Soul
Talk
“You are
not the person who exists in the glare of the spotlight but the one
residing in the deepest hidden recesses of your heart.”
John
Pavlovitz
Carl Jung dubbed the part
of us residing in the spotlight the “persona.” We can think of it
as our public self—the one we are usually identified with. When
someone asks us to tell them about ourselves, this is usually where
we go. I'm a woman/man, followed by a string of descriptors of what
we do in the world—teacher, architect, doctor, social worker, etc.
I'm a mother/father of three, I belong to such and such church, and
so on. This is a simple and obvious way of describing ourselves to
strangers and social acquaintances. However, far too many of us stop here. We
never get beyond the persona.
It's kind of like
identifying with our skin—our surface layer. The skin is very
important—the body's largest organ—and our face in particular is
what we think of when we self identify. But besides the skin, there's
a lot going on to make us who we are. We have lungs, heart,
intestines, pancreas, kidneys; we have a brain and a circulatory
system. There are a million processes going on at any given time
inside our bodies, inside our cells, inside our nervous systems. We
don't identify with them unless they get sick—then we might think
of ourselves according to a diagnosis—heart patient, cancer
patient, etc.
But there's another us.
It is the collective of all these parts—it is the wholeness of our
body/mind. We hold within it all the thoughts and feelings, all the
secret motivations and judgments, all our deepest desires. It's okay
not to share these all the time. That would be too much information
for most casual acquaintances. But it's critically important that we,
ourselves, know them. That we are well versed in our inmost parts.
That we don't really believe that we are simply what we do. Because,
in that deepest recess lives the soul—our true Self. To fail to be
related to our soul is to be as empty as someone who is only made of
skin. To be unable, or unwilling, to communicate from and with our
soul is to be a shell of a human being. To be made “in the image of
God” means to live in and through the soul. It is the difference
between swimming in the ocean and wading in a creek.
If you feel like there is
something more, something calling you, that something is your very
own soul. It's calling you to be fully human. It has always been
there waiting for the rest of you to show up. Give it a listen today.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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