That calling, that pulling, forceful energy that awakens a yearning inside me, I feel it again. I recognize it. I know that I am meant to move towards it, as it moves towards me.
But when I think I can almost define it, almost close my fingers over it or pull it to me in an embrace, I lose it, the way a soap bubble pops and leaves only moisture behind. And then it’s gone, and even that moisture is insufficient proof that it ever existed.
I remember those stories of olden days that I read as a child, of two young people who recognized something in one another when they met and were then separated by life circumstances. They parted, then, with a soft promise, followed by a long separation, perhaps of many years, without any more connection between them than the fading memory of their encounter and their promise. In those stories, they held faith across vast expanses of time until they were finally joined by life once again.
My first thought is that those stories do not describe me. I know how fickle I can be! I need reminders, reconnections, a gentle wind over red embers. I need that calling held before me continuously, palpably, in order not to fall back again into oblivion.
Or, maybe not?
Is it possible that the fading memory of my encounter with that energy, of the promises I fervently made in its presence are powerful enough to hold me up until life joins us once again?
As we go about our lives fulfilling the roles that we have chosen to take on, that we may have inherited from the people around us, we are sometime interrupted. Sometimes the interruption comes through something big, often painful or frightening, something that shakes up our life. And sometimes, the interruption is only a niggling sense, a feeling, an unfathomable itch that gives us no peace.
It is our Soul, calling us back to our essence. It calls us to recognize that which would emerge into the world through us. It calls us to own the fullness of who we are in spite of the apparent contradictions found in that very fullness. It calls us to remember we are more than we seem, more than our bodies and our minds.
Sometimes that calling is present to us for a long time, we keep going as if we didn’t know it is there. But we intuit the potency of it, we are aware that it will not abate, will not release us to continue as we were. Yet, the force of habit, the familiarity of living and doing as we always have, the approval of our family and peers for continuing as we were, and, especially, the overwhelming power that the fear of change grips us with, all conspire to keep us from heeding that call.
We have not been taught to honor our Soul, not been taught to listen for it. Our world is not built to support this kind of growth, this kind of stretching that feels like taking so great a risk. Our lives are built around keeping on keeping on.
We all need to be reminded of the great Wisdom of Life, which we are part of, and, more so, of the Wisdom we already hold. We all need a mirror that catches our Light and reflects it back to us, so that our physical eyes can behold it. We all need someone who has faith in us when we doubt ourselves; who asks what we would gain, when we ask what we would lose; who recognizes our fortitude when we feel weakness; who speaks back to us our own words of Knowing, which we have already forgotten.
We all need support and companionship on our journey to respond to our Soul.
I am that, I am a spiritual companion. I hold up the mirror for you to see yourself in your power and your potential, walking your own path, guided by your Soul’s compass, through the spaciousness of your own making. This is what my Soul calls me to.
I walk among the bluebells that spill over the forest floor, and I think about the ways I serve. For all of my roles, for all the different ways that I could compartmentalize my service, as a mother and wife, a life coach and spiritual companion, a volunteer, a friend, I know this:
When I am fully present and engaging the whole of my Self, I can be a vehicle for others to reach into themselves and to touch what lives most powerfully within them, to reconnect with their soul and recall who they yearn to be. I can be a vehicle for others to discover their voice, to recognize their essence, to own who they are at their depths. I can be a vehicle for them to recognize what is real, and sacred, to them.
And to do so, I have only to see in them their transcendence, only to remember there is that in each person I encounter. Some, I can perceive, know this about themselves, while some waver, and others have no awareness of it. Many who cross my path ache to remember it.
But this process of recognition circles back in a gift for me. For, in order to be that vehicle, I must recognize and claim the same transcendence in myself, and I must grant myself compassion when I waver. To be that vehicle, I must remember that the potential to express that essence and manifest it at all times is always there, within me. That is what I must remember in my encounters with others, and my encounters with myself.
I am reading about power, the ability to make something happen. Yang power is what Westerners would think of when they hear the word “power.” It is what my ego would have me use. To make something happen, to cause a change that I predetermine, my ego wants a plan, preferably in black and white, with measurable markers along the way, and results it can hold up to the light to compare.
