Oh, what a friend we have in our body. She feels for us, thinks for us, cares for us in ways we are not aware, even as we ignore, neglect and betray her. It’s as though God wants to cradle us in arms so loving, we cannot even detect her presence.

Our body is our connection to the outer world, our interface with everything and everyone we meet. Our body is our connection with our internal self, with our inner world of feeling, choosing, creating meaning. Slow moving, non-judgmental, inclusive, patient, our body knows before we do what is best for us, what is not. Her feeling component companions us throughout our day, signaling joy and pain and disappointment and comfort. Her thinking component connects us to the world of spirit and ideas and eternal wisdom.

Spirit and matter dance within her in interlocking energies, releasing soul and sexuality and infinite possibility. She is a wise guide, careful, watchful, discerning. Only our decision not to feel, not to allow her wisdom to shield us, can untangle her protective hold on us. She stands by us, waiting, during troubling times, when we choose unhealthy relationships, when we sabotage our physical and emotional well-being, when we do whatever it takes to survive loss, fear, and abandonment. She holds us until we can feel again.

Our body serves as gatekeeper and soulcatcher. She knows when we draw too heavily on one energy over another. Some of us will our way through circumstances, relationships, careers,  paying no attention to what our body tries to tell us. Some of us are more in tune with the urgings of soul, the sweet lead of feelings.

When we are too much in our will, when we go against the natural feeling value in the body, when we refuse to consider messages or interventions, like illness, misfortune, broken relationships — when we choose will power over the slower movement of soul, reflection, feeling — our body becomes exhausted, robbed of zest and joy.

She knowingly intercedes, floods us with feelings, dreams, unexpected happenings to get our attention. If we are in touch with our emotional and spiritual self, we slow down our frantic drivenness, get in touch with our feelings, check out our direction, get ourselves back in balance. Our body knows better than we how to listen to deeper needs.

I would not have been so angry with my body as an adolescent if I could have held this awareness of myself as miracle. I would not have taunted her that she was the wrong shape, that she was less than others who had a larger IQ, that her beauty was marred by the birthmark on my leg. I would have stood in awe before her, amazed by my opportunity to walk on this earth.

I find wonder in quantum physics’ view of our bodies as localized occurrences of vibrating energy.  Energy, or spirit, comes together for a brief moment, localizes as our body, carries us through life, allows us to interact with all other forms of vibrating energy, then disintegrates back into pure energy. Our moment in time, our opportunity to participate in this miracle called life, is an instance of localized vibrating spirit.

We would all be mystics if we could hold this awareness of ourselves as spiritual beings on a human journey as we move and interact in this vast universe. We would all be saints if we could lean into this awareness and be compassion for all we meet.

I read a book in college by the naturalist, Loren Eisley, called Immense Journey. It was the author’s imaginings of himself as the Flint River as it made its way through the countryside. He became the river, saw and felt the landscape, the vegetation, the life he passed from the river’s perspective, as if he were himself the river. I would take such a journey through my incredible body, become one with its energies and feel and see the marvels they are.

I’m masculine and feminine energy — focusing, organizing, doing, directing, as well as feeling, creating, being, receiving energy. I’m will energy and soul energy — driving, objective, quick to judge as well as discerning, personal, inclusive, compassionate energy. I’m metabolizing energy, processing food and blood flow and cellular transformations.

I’m skin pigment, hair color, body odor, body fat. I’m love and anger and laughter and tears. I carry within me sickness and wellness and learn from each. Energies all, dancing and changing and flowing and breathing. An immense journey indeed.

We do not have to hold this awareness of how our body works, or of ourselves as spirit, as  energy, as much as we have to allow our body to hold us in her awareness. Our body knows better than we our deeper needs. We have a friend as close as our skin.

What is spirituality anyway?

Perspective is a grace that comes with age, with life experiences, with wisdom-grown-deep. It is one of the hallmarks of the spiritual life.

We each live a universal story that winds and intersects its way through our own personal story. There’s a wounding of innocence, a healing or understanding, and a coming to an experience of wholeness that unites. This occurs in spirals, over and over in different ways, deepening into an ever-widening perspective of all this as one movement from different vantage points.

