I’m unsure when I started using the phrase “let your soul arrive.” It’s a phrase I use in almost every spiritual direction session. This week, I realized it’s a nice reminder for all parts of life. So, before you read this essay...
Take a few deep breaths.
Feel your body in the space you find yourself.
Notice how the chair, floor, and ground support your body.
Let your soul arrive.
At the beginning of a spiritual direction session, I invite the person I’m with to settle into this moment, this space. They take a few minutes of silence and breathing. The goal is to create a noticeable threshold to cross over from everyday life into spiritual direction. Most people arrive for a session in the middle or after a busy day-it’s how we approach most of life. There isn’t a lot of space for transitions. That pause to “let your soul arrive” helps the mind to settle and changes the stance for both of us. When we break the silence, we are both a little more grounded, a little more present, and ready to see what might unfold.
Let…
I love the word let. It’s so simple and small. It’s easy to overlook that little verb.
I like to think of let as a gate to our deeper self. I grew up in rural Idaho on a high mountain prairie, with more cows and hay bales than people. I know a little something about gates. It wasn’t uncommon to be on a drive in the mountains or sometimes on the prairie and encounter a barbed wire gate. Entering the gate was (mostly) fine, but it was always a multi-step process: stop, unhook the gate, move the gate, drive through, and shut it before going on. (You can’t leave a gate down. It’s bad form.)
Let means to allow or permit. It’s a choice to let. It’s taking the fence down and entering into the protected space. Or letting what was within the confines of the gate out into a broader, wider pasture.
Let your soul arrive means you can show up at spiritual direction or for a heart-to-heart conversation with someone your care about, and your soul, spirit, heart, or mind might not be present and accounted for. The body is there, but the deeper self is caught behind a gate of busyness, self-protection, or apathy.
Sometimes my soul gets left out of my life because I’m reacting and doing the next thing. I forget to pause and breathe. I don’t take time to let (that word again) the lessons, upsets, frustrations, and joys settle.
Let your soul arrive means to:
Allow space for transitions from one conversation, activity, and experience to the next.
Remember that sometimes the deeper parts of ourselves (and others) need space and grace to arrive.
Live in the present moment, not rehashing the last conversation or fretting about the upcoming discussion, but be right here now.
Take down the gate of protection (when appropriate, of course) and allow the soul, with all wisdom, insight, and knowledge, to gather the gifts of the moment.
Let your soul arrives looks like this:
Pausing to take two or three full breath cycles before starting anything.
Looking around and noticing, feeling the space you are in.
Living wholeheartedly, knowing that the deeper self -the true self is welcome.
Believing that all parts of the day hold the potential for the holy, grace, love, insight, and peace to break through in surprising and joy-full ways. We have a better chance of catching those sparkling moments when our soul is keeping an active watch with our over-active minds.
A blessing for letting your soul arrive:
When you awake, start your day, and begin to tackle the winding path ahead; let your soul arrive.
As your mind swirls with ideas, plans, worries, regrets, delights, and ponderings; let your soul arrive.
As you savor eggs, toast, avocados, apples, and tea; let your soul arrive
In every conversation; let your soul arrive
In every change of space and place, pause; let your soul arrive
Let the wisdom, insight, knowing, grace, and peace of your soul arrive.
Try to let your soul arrive as you move through spaces, places, and conversations this week. It’s a small practice, a brief pause, but we know smaller practices can lead to deeper connections and understanding.
Books I read this week:
Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life by Dani Shapiro
I loved this small book on the writing life. I’ve read several books about the creative process (Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert and The War of Art by Steven Pressfield come to mind.) I love insights into the creative process by writers. I find it interesting that the insights, beliefs about creativity, and challenges faced are universally the same.
“If I dismiss the ordinary — waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen — I may just miss my life… To allow ourselves to spend afternoons watching dancers rehearse, or sit on a stone wall and watch the sunset, or spend the whole weekend rereading Chekhov stories—to know that we are doing what we’re supposed to be doing — is the deepest form of permission in our creative lives.”
― Dani Shapiro, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expectations and Encounters by Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard, I don’t know what to make of Annie! I have enjoyed every book I’ve read by her. She is a fantastic writer. I love how she observes and communicates about the world around her. Her walks sound magical. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and this book left me thinking, “did I like this, or did I not?” Both had parts that were amazing and parts that totally lost me. Annie might be an acquired taste, and I’m willing to keep working on it.
Annie does have a way with words. Read each quote slowly and notice if a word or phrase seems to sparkle, shimmer, or catch your attention differently than all the other words. Stay with those words. Sit with them, and see what invitation, idea, or insight they have to offer. Let your soul arrive and see what it notices in these words.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
“We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add — until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters