How to Recognize the Will of the Soul
What we think we want and what we say we want might not be the same as what the soul wants. The will of the soul is not always immediately known. It's the unconscious continually made conscious through astute listening to body aches, dreams and synchronicities, strange intuitive pulls, deep watery feelings, and life itself. We live in so much mystery, so much magic, so much unknown.
Hello dear humans. Thank you for tuning in to Falling Into Soul. I’m your host, McCall Erickson–author of The Second Half of the Mountain, resident alchemist, and sometimes overly enthusiastic explorer of all things soul. Let me tell you, I’m so delighted and honored to be exploring in this space with you.
“Soul is the unconscious continually made conscious” is something I’ve said so much recently that I’m actually starting to annoy myself. When I inquired as to my self annoyance, my self said, well, listen, I would be really annoyed if I heard you saying that over and over and didn’t really know what it meant.
Ah, I see.
So let’s back this up and maybe break it down. What does it actually mean to make the unconscious conscious? What does that look like? And how can we cultivate the deep listening required to navigate the pulls of the unconscious so we can live, move, and create more with soul?
I am getting an image of an iceberg. You know the kind where you see the tip of the iceberg above the water but then there’s so much more that you don’t see submerged beneath the water? So if we think of our consciousness as this entire iceberg, what we see as the tip of the iceberg above the water is the part of our consciousness that we are aware of–our conscious thought processes, desires, and intentions, things we can actually be aware of at the time. But larger than that, our consciousness goes deep into what we can’t see and what we aren’t immediately aware of. This is what we call the subconscious and even deeper than that, the unconscious. These submerged layers of the unconscious, these out-of-reach layers are where the soul lives–in the deep, the unseen, the yet-to-be-known.
And we need steady access to this part of us because it’s where the will of the soul resides. And we need the will of the soul to carry out our meaningful healing and work in life. Within the context of alchemy, the spirit brings us inspiration, levity, vision, clarity, and ideas, but the soul brings us the motivation and the drive–the actual will to carry out our visions. This is the most important partnership. What good is being inspired and having ideas, what good is that without having the drive and will to carry it out? I mean, how often have you been inspired to do something but when it came to actually doing it, you just couldn’t muster up the motivation or the will or even find the flow to do it? That is where the rubber hits the road. We can have all the vision and the ideas in the world, but the soul brings the motivation and, not only that, but along with that motivation or will, the soul reveals the path through which the vision can actually come into form. The soul shows us the way. One step at a time. The soul brings the flow.
This requires an insane amount of surrender and finesse because the will of the soul can’t be forced. It can’t be manufactured. Cue Bonnie Rait’s 1990’s hit song “I can’t make you love me if you don’t. You can’t make your heart feel something it won’t.” Okay, we get the picture. That’s what it’s like with the soul. You can’t will it to be where you want it to be. You can only receive it where it is. And this is the work. It’s like having a door open toward the mystery or toward the unconscious, toward that submerged part of your iceberg at all times, so that you can receive its pointers and clues. We can have some idea of what we’re trying to do, where we’re headed, but HOW to get there, HOW to do it, and the timing of it, that all hinges on the love, wisdom, strength, and will of the soul that is revealed in the actuality of every moment as life unfolds. It’s a very real time thing. A very real time unfolding.
Yes this keeps us on our toes. It requires constant listening, tuning in, paying attention to the signs, following the breadcrumbs through the forest. It requires being in a perpetual state of curiosity. It requires willingness to enter “downshift and receive” mode instead of always being in override and control mode. For me, the question is always: where’s the will of my soul? Here are my plans, but where’s my soul? Where’s the deeper will? Where’s my true alignment? Where’s the true flow because without it, I’m no good. I’m spinning my wheels. I’m going to be forcing flow. And as the saying goes, you cannot push the river. You will burn yourself out trying. Yes it’s hard to trust the slower processes of the soul. But for me it’s even harder to burn myself out trying to get anything to go the way I think it should go.
So I want to talk about how to recognize, receive, and work with the soul, which, of course, is going to be different for each of us. We’re all going to have our unique processes of how we hear, recognize, and incorporate the soul, but I have observed some general ways the soul makes itself known or the unconscious makes itself conscious in our everyday lives. SO these are general observations, but also I’m going to give you very specific examples from my life of how it’s played out.
So the unconscious making itself conscious
- #1 Loss of motivation or focus for things you once loved to do or feel like you should want to do or love to do.
