Soul Compass
I am back home after a week in France and can hardly believe that we’re a month and half away from stepping into 2024. I have a course entitled “Transitioning into the new year” that has been nearly ready to be published for three years and it looks like it won’t be for 2023 either. My intention was to write this article in French but my brain has decided otherwise. A lot of things haven't gone according to plan since August, and I don’t believe I am the only one with this observation. Part of me would have gladly recalled the sheer amount of things that went sideways on a personal level in the last three months but it has since all become irrelevant as, like the rest of world, I have witnessed the absolute inhumane horror which started on October the 7th and has continued to unfold since. Like many, I watched people taking it to the streets of major cities marching, cheering and celebrating the atrocities and then ripping posters of babies taken hostages while a different kind of war, of misinformation, dishonesty and manipulation is taking place on every media platform known to man. How can we preserve our sanity while being confronted with so much inhumanity? What to do, who to talk to, who to listen, where to look without looking away from what’s truly at play? How not to freeze, how not to hate, how not to become numb? How to hold onto our soul more than ever?
It’s been over a month already and I can’t help thinking to myself about the parallels I see between what’s happening right now and the pandemic the world went through between 2020 and 2022. It was fuelled by lies, manipulation, misinformation, political agendas and the collective fear instrumentalised against freedom and those who became infamous for refusing to take part in a global medical experiment. I remember compiling, translating and publishing factual information from reputable and legitimate people (i.e. Dr. Robert W. Malone MD who is the original inventor of mRNA vaccination as a technology) in a desperate attempt to dissuade people I knew from taking the vaccine which could cost them their lives. I didn’t change one person's mind. Not one. My level of influence was zero. Meanwhile these people, some of worldwide renown with exemplary careers in their field of expertise, lost their jobs, got censored, deplatformed, and subjected to a character assassination. For the majority, fear and money had won over critical thinking and truth (these vaccines were never and aren’t safe). I feel like currently we are in a similar pattern where the mass won’t be turned around irrespective of the facts whoever can present them (doesn’t matter how horrendous these can be) and we have to find a way to live with this reality without quitting. We have to find a way to hold onto our soul despite the reality on the ground.
The expression “moral compass” is one I have encountered a lot in these past weeks and everyone seems so sure to have it and to be on “the right side of history”. To start, one can negotiate and argue all they want; the celebration, the justification or the denial of the massacre of innocent civilians will never put anyone on the right side of anything. As for morality, the pandemic has already demonstrated to all of us that our leaders had none and that a lot of “normal” people didn’t have much either. How about caring for our “soul compass” instead? For those of us who still have one, shouldn’t that be the priority? Everything else is only going to lead us to the “wrong side”, so to speak.
So let’s bring on the million dollar question: how does anyone do, be, embody his, her, soul? I’ll answer with my very humbling personal experience as someone who isn’t there yet, but aspires to be: we work at it, as if our life depends on it. So next question: how do we work at it? I genuinely believe it helps to find someone who can help us connect with our soul in a multi-sensory kind of way so the idea of “being a soul first and foremost” stops being a theoretical concept bounced around by the self-proclaimed “light-workers” of the so-called spiritual community. Said otherwise, I think it helps to gain a “sense” of our soul, its voice to us, its flavour, its energy, its passions, its plan. It takes time and it takes practice. Regarding the practice, in the end, it’s between us and ourselves but again, it helps to be guided, by the right person. The right person as far as soul work is concerned but also the right person for us. Meeting the first criteria doesn’t mean it will meet the latter, far from it. Both criteria are needed so there are likely to be trials and errors.
There is a through line however regarding all this, it’s the necessity to develop, exercise and refine our ability to discern. It’s in our own interest to gain clarity, discernment and be able to see the truth where it is and where it lacks. It doesn’t matter if that’s about our geopolitical environments, our media outlets, our friends, our teachers. We need to see through with discernment. And this discernment isn’t a given, it’s a skill to foster and refine. Our soul isn’t a given either, most of us have lived way too long disconnected or very far from it and we have to work at it, one choice, one decision at the time.
“We can do hard things”1.
We can be in our soul, we can do with our soul.
Thank you for reading.
Mahé
Glennon Doyle