soul

How to stay connected to my soul

To help my stay connected to my soul, I begin each day by spending an hour in nature. Every day I give gratitude; every day I meditate. One day a month I devote to silence and reflection. Usually I fast on this day; it's a whole day of being, and of listening to my inner guidance. There is no doing. I literally either walk in silence or sit in silence listening. These practices help open my creative fires to the mysteries of the soul.

Soul of the community

Since early times, the Holy Soul was known to the people of Israel as the Shekinah. She brought peace and harmony into the community, working into the "soul of the community." Shekinah also means "Divine Presence," and he most direct and immediate experience of the Holy Soul or the Shekinah is the presence of a sense of peace and harmony prevailing on the soul level – a kind of "overlighting" from the community of souls gathered together.

You have found your soul friend

According to Celtic spiritual tradition, the soul shines all around the boy like a luminous cloud. When you are very open – appreciative and trusting – with another person, your two souls flow together. This deeply felt bond with another person means you have found an ANAM CARA or "soul friend." Your ANAM CARA always beholds your light and beauty, and accepts you for who you truly are.

Attending to our souls

We allow loss of soul awareness at our own peril and that of humanity and planet Earth! We can only become authentic individuals by attending to our souls throughout our lives.

If we are willing to sit quietly and wait for a while

If we want to support each other's inner lies, we must remember a simple truth. The human soul does not want to be fixed, it wants simply to be seen and heard. If we want to see and hear a person's soul, there is another truth we must remember. The soul is like a wild animal – tough, resilient, and yet shy. When we go crashing through the woods shouting for it to come out so we can help it, the soul will stay in hiding. But if we are willing to sit quietly and wait for a while, the soul may show itself.

October 1999 (Vol. XII, No. 9)

BLESSINGS, dear friends! Precious to the soul are the pauses in the silence in these intense and, all too often, stressful times. May we each bless ourselves and those around us with soul-breaks throughout the day.

The vale of soul-making

John Keats

Call the world, if you please,
"the vale of Soul-making".
Then you will find out the use
of the world.

Windows of the soul

Arthur Joseph Vocal Awareness

If the eyes are the windows of the soul, then the voice is the window opened up and the sound of the soul coming out.

The soul of humanity

Ewalt Kliemke

The soul of humanity, like the soul of the individual, lives only through love. Inspirited life is never immobilised in the barren monotony of mechanism. Ever and again it brings fresh animation, winged by some spirit on whose pinions it bears a kindred and loving life to all it meets.

The soul's recessed certainty of its being a parenthesis in the immense script of God's eternal speech

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Our awareness of God is a syntax of the silence in which our souls mingle with the divine, in which the ineffable in us communes with the ineffable beyond us. It is the afterglow of years in which soul and sky are silent together, the out-growth of accumulated certainty of the abundant, never-ebbing presence of the divine. All we are called to do is to let the insight be able to listen to the soul's recessed certainty of its being a parenthesis in the immense script of God's eternal speech.

You soul is your life

Benjamin Shield, Richard Carlson

Your soul is your life. Everything else is a fiction -- a mind game in authenticity. Without nourishing your own soul, you can't nourish the world; you can't give what you don't have. As your soul grows, however, it emanates invisibly and involuntarily the light which it has received.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting

William Wordsworth

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our Life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home...

The heavenly vault descended into his soul

Fyodor Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamozov

Alyosha emerged from the dream transformed. Something burned in his heart, something suddenly filled him almost painfully, tears of rapture nearly burst from his soul. ...Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining stars, hung boundlessly. From the zenith to the horizon the still-dim Milky Way stretched its double strand. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring, enveloped the earth. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of heavens, the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars. ...Alyosha felt clearly and almost tangibly something as firm and immovable as the heavenly vault descend into his soul. ...Never in his life would he forget that moment.