This occurs in every life, at different levels or intensity, in different circumstance and periods of history. The spiritual movement is the same. Seeing our story as part of the larger story of human kind offers courage, resilience and meaning to our own walk in the dark.

When wounding happens early in life, a person develops defensives and distractions to protect their wounded child within. It takes a long time to dissolve and integrate these protective walls or energies back into our natural energy flow. When wounding happens over a lifetime, in natural, everyday woundings, it comes with wrinkles, wisdom and, hopefully, a lightness or sense of humor about things.

Spirituality is about becoming more comfortable with the rhythm of this experience of wounding and deeper awareness; coming to see it as, not only part of life’s normal journey, but as something that enriches and enlivens our capacity to experience life in general. Our wounds hold the blessing of our being opened to the non-physical world of spirit so we can integrate more spirit into our person. How we respond to this so called blessing colors our spirituality.

Our early years provide us with all the energy and entitlement required to embrace with full exuberance every experience we can get our hands on. Our middle years provide space and time to sort out the importance of and meaning of the choices we have made about how to use this energy and how to embrace this world.

Our later years slow us down, weight us down, just long enough so the grieving process, the letting go process, has the time it needs to befriend us and to not frighten us. Our intuition deepens. We become more comfortable with listening to and trusting the non-physical world. We move ever so slowly, as if swayed by this non-physical presence, toward our last, and perhaps our greatest, performance — our final-letting-go.

All of this comes with gifts and challenges. Whether it’s through a wounding and healing process, or through the normal aging process, our perspective softens, becomes less judgmental, more compassionate. As we experience wounding and allow healing, we become more curious about other people’s stories, how they did, what they learned. We don’t waste energy on regrets, but use these energies to enjoy the little things of every day life.

When all this happens naturally, our spirituality flourishes naturally as well. There is an open and free dialogue with the imagination, a curiosity about new metaphors and perspectives. A healthy spirituality is free to investigate these new metaphors, new ways of expressing emerging truths without threatening the tradition given one by one’s family. There is no reason to block the new.

If we are burdened by others’ biases – religious certitudes, demands made on our natural preferences – our spirituality gets sidetracked from its natural ability to assist us in the life tasks we face. This can actually foster in us a reaction against life as trustworthy. We cannot trust our own experience or intuition, for fear of what others will think of us. 

Soul grounds our spirituality in life. Soul dialogues with the non-physical world of spirit; asks the transcendent to inform the soul while it is in the body. Soul seeks to connect with the transcendent in the world, not separate from it.   

Spirituality devoid of soul tends to focus on transcendence, perfection, righteousness, places the goal beyond human frailty. It suggests that the meaning of our suffering and wounds lies beyond this life, that the earth is not our home and the body is not our friend. Soul softens this perspective. Soul draws meaning from our struggles, suggests that our suffering gets us more in touch with our humanity, makes us more aware of what it means to be fully alive, not less.

With Jesus the Christ, said Paul the apostle in 2nd Corinthians, it “was never Yes and No”, as it is with us. “With him,” said Paul, “it was all Yes.” Yes to the wounding in life, yes to the healing possible, yes to the brokenness of the world, yes to being broken by the world himself – all Yes.

It is all one movement, cannot be separated out. Jesus taught that, and the Buddha, and Muhammad – as did all the wisdom teachers. Blessing comes with wounding; they come as a pair, inseparable, one movement. Our spirituality, if it is grounded in soul’s deep commitment to life, will witness to this life truth.  

Soul reaching in, spirit reaching out and up, each dancing in rich communion, always in motion, working together, never stagnant. The longing and the reaching and the finding in continuous flow, up and out and in, again and again, up and out and back in again. Spirit that loves soul’s depth, soul that loves spirit’s soaring radiance — unafraid and alive, the two move together.

Several ancient creation stories speak of God’s loneliness, God’s longing before creation. God “longed” and this longing, this need to connect and to be connected on God’s part, created life as we know it. Other stories speak of God being “roused,” from within, that this was what sent God seeking other. This early oral tradition suggests that this longing, this reaching out to connect, is something universal in man, implanted from the very beginning.

I suggest soul is this longing in God and in man, for life, for one another. Soul is the medium between spirit and matter — the longing each has to connect with, to touch, to be touched by, to be in relation with the other. This divine discontent, this divine longing and restlessness, “created man in his own image,” so man’s essence, too, reflects this longing, this discontent, at its core.

