discernment Archives - Page 2 of 3

September 1, 2020February 12, 2022

News from Jules | 08.31.20 | This Wild Ambition

I have a vague memory of a mouthful of thick, chalky dust. But, I was 4, just about to turn 5, that summer of 1987. So, the photos are much clearer than the memories.

After a week camping in the woods, I hiked 6 whole miles beside my Mom down from a lake in the Wallowa mountain range. My first hiking personal record. Of course, with those little legs, it probably took six hours, or more! And then in the home stretch, my tired legs tripped on a root. I face planted on the trail. In the photo, I am covered in dust from head to toe. No smile. Just a hardcore hiker’s stare.

As soon as I could hold my head up, I was in my parents’ pack and outside — rain or shine, hot or cold.

Growing up in the outdoors, I knew it wasn’t easy, it took work to be out there. Bugs, cuts, splinters, sunburns, fatigue, rain — a lot of it sucked. And then there were breathtaking rewards like lakes, wildflowers, mountains, fresh air, space. All together, it added up to adventure. Or so I thought. But, I was missing the point.

It wasn’t just about the adventure, the thrill and the challenge of outdoor recreation. I was being actively raised to have a relationship with nature. What I now see as one of the greatest gifts a parent can give, besides life, safety and love.

And in this relationship with nature a connection to my own spirit, and thus my own sense of spirituality.

Just as my parents had grown theirs after they uprooted from Boston and transplanted to Oregon in 1972. Immediately falling in love with Mt. Hood and everything at the next level, they spent the next six years before kids seeking their highest potential — physically, mentally and spiritually.

They may have felt the same awe as I do now:

Being dwarfed by giant Sequoias and Redwoods in old growth forests.
Seeing Mt. Rainier peaking out from the clouds in the distance.
Sitting beside the lapping waves, always ebbing and flowing as they touch the rocky shore.
Watching hermit crabs tickle an anemone while crawling around a tide pool.

This profound thought has echoed with me for weeks: Nature just knows. It just is. It just exists. None of it has an “identity.”

None of it is studying career and life discernment workbooks, wondering how to live out its calling. This “enlightened” human thing some of us do. It makes this thing we hold so sacred, our individual identity, seem well, mundane.

Yes, every part of nature has beauty, purpose, meaning of each its own, though its significance is not in simply being, but in contributing to the greater whole.

Today is my birthday. A day some cultures see as an opportunity for a fresh sense of identity. More than a marker of years, it represents a self-identified mastery of being. Just so, a few years ago I started using my favorite nickname, Jules, all the time.

Personal, loving, connected. It felt more “me” than Julie ever did.

I’ve spent my life seeking personal significance through my own self-expression. Ironically, as I’ve settled into being Jules “full-time,” I’ve released some of the need for a distinctive identity.

Today I am humbled by the bigger quest: Becoming one with all — mind, body and spirit aligned within. And without. Not just relating to nature, but being as an equal and raising our children to live this way from the start.

This is where my heart is at as I enter a new year: with wild ambitions of living more deeply in harmony with nature, with all others, and with my own nature. And intuiting how to make these truths more accessible to all.

May you feel peace this week by treating every day as a fresh start.

Love,
Jules

I share a lesson learned about integrity every Monday. Sign up for delivery right to your inbox. Want more? There’s lots more lessons learned here on my blog, so have fun exploring and commenting about your own insights!

August 10, 2020February 12, 2022

News from Jules | 08.10.20 | Your Mission(s) in Life

Then, what exactly is the point of life?

The answer was so plain and simple, I remember stopping in my barefoot tracks and smiling as I turned to look out at the sea through the wind whipping my bangs and ponytail.

Our purpose is to live in harmony with nature.

Really? That’s it? I might have even said out loud. Then, what am I so distressed about?

The first time I truly posed that question to the universe was on a personal retreat to the Oregon coast after I was laid off from my “dream job.” I had just turned 28 years old. I had completed graduate school a year before, for exactly this type of job, based on the talents and skills I had thoroughly evaluated, and thus invested in. I thought I was following my calling and I felt like I had completely failed.