In Mother-Daughter Wisdom, Dr. Christiane Northrup calls yin power “the power of expectancy and faith… that change[s] our minds and our beliefs so we are better able to attract what we want. [It] knows how and when to wait and hold back… that sometimes the best action is to do nothing.”
This is the power my True Self would have me use. It is rich, loamy darkness, pulling my focus away from fear and to my soul’s desires. It requires that I sit in silent awareness, that I remain awake to my callings, and that I shift my vibration, tune myself up to the energy of that which is wanting to come into being through me.
It is my intention always to follow what is alive for me, where the energy calls. But sometimes what that is, how to do it, is not so clear to me. In recent months, I have been doing some volunteer work that includes crafting a written environmental statement that my mind recognizes is vitally important, but that has felt immobile, stuck, in no way beckoning!
I am fortunate that I do not work alone, and that my companion on the journey, Amy, is a woman of wisdom who calls me to step into my own center when I forget. Recognizing the static energy in our task, together, and before our scheduled meeting, we decided to set aside all that we had done before and open ourselves up to inspiration.
That intention, consciously set, moved within my dreams, in the archives of my memories, in my imagination. An image came to me of a medicine wheel, sprung from my learnings in shamanism; an image that seemed completely outside of the worldview this Statement is supposed to fit into. But it felt alive: a huge circle made of stones laid side by side; a circle, cut in quarters, and each separating line leading to a vibrant bunch of wild herbs growing. That image reminds me of the energy of la Finca, of mountains and soil and green trees unfolding, the place where I feel most aligned. That image connected me to the energies of all that which our Statement claims to celebrate and protect, but that I had drifted away from in the minutiae of wheres and wherefores.
During our meeting, when I shared the image with Amy, I did so only because it felt so alive, such a powerful presence in my mind’s eye, not because I could see its relevance to our task. Nonetheless, my wise companion invited me to allow what wanted to be expressed through us to arise. She set a process in motion that I could not describe, and before I could make sense of what we were doing, our staid, stiff Statement had turned into something new: a fluid tool that can hold highest consciousness, that can create space for any permutation of celebrating and protecting life, of learning from Nature, of connecting to Mystery.
In spite of the smallness of my imagination, I am blessed, for, in my willingness to follow, to open, I have been utilized again as a piece of the jigsaw that draws into the world something greater than my narrow mind could produce on its own!
My calling. It’s been beckoning, across the years and the decades. And I, I have listened for it, sometimes attentively, sometimes distractedly. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes resisting, I have followed its echo through darkened forests of heavy undergrowth, have felt it push me through tight spots that open into sunlit vistas, its energy giving me momentum to jump across canyons.
I have been faithful to it, across the canyons of time and geography. I have been true, as true as my courage and determination have allowed (which are, admittedly, not unflagging).
After all these years of listening, answering, following, I would think I would have grasped it already, I would predict I would have reached it with a victorious celebration! At the least, I would expect it to have faded slowly to nothing.
But time has only made it stronger. And, lately, it is a command, issued in the imperative.
I can only respond. I want only to respond.
Although I name it “a calling,” although that is a noun, my Calling is a verb, in continuous movement, never attainable, achievable, finished.
And I give thanks for that, for the magnificent white waters it will compel me to navigate, and the shiny mountaintop lakes it will coax me to climb to. I give thanks for all that I will see and learn, that I would never even aspire to, but for my Calling.
Mountaintop Lake in El Cocuy, Colombia, Photo by Santiago Giraldo
When I feel my Soul calling, I know I am ALIVE! And this awakens me to joy and radiance.
Often, the call requires me to stretch beyond my comfort zone, to gather courage and strength, to remember my commitment to my Self in order to find the determination to respond.
Often, what I am called to do has direct and visible consequences, not just for me, but for those around me. I have been called to do community work, to hold rituals, to offer Reiki… none of those occur alone, in my room, behind closed doors.
Often, those consequences distract me, they become the reason for what I am doing.
And when they don’t look the way I expected, my confidence fails and I want to retrace my steps.
But that is a mistake.