Isn’t this what Buddha said: “Life is discontent, life is suffering”? There is a restlessness, a longing in man that does not cease. I see this in soul. Buddha’s second noble truth is that  discontent or suffering is caused by clinging and attachment; desires are endless and distract from the path. Desires, run amok, make one want what doesn’t exist anyway.  For me, the dark side of soul – everything has its dark side – is possessiveness, a desire to control and dominate.

Soul cannot adequately be defined. An image that comes to mind, when I think of soul, is Stephen Speilberg’s “E.T.” with his finger, dimly lit, raised in longing to connect. Light, reaching out to darkness, darkness reaching for the light, yearning, wanting the fullness that true connecting brings. Spirit reaching for matter, matter reaching for spirit, with soul being how they connect. Talking about soul is talking in metaphor.

The body, matter, is heavy, grounded in the things of earth, full of emotion and complicated urges and drives. Spirit is airy, would steal us away from the body, have us caught up in ideas, tempt us to leave the earth behind. Soul wants to bring these two together, to feel, to reflect, to experience most of all.

The body can move through an event and not experience it. The mind can move through an event and not experience it. The soul wants to experience it, to be pulled headlong into it, to be absorbed by every detail of its character and story. Soul is the inner angel who embraces each experience as it enters us. What is imagined, felt, celebrated, brooded over is more important to soul than what is visible and collectable.

Buddha said that we are “souls on a journey of awakening.” This implies a sensitivity, an agility to be able to walk simultaneously in the eternal realm of spirit and the temporal realm of earth. Soul holds this reality for us, allows us to experience both while standing on the earth. Soul is how we experience wholeness in our lifetime, how we come to Center and experience the silence at the core of us, the wholeness at the core of life.

Soul is the pull between our remembrance of wholeness and our ground in matter. Both are vital for soul – the sacredness and the earthiness of life. Questions of meaning and purpose take soul on a journey through the invisible world while the beauty of earth delights soul’s fascination with the visible world.

To be soulful is to be filled with deep feeling or emotion, to be connected in an intuitive, felt way with something or someone, to wander events and feelings like a labyrinth until we find the center and the meaning of them. Every step is important to soul, a part of the whole, none more important than the other, each essential to the journey. Soul is a starting point, an opening, different for each person, with the journey different for each.

Soul tracks the human journey on its continuum, from its roots in the material to its ultimate evolution into the immaterial — from unconscious matter to conscious spirit – delighting in the longing, the reaching, the extending of self it takes in order for this to happen.

By paying attention to the non-physical world through introspection, self-awareness, attention to dreams, identifying purpose, plus other internal exercises, man becomes more inner directed than outer directed, more spiritual than animal, directed by the presence of the sacred within. Images and symbols speak the language of soul and nurture this internal, intuitive reality.

Plato taught that the soul resides in the body and is freed at death. For him, the body was a prison of sorts; the soul was something to be saved. For post-modern writers like James Hillman and others, it is the soul that saves the body, saves man, by allowing man to experience divine energy during his lifetime; by releasing more conscious light into the unconscious body.

This suggests that it is not in death that we come face to face with the divine, but in our lifetime, in our body, through the conscious soul that resonates with wholeness wherever it can find it. The wholeness we experience, in beauty, in reflection, in love — in life — evokes a remembrance in us of the wholeness at our core, present from birth, from before birth perhaps.

If we accept this as our birthright, that we are eternal spiritual energy in a human form, on a human journey, this remembrance evoked in us is the sacred in us. When this remembrance is evoked, we experience it, briefly. Walking in pristine nature, a lovely piece of art, music, prayer – this evokes the sacred at our core.

The sacred is “roused” in us, reaches out for us; we reach back. For me, this reaching, this finding, this moment of intimacy is soul.

Soul is a felt presence, in a room, in a person, in nature, in a piece of music. It is a haunting, an awareness that something magnetic is pulling on you, absorbing you into its essence, as if your essence feels home in its essence. It is a resonance, a coming together of sacred and ordinary energies, the eternal and the transitional, each longing for the other.