The HR person was right. There was a “lack of fit” — not just at that company, but in my life. My greatest failure back then was misalignment.

Since then, I’ve studied many books about finding your calling (here’s a list of my favorites) to figure it out. And, boy was I wrong.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the mind-blowing idea that Richard Nelson Bolles humbly tucked into the Epilogue of his classic job-hunting book, What Color is Your Parachute?. Here he describes our three missions in life in great detail. Wait, there’s not just one?!

He instructed readers to translate his Christian thought forms into their own. So, in my words, our three missions in life are:

Live in harmony with nature,
Live in harmony with other humans,
Live in harmony with our own nature.

Most of us, myself included, easily spend most of life doing it backwards: self first, then others, then nature (which is synonymous with “something greater” or “God” for me). I mean, it just sounds backwards, doesn’t it?

Greater, others, self.

Completing these missions—in that order—takes a lifetime of effort. Not just during one Sabbatical.

Easier said than done, for sure.

As I head back out on the trails in a few days, I’ll be attuning even more to the world around me to find my connection to everything that feeds my compassion for others and fuels my soul. Alignment starts from the center.

May you embrace the greater, others and yourself this week.

Love,
Jules

P.S. Listen to “A Missional Life: Your Calling” podcast episode for Suzy Silk’s reassuring pep talk about how far you’ve already come.

I I share a lesson learned about integrity every Monday. Sign up for delivery right to your inbox. Want more? There’s lots more lessons learned here on my blog, so have fun exploring and commenting about your own insights!

August 3, 2020February 12, 2022

News from Jules | 08.02.2020 | Follow Your Must

There really wasn’t any sound at all. Just the sun inching out from behind Mt. Hood and casting a dusky haze like a natural snooze button over the forest, the highway, the nearby town of Government Camp and tiny Mirror Lake right below me.

As I sat there listening, the nothingness slowly filled with answers. As it always does.You know these kinds of answers.

It’s more of a feeling than a thought. Like knowing a truth. And once known, can’t be unknown, just ignored.

Perhaps this moment was why it was an immediate “yes” when my friend texted about going backpacking, even though I had barely been off the mountain for 24 hours. Or why my body woke up as the first bird chirped and scooted me up the trail by myself, even though my phone only had 10 percent battery left.

It was what must felt like. Just like Elle Luna describes about her own journey at The Crossroads of Should and Must (and in her book that I’m currently rereading).

All the tough, real deep questions I’d considered over the past few weeks, even during the two miles up to the top of Tom, Dick & Harry Mountain that very morning, came back to what I had discerned many times before.

Nuts and bolts stuff like family, kids, nature, writing, teaching, retreating and ultimately, what I was put on earth to do in this lifetime — to make spirituality accessible to all*.

Even though I felt “off mission” at the moment, I realized how many of my choices have been actualizing the calling. I noticed how imaginary the hurdles of money, time, space and vulnerability that Elle mentions truly are. I saw how “close to the trail” I am (so close).

So, the real question: what needs to be different this time?

I have to own it. It has to be more important than all the shoulds.

Yes to must. And no to everything else.

I sat in my tank top, leggings and sandals basking in the warm, reassuring feeling beneath the rising sun for a lot longer than expected. It was alluring — savoring the truth in all its ease, all its perfection — part of me wanted to stay there forever. But, I had already been there long enough.

And, at that moment, I must return to the campsite before my friend started to worry and my stomach got hangry.

May you do exactly what you know you need to this week, no matter what.

Love,
Jules

*As poetically described by Tiff, one of my friends and kindred spirits, who I think of as a real-life Ms. Frizzle.

July 27, 2020February 12, 2022

News from Jules | 7.27.2020 | Get Fear Out of the Way

The first two weeks of this new interim state of unemployment, I did life maintenance: iPhone fixed, car detailed, checkbook balanced, direct deposit set up for unemployment benefits.

Last week, I started doing spiritual maintenance.

I retreated by myself to the woods.

I read 48 Days to the Work You Love in the hammock in the evenings, then reflected during my rigorous daily training hikes. Dang, this book goes real deep, real fast:

If your job changes, does your purpose change?
What have been the happiest, most fulfilling moments in your life?
If nothing changed in your life in the next five years, would that be okay?

No. It wouldn’t be okay.

How come? Because I’m off-mission.

Slightly, but enough to make life a lot harder than it needs to be. Sacrificing energy from my deepest needs to simply making do.

Take one of my hikes last week: I wanted to finally reach Barrett Spur, an 8,000 ft. rock outcropping on Mt. Hood’s north face, which I have camped below many times. About a mile or two in, the trail was completely obscured with snow. Options included: turn around and attempting a different time, go up the snow using crampons for the first time and follow GPS along the trail or bushwhacking the ridge along the basin. Even though there wasn’t a trail to follow, choosing the third option seemed less risky and less scary. It also took HOURS to cover a couple miles and depleted enough energy that I almost turned around at the trail junction, instead of proceeding to the Spur summit.

My fear was getting in the way of my goal. Not only achieving the goal, but in the simplest way possible, with energy to spare.

I only made it to the top because a kind, older man came along. He was also pooped, but way happy to lead the way having done the Spur many times before.

This is why I’m rereading this book. This is why I’m training to summit Mt. Hood. This is why I’m being intentional about this time-off as a Sabbatical instead of just “funemployment.” I sense I’m not fully delivering what I was put on earth to do in this lifetime yet, even though work – my job, career and even vocation – has taken up so much of my time. It has also taken a disproportionate amount of energy and sacrificed other parts of having and sharing a full, integrated life with a family of my own.

I want to level up. Not accomplish more things, but break through the fears. Learn balance, gain accountability, act selflessly.

It has been a beautiful life. Just harder than it needs to be.

I’m close to the trail, but not on it. That is what needs to change in my life over the next five years.

May you notice extra efforting this week, and adjust accordingly.

Love,
Jules

August 6, 2018February 12, 2022

News from Jules | 08.06.2018 | Are You Ready for Adventure?

How is this going to work?

Is it going to work?

What have I gotten myself into?

The adventure has begun as soon as these questions start coming to mind.

Less cold feet or nerves, this is curiosity kicking in. Wondering what lies ahead on the known but uncertain path.

If it were more certain it’d be boring and less known it’d be scary.

This is adventure.

I happen to like adventure. Okay, love, adventure.

Not exploring the Amazon by myself kinds of adventure, but the running-a-216-mile-relay-race- on-a-team-of-10-strangers-and- 1-friend-kind like I did last weekend.

Or running a half-marathon.

After I signed up for my first half marathon in 2008, the next thing I did was go to the library and get some running books.

If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right.

The beginner’s marathon training books had some pearls of wisdom about running, and about life. Once you’ve set a training schedule, then determine your goal:

Are you going to be a competer or a completer?

A competer is someone who trains for a certain pace or overall time and then seeks to beat. Perhaps seeking a personal record. This is what we think of as “winning.”

A completer is someone who seeks to reach the finish line through running, walking, hell or high water.

The most important step: setting your race goal and being satisfied with it.

This is harder than it sounds.

There are two kinds of decision-makers according to an article I read in Real Simple magazine in 2008:

Satisfiers just want to make a decision and move on.
Maximizers just want to make the absolute best decision possible. This feels like winning.

Unsurprisingly, the article concluded that generally “satisfiers” are happier people through their ease of decision making.

Whereas the “maximizers” may have the occasional euphoric decision-making successes, they are generally stressed out all the time due to an acute case of perfection.

For my first half-marathon adventure back in 2008, I settled on being a completer—to train and make it across the finish line.

Read the story about this adventure in my latest blog post: When 2,364th Place is Winning.

What I’ve learned since then is that it’s actually really difficult to be a “completer” when you have a “maximizer” mindset.

It takes truly being satisfied with making the decision, any decision, and moving on with it, in order to truly complete things, come what may.

Otherwise, you’re still competing with yourself. And unless you’ve made that perfect decision and achieved the perfect outcome, you’re not actually satisfied.

Not that competing is bad. It can be very motivating. It’s just not necessary for winning.

