A Young Soul

Standing in My Own Power and Strength

A young soul grows into an old soul, who then finds a new young soul inside. His soul hides inside his body. His body grows at a steady rate while seeming to run and crawl at the same time.

Wrapped around the soul is a mind that wanders around trying to find the route to his soul. Without realising, it tucks the soul inside it. Whenever his mind sees glimpses of this it rushes off to new places. The storms of emotions that blow up out of nowhere, like whirlwinds in the desert, buffet the whole.

The Beginning

His soul is the home of his spirit, the heart of his being, the core of his existence. The journey through life is a metaphor for the journey to his soul. This is where the spirituality of existence lies. It is at the intersection of the journey through life and the journey to the soul. Spirituality is the air he breathes, the thoughts he has, the emotions he feels, and the spirit that fills him. Spirituality is the cause and consequence of his being.

Without this multi-dimensional approach to his time on earth, there is nothing. Without a sense of guidance from afar, he roams, lost. Without a mind to understand these struggles he fades into the nothingness of living from day to day.

The beginning is where time forges these layers and forgets them. The beginning is where the seeking starts. The beginning is the end of the forging of who he is and the start of the journey to the discovery of who he is. Existence separates from knowledge. The desire to unite these in the context of the physical world is the grand journey.

Who Am I?

Am I the body I inhabit? My body that has kept me driving through the days and years, and has held me back. For many years I thought my body was me, and that did not please me. There is so much in it to explore that there is a danger it will take over. I still obsess over it, trying to bend it to my will while it still succeeds in bending me to its will.

Am I my mind that never stops filling my head, whether I am asleep or awake? My mind that helps me make sense of who I am, but only as time passes. My mind that makes sense of the world I am in, but only as I accept its existence. My mind that fools me and sends me off at tangents, confusing me and, sometimes, enlightening me.

Am I my emotions that push me up and knock me back? The emotions that govern how I relate to others and the world out there. They come from deep inside and tear me apart. They are never real but pretend to be what protects me from the world and those that would harm me. They pretend to connect me to the world and support me in what I desire. They are a blanket over my soul and they stop me reaching it and learning the truth—at least the truth I came here to find.

Am I my spirit, am I my soul? I'm not sure… I am only now discovering them.

In the past I was my body and my body was everything. I teased it into life every morning and soothed it to sleep every night. My body served me, and still does. This story starts with my physical existence. It only morphs over time into what was there, underneath.

Beyond time my soul joins with others in a sea of awareness that underpins it, should I choose to recognise it. There I am united in an understanding of what relationships are and what solitude is.

Physical Existence

At some point, for some reason, a soul merges into a physical existence and be born onto this earth. It comes here for a purpose. It needs to merge into the flow of life in the physical and so forget its divine existence and purpose. It progresses through the physical span of its being. It wants to fulfil its purpose and discover what that is. This dichotomy defeats most people. They drift into living their life until their souls merge back into the sea of awareness.

On a simple level my life is flying towards its end. It is wandering, spiralling towards the final realisation, where I have the flash of understanding that explains my existence.

Long before I came into this world my grandmother created a large tapestry. It always hung in pride of place in our home. It was a scene of nature created by woollen threads sewn into the hessian cloth. It fell one day, breaking the glass and the frame. As it lay exposed I looked at the reverse side. It was a mess of intersecting threads that made no sense. This was not where the picture was and yet, it created the picture on the other side. What would life be like if all I saw was the reverse side, like the tapestry, the seeming random threads, the mess and the chaos?

The flash of understanding is the moment when I turn life over and see the side with the picture. I see what life was all about, for the first time I understand. That is when I know where I am going, when I know what it is all for. But it does not make me feel sad or depressed. I have come to accept that this is how life is, although it was not always so.

My being is precious, I need to handle it with care, no matter how I treat my body. My being transcends my inadequate mind and suffers my flailing emotions. My being merges, for the present, with my spirit, my soul.

Circular Nature of Life

I have already opened up to the circular nature of my life. I see the end point of my life of searching. Like for Santiago, in Paulo Coelho's book 'The Alchemist', the pot of gold has been underneath me all along. In my case the love, inspiration and connection I longed for was inside me all along. I spent years trying to find the answer but then I realised that all I had to do was stop, listen and look within my own heart. What I found is my light, my inspiration and my soul. It has always been there and continued to drive me on until I finally heard its voice.

The longing was like an empty hole—a vast void. I did not know how to fill it or even know what it was there for. I see now, though, that Spirit was talking to me all the time. The problem was my willingness to listen, not my ability to listen but my desire to step into the flow of Spirit and listen to what it was saying to me.

I no longer feel the need to let my past or my past emotional reactions govern or control me. It is not that I no longer need them, but more that I want to stand in my own power and strength and succeed or even fail. I want to be myself and be responsible for everything that I do.