You know you are touched by soul when the deepest part of you is totally engaged — lost almost in the feeling of connectedness. You feel refreshed, resilient, empowered. There is no theology to it, no cerebral explanation. You just come to Center alive in the moment. Even in moments of deep sadness, there is a feeling of being held at our core, the awareness that we are part of something larger passing through us.

This is the force of the immortal soul moving in us, stirring in us, awakening in us a memory of the wholeness of which we are part. Something happens in the imagination, in the heart of the one who experiences it. It is not of the mind, not intellectual, but felt, experienced, an intuitive knowing in the body. Like the combination of a lock, the numbers tumble and then “click,” you know you have reached the exact moment you seek, even without knowing it was this moment you sought.

Another metaphor that may describe soul is that glorious button Shug speaks of to Celie in The Color Purple: “There is a place in you,” says Shug, “If you can touch that, you will never again be dependent on someone telling you who you are.” Once you experience soul and trust its wisdom in you, you can’t be a slave or an object or an inadequate person, no matter what others tell you or do to you. You can’t ever be the same again. You know you belong to something deep and fine, larger than life yet activated by life.

We speak of soul residing in a thing as ordinary as food – soul food, that food passed on to us by the black experience. When black people enslaved generations ago cooked and tasted their soul food, they felt themselves connected with divine energy rather than the debilitating slave energy imposed on them. It allowed them — freed them up — to remember their worth, their essence as human beings.

Soul unlocks the feeling of wholeness in a thing. Something in us is touched on a deep level, at the level of essence, and we know it, we can’t escape it. For an instant, we feel whole ourselves, not splintered or stressed, but lifted up and graced by our higher angel. Like winged creatures, we long to follow soul’s lead till morning, till the light shines through the mystery of it and lets us know what it is trying to say to us, the gift it is trying to leave with us.

“Everyday life is porous,” Thomas Moore says in The Soul’s Religion, “full of holes that open onto the sacred.” Only one steeped in soul can see through the distinctions made in this life between the secular and the sacred, to allow all experience to touch and inspire their higher selves. Life is rich and alive, if only we will allow it to touch us in more than superficial ways.

We’ve spoken of how Archaic Man had a profound but unconscious sense of the sacred. Post-modern man drowns in his race for secular gains. His conscious awareness of the sacred in daily life is often stunted. “All that is needed,” says Eliade, “is a modern man with a sensibility less closed to the miracle of life; and the experience of renewal would revive for him when he built a house or entered it for the first time,” or created something, or performed a meaningful ritual.

This is the activity of soul — to unmask the sacred, the eternal in things, to decipher the messages from the universe, to interpret our dreams and experiences. Like a dream catcher, soul catches our experiences and holds them close so we can feel them. Soul collects our gratitudes and holds them, too, until we experience a fall from grace and need to be reminded of them. Soul helps us to sit with something until we get it.

Soul stirs and mixes the rainbow colors of our life until we get just the right frequency of light to create the meaning we need out of them. Soul tells us stories until we know who we are and can claim our deepest selves. Soul contributes to our resilience so we can move beyond tragedy and know that we are more than what happens to us.

Soul sniffs out the beauty of the earth so it can heal us. Soul touches us in the present moment, in the Center, through the energy centers of our body. Soul stops me on my early morning walk and reminds me, in the words of Thomas Merton, “Don’t think. Look.” Don’t miss the dance of nature. Don’t lose this moment of sacred encounter.

When I walk, I pass a neighborhood duck pond. If I allow it, I am drawn in, pulled into the experience of it. I breathe it in, take in the ducks and the wild geese and the stillness of the water and of time. I am lifted up and quieted down at the same moment. I am absorbed into the feeling of the pond, as if it is my home as well, my own body. That meeting point between the energy of the pond and the matter of my own body is blurred. I languish in the soul. It begins my day.

The longing of the divine for the human, of the human for the divine, is soul’s love song. It is the nectar that sweetens and deepens all the days of our lives.

If Center is that mysterious intersection or encounter between ourselves and divine energy, wherever and whenever this occurs, Soul is how we connect with this intersection with the divine, the personal face we put on it, the personal experience we have of it.

Like a glittering diamond or prism of light, Center and Soul are interconnecting metaphors and realities experienced from different vantage points.