And definitely not necessary for adventure.

What have you gotten yourself into lately? Are you ready for adventure?

Everything about that half-marathon had taken me outside my comfort zone and into my courage zone.

This is what I love about adventure: it’s fun and we learn a lot.

When we’re in our courage zone, life is an adventure.

May this week bring you to the edge of your courage zone.

Love,
Jules

June 25, 2018February 12, 2022

News from Jules | 06.25.2018 | What Are You Protecting?

We know more than we think we know.

Many wise people talk about this. And I believe it too.

Then, how come we so often think we know things that we are actually clueless about? Things we can’t know. Yet.

Perhaps we are too “lost in the energy of the problem”?

As Michael Singer wrote in The Untethered Soul:

No solution can possibly exist while you’re lost in the energy of the problem. And…generally problems are not what they appear to be.

Well, that’s the truth, isn’t it?

Problems need to calm down. They need to breath.

They need space so that one can get to the heart of what’s actually going on. What actually needs to be overcome.

When my bike hydroplaned on the wet rail tracks and my knee slammed into the concrete three Sundays ago, I knew immediately that my knee was a problem.

Week One:

Within the hour it swelled up and I couldn’t bend it to climb even one stair. Uh oh.
On advice from a friend with First Aid experience and my trusty Healthwise Handbook, I waited for the swelling to settle down.

Week Two:

Then, I went in to get x-rays that confirmed no break, fracture or sprain.
But, still I could barely walk. My knee was too swollen for the docs to really know what was going on.

Week Three:

I saw the physical therapist (PT) a few days ago and now we know: it’s a strained MCL (ligament that runs along the inside of the knee) and knee cap contusion (which is a fancy name for bruising, but I like it because it sounds as bad as it hurts).
My PT nodded when I asked: “On a scale of 1 to 5 for knee injuries, this is a 1, huh?”

Not that bad, all things considered.

Still a problem right now.

But, one that she could not have diagnosed this specifically when she had so little information to work with 12 days ago.

“No solution can possibly exist while you’re lost in the energy of the problem.”

When I first read this in April, I wondered: what problems do I need to settle into deeper?

Which might be a question that’s echoing in the back of your mind right now.

I see now that it’s not a matter of me going deeper into a problem—that’s just getting more lost in the energy of the problem.

It’s the energy that needs to settle. The energy is protecting something.

Something pretty important, probably. What are you protecting?

Once the energy dissipates, then we can see what it’s protecting and why it flared up.

We have to move past being consumed in the energy of the problem in order to get back to a place of wholeness, to a calm, creative place of seeing things the way they actually are.

So that we can see the many—specific and useful—ways they could be different.

And that is how we stay whole even, and especially, as we heal.

After all, the whole cannot be whole without all of you.

May this week bring you extra space and discovery,
Jules

June 4, 2018February 12, 2022

News from Jules | 06.04.2018 | What Have You Been Ignoring?

For the last two weeks, I’ve pretty much followed my shower routine: shampoo, face wash, conditioner, teeth brushing, soap, rinse.

But, I kept getting stuck on step one. Wait, what is wrong with this stuff? Why won’t it lather?

I knew there was something funky going on, but I just kept doing the routine.

A few days ago I figured it out. It won’t lather, because it’s conditioner.

Oh geez. No wonder my new Mia Farrow-style hair felt so weird and greasy.

I had been using conditioner followed by conditioner for TWO weeks. 

This is stress.

Creating hazy veils of Maya, the Hindu word for illusion, so subtle that our senses malfunction and wrongly perceive or interpret things the way we want them to be. And, when it goes unchecked this sneaky stress becomes Avidya, generally agreed by Hindus and Buddhists as a state of misconceptions and misunderstandings of the world.

I bought shampoo. Of course, I’m using shampoo, I told myself each day.

Everything looked the way I wanted it to look.

Sure, it was just conditioner.

Just as it was just burning the rice, and just a speeding ticket, and just a dead battery after leaving the lights on and just wet laundry sitting in the dryer for a week.

