Tag Archives: soul

More soul. Less façade.

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Girl blowing out candles on a birthday cake

If you want to heal, you must live more from your soul and less from your façade. This is the first of four healing shifts I teach to my coaching clients.

I came face to face with this reality again on our recent Grand Canyon pilgrimage. I saw again, more deeply than before, how my insatiable search for safety after my dad died was driven by my social self. My façade. The part of me that desperately wanted to feel secure, and thought that following the rules and keeping everyone around me happy was the way to do that.

Our façade has many names. Martha Beck calls this part of us, constructed in response to social expectations that begin virtually at birth, our “social self.” Franciscan and prolific author Richard Rohr calls it our “false self.” Jungian James Hollis calls it our “psyche.” Buddhist teacher and psychologist Tara Brach calls it our “spacesuit self.” It’s the part of us that speaks in “should” and “have to.” The part that strives to be nice at all costs.

Our facades will never know peace. Only our souls know peace.

We all have facades. Our facades are necessary. Our social selves keep society’s gears running smoothly. Our social selves help us navigate four-way stops and dentist appointments. Our façade, our social self, the part that looks outside ourselves for direction and approval, has its place.

Maintaining our façade, our social self, requires energy. Façades, because they’re constructed and flimsy like false store fronts in old Western movies, take work to keep up. This is why many of my clients run out of steam in their middle decades. They’ve been working so hard to be who everyone outside themselves expects them to be, that they hit a wall.

The first half of life is often about running around accumulating identities – credentials, careers, achievements. The second half of life is often when we shed this surface stuff, because maintaining it takes energy we just don’t want to expend anymore.

This feeling of running out of steam, of hitting a wall, is commonly known as a “midlife crisis.” It’s when women wake up, look around at the life they’ve created with their choices, and decide to recommit to themselves and their priorities.

What’s the alternative to living from your façade?

Living from your soul. Your soul is sturdy, rooted, and peaceful. Your soul is who you came into this life as. The same teachers listed above also have many names for the soul: “True self.” “Essential self.” “Authentic self.” Your soul says “I want to” and “I yearn for.” Your soul craves real, kind, and good, not nice. 

Parker Palmer calls our soul the “taproot,” the part of us that connects us to what James Hollis calls the Divine Energy. Since my Camino vision of God as a deep Wombish Heart, I imagine my soul as an umbilical cord connecting me to that Divine Energy, my source and nourishment.

Your metaphor for your soul will be personal to you. You may have many metaphors for your soul. I hope you do, because something this foundational is too important to contain with only one label.

How do you know if you’re living from your façade or living from your soul?

They feel different in your body.

When we’re situated in and identified with our social selves, we won’t feel peaceful. When our social selves are driving the bus, we feel graspy. Anxious. Unrooted and ungrounded. And fearful.

Remember a time in your life when you experienced deep peace. What sensations did you feel in your body? That’s your soul’s signature. Hold onto that knowing. 

So what? Why does this matter?

Learning to discern whether you’re living from soul or façade is foundational to healing. When you choose to redirect your precious energy and attention away from maintaining your façade, when you focus instead on relearning the contours of your soul and regaining trust in yourself, you will, inevitably, recommit to your life and your priorities.

When you recommit to your life and your priorities, you bring your authentic, whole, messy self with all her strength, knowledge, and compassion to our shared world.

We don’t need you to be nice. We need you to be who you are, fully and honestly. We need you to bring your gifts to this wild party!

(For a light-hearted cinematic take on this shift, check out “Legally Blonde,” now streaming on Netflix.)

Want to explore this shift more deeply? Contact me to schedule a free, no-strings-attached conversation about coaching together. I’d love to connect! 

For my latest news about coaching, workshops, and pop-up opportunities, subscribe to my newsletter here. While this blog is great, my newsletter is where I go a little deeper into what I’m up to in my coaching practice, and how we can hang out together.

(Photo by Jorge Ibanez on Unsplash)

Big. Loud. Messy.

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Wearing a lichen hat
New Year’s Day lettuce lichen hat

Lately I’ve been trying on words to see if they fit. I, and many of my clients, choose a word of the year every December or January. Many of us find that our words actually choose us.

I’ve gone through several word changes before finding the perfect word(s) for 2021. First there was “delight,” which turned out to be too airy-fairy to support the big changes in store for me this year. Then I tried on “Force of Nature,” thinking that the unstoppable, fierce energy of that phrase was perfect. Close, but not quite right. So I tried on “Creator,” thinking that the goal of moving from victimhood to creatorhood in every area of my life was a worthy one indeed. Powerful, but still not it.

These are all fine words. Perhaps one of them is your word.

The trouble with these words, for me, is that my brain thought of them.

Words of the year should arise from your soul, your connection to what simultaneously sustains you and calls you into new life. I hadn’t been listening to my soul very well.

It turns out, my soul wants to expand. My soul is tired of staying in the lines, caged, and tame. So my words this year are, according to my soul, are BIG, LOUD, and MESSY, whether I like them or not.

My friends, I don’t like these words at all. These words scare me. Like most females in our culture, I’ve been heavily socialized to be the opposite of big, loud, and messy. I’ve been taught that I should strive to be small, quiet, and neat. I’ve been trained to be pleasing and useful and “low-maintenance,” whatever that means.

To take up space, to say what I mean and mean what I say, and to make a lot of mistakes—these will be very uncomfortable. I will not be the same woman after I embody these words for a year. No wonder I’m scared.

That’s the point of your word of the year: to set an intention and a direction, to plant the seed of a desire, to unfurl and grow a little. Maybe to scare yourself a little, too, although that’s not a requirement.

For me this year, I’ve decided I’d rather feel the fear of being big, loud, and messy than the despair of staying small, quiet, and neat.

What about you?

How do you want to feel? What do you want to create? What is your soul’s call?

Want to go deeper or explore further? Contact me here to schedule a no-obligation conversation. And here’s more information on how coaching with me works.

My favorite “Word of the Year” resource.

A meditation on messiness from my novel.

A poem to bigness, also from my novel.

The link to download my novel as a free PDF.

Photo credit: Jed Holdorph.

How to feel joy.

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Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance. ~Mary Oliver

This is the piece I was ready to post last week. And then “A letter from God to her daughters who resist joy” showed up and wanted to be shared instead. Here’s my more cerebral, left-brain answer to the question, “Why do we resist joy?”

Two weeks ago I wrote about how to feel sad, and I heard from a few of you who were grateful for the encouragement and instruction. Today I want to encourage us to feel our joy.

Joy. Why would we resist feeling joyful and happy? It seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Pushing away sadness makes sense. Sadness, grief, sorrow – they hurt. Joy doesn’t hurt, right?

Well. Maybe, maybe not. We might not resist joy like we resist sadness. We resist joy in different ways – we might rush past joy, not stopping to take it in.  We might hold on to it with a death grip, grasping and needy, not trusting that there are moments of joy yet to come.

We might believe that if we let joy in, it will only make our inevitable sorrow more acutely painful.

And we’d be right.

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.

And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.

And how else can it be?

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?

And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”

But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Kahlil Gibran

Feelings are unpredictable. Feelings ebb and flow. Feelings arrive, fresh-faced or tear-stained, without words, yanking on our skirts and distracting us from our to-do lists. They require our attention at inconvenient times.

Feeling our feelings, all of them, is a choice. We don’t have to do it. We can numb and distract and talk ourselves out of our feelings until we die. Many lovely people choose not to feel their feelings. You probably know a few of them.

Our dominant culture excels at teaching us to ignore our true feelings.

So, why bother? Why feel at all? Why rock our little human boats that we try so hard to keep afloat and on an even keel? Why make life harder than it already is? Why choose to feel deeply? Why not leave well enough alone?

Why choose to get back in touch with our emotions? Our emotions live in our bodies. When we cut off our emotional lives, we cut off our embodied existence. We live from the neck up, dragging our bodies around like machines controlled by our brains.

You may have vacated your body and moved into your head at some point, probably in self-defense. It was the best strategy at the time. Vacating your body was how you got through the painful stuff.

If so, it’s time to come back home.

Why? Because, when you cut off your embodied feelings, you also cut off your connection to Soul. Our souls and bodies are intertwined. Your soul does not live in your brain or your mind.

