The Call of the Soul

“One of the great revelations of the Space Age has been the perspective it has given humanity on ourselves. When we see the earth from space, we see ourselves as a whole. We see the unity and not the divisions. It is such a simple image with a compelling message. One planet. One human race.

We are here together and we need to live together with tolerance and respect. We must become Global Citizens. Our only boundaries are the way we see ourselves. The only borders, the way we see each other…

We are all time travelers, journeying together into the future. But let us work together to make that future a place we want to visit.

Be brave, be determined, overcome the odds. It can be done.”

-Stephen Hawking,
Theoretical Physicist & Cosmologist

April Greetings!

And Happy (Almost) Earth Day!

In 2018 the above message from renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking was beamed into space by Hawking’s family and the European Space Agency. It’s destination? The nearest black hole that it should reach in about 3,500 years.

But let us hope that it takes us a good deal less than 3,500 years to heed his message and reach our destination: a future we want to visit.

With Earth Day approaching later this week, it’s a good moment to stop and zoom out of our typically zoomed in perspective of our lives. To remember that we’re more than just the trees we can see around us – we’re part of an entire forest, an entire ecosystem of human beings surrounding the globe. All of us looking up at the same sky, all of us with our feet planted upon the same Mother Earth.

We’ve created so many distinctions between ourselves, polarized ourselves into so many competing camps, because we forget that we are more alike than we are different.

But we can only meet each other as deeply as we’ve met ourselves.

We can only truly understand and appreciate another human being when we can truly understand and appreciate ourselves: we can accept the darkness and the flaws and the faults in another when we can accept the darkness and flaws and faults in ourselves. We can truly encourage another human being to shine their light brightly when we’ve given ourselves permission to shine our own.

When we haven’t encountered the faults inside of ourselves and learned to grow through them and love ourselves because of them, we judge others for their shortcomings.

When we haven’t discovered the unique gifts inside of ourselves that only we can bring to this world and given ourselves permission to shine brightly, we yearn for or envy the success of others.

It is both our darkness AND our light that we tend to be most blind to, and so we keep ourselves living inside a narrow zone of comfortability and safety.

As Hawking observed, we create boundaries in the way we see ourselves, borders in the way we see others.

And bound by the judgments and the yearnings and the envy, we create for ourselves a comfortable prison. But life is meant to be a playground.

You Are Here to Live in Joy

“You are here to live in joy, everything else is extra,” Celtic teacher and healer Amantha Murphy said at a recent training I attended. She went on to explain:

“You don’t have to go out and make your mark, that is your only job: being at ease, in joy. Then you gift that opportunity to others simply by your being.”

What a concept, right? We tend to think our purpose here is to make money, or make children, or build a business, or make a name for ourselves, or change the world in big systemic ways.

But do we consider that it might be our purpose to be JOYFUL?

How drastically would we have to alter our lives and our jobs and our aspirations if every day our main goal was to be joyful?

How many of us truly feel joyful on most days? With the way the world’s been the last couple years how many of us are just hoping for feeling ok?

I think the reason that true joy can feel so out of reach is that so many of us live our lives out of alignment with the desires of our Soul.

And we instead create a life based on the ‘shoulds.’ And based on the expectations layered upon us by family, society, our jobs, our roles…

Until we’re a body and a life filled with shoulds instead of filled with SOUL.

Stephen Hawking said that if we work together, if we’re brave and determined, we can make the future a place we want to visit.

But how do we make such a drastic change?

A Closing Door, A New Beginning

When I first sat down to write this month’s newsletter I had so many bits of ideas and yet I couldn’t seem to distill them down into the essence of the month of April. So I decided to do something I often do for myself and my clients when I want deeper insight into a matter: consult some oracle cards.

For those who are new to them, oracle cards are a fun and tangible tool for practicing getting in touch with your intuition, that deep inner knowing that is the voice of your Soul.

Before I draw any cards I first use it as an opportunity to sit quietly in meditative silence, to clear my energy field using breathing practices or burning herbs, and to listen to the questions that arise from my Soul.

I always ask to be connected to my spirit guides, my ancestors, passed loved ones, angels and archangels, god and goddess. You could also ask to simply connect with your Higher Self.

A question is posed, cards are chosen intuitively, then flipped over to reveal an image and an accompanying message.

If you continue to seek ways to balance an over-reliance on the logical, rational, masculine left brain, this is an excellent practice to engage your intuitive, imaginative, creative right brain.

I asked for insight into the best message to share with you this month, to distill down the essence of the month of April. As you read the messages below, see if you can intuitively apply them to anything in your own life right now.

The first card I pulled was from a deck called The Shaman’s Dream Oracle:

And the message was this:
Closing Door: Endings, Completion, Your Greater Calling
“When the Closing Door shows up, it’s a call to recognize an ending – to terminate a relationship, job, task, or situation that has been dragging on far too long. Unlock the cage you have been trapped in, and shut the door behind you. This is not the time to worry about what others might think or feel. Instead, break with routine, consider what you think and how you feel, and be true to your heart’s calling. Muster the courage to say, ‘No more!’

