Connecting with Your True Self

INTENSION: Connectedness

TOUCHSTONE:

Trust in Your Own Inner Teacher. Known by many names— Divine Spark, Voice of the Genuine, True Self—the soul can be understood as the place where your spirit and the Divine Spirit are conjoined. There is an authentic place of wisdom held within. Learn to listen to the strength and character of your own soul.

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Do You Know That You Have an Inner Teacher?

Philosophers haggle about what to call this core of our humanity…Thomas Merton called it true self. Buddhist, call it original nature or big self. Quakers call it the inner teacher or the inner light. Hasidic Jews call it a spark of the divine. Humanists call it identity and integrity. In popular parlance, people often call it soul.

—Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness

All my life I have known that there is a deeper, truer part of me that senses the world and myself in a unique way. Much of my life, especially when I was young, I didn’t necessarily know what to call it, nor did I spend a lot of time thinking about it, I simply knew that it is there. Some might say that inner awareness has to do with following your heart. Others might say it’s following your gut. I have come to know this as following your soul…or rather, listening to your soul.

In the fall of 2019, I attended my first “Courage and Renewal” Retreat and became part of a cohort, which is based in the writings and teachings of Parker Palmer. A primary piece of this work is something called a Circle of Trust. Within a Circle of Trust, as stated by The Center for Courage and Renewal, “we co-create trustworthy space to do our own inner work in community with others. Circles of Trust help us listen to the wisdom of our inner teacher, honor each person’s identity and integrity, and renew our courageous spirit as we journey towards personal and societal wholeness.”[1]

The Courage Cohort has been a significant part of my life for the past five and a half years. As a member of the cohort, I have witnessed firsthand the value of listening to your own inner teacher. Through practices of deep listening within a loving and supportive community, I have become better at listening to that deeper part of myself. I have experienced how, if I am still enough, and attentive enough, my soul can show up and reveal to me a depth of wisdom that often surprises me. I have also experienced how holding space for others to hear that deeper part of themselves creates loving and generous community. I know that I have an inner teacher, not only because I believe it, but more importantly because I have experienced the reality of such, and I have seen the reality of such in the lives of others.

Some of the Functions of the Soul

From A Hidden Wholeness:[2]

The soul wants to keep us rooted in the ground of our own being, resisting the tendency of other faculties, like the intellect and ego, to uproot us from who we are.
The soul wants to keep us connected to the community in which we find life, for it understands that relationships are necessary if we are to thrive.
The soul wants to tell us the truth about ourselves, our world, and the relation between the two, whether that truth is easy or hard to hear.
The soul wants to give us life and wants us to pass that gift along, to become life-givers in a world that deals too much death.

Connection with Your True Self

One of the practices of deep listening, or as I like to call it, soul listening, is the practice of reflection which is invited by something called a “third thing.” A third thing can be a poem, a piece of music, a sacred text, a piece of writing, a piece of art, a part of nature, etc. The third thing acts as a portal, or window, opening you to a deeper part of yourself through a metaphorical approach. These third things invite us into our inner landscape indirectly, unlike our western culture that usually runs us headfirst into things demanding an answer or immediate action, hence, frightening the soul away.[3]

Below is a sharing from my personal journal. The poem, “Blue Iris,” by Mary Oliver,[4] was the third thing that invited the following reflection. My journal reflections are a result of “flow of consciousness” writing that I first learned from Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way.[5]

BLUE IRIS

by Mary Oliver

Now that I'm free to be myself, who am I?

Can’t fly, can't run, and see how slowly I walk

Well, I think, I can read books.

“What's that you're doing?"

the green-headed fly shouts as it buzzes past.

I close the book.

Well, I can write down words, like these, softly.

“What's that you're doing?" whispers the wind, pausing

in a heap just outside the window.

Give me a little time, I say back to its staring, silver face.

It doesn't happen all of a sudden, you know.

“Doesn't it?" says the wind, and breaks open, releasing

distillation of blue iris.

And my heart panics not to be, as I long to be,

the empty, waiting, pure, speechless receptacle.

From my personal journal, June 2021:

“Now that I am free to be myself, who am I?”…

Perhaps this is why freedom, although longed for, is seldom truly embraced. There's a certain comfort in not being free… in being told who you are and who you are to be by others and the world. True freedom, or freedom truly embraced, is scary and undetermined. What if I'm not who I think I am? What if I cannot live up to the ideas of my own selfhood? What if my self-image is not really me? Perhaps, in truth we avoid freedom because we don't want to face the question, “who am I?” Yet, failure to face this question perpetuates a course of life that is not one's own.

When I think of where I am right now in my final days of work, I am faced with this question. Like no other time in my life, I am free to live into the truth of who I am. In the poem, Mary Oliver argues with the wind that such takes time… yet the wind questions, “does it?”

Perhaps true self is more of an opening than a figuring out. Perhaps it is more of a way of “being” than a way of “doing.” Perhaps the truest aspect of living an authentic life is in the act of receiving. Receiving the gifts and challenges and beauty and disappointment that are all around us. Like no other time in my life, I feel that the universe is providing for me all that I need. Things and people are coming to me, naturally. It is an invitation to step into the flow of my life. I do not have to have all the answers. I need only be open and willing to engage. Such is not without action or decision, yet those actions and decisions are based in a nowness, a trust. The world around me is singing. I feel a power of self rising up, ready to emerge more courageously. I must continue to trust what I know.

I know that God is good, that God is wild, that God is creative and that the power of God is love. I know that I am created in God's image and therefore the same must be true of me. I do not believe that God's desire is for me to disappear…otherwise why do I even exist? Rather, I believe that God's desire, as the master artist, the true Creator, is for me…as God’s creation.. to become my truest, wildest, most beautiful, creative, and loving self. As Irenaeus of Leon said, “the glory of God is the human person fully alive!”

God, I believe, help me in my unbelief. Help me to return to… to come back to… what is real, what is true, what has been there all along.

With love and gratitude,