The Soul. That’s a pretty big concept for such a small word. The Soul is often regarded as the most spiritual part of every person. At Positive Presence, we believe when you begin to build a connection with your soul, you see yourself for more than just a physical body, a title, a job, or a relationship status. With this Soul connection, you start to curate your purpose, divinity, and exquisite uniqueness that distinguishes you in the physical world and beyond. Life is life, but it’s not living without a connection to all that you are within.
Finding your Soul can be an empowering moment to help you uncover your purpose to positively impact those around us and the world as a whole. In this blog, we are going to explore some ways to start the journey of connecting to your Soul.
Why A Soul Connection Matters
Connecting with your Soul will help you feel at peace. That is the long and short of it. Soul is such an esoteric, abstract thing. It is not something we can see, touch, taste, or smell. The nature of Soul can make it exceptionally difficult not only to build and grow that relationship with your Soul. but even to know where to start.
As you begin investigating what it means to have a relationship with and to your Soul, you may face some unpleasantness. This is normal. Keep going. This unpleasantness is from the fear we all feel when we venture into something new, unknown, unfamiliar, and potentially life-changing. Connecting with your Soul truly does have the power to change your life. There is no end to this journey, there is no final destination. A Soul connection is a lifelong voyage to feel a deep connection with who you are at your core. When you strip away all the identities society subscribes to you, who are you? What is left? A Soul connection helps you discover this version of yourself and fall in love with them.
Where to Start?
The best place to start is by beginning to identify the many different roles you play in life. For example:
- Student
- Daughter/Son
- Athlete
- Mentor
- Parent
- Friend
- Etc.
These are important parts of our identity. When someone meets you, they often ask “what do you do?” This question is limiting, and honestly frustrating because we are so much more than just this one thing. Take a moment to identify your roles. Then, once you’ve done that you’ll need to do something radical. Throw away all these identities (just for a moment). If you no longer have these identities, who is left? Who are you at your core?
This exercise can be difficult, and that’s ok! It can take practice, dedication, and support to really dig into this question. Another way to look at it is thinking as though there are two versions of ourselves at all times; Our human version, which is what others see of us. And our Soul version, which is what we see of ourselves. Sometimes these two versions are not in alignment. In fact, they are probably out of alignment more often than in alignment. All the pressures of the world and expectations of society make these two versions disconnect. As we work on ourselves through therapy, life coaching, self-work, etc., we are attempting to align these two versions of the self and to learn patience and compassion for ourselves as we are on the journey.
The goal eventually, is to show up on the outside the same as how you feel on the inside. This is a question you can practice asking yourself to become aware of this potential disconnect between your physical body and your Soul.
Awareness is Key
This leads us to our first tool for building a Soul relationship: Awareness. We are nothing if we are not aware. There is power in presence. So often, we run from our feelings and emotions and thoughts because we may think they are bad or wrong. This habit dims our ability to connect to our Souls by suppressing our true selves.
Emotional Awareness is learning to put words to our feelings and identify them. A helpful practice for emotional awareness is associating a feeling you have with where it is most poignant in your body. When you are angry where do you feel angry? Your stomach? Your hands? Your chest? What does that physical feeling feel like? Try to describe it. Once you learn to identify the emotions you’re feeling, you can begin to accept them. Emotions are not bad. To connect with our Soul, we need to connect with our full selves, even the parts of ourselves that we do not particularly like.
Note: Feeling your feelings is crucial for self-awareness, emotional awareness, and personal growth. But we also need to learn to release those feelings instead of being consumed by them. Talk to your mentor, life coach, or therapist about strategies to help you learn to let go of the big emotions. Feel them to completion and then let them go.
Some Strategies to Grow Your Positive SOUL
1. Stillness
Our world is so busy. We are constantly being bombarded with messages and noise not only from others and the media but from within as well. Practicing stillness is a powerful tool to help you connect with yourself, your needs, and your Soul.
To learn more about stillness and how to practice it, listen to the Positive Presence Podcast Season 2 Episode 1 with Devon Kerns.
2. Manifesting
It may sound silly to some, but there truly is power in manifesting. Practicing visualizing our wants, desires, and goals can help us make a habit of focusing on the good, the positive, and the power within us. So often our thoughts are muddied with negativity, despair, and fear. When we practice manifesting, we are training our brains to think of ourselves and our surroundings with a lens of positivity.
3. Living in the Present Moment
We frequently get trapped living in the future instead of the present. This creates anxiety and worries about the possibilities of the future. Focusing on the present moment allows us to be aware of how we are feeling and what we can control. We cannot control the future, we can only control ourselves and our reactions. Practicing living in the present is also foundational to finding peace. Life is a rollercoaster, there are high highs and low lows. We can get stuck in the peaks and valleys, always looking for a way to get back to the highs. What if we found joy and peace in all versions of reality? Living in the present moment challenges us to find joy and peace in the journey instead of the destination.
4. Achievement Formula
The Achievement Formula, designed by Michele Ariana, is a four-step process for grounding ourselves, applying the three strategies mentioned above to reconnect with our Soul.
– Awareness → Stop and ask yourself where am I right now? Allow yourself to feel the feelings and move through them. Listen and surrender to the needs of your Soul.
– Aim → Think about what you want, what you need, and what you are moving towards.
– Alignment → Think about the why. Why are you feeling this way, why are you marching towards the goal on your mind? Then, do something aimed at relief. Find a healthy outlet to release the feelings you are experiencing. Ex: therapy, talk to a friend, exercise, etc.
– Act → Take some sort of action that gets you closer to your Aim (goal).
To learn more about the Achievement Formula and how to implement this in your life, listen to Episode Three of the Positive Presence Podcast with Michele Ariana.
5. Rocks
Each one of us carries around a metaphorical backpack every day filled with an abundance of ‘rocks’ full of limiting beliefs and negativity. We need to learn to let go of these rocks weighing us down from accomplishing our goals and connecting with our Soul. Often, we may not feel worthy of not feeling negativity. We sometimes struggle to allow ourselves to feel joy. Through gratitude, awareness, and surrender, we can learn to let these rocks go.
For more on letting go of the rocks that weigh us down and learning to open ourselves up to love, acceptance, and peace, listen to Episode Four of the Positive Presence Podcast featuring Shannon Stone.
6. Acceptance
The world can be a dark place. We all experience darkness in our lives and struggle to step back into the light. There is power in accepting these dark periods as part of our journey and part of who we are. There are many things we do not have control over. Learning to accept reality as something we create ourselves, instead of something that is created by us allows us to shift our perspective from the world is happening to us to the world is happening through us. We cannot control the things outside of us. If it rains, the world did not do that to you. What you can do is control your reaction to the rain.
Acceptance isn’t a straight arrow. We will swerve and weave as we explore accepting not only ourselves but the world as it is. Listen to Episode Seven of the Positive Presence Podcast for an extremely enlightening look into acceptance with Sam and Yelena.
Putting it All Together
Connecting with your Soul is a lifelong journey with the goal of experiencing joy and peace. When we are able to grow this relationship with our Soul, we free up ourselves to help others and to put positivity and light into the world. It is not easy. This single blog post does not have all the answers. We will fall, take steps backward, and we will fail on this journey. But we are not measured by our failures, we are measured by our ability to stand back up, dust ourselves, off, and move forward.
To learn more about Positive SOUL, there are a few options to start or continue your journey to peace:
