Create the Life You Imagine ~ June 2019
The Practice: Soul Expression—How do I express my deepest Self and my highest purpose?
“Every human being comes to the earth with sealed orders.”
~ Soren Kierkegaard
I love this quote from Kierkegaard because it reminds us of the enormous potential that each human life represents. When we flow from the crown down we remember that the limitless and eternal power of the Divine Source flows down to and through each one of us, and our sacred task as human beings is to activate and express that energy in a way that is uniquely and authentically ours. It has become a quintessential question of this age to ask, “What is my purpose?” Kierkegaard reminds us that our purpose is to unseal those sacred orders. Imagine that before you came into existence in this human lifetime your Soul was handed a letter explaining unambiguously why this human life experience you were about to begin matters, and what lessons you were first to learn, and then to teach and share with others. The letter might also have explained that because human beings learn their most important lessons through experience and self-discovery, the contents of this letter will be sealed from your awareness once you are born and your job will be to live your life with enough consciousness to REMEMBER why you are here—to unseal those orders that were written explicitly and particularly for you.
In his book, The Soul’s Code, Jungian psychologist James Hillman, taught about this set of orders from our Soul as the seed thought for each human being and proposed that the Soul, if given the opportunity, will assert itself even at an early age. Hillman argued that our Soul, this fundamental essence of our individuality, knows the code and is actively working within us from the time of our birth, shaping our lives in response to an internal blueprint that represents our unique cosmic fingerprint. Hillman reminds us through his work that each human life is an unfolding into that internal blueprint that takes time and awareness, just like a small and insignificant looking acorn, when planted in the right conditions, breaks open and unfolds over time into something that was unseen when we looked at that acorn—a massive and stately oak tree.
You might ask, why then does it seem so challenging for us to unseal these orders and to activate this code? The first answer to that question is that we all begin our lives through the developmental process that moves us through the lower triangle centers without any awareness of our Soul. Even those individuals we perceive to have evolved into great and powerful forces in the world, began life as an infant that had to learn to roll over, sit up, crawl, walk and eventually run. If you read the biographies of some of our great humans in history, their early life experiences and conditions often defy their ability and ours to explain logically how that great life emerged from that set of circumstances. These stories remind us that life is truly an evolutionary process and it begins at the beginning, immersed in the experience of being a human being who needs to grow and develop and learn through the conditions of human life. Sometimes those conditions seem perfectly suited to the Soul that is emerging, and sometimes those conditions seem completely contrary to the needs of the emerging Soul. But we have enough stories of people that emerge from even the most difficult human conditions to express their Soul’s purpose in a way that changes history, to be curious about what lies behind that veil of human awareness that moves us through the most challenging and difficult of our life experiences and pushes us toward expression of our unique hidden code.
Another reason it may be difficult to unseal our Soul’s orders is that our purpose may be bigger or our path more challenging than our human mind can imagine, and if we saw it all clearly from the start we frankly wouldn’t believe that we could muster up the internal or external resources to make it so. If you had to tell a caterpillar that it needed to get inside that cocoon and endure the decay and destruction of its form into some kind of degenerative soup that would mysteriously unlock a hidden genetic code for butterfly wings, it’s lack of experience or imagination would likely cause that caterpillar to refuse to enter into that magical transformational process and to say, “thank you very much but I will just continue crawling along here in the grass.”
Likewise, Irish poet David Whyte describes his sense that our Soul is always silently sneaking ahead of us and leading us into experiences designed for our own transformations, but if our human awareness knew the plan ahead of time and fully understood that our evolutionary path may involve enormous difficulties and human perils, we would put a stop to it as quickly as we could. The preeminent theologian, Huston Smith, used to say his favorite prayer was “let gentle light,” because he understood that our human personalities can only handle seeing what’s going to happen in just the next few steps on our path, and if you illuminated the entire journey of a human life we might all opt to just keep crawling along in the grass. Those of us who have lived long enough to have emerged through some significant transformation experiences, can look back and see how unwilling our younger selves might have been to take the journey if we had been provided with full informed consent and given the choice to proceed or not. But we also know from our experiences, the deep transformational power and the spiritual insight and wisdom that unfolded through our participation in the journey.
The final reason we might struggle to unseal our orders is the shadow energy of this fifth chakra center. If we move into our fifth chakra from our lower triangle small self, then what we will express through this powerful center is the conformity thinking and dualistic dogmatism of the small self personality. The small self specializes in interpreting life through its own limited lens, casting judgment on others to feed its own ego, and speaking its “truth” from the perspective of the insecure, anxious and defended self. It joins the crowd or sometimes the angry mob, it is terrified of ambiguity and nuance, and it opts for the clear and the dogmatic to avoid the uncertainty, vulnerability and fragility of our human experience.