Soul is that part of us that is relational, emotional, that connects with and contains experience. Soul digests experience into our psychology and mythology. Soul is how we talk about experience, soul mate around it.

Soul is how we open ourselves to life passing through us, releasing the light from the darkness of our matter, from the darkness of our struggle.

Soul dips us into the primordial formless, takes us down into our earthiness, enables us to rise again with more depth and meaning.

Knowing what direction to go in makes all the difference. Perhaps it becomes clearer with the wandering, but I wish I had known when I started out. I tried so hard to grow up when, all along, I should have been growing down. I wish I had known to tell my children that.

As a child, I looked to the adults around me to get an idea of what it meant to be grown-up. Now that I am an adult myself, I smile to think the models of maturity I chose to emulate didn’t know then any more than I know now. We inherit a tribal image of what it looks like to be “mature” — to be settled successfully in a career, to be responsible choice-makers and committed partners, to have the wisdom to know what our spouse and children need and the grace to give it to them.

We take on this image as we would a borrowed garment, from the outside in: We marry and assume we’ll know how to make it work, we have children and assume we’ll know how to be loving and effective parents. We try to grow up — take on roles expected of us — rather than allow ourselves to naturally, authentically grow down into the duties and circumstances our particular life presents us, on our individual timetable.

The notion of growing down into our life is a gift to me from James Hillman, a Jungian analyst, author of The Soul’s Code. We receive a particular body, family tree and life circumstance that tie us to the earth and create a container in which we experience living. The trick is to move ever more deeply into our own unique mix until we discover who we are, what we want. It’s not about copying society’s standards or comparing success. It’s not about making our family proud. It’s about discovering our own unique calling and meaning.

The problems I see with the notion of growing up:  If I don’t live up to others’ expectations, I feel guilty, inadequate, when it may be that I’m just not emotionally ready to take on something. I’m  where I am, where I need to be and can only be on my journey. If I’m heckled about the need to grow up, I feel judged, criticized for who I am, compared to others who may be in different circumstances, need to be on a different journey, to learn different things than I do.

If I’m encouraged to grow down, I feel supported in my effort to become who I am, more able to affirm myself and my personal pace, not caught in comparing myself to others. I’m not stifled by the fear of disappointing anyone. There’s no end to it as there is in “He’s all grown up.” I get the message, “Easy does it,” and “Go at your own speed” rather than “Measure up!” and “Stand up like a man!”

When young people don’t think they’re “making it” in their own or in others’ eyes — according to traditional mores of growing up — they often fall into “faking it.” They lose their grounding, their footing on the earth, as they opt for ways to escape the shame of not measuring up, not meeting some external standard out there for which they were probably not emotionally equipped.

They become so focused on looking successful, adequate, grown-up, they lose touch with being who they are. They’re robbed of learning the lessons they need to learn. They become disconnected from soul, disoriented, unable to develop the gifts and talents they were intended to contribute to the world – all out of love and loyalty to their family tribe.

As the shame or the escapism takes over, they isolate, aren’t comfortable being around anyone who might know the failure and confusion they feel. The garment/image of what maturity “should” look like, placed on them by the tribe, doesn’t fit, so they experiment with other things, like drugs or self-destructive living. They “act out” rather than pull in and take stock of what’s happening to them. They move further out, on the edges, where no one can touch them.

Life has a way of being there for our lost children even when we cannot. Some calamity will arise, a legal tangle perhaps, some random event that uncovers the truth of their running. Everything falls apart. Sitting with the broken pieces of their life, they are forced down into the circumstance they were trying to avoid. Life offers them, and us, another chance, another look.

We all stand, together, where they are, not where we thought they were, needed them to be, but where they are. Down, into the pit with them, into the mess we created together. That’s where their spiritual journey begins. That’s where their soul emerges like a phantom from the depths and screams in pain, “I’m starving. Pay attention to me.”

What rises from of the ashes, what works its way up from the black muck of crisis is something real and human, something we can all get our arms around. It sometimes takes a fall to see better where we stand on the ground. Our child gets to know themself better and we begin to really see them as separate individuals.

What would I tell my children if I had it to do again? Find something you love about yourself, find something you’re passionate about doing, love what you have to offer the world. Stand in your own place. Take your time. Don’t compare; it robs important energy.What would I tell myself? Throw away narrow expectations and family “shoulds”,  delight in your child’s fantasies and dreams, encourage your child’s uniqueness, don’t compare, and listen, listen, listen. 