- In my 20s, just out of college, I had the dream of making a living through music. Music was my one true love. I couldn’t imagine wanting to do anything else with my life. So I rented this amazingly adorable space in a downtown building, painted and decorated it to reflect my love and soul, filled it with musical instruments and a ridiculous amount of soft pillows and I started teaching music lessons. It was a dream come true, a dream that let me bring it into form. And for a few years it sustained me. But there came a time when my passion for teaching started to wane. It got worse and worse until I felt like I had to drag myself and force myself to show up for my lessons with my students. That was an awful feeling. I had built this dream and now it was dying.?? Why wasn’t I happy? I should be happy, right? This is what I’d wanted. This is what I’d worked for. How was it possible that I had no more motivation to do what I loved most? And what would I have if I didn’t have music? Ugh! This was a really scary outlook for me. I began to realize during this time that my favorite sessions were the ones that turned into deep soul talks–where instead of practicing scales and techniques we ended up soulversating about life and all the things that caused us to want to make music in the first place. Something deeper was taking over me. And I realized I didn’t care as much about music as I did about the soul processes behind it. I cared more about fostering a space for the creative soul than teaching proper musical techniques. This was very distressing to me at the time because teaching music was my livelihood and I’d invested a lot of time and money into my education of it. But my soul would not let me play small, it would not let up on this, so I had to find a way to morph out of teaching music into something that felt more aligned with me. That was only the beginning of learning to morph for the sake of the soul. But the point is, anytime I lose interest in a project or something I feel like I should be into, should feel a certain way about, should is always the key tipoff word, it’s a sign that the soul is pulling me somewhere else, deeper, onward. It’s not that the motivation and passion dies, it’s just that it goes somewhere else. And will I have the courage to follow? Or will I suffer by trying to fit the passion and motivation into a form that is already played out and expired? Whew. That question right there. Will I suffer by trying to fit my passion and motivation into a form that has already expired, or will I have the courage to follow where it’s going?
- #2 Being thwarted, pulled back or seemingly sabotaged when you try to execute your plans or move in a certain direction.
- When I first moved to Hawaii, my partner and I were looking to buy a little house down by the water in the rural community where we lived and loved. We did a walkthrough with our realtor friend and started talking about the sale. We were very serious. I remember sitting by the water that day, it was so magical, the whales were out, we were watching the whales come up to the surface and dive deep. We were talking about our plans, what to do with the house. Everything seemed alive with possibility. But that night everything changed. We had to leave the place we were renting in the middle of the night due to a terrifying and violent situation in the neighborhood. We left knowing we would not be going back. We didn’t know where we were going. We ended up on a different part of the island and didn’t have a chance to even think about our tiny dream house on the water. We were obviously being redirected, not where we wanted to be, but where Hawaii wanted us to be. This is obviously an extreme example of being thwarted and redirected. It doesn’t always have to be this extreme. And it’s not always this obvious. And it can come from external forces like it did for us or internal forces. Like every time you set aside time to paint or write and you set aside time for it, you set aside time for something you really want to do and you get a headache or you get really tired and need a nap instead. Or every time you try to move forward with plans for a project, they fall apart or you hit a wall of emotions and triggers to work through. Soul will always show us what needs to be addressed first in order to get where we want to be. And addressing those things is how we get to be where we want to be. What gets in the way is the way. But I will say this, being thwarted and redirected by soul flow and the actual flow of life is different than self-sabotage or being hijacked and distracted by other people’s agendas for you. And this difference is imperative to learn. I’ll talk a little bit more about it toward the end of the episode.
- #3 Deep watery feelings and emotions, often arising at inopportune times.
- This one makes me laugh because how many times in my life have my deep watery feelings risen at inopportune times to tell me how I REALLY feel about something? (a lot!) And by feelings I mean more than just mere surface emotions. More like energy waves that come up from the deep and threaten tsunami style to take out the whole village if I don’t listen. Here’s an example that comes to mind. When I was 14 my mother and the man she’d been seeing announced that they were going to get married. Something akin to a seismic shift released a wave of upset in me that made me run to my room where I screamed NOOOOOOO, kicked the walls, and wailed some of the worst tears of bereftness I’ve had in my life for 2 whole hours before I calmed down. I had no idea why I felt so horrible. But I did. I mean, I actually really liked this man my mom was going to marry. He was funny and kind and he had horses at his house in the country where we were going to be moving. Our lives were going to improve for the better. There was so much to love about this. It was a very inopportune time for my soul to scream out the way it did. I wanted to be happy for our good news. Why wasn’t I happy? It took me many years of unpacking that soul tsunami moment to understand why I was so upset. It doesn’t take me as long anymore to figure that out. But back then, I had no idea. Again, this is an extreme example of how emotion and energy arises in counterintuitive ways and times. Anytime I have a different reaction underneath than I have on the surface, I know it is from my soul. It is something for me to pay attention to. There are clues for healing. It’s never about how I think I should feel about something. The soul truth is always in how I actually feel about something. The soul splits off from the surface narrative and pulls us into something deeper. So I’ll give you something to contemplate here: do you know how to tell the difference between how you think you should feel or wish you felt about something and how you actually feel about it? Do you know the difference between the surface story, surface emotions and the deep energy truth you feel in orientation to something…because oftentimes, they can be very different. And we have to hold the tension between them to come to a bigger, fuller picture with it.
