All the Things: The Soul Journey is Not Simple
The world of pop-psy is full of clichés, pithy truisms, contrived formulae, lists of simple steps, and promises of quick, easy, miraculous results if you just follow these 5 simple rules every day or if you sign up for my program and have faith in the process.
This, my friends, is what's called hogwash. Or bullshit.
This is not to say that nobody has ever gotten results after following the proclamations of some self-styled psychological or new age spiritual guru in their "revolutionary" program, which just so happens to be conveniently accessible via their website (all payment methods accepted) or a book for $14.99 (Kindle edition even cheaper!). Many people, to be sure, have benefitted from such programs, plans, and pamphlets. The distinction we need to make -- and remember -- is that Soul has no direct concern for results. That just isn't what a soulful life is about.
Results are relatively easy. With sufficient motivation, adequate resources, and sticking to it long enough, any one of thousands of processes will yield results. I do not mean to trivialize this. For example, if someone sticks to a weight-loss plan and achieves their desired results, that's wonderful. I'm glad for that. (Assuming the weight loss comes through a healthy and sustainable means, which is a whole different question.)
But living soulfully is a fundamentally different matter. To cultivate the soulful dimension of life requires struggle, uncertainty, mystery, unpredictable starts and stops, detours, getting lost, being found, getting lost again, being found again, realizing at some point along the spiral path that your bearing is not fixated on "the" destination (and that there is no singular, fixed, final, identifiable destination), forgetting what you're supposed to be doing, remembering exactly what it's all about, questioning your certainty, relishing the uncertainty, desiring the certainty, respecting the desire, maintaining a healthy dose of hesitation around your desires, tossing everything up in the air from time to time, establishing reliable routines that will inevitably fray at their functional edges, rejoicing in the impermanence of everything, including the impermanence of impermanence (oh yes), and so on.
Lists of simple steps, formulae, and linear programs that take a few weeks or a few months (or even an entire year -- !!! a relatively very long and shockingly short period of time) can definitely generate results, but they do so at the cost of resilient depth, creative complexity, adventitious adventure, and quantum leaps of faith that couldn't, in principle, be predicted or prescribed by all the most powerful supercomputers on Earth linked into a super-supercomputer. For soul exceeds any actual or possible attempt at calculation, codification, quantification, or control. Simultaneously, this does not mean simple surrender -- whether cognitively, conceptually, intellectually, practically, functionally, spiritually, or theoretically. Soul requires -- no, demands -- courting. It cannot be so cheaply or easily purchased, consumed, and applied like the directions for a bottle of superglue, or a piece of IKEA furniture.
To grow soulfully is to step into mystery, not for the sake of solving it, but for the sake of knowing it the way that lovers come to know one another over stretches of time that can only be measured in the breaths, tears, grief, letters and poems written, letters and poems never written, doubts, fears, passions, falling outs, reunions, and letting go's that constitute any real romance, human or holy. Puzzles can be solved; mystery is precisely that which cannot be. To court soul is to court eternity, in whatever form it takes, knowing that it will, by logical necessity and inevitability, someday become something you can never imagine, but know and trust will be as beautiful as anything your current form of consciousness has been blessed to witness and taste.
Nothing escapes soul. And soul is no escape. It is the art of living as fully into the present, tangible moment as possible. And for this, there is no formula, no recipe. You must make your own map, as Joy Harjo writes.