Maybe it’s all semantics, just words, to squabble over “growing up” or “growing down.” But words carry energy and direction and meaning. And words are all we have to tell our children we love them just where they are on the journey right now, that there is always time, and that we will always be in their corner, cheering them on.

“My neighbors tell me I waste time by pulling weeds in my yard when a chemical weed killer can do it with one stroke. I like sitting in the grass, listening to nature, pulling weeds one at a time!”

My friend’s remark reflects how many perceive the impractical nature of soulmaking. Persons who are into doing find it difficult to understand those who are more into being. Doing is goal oriented, task oriented, action driven. Being happens beneath the level of the skin, is more subtle, less measured.

Drinking in nature’s performance as it moves across the day, sensing a shift in our partner’s emotional presence, experiencing a sunset in the pores of our skin — this is about being. It’s a quality, a receptivity, an intuitive awareness, an inner going-on that is invisible to others. It serves no purpose but to enhance meaning. It has no tangible result but an enlarged soul.

A person into being honors their activities, not by trying to complete them, but by trying to be present to them, by remembering them while they are doing them. A person into doing enjoys their activities, but most of the enjoyment comes with the feeling of accomplishment, with delighting in the outcome.

It’s a difference of focus: one focuses on the process or experience of something, the other, on the end result. I often find that someone into doing finds it more difficult to be, whereas someone into being can certainly do, but needs time for being in order to be more active. It’s more difficult for a doer to understand or appreiciate a person more into being, whereas both preferences are necessary for a balanced life or a satisfying relationship.

It’s the imbalance or neglect of either that brings an individual or a couple scrambling into my office. It may surface as loneliness or as dissatisfaction or as a conflict in priorities. Dialogue has to happen, whether it’s between the two sides of an individual’s personality or between two individuals in a relationship.

Within the personality, the dialogue is between the complementary aspects of our doing and our being energies: our capacity to focus and activate our dreams and plans, but, also, to enjoy the experience we have just activated. It’s the play between knowledge and wisdom, between our focused and our softer energies, between causing things to happen and experiencing them happen, while they are happening. When the personality is tilted or lopsided in favor of one over the other, an individual is not in touch with his or her full capacity for wholeness and creativity.

Within a relationship between two persons, the dialogue is between the needs, expectations and preferences of each. The partner who favors the being energy may frame it as a loneliness felt when the other remains solely in the doing mode. They long for the doer to slow down, to appreciate the reflective moments of life, to spend emotional time together, to be still together.

The partner who is more into doing energy may express anger with the be-er for not taking more initiative with daily chores, for not taking charge of planning activities or setting common goals. They often feel unappreciated for all the doing, responsible things they contribute to the relationship, thinking the partner who functions more out of a being mode to be less committed.

Both partners, both energies need to be reframed positively as serving to nudge each other toward wholeness. Both energies are vital, one aspect of the whole journey, seen from different vantage points. Learning to appreciate and deal with the differences, experiencing life from the other’s perspective, joining forces rather than judging and discounting one another — these efforts strengthen relationships, not threaten them.

As soul is the pull between spirit and matter, soul pulls between doing and being. The divine longing, the discontent at our core, rouses us into doing, then reflects and relaxes in our being side. Soul wants to experience both the being and the doing, to be caught up in the action and the reflection, to experience every feeling, then sit back and delight in the accomplishment of it.

Our doing keeps us grounded in matter, in the physical world; our being keeps us in touch with the invisible world of wholeness. Both release light in the other. Toiling in the invisible world and in the visible world come together in more insight in what it means to be a human person. Doing and being are starting points from differernt perspectives. One journey, different energies.

Most of the people close to me that have always been into doing seem to come around in later life to appreciate and enjoy the being side of themsevles. It’s part of their spiritual evolvement. Those who have preferred being all along seem to exhibit, in later years, a desire to develop skills they never attempted in their youth. Perhaps this is the pull of soul, the push toward wholeness and completeness.

The sacred is roused in us, reaches out for us; we reach back. That is the doing. The finding, the moment of intimacy is the being. Soul delights in both.