Layers

We arrive here with our souls uncovered, all of our magic fully intact, eager to live out our purpose. We have attachments to nothing but our mother at the time of our birth. 

We have no language.  

No race.  

No religion.  

No gender.

No political affiliation.  

No scarcity or abundance mindset.  

No professional aspirations.  

No opinions.

No shame.

No wounds.

We learn all of it.  

We’re shaped by the family we are born into, by their attachments, affiliations, beliefs, behaviors, and patterns. We’re molded by our peers, our teachers, our leaders, our government, and… la la la. It’s all just part of the human experience. 

Generally, we’re compared to our peers from the minute we’re born with the measurements of our length, weight, and APGAR scores. Then we fall into our percentiles for these measurements against our peers as we continue to grow. 

Then it might be about what schools we get into, or what kind of grades we’re getting. It might be about whether or not we excel at sports or the arts, or if we’re academic. Are we shy and our parents want us to be a ‘leader’? Are we wildly energetic and our parents and teachers want us to sit still and be respectful? Were we born into a lineage of doctors but we’re meant to be in a dancer? Or vice versa?

From the very beginning, we’re in a game of more-than/less-than. Whether the messages are verbal or non-verbal - they’re clear.

“Don’t be like that.” 

“This is how we do it here, don’t do it like that.”

“You’re too (fill in the blank.)” 

“You’re not (fill in the blank) enough.” 

And because we’re inside of this comparative machine, throughout those incredible, spongey, formative years when our brain is developing faster than it ever will again, we just go with what’s happening around us because we don’t know not to. We start to conform. We learn how to be and what to do to remain “safe” and loved. It’s primal. We need the other (our parents/guardians/caretakers) in the beginning - we’re “other-reliant.”

This is all just survival. It’s learning to be self-reliant. It’s just the human experience.

We end up taking on these soul-covering layers - these wounds, this shame, and the messages about how we ought to be, behave, think, etc. Little by little, we accept each of these layers as truths and they begin to bury our soul, its brightness, purpose, and gifts. We grow dim as the layers become opaque.

We live life from the outside-in instead of the inside-out. Because as children and young adults (even as grown adults) we don’t recognize that we have the authority and agency within us to change or do life in our own way, or even that there is another way. We end up just going through the motions of what we internalized from watching those around us go through the motions of what they internalized (and up our ancestral line we go…)  

A lot of us live a life that’s a lot like how our parents live, or how our friends live, or the people next door. We live the American Dream or something similar. For some, that’s enough and that’s beautiful. For others, there’s a nudge from their soul - in a whisper or a great shaking - trying to show us that there’s more to life than just checking off the boxes.

Our soul can be so buried within us that we don’t recognize it’s there and alive and bursting with this pent-up energy to DO ITS THING and LIVE.  

We’ve been conditioned to stay the course of what was set out before us, or what we chose to be our course, and resist the urges to make changes. We’ve learned how to ignore the whispers and the shaking so that we can just keep on keepin’ on and not rock any boats, or make anyone uncomfortable.  

We choose to stay safe in how we believe it “should be done” and that is to say we choose to stay the same.  

It’s much easier to stay the same than it is to excavate your soul. 

I believe there are beautiful humans living extraordinary lives who have been on their soul’s journey since early on. I believe there have been parents that held sacred space for their children to be who they were meant to be (likely these are very conscious and loving parents who are probably also living their soul’s purpose). There was a nurturing of the inherent gifts and uniqueness when they were children which set them up to maintain a connection to their soul.

There’s a harmony that exists within people who are living from their souls. We pick up on this otherness. Even if their circumstances are shitty, they’re not overtaken by them. Their lives feel different - because there’s transparency between their conscious mind and their soul and they’re able to live from their before born self.

These harmonious humans living their soul-led lives are here to show us what it looks like and that it’s worth it and extraordinary to live life this way. I believe they hold space for us to follow suit.