I can’t find a “logic” to what my deepest Self asks me to do. I don’t really know why something calls to me with a power I cannot deny. I especially don’t know it when I experience the call.
I forget that it is the fact of responding to my Soul’s urgings that is the reason I answer the call: honoring my Self.
Doing so makes me expansive and generous. And I know, for the briefest instant, the white-hot, numbing cold, impossible-to-reconcile, utterly familiar Oneness.
That irritability, the discomfort, that impatience that I have been feeling… it is a sign. It is a rapping on the door, a weathervane turning. Change is coming.
But change is always coming. Nothing remains static, except, sometimes, small self’s grasping for predictability.
True. Change is coming. But more than that, something is wanting to take form, something is asking to be given shape. That edginess comes from the distant, quiet awareness that I am being called, that I am being invited to allow some indistinct feeling to come through me and express itself in my life, through my body, or within it, perhaps.
Now that I recognize it, now that it is named, I can permit myself to remember how often I have experienced this before.
And how I am filled with wonder by what it is that results.
And so, instead of pushing away the change that will come, with or without my consent, I can center myself and prepare to receive it.
That burns away the layers of dishonesty and dissimulation.
A fire that burns somewhere in my belly, under my ribs, and somewhere deeper, in a place unknown, unseen, that only can exist in the mists of Knowing, beyond the physical plane, yet still within me.
It burns with a great roaring.
It is not the flame that once scorched me, it is not the fire that brings death,
A part of me likes the order, the neatness, of finishing things, of seeing them through. The Noisemaker within me holds judgment against me for starting such a variety of things and leaving them halfway done.
But the question is whether those things I started are valuable for the finished rug in my office, for the published novel on some shelf, for the law degree framed on the wall. Or rather, are they valuable for what they brought me when they were juicy and real and in the moment: for the rhythmic latching of the wool on the needle that opens my unthinking mind and allows inspiration to come in; or the myriad gifts of connection with my grandmother as I interviewed her and the juicy excitement when my day job was over and I headed for hours of joy in the darkened library, paging through microfiche; or the painful disconnect that threatened to deaden my soul and alerted me to my responsibility to live true to my essence? I may have started a rug for the finished product, the image of it lying over the patch of ink on the floorboard of my office. I didn’t start a novel knowing that’s what it was, but when I caught on that it could be, the concept of a book of my own beckoned me on when the going felt rough and what I was learning about myself felt too heavy to hold. I definitely went to law school assuming I’d end up with a degree.
None of these things came to be. And I am not sorry for any of them. Perhaps some day they will. (Okay, there’s little chance that I will suddenly feel my interest rekindle for studying law.) It is what I received of these experiences as I found myself in them, that I value now.
So, recently, sharing what I teach with a larger audience made me feel expansive: I could contribute more joy to more people. Preparing for a new class is always exciting, rich. This time, it opened me up to deepening my awareness of concepts that had long called to me softly.
But I ignored them, because, of course, now I had to focus on the class.
And that is when I became divorced from what is alive, when I lost touch with what energizes, vitalizes, uncovers my essence to me. That’s when I forgot to check in and notice that what is calling is this small and unexpected side-path.
Letting the old idea of the class hang over me, a “should” that weighs and drags along as I move, no longer serves me. So I must let it go, put it on the shelf with the rug and the novel and the law degree, to come back to when inspiration hits me, pick it up where I left off— but only if it is nourishing to my soul, if it reminds me of my essence in that very moment. Or perhaps they have all already served their purpose.
My true task is to remember, from moment to moment, from thought to thought, to be aware of my essence, to check into my heart, to check my energy and remember my Self. Am I being true? Am I remembering who I truly am? Or am I letting the energies of other people, of the small aspects of myself, of the fragments and insertions determine what I do, where I focus my energy, the kind of energy that I carry, and who I think of myself as being?
In truth, I am recognizing that my Self requires a loyalty to change that may look like fickleness. But it is the fickleness of my essence, which sometimes shows me new directions that don’t make sense or don’t lead where I would expect.
And I am committed, first and foremost, to my Self.
Reflections From My True Self 