Soul
Work
“To
acknowledge that you do not truly know another's soul print is to
resist the siren's call to reduce that person to a box or a label. To
know how much you don't know the other is sometimes the holiest act
of receiving the other.”
Marc
Gafni (Soul Prints)
Some
people have mathematical minds. They see the world through a
particular lens that contains numbers; it calculates measurements,
degrees of angle, and percentages of likelihood. If I sound like I
don't know what I'm talking about, it's because I don't have a
mathematical mind. I do know, however, that people of different
mind-sets have different orientations to the world. Take the poetic
mind, for instance. People of that ilk seem to see the world in a
particularly sensitive way, and the manner in which they speak and
write enables them to capture what they see like a firefly in a
jar—crystal clear, concise. The artistic mind sees color and form,
shadow and light. And so on.
Most
of my friends are therapists or retired therapists. We have the kind
of mind that analyzes, that picks apart personality traits and
deciphers the underlying reasons based on their personal history, and
our specific training. Mathematicians like to talk about math, poets
like to wax poetic, artists like to describe images, and therapists
like to analyze people. We each come here with an inborn and native
way of taking in and processing information, and rarely do any two of
us see the world in the same way.
Each
of us believes that our way of viewing the world and other people in
it is correct simply because it seems absolutely valid to us. But
truth is, we are only speculating; we can never know another
person completely, even our closest kin. We can not step outside our
own point of view, our own orientation, to walk in the skin of
another. I will never, for instance, understand the mathematical
mind, but I can appreciate those who possess it. I can see the need
for all sorts of personality types and skill sets in this world.
One
of the things I want to work on in this new year is to be less apt to
put people into a box of my designing. I would like to simply see and
accept each person exactly as they are, and embrace their differences
rather than analyzing them. I can't discard my own neurology, but I
can try seeing with my soul. I wonder about you. What is your soul
work for 2015?
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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