Welcome to Soul Stories
Welcome to Soul Stories!
If our lives are played out in a series of ever-deepening stories, and soul is the place from which we (ideally) act out those stories, then Soul Stories is about touching the essence of the deepest, juiciest story of which we can be(come) aware.
We hear this word in many contexts, don’t we — “soul.” What, specifically, does it refer to?
Peruse a book like Handbook for the Soul and you might notice (or at least I did) a theme emerging around this term, “soul.” Jacob Needleman talks of a “sacred impulse”, referring to the soul as “an embryo in us that needs to be nurtured and nourished.” Phil Cousineau shares, “It seems to me soul is still our touchstone word for what’s authentic and vital. So if someone says, ‘I’ve lost my soul,’ what I hear is, ‘I’ve lost my authenticity. I’ve lost my spark. I’ve lost my connection to the sacred.’”
It’s true, even everyday vernacular about living or performing “soulfully” hints at a specific meaning to the term. Singer John Legend describes this well in a 2009 commencement speech, noting, “Soul is about authenticity.”
I love Michael Meade’s wax-lyrical on soul in Fate and Destiny:
What makes us each unique and therefore genuinely human is more vital than any dogma or doctrine and more creative than any ideology or system of belief. For the ideas seeded in our souls from the beginning confound all the ideologies and trump all the abstract systems. It is the spark of spirit within the individual soul that makes religion possible at all and that makes culture inevitable. It is the inner uniqueness that makes life meaningful at each stage, that makes love a possibility at any moment, and that makes each moment susceptible and vulnerable to the eternal.
There must be so many ways to live soulfully — especially if we do each have that unique essence waiting to be drawn out — and probably equally as many ways to confuse and conflate. Thomas Berry, in his prophetic way, offers guidance in his moving work, Dream of the Earth:
In moments of confusion such as the present, we are not left simply to our own rational contrivances. We are supported by the ultimate powers of the universe as they make themselves present to us through the spontaneities within our own beings. We need only become sensitized to those spontaneities, not with a naive simplicity, but with critical appreciation.
Soul Stories is not about naive simplicity, nor pie-in-the-sky romanticization. It’s about what is true, for you. AND about what is universally true, on an archetypal level. Both can be held. The map is never the territory, but they can inform each other.
Okay, this is all well and good, but what will Soul Stories actually consist of?
The Soul Stories Page will have the basic info: Every Saturday morning starting at [updated] 9am I will sit in [updated] Civic Center Park in Berkeley, holding space for the stories of the soul to emerge.
Simple concept: whoever is moved to can come and have a go at speaking aloud the story of their soul — the part in us that feels the deepest calling in life. My practice will be to listen, perhaps ask some questions, and mirror if that’s wanted. I’ll be drawing on whatever depth psychology, mindfulness, and social/emotional intelligence skills I’ve gained over the last three years+ of my own wandering journey.