As present in my life and day-to-day as I thought I was, I wasn’t. I’d pared my life down to the essentials this year: What could be stressful?

No more busy, no more crazy, way less complicated.

And yet, I still had blinders on.

What have you been ignoring? Has your gut been nagging you about something?

After countless “oh geez” moments of late and the mounting chaos, I had started sensing that something more was going on.

Streak of bad luck?
Mercury in retrograde?
Signs from the universe?

Perhaps.

Whatever the cause, my past experience is that chaos precedes breakthrough. Something from deep down needs to come to a head. A problem itself and/or resistance to reality.

Low grade stress was rapidly compounding and leaking into everything, especially the everyday.

The conditioner discovery was the last straw for me.

You know those moments. Mundane but profound. Tiny but significant. The crack where the light gets through.

I had been spinning out from my center, feeling undone, and wondering how to cope better. What to do to regain wholeness, a sense of integrity?

Just as it wasn’t actually shampoo, I realized it wasn’t about what to do, but what I wasn’t doing. What I was ignoring.

It was the moment I had just read about in Wild Creative by Tami Lynn Kent:

“Let go of the urge to flee when intensity and a sense of inner chaos build; the form within is being pressed and changed. Stay with the discomfort as long as you can. The physical, emotional, and/or spiritual compression you feel is your resistance to your expansion. Surrender the tension in your body, the resistance in your mind, and the hesitation in your heart. Surrender, and you will fill with new life.”

Depending on how you react to staggering truths, you stop cold, you breathe deep, you sit down. Or maybe you cry in the shower, like I did.

Hard, grateful tears.

For my deepest knowing. For answered prayers. For the stress.

The stress that has been my blinking “check engine light.”

Just as Kelly McGonigal describes in her TED Talk about how to make stress your friend that my friend, Tiffany, reminded me about:

“When you choose to view stress in this way, you’re not just getting better at stress, you’re actually making a pretty profound statement: you’re saying that you can trust yourself to handle life’s challenges and you’re remembering that you don’t have to face them alone.”

My trusty body had been talking all along—through my gut and my actions.

And I was finally listening. Finally ready to receive the vulnerability, detachment, and decisiveness I’d been praying for.

True to form, since this breakthrough so much has showed up.

Vulnerable, detached and decisive things I wasn’t ready to do a week ago, like debt consolidation through a bank loan.

And some beautiful synchronicity, like the text I just got from a woman in my neighborhood Buy Nothing group. She’s moving and needs to purge her bathroom. She’s got shampoo! Real shampoo.

May your eyes be wide and your gut be loud this week,
Jules

May 21, 2018February 12, 2022

News from Jules | 05.21.2018 | My Guilty Pleasure

Last week when Monday felt so “off,” I was stressed about details like cashflow, yes, but more so whether I was off course overall.

I woke up Tuesday and I got out the post-its. And markers. And whiteboard.

I came up with what seemed like an awesome two-week sprint of business projects (like this except for 2 weeks).

That’s my guilty pleasure: planning.

Wait a second, that’s your guilty pleasure?

Maybe planning isn’t “unusual or weird,” but I’m growing more and more convinced that it’s a bit unnatural.

At least in the way, I do it. And the way a lot of people do it.

Here’s what I’ve been noticing:

Planning gives the illusion of control, even though we know change is the only constant.
All the doing feels like measurable progress, whether or not its effective.
It promotes this-or-that comparison, instead of more creative options.

Entering this second week, I felt good about having an action plan. But then, when my body wanted to work on bookkeeping and clearing out my inbox instead of creating the practice guides I started last week, which are actually all about presence, connection and balance. Oh, the irony.

There was so much tension.

Throw out the action plan??

As much as I’ve adapted to this new creative lifestyle, I’m having a hard time releasing modes of measurement, control, schedule, planning. It’s so uncomfortable. And, I’m not just thinking about big project planning, but the day-to-day stuff—the infinite ways we micromanage our lives.

This felt like a lot given I was already coming off of another “vulnerability hangover” as Alison Faulkner described in a recent podcast. Sure, they’re avoidable, but as Alison asked:

“Do you love your comfort more than your goal?”

No, I don’t. I love the goal of living from a place of wholeness into a space of sufficiency and empowering more people to live this way—wholly and soulfully.

This guilty pleasure of planning is overshadowing my natural intuition to notice and adapt to what’s going on right now. But without a plan, how do I know where I’m going and how to get there?

I can use my attention to guide my intentions.

After a gut check, I was pretty sure it was intuition and not procrastination. So, I’m going with it. Bookkeeping doesn’t generate cashflow, but maybe it will realign the energy. I’m trying to see the forest for the trees, though still unsure these are the trees that need tending right now.

Perhaps this is what Tami Lynn Kent is talking about in Wild Creative:

How living from our creative core, our wholeness, our essence, requires balancing the feminine (being, visionary) and masculine (doing, action) energy cycles so that we can really go with the flow, naturally intuiting the next right thing and then doing it.

Or as Phil Powers says about finding rest in every step, not only as I’ve been doing every week during Sabbath:

“Concentrating on how I move through the world is important. It’s why I reach mountain summits and life goals with energy to spare.”

May you follow your gut and enjoy energy to spare this week,
Jules

P.S. Did you know that libraries can order books that they don’t have? So cool! I put in requests recently and am happy to report that my local library, Multnomah County, now has Rhythms of Rest and the recently published Subversive Sabbath: The Surprising Power of Rest in a Nonstop World (hardcopy and Ebook) available. If you’re curious about more resources to learn about Sabbath, I made a handy list here. And, FYI, I’ll be opening registration for the Sabbath Circle running this summer soon. Yay!

April 20, 2018

My Spiritual Path: Part 1 | Discovering Wholeness

What was my path to get here—to a place of wholeness—today?

What a loaded question, right?

Beautifully so, I’d say.

A co-facilitator and I posed this question at the opening of our intergenerational, interfaith women’s group when we were facilitating a session about “Spirituality and You” last fall.

We meant to stir up a conversation of breadth and depth. And the answers about paths to get here ranged from the commute to the pub to one’s religious upbringing.

I went with the easy out, a brief summary about how my bandwidth had shifted in the previous few months allowing the opportunity to step up and lead the session. In truth, I wasn’t sure how long it would take to truly answer that question.

Definitely not a minute. Perhaps I can sum it up in five blog posts?

In this blog series, “Discovering Wholeness,” I’ll attempt to distill 15 years of searching, growing, becoming into five posts, including this one, about my spiritual path to get here today.

What was my spiritual path to get here today?

Here:

Where I deeply know my inherent dignity and worth.
Where I forgive and embrace my imperfections.
Where I eagerly spend time with myself and with what (not who) I know as God.
Where I also deeply know it’s not about me.
Where my purpose is first and foremost our purpose: to live in harmony with nature.
Where living each day to the fullest means being as true as possible, not doing as much as possible.
Where I bring loving attention to everything I do.
Where I can’t imagine going another day not living this way.

Do I have it all figured out? Oh heck no. Far from it.

Turning Inside Out

But I have it figured out. I have peeled back every layer of the onion until I got to the kernel of my core where my deepest fears and deepest desires reside. And I stayed there, getting to know them.

I turned myself inside out as I had the sense I needed to do. And then I started anew.

Technically the same person—the same fears, the same desires, the same weaknesses, the same strengths. But, with a totally different relationship to the world.

A relationship grounded in the sense of a personal spirituality “cultivated, nourished, and harvested” along the way.

Most simply, spirituality refers to direct experience of the sacred, said Dr. Roger Walsh, a longtime practitioner and professor of philosophy, anthropology and psychiatry who wrote Essential Spirituality in 1999 about seven common practices of the world’s great spiritual traditions for recognizing the sacred and divine that exist both within and around us.

He describes spiritual practices as those that help us experience the sacred —that which is most central and essential to our lives — for ourselves.

Another scientist, and renown atheist, Dr. Carl Sagan said, “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined is surely spiritual.”

And as Michael Singer, author and devoted buddhist practitioner, says in The Untethered Soul:

“When you contemplate the nature of self [and soul], you are meditating…It is a return to the root of your being, the simple awareness of being aware…You woke up. That is spirituality. That is the nature of self. That is who you are.”