Feeling your joy and sorrow is how you reconnect with your body. Reconnecting with your body is how you connect with your soul and your soul’s Source.

Cutting off your body because it hurts too much and you feel uncomfortable is to cut off your connection to God. Refusing to be in our bodies severs our connection to Holiness. Your holiness. My holiness. Earth’s holiness. Holiness Itself.

Besides, it takes so much energy to keep stuffing and resisting our feelings! Just think what you could get done if you just let your feelings move through you and got on with your day?!

If you want a less woo-woo, more sciency reason to feel your feelings, consider the neurobiology adage “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” In the words of Rick Hanson, “Passing mental states become lasting neural traits.” He’s got some good instructions in this 13-minute TED talk.

When we pay conscious attention to joyful moments, experiences, and memories, we heal our brains. A healed brain is more resilient and flexible. A healed brain is more resistant to stress and the cascade of destruction and disease caused by stress.

We inhabit our joy only when we also attend to our sorrow. They walk together.

Mary Oliver:

When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider

the orderliness of the world. Notice

something you have never noticed before,

like the tambourine sound of the snow cricket

whose pale green body is no longer than your thumb.

Stare hard at the hummingbird, in the summer rain,

shaking the water-sparks from its wings.

Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no.

Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also,

like the diligent leaves.

A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world

and the responsibilities of your life.

Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.

Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

Does this resonate? Want to explore further? Contact me to schedule a free no-obligation conversation. I’d love to talk!

Photo credit: Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Seek Sanctuary for Your Soul

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In his essay “Sanctuary” from On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity and Getting Old, author and activist Parker Palmer describes the mandatory church attendance of his childhood, and how he came to associate the word “sanctuary” with stained glass windows, hard wooden pews, and the strong desire to flee that space and its terrible feeling of captivity. He continues:

“Today—after eight decades of life in a world that’s both astonishingly beautiful and horrifically cruel—“sanctuary” is as vital as breathing to me. Sometimes I find it in churches, monasteries, and other sites formally designated “sacred.” But more often I find it in places sacred to my soul: in the natural world, in the company of a faithful friend, in solitary or shared silence, in the ambiance of a good poem or good music.

 

Sanctuary is wherever I find safe space to regain my bearings, reclaim my soul, heal my wounds, and return to the world as a wounded healer. It’s not merely about finding shelter from the storm—it’s about spiritual survival and the capacity to carry on. Today, seeking sanctuary is no more optional for me than church attendance was as a child.”

Later in the essay, Parker quotes Thomas Merton: “The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work … It destroys the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

Parker continues:

“Merton names one of our deepest needs: to protect and nurture the “root of inner wisdom” that makes work and life itself fruitful. Fed by the taproot some call the soul (emphasis mine), we need neither flee from the world nor exploit it. Instead, we can love the world with all its (and our) flaws, aspiring to the best of human possibility.

 

We can live that way only if we know when and where to seek sanctuary, reclaiming our souls for the purpose of loving the world. When service emerges from whatever nurtures the root of one’s inner wisdom, it’s much less likely to be distorted by the violence of activism and overwork. Once we understand that, we are moving toward the heart of nonviolence—the only way of being that has any chance to transcend and transform the violence of our culture.”

I am struck by Parker’s discussion of his soul as having its own life, in a sense. He describes his soul as an entity that’s part of him, yet separate—an entity that needs care and protection. It’s through care of our souls, he says, that right action emerges.

Right action, I believe, is crucial in our wounded country and hurting world. Especially now, on the eve and in the aftermath of the American midterm elections. We require action rooted in deep wisdom, action that flows from the sustaining, abiding Heart of Life.

This week, seek solace and sanctuary for your soul. Seek sanctuary for your soul, first for yourself.  And then do it for all of us, your fellow earthlings. When your work is deeply rooted in wisdom, your work will help us heal.

As Parker says, sanctuary is as “vital as breathing.”

Quotes from parker j. palmer’s On the brink of everything: grace, gravity, and growing old. BK Books, 2018.

art by ashland, oregon artist Denise kester, entitled “she let her words fly forth as blessings.”