonic on the planet. Can we bottle this??? And yet we can’t, when we grasp and cling it slips away…
So of course, even though I just had this experience, I still am running my racket of trying not to be me. Of feeling bad that I am not more like someone else. I should be thinner, younger, smarter, richer, more organized, neater and more responsible. I should work harder. I should be perfect. I should be less empathic, emotional, sensitive, anxious and moody. I am too kind, chaotic, lazy and needy. All of this crappy dialog runs through my consciousness 24/7 like a sewer pipe through the garden of Eden. And it causes me nothing but pain and suffering.
Was not that glowing, singing egg the most beautiful thing in the universe? And wasn’t that me? So why spare one single moment feeling BAD about being all that?
I think this is the universal question, isn’t it? The key to unlocking the human mystery. The original sin is that of forgetting our own perfection and of feeling like somehow we are not ok.
The poet Rumi says it way better than I do.
“Oh soul,
you worry too much.
You have seen your own strength.
You have seen your own beauty.
You have seen your golden wings.
Of anything less,
why do you worry?
You are in truth
the soul, of the soul, of the soul.”