And so, personal spirituality, or “a religion of one’s own” as former monk Thomas Moore calls it, forms “the fundamental precepts by which we guide our life are cultivated, nourished, and harvested in time,” as poet Wendell Berry says.

Understanding, Accepting, Releasing

A year ago there was a series of events starting around the Spring Equinox, including a fateful retreat, moving to a new cottage home, and a blessing hosted by my spiritual communities around Beltane (a mid-spring celebration of abundance on May 1).

It was the beginning of the end. In the very best way possible.

I sensed that my journey over a decade plus years of active searching, growing, becoming was coming to a close.

Perhaps it culminated due to the position of Jupiter in transit?

As my astrologer friend tells me, that’s a rare element on a chart that represents a process of rebirth within one’s lifetime.

Perhaps the journey was part of my soul’s mission in order to get to the life’s work I’m really here to do?

For me, the path to get here today is a braid of spiritual, entrepreneurial and personal experiences. Intertwined, not separate.

The details and results of the experiences are extensive and unique to me. Tales for the next posts in this series.

While I do believe many lessons must be learned alongside others — partners, children, communities, students, teachers — ultimately our learning journeys are our own.

From our intuition and wisdom to deeper places within.

Perhaps that’s why sometimes it takes us many times to finally grasp a certain lesson?

Even as others provide sound guidance. Even as our inner teacher provides sound guidance.

Until it’s heard, understood, accepted and released, it remains unlearned. At least that’s been my experience.

Universal Lessons, Unique Path

The practices and tools I’ve discovered and absorbed into my “spiritual portfolio” as I like to call it are also extensive, so I’ll also save specifics on those for later posts.

But the process—the process of using these practices and tools throughout all these learning journeys along my spiritual path—isn’t that unique to me?

Me and the other millions of seekers and students and teachers in the world?

Well, I’ll leave that as a rhetorical question.

So, here’s the story of my journey to get here. Here’s my story of my journey. Which may or may not be the truth.

It’s the truth as I sense it, now, in my head, my heart and my gut, based on the information I currently have.

This is the first in a five-part series about my spiritual path and how I came to live from a place of wholeness into a space of sufficiency. Raised with New Age roots and inspired by world religions and native cultures alike, I have built a portfolio of interfaith spiritual practices that sustain me. I currently worship in nature and at a Unitarian Universalist church, find fellowship with the Sacred Fire Community and Bras, Bibles & Brews, and have active personal practices including Sabbath, yoga, prayer and seasonal retreats.

[To be continued]

April 9, 2018

The Shape of The Soul

All of my learning journeys, growing in and growing out, carry me along my spiritual path.

Along this path, I have studied many traditions, practices and rituals to help me discern what aligns with my personal spirituality, my current understanding of the universe and my presence in it.

So far this has been a never-ending process of continual growth and ceaseless seeking. At least in this lifetime.

There is one constant everybody seems to agree exists.

I have collected notes and quotes from countless others describing this thing we call the soul.

And, they seem to agree that just as the divine source, the something greater that many call God, is perfect, complete, and I’d add incomprehensible, so is a soul.

The soul is indescribable and when I try, I fall into paradoxes, truths that seem unable to coexist and yet they do:

it is not a thing and yet it is everything.
it is without self, feelings, personality and yet uniquely me.
it makes me weep while filling me with love.

My soul connects me to the universe, to everything, to all beings, to life — this deep community.

While I’ve only sensed that mystical connection of “touching my soul,” once or twice, the truths I received have remained.

My soul is, and thus requires no growth. My soul is always with me, thus requires no seeking.

“As time goes on, we are subject to powers of deformation, from within us as well as without, that twist us into shapes alien to the shape of the soul,” wrote Parker Palmer in A Hidden Wholeness. (italics in quote added for emphasis)

“But the soul never loses its original form and never stops calling us back to our birthright integrity…we are invited to conform our lives to the shape of our own souls.”

Growing in and growing out helps reveal the shape of our own soul.