The Golden Thread of Soul
The Way It Is
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
William Stafford
Image: Souling by Anahata Giri
What is the Soul?
What a paradox that we can hold closely and dearly the golden thread of soul, while the concept of soul itself remains beyond definition. Here we explore different ways of picking up the thread of soul. As we deepen our capacity to be ensouled, we reclaim deeper belonging, meaning and purpose, enabling us to bring our soul gifts to the world.
Soul as Mystery
May we step through the portal of mystery, shedding the outer garments of the known small-self, allow the membrane of our naked Self to be permeable to wonder and curiosity, so that we can become ensouled. In this excerpt of her poem Bone, Mary Oliver describes her experience of not-knowing and of being guided by the felt beauty and grace of soul:
1.
Understand, I am always trying to figure out
what the soul is,
and where hidden,
and what shape
and so, last week,
when I found on the beach
the ear bone
of a pilot whale that may have died
hundreds of years ago, I thought
maybe I was close
to discovering something
…
..what the soul is, also
I believe I will never quite know.
Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving,
which is the way I walked on,
softly,
through the pale-pink morning light.
Mary Oliver
We go about our lives, trusting, touching, seeing, listening, feeling our way, loving. These are verbs, words of action, that bring us into the way of soul as a journey and process, more than a destination or thing. Perhaps we need a made-up word for this attuning process: souling.
Souling
“Work with soul is process - alchemy, pilgrimage and adventure.”
Thomas Moore
Just as we know love by loving and being loved, we know the soul by souling and being ensouled. Souling is an experiential way of attuning to the wild or essential self, that is underneath the viewpoint of the ego or small self. Souling is an ongoing, embodied, heart-based, revelatory process of conversation and communion. Souling happens through our body and heart, through our lived experience, through deep emotions and feeling, through our biography and wound, through our joy and longing. Souling is a conscious, living, intelligent presence.
Souling happens on the current edge of your life’s unfolding. If an old grief is calling you, follow that. If dormant creativity is whispering to you, follow that. Souling is found in the here and now, in the immediate felt experience. We turn to what is arising and draw on the deep inner resources of the body, heart, soul, spirit and nature connection, to connect with that emerging edge.
Souling can happen in small, subtle daily experiences, as we slowly deepen and maintain our souling connection. It can also happen in powerful soul encounters and initiatory experiences. A soul encounter is a revelatory experience of a soul image, symbol or story, something sacred, at the very core of one’s life. The compelling truth of this revealed image can initiate us into our deepest life, the life we have not lived, until now.
Souling is not a head-driven, analytical process. Embodied, heart-felt insight is very different from mentally derived ideas. We put aside the cultural overemphasis on mental investigation and step into the deep feeling undercurrent of soul.
We also put aside the small self’s habit of pointing toward external experience, whether joyful or wounding, as the cause of one’s own response. This linear explanation for our inner world is deeply pervasive in modern culture and contributes to a perpetual loop of blame, fear, disempowerment, avoidance, stuckness and a diminishing of our inner knowing. It is a one-way process, a dead end. Souling is a much larger conversation, an interdependent co-creative dialogue between self, soul, spirit, world and nature.
To step into the intuitive slipstream of soul more fully, we may need to work with the small-self’s habitual patterns, often based on unhelpful messages we have absorbed from family or culture. Each of us will have our own conditioned script and ego-habits: the self-effacing behaviour of the person who has learned to hide; the unfinished, abandoned projects of someone who was abandoned as a child; the aggression of someone afraid to show vulnerability; the critic of the world who was betrayed as a child.
These survival strategies are played out in small daily events that seem to confirm this script - until the soul steps in, with tender curiosity. Between the small self and the everyday world, is a third realm, a third way of being, the underlying presence of the flow of soul who calls us into deeper meaning.
Souling as Meaning
Souling gives us access to experiential, embodied meaning that is utterly our own. A beginning premise of a mature inner life is that we see external events as prompts for our inner process of discovered meaning. Through souling, we transform events into meaningful experiences. This requires an internal shift, a conscious choice and willingness to step into the receptive, perceptive flow of soul. With practice, we can step into the perspective of soul, and ask: what would soul say or do? When we step into this souling process, we perceive the unique symbolism that is there for us in every event or experience.