Utter silence of the soul

Madame Guyon Union with God

In the resurrected state, there comes an utter silence of the soul. By that silence, the advanced pilgrim lives in God and lives from God. It is silence of soul that he or she communicates with God. A soul that is thus dead to its own working and to all provision of itself, to that soul, SILENCE becomes both a wonderful TRANSMISSION and RECEIVING of Divine communication.

The whispers of our soul

Joyce Rupp Little Pieces of Light

The stirrings in the tomb of our darkness are the WHISPERS OF OUR SOUL, urging us to move toward a place where we have not been before. We may be pushed to make changes in our lives that we would never considered otherwise. We may be forced to look at hidden wounds and inner issues that we had always been able to shove aside. We may be led to appreciate life and our gifts at a much deeper level. Most always, the womb of darkness is a catalyst for creativity and for a deeper relationship with God. Always it is a time for trust in the transformative process and for faith that something worthwhile is to be gained by our waiting in the dark.

The soul is a bit shy

Macrina Wiederkehr Gold in Your Memories

There is a way that the soul can get crowded out of one's day. The soul is a bit shy and does not demand center stage. She lives a life of her own, and yet there are soulprints in every fiber of your being, even in things you've forgotten. The soul is the keeper of memories. She knows where beauty is stored. She contains the memories of your entire life. Deep in your unconscious she stands guard. If you are in need of a particular memory she can reveal it to you and help you to bear both the beauty and the pain. She knows all about the gold in your memories.

Hope is a thing with feathers

Emily Dickinson

Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul,
and sings the tune without the words
and never stops at all.

The soul should always stand ajar

Emily Dickinson

The soul should always stand ajar,
ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.

Soulful divinity needs to be mated with the spirit

14th Dalai Lama

People need to climb the mountain not simply because it is there, but because the soulful divinity needs to be mated with the spirit.

Our soul's potential

John Welwood

Someone who loves us can often see our soul potential more clearly than we can ourselves. When this happens, it has a catalytic effect, it invites and encourages the dormant, undeveloped part of us to come forth and find expression.

Fully conscious individual soul life

Robert Sardello Love and the Soul

The World Soul has undergone the long process of evolution, a kind of fall from unity, in order that this unity might be again fulfilled, now fully consciously. Restoring the World Soul to its unity becomes weighted on the side of the development of fully conscious individual soul life: the task of human beings in the destiny of Holy Wisdom.

Hardly ever a complete silence in our soul

Frederick William Faber

There is hardly ever a complete silence in our soul.
God is whispering to us well-nigh incessantly.
Whenever the sounds of the world die out of the soul,
or sink low,
Then we hear these whisperings of God.

Hearing with the soul

Renate Craine Hildegard

"Hearing with the soul" refers to perception with the spiritual senses, to an awakening of a new quality of perception. It is an inbreaking of a contemplative awareness that is capable of perceiving all reality as illumined and suffused by God, as graced with tremendous potential. ...The awakening of the spiritual senses can happen to all of us. We are all capable of "hearing with the soul."

The soul is a bit shy

There is a way that the soul can get crowded out of one's day. The soul is a bit shy and does not demand center stage. She lives a life of her own, and yet there are soulprints in every fiber of your being, even in things you've forgotten. The soul is the keeper of memories. She knows where beauty is stored. She contains the memories of your entire life. Deep in your unconscious she stands guard. If you are in need of a particular memory she can reveal it to you and help you to bear both the beauty and the pain. She knows all about the gold in your memories.

You soul is your life

Your soul is your life. Everything else is a fiction -- a mind game in authenticity. Without nourishing your own soul, you can't nourish the world; you can't give what you don't have. As your soul grows, however, it emanates invisibly and involuntarily the light which it has received.

Hearing with the soul

"Hearing with the soul" refers to perception with the spiritual senses, to an awakening of a new quality of perception. It is an inbreaking of a contemplative awareness that is capable of perceiving all reality as illumined and suffused by God, as graced with tremendous potential. ...The awakening of the spiritual senses can happen to all of us. We are all capable of "hearing with the soul."

Pages