- #4 Body signals. Aches. Pains that come out of nowhere. Illness.
- This one is huge. The soul doesn’t work apart from the physical body, but through it. The soul speaks through the body. To come into the soul is to come into the body, not out of the body. Soul is loyal to the body. Soul holds down the fort, so to speak. One example: years ago at the end of the year, I was getting all gung ho about my plans for the new year. I was going to write a blog post every week. I was going to add more online classes to my teaching. I was inspired to do more, be more and my plan was crystal clear. But on January 1st, I got so ill. I had some kind of body flu that laid me up for a couple of weeks. I was pulled under. Big time. And all my plans for the year were pulled under with me. In that weird altered space where illness can often take us, I got the message that I was not at all going to be going in the direction I thought I was going to be going in that year, the year ahead was going to be much more dark, slow, and unsatisfying for my creative ego than I’d originally thought. It was truly ominous and I couldn’t argue with what was rising from the deep and overtaking my plans. That year went the way it started. I couldn’t do shit that year. I was held down and under in deep soul processes more than I was comfortable with. That was the year I entered my Dark Night of the Spirit. Anyone who’s been through a dark night of the spirit…you know how laughable it is to try to plan or execute anything during that time. Getting sick that year and being rerouted into the Dark Nights of the Spirit is just one example of how soul works through the physical body. I could make a whole podcast or even write a whole book on the soul-body relationship. Truly. It is a big complex subject. But know this: there is no relationship with the soul without a relationship with the physical body. The call of the soul is a call home to the body.
- #5 Strange intuitive pulls that often seem backward or counterintuitive.
- Once again, these intuitive pulls happen through the body. There are times I think I should be doing a certain thing but my body pulls me differently. Intuition is deeper than thought process, deeper than thought-knowing. Intuition is a body that moves instinctively in a certain way. It’s a body that either will or won’t. This makes me think of a dear friend I had many years ago when I lived in Utah. She showed up at my door one sunday morning and said “I was driving to church but I ended up at your house instead. I don’t know what happened.” Of course I welcomed her in. We started soulversating. After a while as her confusion started to ease, she said, wow I’m getting so much more spiritual nourishment out of soulversating with you than I would from church. Her soul-body had initiated her exit from religion and there was no turning back. Her body drove her, her soul body drove her to where her soul wanted her to be that morning. Not to where she thought she should be. The body is the center of the soul navigation. The body is the compass. And the strange pulls through the body often seem counterintuitive or backward. Honoring the pull of the soul means trusting the sense it does not yet make. It might make sense looking back, not looking forward. Looking forward, you’re always going out on a limb to honor the soul pull.
Okay, the big question underneath all of these that I hear from people a lot is: What’s the difference between following the pull of the soul and self-sabotage, because they can look an awful lot alike sometimes.
Yes, they really can.
The answer to this is vulnerability.
Self-sabotage serves as a protection, an avoidance, as a way to control the course of events or the outcomes. Pull of the soul or what I sometimes even call soul-sabotage serves as an opening. The soul rises to sabotage our too-small plans and notions for things. But the soul does not sabotage the bigger story. The self, the small thinking self will sabotage the bigger story. The soul doesn’t. The soul strips us of control, it requires us to be open and vulnerable. It’s not self-protecting or self-defeating like self-sabotage is. It’s exposing, it’s opening, it requires self examination.
You feel the difference on the inside. You can’t determine whether it’s soul sabotage or not on the outside.
On the outside, for years, it looked like I was sabotaging my whole life. I passed up amazing opportunities. I burned bridge after bridge. I disappeared from the limelight just as my performing career was picking up speed. I closed my music studio and went back to waiting tables for money…after I had a college degree. It was always looking like I was sabotaging my dreams and my best chances. But I wasn’t. My soul was pulling me through the smaller dreams to my big dream. The big dream.
Self-sabotage is about playing small because of fear. Pull of the soul is about opening and burgeoning for the love of who you really are, which can sometimes mean appearing smaller to get bigger. Because every small confine of the outer has to go. Once again you have to become nothing, you have to shed it all to know the soul. It’s not about what it looks like on the outside, but what it feels like on the inside to you. The soul reveals itself from the inside out.
Thank you so much for being in this space with me today. If you know someone who values keeping it real on the spiritual path, will you consider sharing this podcast with them? Passing the love along is how the love gets passed along.
Alright, my friends. Until next time…with love for the soul, our driving force, our deep will, our knowing beyond knowing, our most gorgeous and brilliant interruptor of plans.