Alone in the wilderness for the first time, with night encroaching, it doesn’t take much to trigger my fear and the broken tent pole does it. Even though I manage to set up the tent, the fears come. At first I am cross that fear is here, I resist it. I cannot feel or hear the voice of soul at all, just Fear. Then I say to myself, Ok, this is it, trust what arises, welcome the fear in. I sit with Fear for hours and it is a kind of torment, but it feels strengthening to open to it.
The next morning I feel light, like a layer has been released and I feel in the soul-stream again. Walking, I sense that my claustrophobic tent of fear last night was like a cocoon and that Fear is the Cocoon that transforms me. At the moment I think that, I see a fat, very hairy, energetic, striped caterpillar crawling quickly across the path in front of me. I give thanks to the reassurance of this lively caterpillar.
What a dance there is between the psyche and the soul, between psychology and soulology, the two deeply entwined. The challenging events of life, physical or psychological ailments, crumbling relationships or loneliness, lack of meaning or purposelessness can bring us into deep feeling and insight. During life’s strong or catalytic experiences, the ego, if we allow it, can soften and surrender to the inner guidance of the soul. On the edges of our own becoming, the soul guides us.
In deep souling work, there is a sort of collapse or eclipse of the ego-self’s hold on reality. This can feel profoundly disruptive and scary as the ego lets go and dissolves. It can also feel deeply empowering as we transition to souling and draw on a deeper well of knowing. The raw material of the felt sensing of soul includes all aspects of the self such as psychological, somatic, mental, emotional and imaginal aspects. In the flowing stream of soulful experiencing, we do not need to rely on maps or externally defined paths. We make our own path by walking it.
Pathmaker, there is no path,
You make the path by walking.
By walking you make the path.
Antonio Machado
The Soul and Spirit
My soul is the bridge between spirit and body and, as such, is a uniter of opposites. Without soul at centre, I would either transcend into spirit or become mired in matter.
Marion Woodman
The soul mediates between the human individual and the greater spiritual whole. Spirit is the infinite, luminous, sacred animating force of the cosmic web. The soul is a golden strand in that web. Or to use another metaphor, in the infinite night sky of spirit, of sacred oneness and wholeness, the soul is a star with your name on it, as described in this poem excerpt:
93 percent stardust,
with souls made of flames,
we are all just stars
that have people names.
Nikita Gill
The soul is an expression of spirit. The soul descends from spirit, to inhabit and animate human form, embedded in place, here on earth.
“ Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
Spirit and soul are on a continuum of light or energy, with no clear demarcation between the two. Our spirit-soul is a luminous self, that brings gifts such as universal love, wisdom and oneness. Our soul-self is a deep self that brings to spirit earth-based values such as love, purpose, place and belonging, understood in intimate relationship with the web of life.
Spiritual and soulful experiences often overlap. Spiritual experiences gives us a foundation of identity that is vast, luminous, whole. Soul, echoing the vast oneness of spirit, operates independently from the events of life as witness. Soul also gives us a foundation of identity that is embedded in our unique place and intimately woven into our life. Being both independent and interwoven, makes soul a powerful and unique messenger, bringing messages from both spiritual oneness and from the intimate relationships of the web of life.
Soul likes intimacy; spirit is uplifting. Soul gets hairy, spirit is bald. Spirit sees, even in the dark. Soul feels its way, step by step, or needs a dog. Spirit shoots arrows; Soul takes them in the chest..Spirit likes wholes; soul likes eaches.”
James Hillman
The Language of Soul is Image
“What is to come will be created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself. Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfil the way that is in you.”
Carl Jung
Image: My soul name in symbols: Anahata River Soulwoman
Carl Jung believed that while the soul was unknowable, we could receive the expression of soul and of the psyche through images. Jung’s active imagination process involves actively engaging with images that arise from deep within the psyche. The ego does not change the images, but treats these images as real unto themselves. Here images includes symbols, archetypes, poetry, sensations, movements and metaphors, that arise in our dreams, art, meditations, responses to nature and in everyday circumstances. We do this through evoking reverie or meditation, then letting the images speak through us in a stream of consciousness, that may be written, spoken, drawn, danced, enacted or sung.
