Do you wonder what your soul purpose is? You have been working hard at becoming conscious and spiritually aware, and you want to make a soul-guided or purposeful choice about the direction of your life. However, it’s hard to determine what you bring to the world and how you do that every day. Is this really the direction I need to go in and how do I recognize that, what does that look like on the ground?
One of the big assumptions we make when we do this work is that we think our soul-guided life started with our awakening, or after we became aware of this deeper force in our lives. Our soul-guided life didn’t start with our awakening. Our whole lives have been a series of soul guided choices both conscious and unconscious. We are in the middle of a much larger process that is focused on the growth of our soul-selves or shifts in consciousness. Essentially, we’ve been living our soul’s purpose our entire lives, however, after the awakening, we are more aware of it because we are now conscious of it.
I don’t think you are making the choice to start a purposeful or soul-guided life after awakening. What I think is actually going on is that we are making the conscious choice to continue. To consciously listen to and follow direct guidance from your deeper soul self.
When we think about when we started on our path of consciousness, we think we start with our awakening or the time we realized that we couldn’t live our lives the way that we had before. When we became aware of a much deeper and larger force in our lives that we couldn’t ignore.
It certainly makes sense to think that’s where it starts. But does it really?
I guess the question here is, who is waking up? We use the word “awakening”, and for some of us, you could probably use the phrase “rude awakening”, because it really felt like we were asleep, and now we’re not. But who needs to be woken up, and why? If we are going with the assumption that our souls are eternal, timeless beings and that they are part of a larger conscious source, it would seem that our souls are already tapped into that all-consciousness and don’t actually need waking up as such.
The way I think of it, what we refer to as awakening is our souls waking up our ego-mind to the soul’s existence. Our souls and unconscious egos have been working behind the scenes to help us set the stage and gain the experiences we needed, but now it is time to work more consciously – to grow and expand as souls beyond the limits of our ego-minds, but with a connected awareness.
So, essentially, I think what we refer to as an awakening, is a choice point that’s part of the way along a much larger process.
Another thing that can trip us up is that we tend to think of awakening, not only as where it started but also where it ends. We feel that we are presented with this opportunity to make this choice once, that there is this one thing out there that that is our purpose and it is something specific that we need to do. I don’t think it stops there. When we initially made that choice, it wasn’t an isolated event, Everything you have been doing up to now has been spiritually guided, although initially may be more behind the scenes. This isn’t the first time you made a soul-guided or purposeful choice, and, more importantly, it isn’t going to be the last and isn’t about what you do.
Our soul selves wake our ego-minds up to their presence and force. But not all at once. It’s not a Frankenstein switch from unconsciousness to total enlightenment. The initial one gets us moving but we’re not done. There are so many aspects of who we are as a soul-self that we need to awaken to that I think it would be overwhelming to do all at once. Honestly, I think that would fry our circuits. I also think that’s not really the point. I think the point is the process. The point is to experience what we need to. The experiences are what we need to focus on. If we work with our experiences with awareness, enlightenment will happen. But enlightenment is not the focus. We “wake up” gradually and in stages, although it is more of a flow then set, rigid stages.
The way it was imaged for me was like a canal lock.
If you are unfamiliar with what a canal lock is and how it works, I’ll give a brief overview. For those who are aware of what a lock is and how it works, please bear with me! I’m using it, as an illustration, to understand the process, not to teach people about locks, so it may not be 100% accurate.
What a lock does is allow boats or other watercraft to navigate stretches of water that are at different levels. A lock is essentially a container with gates at both ends that encloses the boat while the water levels change. The gates are used to control the level of the water, raising or lowering the boat to match the level of the water on the other side of the lock.
If you are going upstream, or you need to get to a higher elevation, you enter the lock, and the lower gate closes behind you. The upper gate is already closed. Water is allowed in from upstream to fill the lock or the container. When the level of the lock matches the higher level stretch of canal, the upper gate is opened and you can sail on.
We can think of the canal as our personal soul path with the locks representing major shifts in soul consciousness that we are looking to make, and the water as the opportunities for growth of awareness in our everyday life experiences and the choices we make around those experiences, and the gates as major choice points. Our soul isn’t particularly bothered about what package these experiences come in, just that these experiences happen.
So what do I mean by shifts in soul consciousness we want to make? Probably the simplest way to explain that is in how we view our life experiences. We start on our path feeling disconnected from an internal sense of self and what’s happening outside of us seems to have control of our inner life. So our experiences feel like they are happening to us. We make the choice to become more mindful of our inner life and emotions. Over the course of years, we perceive the experiences coming at us as the work we need to do to try to feel connected to our inner self. We feel our experiences are there more for us to solve, that we can handle anything that comes at us. When we have integrated enough of our inner self so that you feel that you have a mostly connected sense of self, we come to another shift in consciousness or another way we view our experiences: as opportunities for soul growth – as a way to connect to and express our soul purpose.
You are already living your soul purpose. I think we have been making soul guided choices all along, we have just been at different stages of conscious awareness when we’ve done it. Also, these stages are there to help us fully awaken our ego-minds up to our soul growth needs in a way that won’t overwhelm us so we can make conscious soul-guided choices. As we become more aware of the growth we need to make as soul-selves, we can make more conscious choices about how we need to express that growth.