If the door to a project or a relationship has been closed to you, stop knocking on it. You have tried that already, and no one answered – at least not in the way you would have liked. Take this as a gift, difficult and painful as it might be. Move on. Every door that shuts is an invitation to find another way, another path, to your destination. Bow deeply before that closed door, give thanks to the lessons, and set yourself free.”

After this first card, I decided to pull a second clarifying card for more information; this second card was pulled from a deck called Sacred Destiny Oracle: A 52 Card Deck to Discover the Landscape of Your Soul:

And the message was this:
New Beginnings: Radiant Sunrise
“The sun is the most profound symbol of life itself, large enough to fit one million Earths inside it. In ancient cultures the largess of the rising sun represented hope and the understanding that life begins again, fresh and new. Responsible for the climate and the weather of the earth, it is the symbol of birth and rebirth. It can also represent resurrection and a time of profound spiritual awakening. It symbolizes the end of darkness and the beginning of light, and an initiation of a whole new cycle.

The Sacred Landscape Wants You to Know: Your life is expanding in profound and wondrous ways. New experiences and ideas are emerging. Vitality and wide-open opportunities are at hand. Seize the day! This is a perfect time to begin that new project or give birth to an emerging idea. Timing is everything, and the time is now. Anything and everything is possible. Good fortune awaits you. The rising sun is the ultimate symbol of the yang principle: expanding power and activity. You are radiant and luminous. There is a glow within you that can be felt by all.”

It was after pulling the second card that I realized how perfect these messages were for right now.

A closing door and a new beginning?

What signifies that more than the seasonal shift of winter into spring, a whole new cycle of life beginning again as we leave behind us the dark of winter.

And yet how even more significant right now as we take a deep breath – figuratively and literally, without a mask – after the last two years. While it may be simply that, a breath of fresh air before we go back down for more, it certainly signifies an important turning point.

This covid moment in our lives has given us a gift – the whole last two years has been an advanced initiation into your life; it has given us the opportunity for an awakened sense of deeper meaning and greater purpose.

We stand now upon a new threshold – after the initiation, the emergence. After the winter, the spring.

Much as these cards suggests to us, we now have the opportunity to close the door on what we now know isn’t right for us, as well as the opportunity to take a step towards what speaks to our Soul.

And what a perfectly aligned moment to begin to do so, as we also move together from the dark of winter into the newness and expansive growth of the spring.

Pausing Before the Leap: Reflection Questions for New Beginnings

The April rains pour and pour and pour, scouring the slate clean for our new beginnings.

But on the threshold of any new beginning it is wise to pause first and ask, what wisdom am I bringing with me from this last chapter?

Over these last two years, what did we learn? What new knowledge can we take with us? What did we miss? What can we make a point to focus on?

What did I learn about myself? What did I learn about what I love? What I fear? How I want to spend my time? What I don’t want to spend my time on? What I value?

Am I happy with my life? Is there something missing? Do I feel a sense of meaning and purpose? How do I deal with stress? How do I deal with change? What are my coping strategies? Are they contributing to my health or taking away from it?

Who am I becoming? Who do I want to become? Who are we becoming as a global society? What kind of future do I want to live in? What can I do to help create this?

Life is too short and also too long to be living in a way that doesn’t make your Soul happy.

“You are here to live in joy, everything else is extra.” Remember this.

Covid gifted us with an immense pool of data on ourselves from which we can choose to learn and make conscious shifts.

But we can also allow ourselves to slip back into a mindless unconsciousness of routine. The pull back into comfortability and our narrow band of what is safe and known can be strong.

Stay awake! Stay conscious.

A Future We Want to Visit

I had an interesting convo with a friend recently about free will and pre-determination. She expressed hating the trope that “everything happens for a reason” as it seems to presume that every single thing is predetermined like we have no choices we can make for ourselves. What about free will??

I agree that free will is vitally important! And I believe that life gets most exciting when we weave the concepts of pre-determination and free will together [See last month’s The Weave of the World for more on that].

But I shared that the reason I know that free will does exist is because if everything really was pre-determined and we had no free will, we would all be lovely angelic beings. We would be living in Paradise.

It is precisely because we have free will that we have been able to make such unhappy choices for our planet, for the way we treat each other, and perhaps in our own lives. That’s the ‘gift’ of free will.

But the gift of free will also means that at any given moment we can choose to take a different action than what we’ve taken before – and every action we take collectively adds up, in our own lives as well as together as a global society.

What actions do you want to be contributing to your own life? To the collective? Are you contributing to keeping things the same? Or contributing to bringing us up into a different kind of future?

Spring is about new beginnings – what will you choose to begin anew? How will you fulfill your purpose to live joyfully in alignment with the desires of your Soul?

If it is because of free will and our ability to make our own choices that we don’t live in Paradise, I would argue that it is that very same free will and our ability to make our own choices that can take us there!

“We are all time travelers, journeying together into the future. But let us work together to make that future a place we want to visit.”

Happy Spring!

During this winter into spring transition time be sure to spend some time pondering the reflection questions above.

May you heed the call of your Soul, have the courage to recognize what is no longer serving you, and find JOY in new beginnings this spring.

Here’s to creating the future we want to visit!

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