It is important to distinguish here between active imagination and fantasy. Cynthia Bourgeault describes the imaginal process as “direct perception through the eye of the heart, not through mental reflection or fantasy.” Active imagination is a way of engaging with what is already present within us, as described here by Rilke:
The work of the eyes is done.
Go now and do the heart-work
on the images imprisoned
within you.
Rilke
In the process of souling through active imagination, the arising images are exquisitely attuned to the self’s unfolding and are often recognised viscerally, emotionally and deeply. Significant and unique meaning can be powerfully coalesced into a single image or we may receive many images in a lifetime. As we consciously engage with these images, this evokes psychological growth and integration, and a deepening relationship with the sovereignty, wisdom and love of the soul.
As soon as Magpie walks into my mind, intellectual doubt vanishes and my heart pounds. I am worm-sized and mute. I am deep in the fertile, dark soil, as Magpie stabs and kills a worm next to me. He looks at me with an intimidating and piercing eye and says: “Surrender your humanness.” The next time Magpie comes, is the day before my vision quest. I am the worm. Magpie stabs me and I am dying, while the magpie stands over me as he fiercely and fully inhabits his place. In my journal I summarise this in two words: dying and seeing. On the first day of my vision quest, I die to all in my human story that holds me back. On the third day a profound vision comes. Dying and seeing.
Soul as Belonging
“The home we are looking for in this world is within us all along.
The lost home that we are seeking is ourselves; it is the story
we carry within our soul.”
Michael Meade
Bill Plotkin defines soul as a person’s ecological niche within the web of life. This does not mean that all humans as a species have the same eco-niche. Rather, each individual human will have their own true, unique place in creation. This is a place where the soul is fully alive, radiantly occupying the fullness of the deep, essential soul-self.
Whilst this is an ecological definition of soul, the process of coming to know our own soul is a psychological and spiritual journey. We come to know the soul through what Plotkin calls our own mythopoetic identity, a mythical archetype of our own soul-self, revealed through symbol, image and metaphor. The mythopoetic identity is not the soul itself, but is how our human consciousness communicates our unique eco-niche to us.
On the third day of fasting and questing, I had wept and sung my longing until I was left empty, bereft. I feel raw, lost. I look up and the dead branch over the river shape-shifts. I see a hooded cloak, a holy woman. She has three glowing white fronds over her arm and when I ask she shows me gifts of love, wisdom and the knowing of hidden things. Then I see that she is holding a stick, just like the one I had been beating with for two days. I sob, knowing she is me. She tells me she has no need of a name, but the name comes in a stream of consciousness as I write down the experience. It is my name. I am here to protect and love the sacred river of life. I feel stunned as I weep and laugh on the river bank.
The soul shows us the larger, deeper story we are living, the archetypal myth that underlies our personal biography. The myth shows us who we are on a level much deeper than any social or vocational role. Soul points to our essential ways of being. The soul is reflected in the deep structure at the core of the psyche. It may be that in our lives we have reached a level of social, personal or vocation success, but something feels unmet inside us. When we turn to the soul, we may realise we hardly know ourselves at all. This is the journey that soul takes us on: to retrieve the essential unique self within you, so you can live the myth within you.
Soul gives us Purpose
…To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others…
David Whyte
Alongside its unwavering love, the soul brings a great gift: the exquisitely unique inner purpose that lies within each one of us. As is the way in fairytales and myths, we so often need to become lost before we are found. Yet the soul knows the way through and is waiting for us to catch up with it.
I see us each holding a lit up soul-thread, luminous in the surrounding darkness. We walk, accompanied by the light and dark, by insight and mystery, knowing and not-knowing. As we take each step, we contribute to the morphic field of soul’s beauty and possibility. Here and now, step by step, we attune to our own unfolding edge, as we walk in the inspiration of the light, or the wild and fertile not-knowing of the darkness. We do not let go, but follow, follow, the golden thread of soul.
Anahata Giri June 2022
Anahata Giri knows her purpose is to love and serve the web of life. It is an unfolding mystery how this takes shape. She is a soul guide and helps people to know the love, meaning, purpose, belonging and unique gifts of their own soul. She offers a one to one mentoring immersion with 60+ practices, the Soul Purpose Immersion as well as the Wild Heart Wild Soul Retreats and the One Heart Silent Retreats.