Just as I’ve been contemplating the writing of this post I opened an email from
and read the following quote,“We do not always allow ourselves to work through pain. More often than not, we think pain is a signal that we must stop, rather than find its source. Our souls do not like stagnation. Our souls aspire toward growth, that is, toward remembering all that we have forgotten due to our trip to this place, the earth. In this context, a body in pain is a soul in longing.”
— Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community
The part that jumped off the screen for me was “Our souls aspire toward growth.”
Which means that the work I’ve been doing within myself and with others, which is to connect more deeply with our purpose, means, that by extension we are connecting more deeply with our souls. And when we connect more deeply with our souls, we come to recognize the soul’s innate desire for growth.
Each time we are born into another incarnation we forget who we are as we enter into the tiny fetus of a being with a brain that will take decades to fully develop. We lack the intellectual capacity to hold the knowing of our being in those tiny developing brains, and instead we enjoy the tactile experience of being held in embryonic fluid and the constant warm embrace of a mother’s body.
As we come into the light of the outside world our every need is attended to by nurturing mothers, fathers, family, friends, and helpers. We only need to cry and we receive attention. And we live this way for some time while our brains slowly develop. We’re cradled in the climate of culture and its values and precepts. We feel the fears of those around us, just as we feel their joy. And by the time we reach the point in our development where we expand our sense of self to include those around us as distinct beings operating independently from our own personal needs we have already absorbed a great deal of information and experience related to how we are to function in the world.
Which is to say that all the limiting beliefs and understandings of who we truly are have already been inculcated into our developing intellectual capacity with no understanding of the soul’s infinite journey, no memory of prior incarnations, no knowledge of who we truly are.
Only a slowly developing conscious life of physicality, rote learning, and play. And play, by the way, is a giant clue to our true essence. But at the time of childhood we don’t yet know it. Even most adults fail to recognize its importance, as the nature of our play is the first and most powerful clue to our innate being.
And so it continues. We build a life. We make choices. We attach ourselves to some values and not others. We feel compelled to move in certain directions, and not others. And we continue to feel the powerful dynamic of human culture convincing us of the purely physical nature of our being, while diminishing the voice within that prods us toward a life of continual change.
Our culture tells us we have to achieve certain things, things of permanence. A college degree becomes a thing of permanence in our resume/CV. A marriage, we are taught, is supposed to be permanent. Purchasing a home so that we may establish a permanent residence. Finding a good job that we can settle into. Becoming a part of certain communities, which are tacitly understood to imply permanence. And family is always understood to mean that it’s forever.
The holy grail in academia is to achieve tenure. Being elected to political office is supposed to be for a limited time, while entrenchment is the norm. Friendships are understood to mean we are locked into them forever. And while lasting friendships are a beautiful thing, when one in a friendship seeks to continuously evolve while another stagnates, it is usually best for them to part ways.
Interestingly, I have one single friendship that stretches back 52 years to the second grade. It continually amazes me that we are still in touch and still greatly enjoy each other’s company. We may go a few years between phone calls, but once we’re on the line together it’s as if no time has passed. At this point, we both get that our souls recognize each other, that this is not the first lifetime we’ve known each other, and that we’ve been brothers before. More importantly, my friend Alfred is a seeker. He looks within and gradually and continually evolves, which is the most significant reason we are still such good friends after all this time.
But then . . .
All around us there is constant change. With the primary example being nature. Leave a yard untouched and nature takes over. Leave an entire city behind and it takes over. Mountains are constantly forming and eroding. Even our cosmic journey through space is in constant movement, as our solar system travels around the Milky Way at approximately 448,000 miles per hour. It takes roughly 230 million years to complete one rotation. The Milky Way itself is traveling through space at 1.3 million miles per hour, and in 4 billion years our galaxy will collide with the nearest spiral galaxy, Andromeda, creating a spectacular cacophony of intertwining orbits and collisions.
There is no possibility for stagnation for more than brief periods. In stagnation the pressure for change builds up in the form of tension and even conflict until the proverbial levee breaks.
We build levees within ourselves. We tell ourselves we have to make things work, keep it steady, keep it the same. All the while ignoring the pressure within that feels like a growing discomfort. We ignore it for as long as we can. We may seek to inebriate ourselves, to numb out, to avoid, and when that doesn’t work we blame other people, situations, or places without understanding that no one is at fault, it’s just our soul yearning for change.
I’m only recently understanding this dynamic more fully, and in coming to this awareness I’m reflecting on prior changes and recognizing how much I’ve blamed others for them. The company I worked for had a lousy culture. Certain people were unethical. The former wife did this or that. That friend was this or that. The community didn’t offer this or that.
Many of those things are true, but those things (whatever they were) were not the real reasons for the change. The true reasons were that my soul was ready to move on.
I had learned what I was at the company to learn, in the relationship to learn what I was meant to learn, the friendship, the community, the city or state I was living in, the car I was driving, the style of dress, the lifestyle, the hobbies and interests. All of it. Was intended to be temporary, like the constantly changing landscape of our natural world and the great evolving cosmos.
As I wrote recently in Emerging from Gooey Gestation,
“Butterflies are unquestionably beautiful, and yet they evolve from a gooey substance within a cocoon in which they literally digest themselves in the process of reconstituting into a new life form. From caterpillar to sticky goo to delicate beauty, and then within less than four weeks they perish.”
While we live much longer than four weeks, we are not unlike the butterfly. We are conceived into a fluid, formed, and pushed out into the world. We grow and evolve and then we decay and decline before our physical form ceases to function and our soul moves on to the next adventure. And yet many of us have our bodies preserved, placed in sealed caskets, and buried in the ground with much ceremony and commemorated with often elaborate headstones that are presumed to remain in perpetuity. Nature, however, will not allow any cemetery the permanence with which they are intended. Tectonic plates shift, new mountains form, and in a million years there will not exist the slightest trace of us having ever walked the Earth as distinct beings.
But our egos want us to be remembered forever, because we feel through remembrance we will live forever.
This understanding is important to embrace because it helps us make sense of our lives. The tension we so often feel in relationships, places we live in, career directions, friendships, and all of it are most often misunderstood as some form of a conflict or dissatisfaction with the person, place, or situation. Thus we seek for the drama that may not exist or to amplify minor drama into major drama to give ourselves the excuse to walk away. We may even create drama where none needed exist.
Understanding this dynamic more deeply is providing me not just great clarity, but serenity in the face of change, as I share this in the context of great change I’m currently preparing for.
In Emerging from Gooey Gestation I shared that Maria and I have been having open and honest conversations about what is emerging from within us and the kinds of lives we are seeking for ourselves. As a result of such conversations we have made the decision to go our separate ways. As we’ve begun to share the news with close friends and family we are usually met with expressions of sadness. And while there will be sadness and grieving we are not making this decision because our relationships has become toxic or unhealthy, but simply because we are being called to different kinds of lives and we are honoring our soul’s calling.
We’ve even joked that maybe we should try to find something to argue about so we can blame the other for the separation, but only in jest. There is some fear, uncertainty, egoic crumbling, and also excitement and a feeling of release and freeing up.
What remains is our friendship, which we feel is enduring, as we are after all, best friends. We feel on a deeper level, our relationship is not ending but evolving. Maria will continue to edit these posts and provide her valuable input on the shaping of content, and she has stepped away from her role in 4 Directions Branding.
We will move on to re-create our lives anew. We will honor the call of the soul to continue to evolve, and I’m sure I’ll be sharing aspects of my new journey here at the DEEPER side of things, as many things are in the works.
And so, to the topic of fundamental change, embracing change is mostly an uncomfortable process but it enables and allows the soul to evolve in ever more exciting and profound ways. Deciding to seek permanence is not bad, it’s only a choice. I’ve just chosen differently — not better — just a choice.
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