free-range souls

soften up to let healing happen

Dear friends.

Thank you for being here. You are a precious soul venturing forth in an ever-changing human body. How much does your soul’s mission amaze you?

If it doesn’t, maybe let’s talk?

It might change things, you know, to remember that every human you will ever meet is carrying a soul in there. You might even let your souls meet and play. If you do, I’m pretty sure you’ll remember true love.

Which brings me to a question:

How do you give your soul room to roam?

We like our chickens to be free-range. What about that indwelling spirit of ours?

I ask because I spent six wonder-filled weeks contemplating the Yoga Sūtra of Patañjali with some yogis. Specifically, we looked at the ways and means of yoga, and the human conditions that trouble our progress. According to Patanjali, these obstacles arise due to our ignorance, ego, desires, and fear of change.

I found the discussion about the guidance of sutra 1.33 most informative. Here’s the verse with a standard translation:

maitrī-karuṇā-muditopekṣāṇāṃ sukha-duḥkha-puṇyāpuṇya-viṣayāṇāṃ bhāvanātaś citta-prasādanam

By cultivating friendliness toward the happy, compassion toward the suffering, delight toward the virtuous, and equanimity toward the unvirtuous, the mind remains clear and serene.

While folks felt comfortable sharing attitudes of friendliness, compassion, and delight, we stumbled a bit at the invitation to practice equanimity.

Specifically, and importantly, my wise friends asked for a definition of virtue in order to understand what might be unvirtuous. So, what is virtue?

I shared the Socratic six: goodness, wisdom, moderation, courage, justice, and faith. Of course, Socrates believed that you couldn’t have one without all… and his list has been expanded over time to include other qualities. Maybe silence and cleanliness. Maybe order and punctuality. Maybe tranquility, sincerity, kindness, and gratitude.

The virtues I hold dear? Compassion, unconditional love, sincerity, courage, and faith.

What behaviors demonstrate goodness on earth to you?

Whatever they are, can we agree? We all value goodness, and we all stumble, from time to time, creating it.

What can I say? We’re souls inhabiting heavy, sentient human bodies. Something or other is going to get us hurting. And when we hurt, our souls often lose their freedom.

We constrict.

And with good reason, right? We live in a world balancing light and dark.

This understanding brings me to a question.

When we’re tense, constricted, restraining our souls from their adventure, who do we become?

First, here’s what we seem to do:

We scroll, trying to impress, suppress, or punish. We bristle, upset at news in the home, community, or abroad. We are neighbors reporting neighbors for rolling through stop signs. We are community players hollering at community players. Earthlings upset at earthlings.

And everyone yelling believes they’re the virtuous ones. And everyone getting yelled at thinks it’s them.

Meanwhile, we’re all crouching a bit on the inside, hurting. Certainly not steadfast in our equanimity practice. Maybe the only steady part of us is the finger pointing at someone else.

And so, before the equanimity… a little bit of healing. We need a little space, a little quiet, a little rest. Some encouragement to the body to soften; an invitation to the mind to look beyond these patterns of hurt.

Let’s learn. Together.

First things first… we take responsibility for our healing.

We may need to enlist the support of friends, family, caregivers, therapists, coaches, trainers, teachers, dogs, trees, flowers, oceans, all of it. Importantly, we enlist the support of our higher power— the one coursing through us in every moment, animating every breath and heartbeat, every glimmer of connection with life and love. With that power, by whatever name you uplift it, healing is ours to navigate.

Likewise, the source of our hurt. That’s ours to investigate, too.

And it may not be what we think—especially if we assume it comes from elsewhere.

We forget that it’s our bodies that feel the pain. It’s our minds that provide the context. It’s our history in the world that tells the story. Something outside us may inspire our pain to cry out, but our pain resides within us.

It calls on us to pay attention. What a blessing.

While our pain has value, our attachment to it diminishes its worth. We may hold on so we don’t repeat the mistake—but there we are again, contracting in hurt.

All of this? Ours to experience. Our pain, our resistance, our softening, our healing.

We may love to blame everyone else, but it’s ours.

Consider how often we collectively point outside ourselves when difficult emotions arise? Partners are meant to improve for us. Friends are meant to agree politically and spiritually with us. Family, even, is expected to behave in particular ways or risk a beloved going no contact.

And even though we live in a time of safe spaces and trigger warnings, we can barely practice the virtue of moderation when it comes to our national dialogue. Everyone just keeps yelling at each other, demanding everyone else to change.

Well, my friends, it seems our equanimity is troubled. Our suffering is clear. Our souls are confined.

So let’s offer ourselves some compassion.

As gold requires the crucible and success requires mistakes, our hearts require some hardship.

Mended hearts are the strongest.

We’re all in the same boat. A bunch of perfectly imperfect beings meant to coexist. And try as we might to cultivate our own inner peace, once we’re in the dynamic of relationship— a party of 2, or a festival of 8 billion— we’re sailing a sea of potential. Still waters give way to a storm; the storm fades into serenity. It couldn’t be otherwise, really.

So here’s a reminder.

Failure is an opportunity.

If you blame someone else, there is no end to the blame.

Therefore the Master fulfills her own obligations and corrects her own mistakes.

She does what she needs to do and demands nothing of others.

— Tao Te Ching, verse 79 (Stephen Mitchell translation)

Let’s do what we need to do. Let’s see what happens when we demand nothing of others for a day. And to practice, we might try one of the following:

1. Practice gratitude. Sit quietly and find the ever-present light shining on your path. Search for it. Wake up early and witness the sunrise. Sit on the grass and listen to it hum. Stand at the mirror and gaze into your own eyes— see every dearly beloved person shining back from them. Whatever you find, say thank you. Our willingness to say thank you shifts everything in our brains to accommodate positive news and then generate it. Imagine: if you generate positive news, what would change in your life? And if everyone you know did the same?

2. Accept responsibility. I know it sucks to feel difficult emotions. And I’m sorry. But they’re yours. I can’t say it anymore simply. What we feel is ours to feel. And it’s okay to feel. We’ve been fed so many lines for so long about the perils of pain— medicate it away, create the safest rooms, demand kid glove behavior from all. But we’re meant to feel our pain. Not to push through and not to suppress but to learn about solace. Consider: How do you find solace? How do you give yourself to your solace? What do you call that solace?

I have a determined faith that we all rise together. I know our souls absolutely love one another.

Which brings me back to our free-range souls.

My little voice is a small one in the wilds; far and wide may it roam. But here’s the thing: I used to hear the noise over truth, too. My soul used to be tightly held in a hurting body. And, good Lord forgive me, I was an eloquent complainer. About the ways someone, some thing, some past event left me scarred. About the state of the world. About every burden of life.

One afternoon, thanks to the arrival of one free soul at my side, I realized I could heal. Thank you, God, for sending a message. Thank you, friend, for delivering it.

One solitary voice in the wilds opened my ears after a decade of keeping them shut tight.

This is why we’re meant to heal— so we can share. So we can hold our collective failures in forgiving hearts and set our souls free. We never know where they need to roam, and how our little voices may share a truth beyond the noise.

We can be steady. We can be virtuous. We can also fail—and when we do, we can set our souls free to understand, while we remain steady and virtuous.

Please let me know how you’ll give your soul some room to roam. I want to hear from you.

I love you.

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Thank you for your kind support. If it feels right, please share this with a friend. Your soul is a messenger, too. Your love is required.