Rest assured, however, that even the most evolved among us must struggle in the space between the personality and the Soul. The trick to navigating that space is practicing and cultivating our spiritual awareness. If we are going to engage in that space from our non-dual Soul consciousness that we talked about last week, we can’t get dualistic as we think about our upper triangle Soul consciousness as good and our lower triangle personality consciousness as bad. We can’t stop judging others if we can’t stop judging ourselves. The truth is that we all have a messy lower triangle born of our life experiences that can get tipped over with fear and insecurity. If we are moving from the crown down, however, we surround our lower triangle with love and compassion and hold our personality worries and fears with the wisdom of our Soul. The dance of life is navigating between the anxiety of this lower triangle protected small self and the wisdom of the upper triangle Soul and trying to stay conscious about which part gets to direct the action of our life. If we are going to give expression to our highest possibilities and our deepest Truth, we have to be able to discern the qualitative difference between the voice of our personality and the voice or our Soul, and choose to create a life that is worthy of our Soul.
When you catch yourself struggling to know the difference between the voice of your Soul and the voice of your personality, simply ask yourself, where is this thought, this impulse, this movement coming from? If it is coming from the personality, you will recognize old and familiar patterns of fear, anxiety, and control, and there will be an impulse toward pleasing, proving, and positioning that robs you of peace, presence and joy. If it is coming from your Soul, it will whisper in your ear and remind you of who you really are, it will call you up to your higher possibilities and ask you to hold your frightened personality with compassion but not let it stop you, and it will offer you a glimmer of the Mystery that is unfolding within you and within others that calls you into humble surrender. From the perspective of our personality, to surrender might mean to quit. But from the perspective of your Soul, to surrender is to accept deeply the purpose of our lives and the experiences that are part of our path, and to be willing to be transformed through the process.
We will never unseal our orders unless we make the shift to our Soul. Remember that this upper triangle is like a giant funnel that focuses the energy of the Divine Source through each of us and allows our Soul to access that which is authentically ours to manifest. When we flow from the crown down, the power of this fifth chakra is our creativity. Don’t confuse being creative with being artistic in some commercial sense. Creativity simply means that we are willing to engage in the organic process of life and let what is true and authentic about ourselves emerge. Creative people don’t come to the table with all the answers, they come with compelling questions and let the answers unfold. Creative people don’t know where the story ends, they are willing to say, “we’ll see.” Creative people don’t work for outer world approval or success, they respond to an inner call toward wholeness. Painters don’t expect to paint a masterpiece without getting paint on their hands; likewise, creative people don’t expect to engage in the transformative process of life without hazarding the messes, the mistakes, the vulnerabilities and the uncertainties that are part of the creative process of life.
Each of us is a funnel for the light of the Divine to enter the world. What comes authentically through our Soul will flow down into our personality and translate into service in the world. When we consciously choose to answer the call of our Soul, our lives take on a true sense of meaning and purpose that we could never have discovered had we continued to thrash around in the lower triangle. When we answer the inner call from our True Self, the anxiety of our lower triangle is transformed, and we use our lower triangle capacities—our bodies, feelings and minds—to move into authentic and Soul inspired action. When we use our lower triangle to creatively express our unique and authentic Self, we naturally move into the world in service to the Divine. There is enormous freedom, power, authenticity and magnetism in someone who is operating from the level of their Soul, and the lives they create, whether in small ways or in big ways, touch and transform the lives of others and change the world we share.
Wishing you the blessings and light of the Soul, as you create the life you imagine.
Tracy
Stepping Stones:
If we accept Hillman’s view that we each have a Soul’s code that is actively shaping our life, we should be able to notice that code operating through the long view of our life experience. The death of our creative power in the fifth chakra is getting caught comparing ourselves to others and comparison is one of the curses of the lower triangle. Your Soul is unique and is meant to bring something into manifestation that no one else can bring. I had the privilege of growing up with four siblings and a mother who reminded us frequently that despite our genetic code, none of us had the same Soul’s code, and that we should find and cultivate own gifts rather than trying to be imitations of the others.
This fifth chakra creative life work requires that we engage our powers of reflection and contemplation and really look deeply at who we are. This week spend some time thinking about your life history. If you were writing your own biography, what were the persistent personality traits you see running through your life story? What stories do people tell about you as a child? What natural talents and gifts do you bring into the world? What are the interests, hobbies or professional activities that you chose because they gave you a sense of purpose and joy? Who were the people in life that drew your attention and inspired you in some way? What were the seminal moments or critical challenges in your life when you had to discover some deeper truth about yourself and let some surface stories fall away? If you interviewed three people that really knew you at a deep level, what would they tell you about who you are?
Be sure as you ask these questions that you listen for the answers from your upper triangle Soul and not from your lower triangle small self. You might catch your upper triangle sharing a truth about who you are and suddenly hear some voice from your small self saying, “you weren’t that special.” Your Soul self knows the code and knows that you are like no other being that has ever lived or ever will, and you have something unique and special to bring to the world. Practice living inside that upper triangle Truth this week and see what you discover.
To inspire you this week, click below to find Kate singing Shine to help you remember who you are. The opening lines of this song are, "You hold the stars in your pocket, reach in and unlock it you can. All of the world lies awaiting, for you, its all in your hands." Let this energy fill your meditation practice and your week.You might use it in the background during the breathing meditation, by going to the Products Page on my website and just scroll down to the Transcendence CD and click the track. Both of Kate's CD's are available for purchase on that page.
