SoulCircling

Principles:

• Life gave you a set of resources to meet it with.
• It met you with a set of circumstances.
• You created an experience out of the meeting.
• You share your attitude about that experience with everyone you meet every single day of your life.
• If you don’t like the way they’re reacting, change your attitude—become a gift to everyone.
• Your soul knows your gift—it came here to share it.
• Create your own SoulCircle to help you find what your soul came here to do.
• Do it with their help.

It is time to create your own SoulCircle and set the gossamer web in which you will catch your soul and ask it what it came here to do. It will allow itself to be held in the loving hearts of your SoulCircle and help you develop the four elements of SoulCircling: your StoryCircle, your Inventory, your Intention, and your Affirmation. Let us take them in order.

Your SoulCircle:

First, you must set the environment for catching that butterfly, Psyche. Butterflies like warmth, light, water, and food. If you convene a small group of friends, provide for their comfort, too. You will need the following materials: a sheet or two of 8½ by 11 paper for notes, two large sheets of easel paper that you can get from your school or library, and some colored pencils or pens.

If you do this with only this book for company, provide for your own comfort. If you convene a small group of friends, provide for their comfort, too. If you have engaged the services of a HOPE LifeCoach, go through your checklist and see that everything is ready for your talk with her or him.

Your StoryCircle:

You are living a life unique in the annals of the universe. It is a single story in an encyclopedic collection of stories that comprise the journey of your soul. Take one large sheet of easel paper and write the words "My Story" at the top. Write "My Intention" on the top of the other large sheet. Take a sheet of 8½ by 11 paper and write the words "My inventory" at the top. Take another sheet of 8½ by 11 paper and write "Life-shaping events" at the top. Now, give yourself two minutes and, as quickly as possible, list those life-changing events as they come to mind. (The average adult will recall between eight and fifteen of them in those two minutes. Please do not dwell on them; today’s important ones are right up front, ready to go on the paper.)

Take the "My Story" sheet and decide of what kind of a background you would like for your Story. Perhaps the simplest of all is a circle, so we shall work with that as a starter. Pencil in a faint circle almost as big as the sheet and put a mark at the top of the circle where the "12" would on be on a clock face. Midnight or noon, this is the point where dusk and dawn lie equally behind and before you. In SoulCircling, this point is midnight; for the next step, which is but a moment in time, takes you toward morning. How you take it sets the stage for how you meet the light of the coming day. Indeed, you are always at the morning of the rest of your life.

Please take note of this: every successful person knows at the bottom of her or his heart that success comes from the way with which s-he meets the new day. Also note this: success is, in and of itself, not the goal; it is the process of moving towards the goal. Using midnight as the starting point, make a mark for each of the numbers in your list, spacing them fairly regularly around a clockwise circle. Note midnight well, for it marks a truly remarkable event—the moment of your birth into the rest of your life. Draw a picture of the second event in the second space. Move around the circle this way until every space contains an image of a point in your story. Work on the background until it is complete in your eyes and mind. If you’re like me, the name may not be the name your parents gave you. As you reflect on what I’ve just said, let your own soul-image come to mind, draw it in the center of the circle, and sign it with your soul name.

Your Inventory:

With the completion of the story circle, the next steps develop a loving inventory of your assets with which you make your soul’s journey; assets your soul knew it would have when it incarnated. It will be a list of your qualities that comprise each of the following:

• your archetype

• your genetic gifts of form, intelligence(s,) talent(s) and temperament

•  your core passion

• your attachments and responsibilities

•  your goals and intentions

•  your will.

(If you have difficulty with any part, get the help of your soul circle, your HOPE LifeCoach, or a friend or family member who knows you intimately and well.)

Your archetype:

In its most recent incarnations your soul developed a passion to be an archetype, an original model of thought and behavior. Any time you say of someone, "Oh, she’s a typical _____," you have just named an archetype. Whether a person lives the life of one archetype or a blend of archetypes, s-he is still a one-of-a-kind work of art. It knows that its archetypes always have different resources with which to work each time around. Your ego has likely given little consideration to this spiritual awareness, but SoulCircling draws one’s ego into a new perception of its role and purpose.

Your genetic gifts:

Form, intelligence, temperament and talent—your soul knew it would share these with your ego.

Your core passion:

Your soul accepts your genes without judgment, knowing that these genetic attributes are gifts that it works with to be able to follow its "Earth Orders". Whereas the engine of your ego's drive is survival, your soul’s engine is its core passion that lights your fires and resonates deeply inside you. It is what you love to do—what you would rather do than anything else—the reason for your soul’s call to life.

Your attachments and responsibilities:

Your ego, with its memory of the past, makes attachments to its judgments of its experiences, and resists all attempts to move it out of its past—until it recognizes the captain of the ship of your life. Its attachments are both that which you fear most and that which you desire most … your aversions and your cravings. Your attachments resemble an unhealthy set of mooring lines or a spider’s web that some of the people, places and things in your life have used to bind you down and take your power. Those unhealthy strands bind your ship of life to the wharf and hold you in your past. If you have already cast off, the unhealthy attachments have given the main sheet and tiller to someone out of your past who owns you still. As long as someone else is at the helm they will try to get you to sail of course that is not your own. You are certain to run up on the rocks or find yourself in the eye of hurricane. You must be willing to take back your power and take over the wheel.

Your goals and intentions:

Your ego, with its memory of the past, makes attachments to its judgments of its experiences, and resists all attempts to move it out of its past—until it recognizes the captain of the ship of your life. Its attachments are both that which you fear most and that which you desire most … your aversions and your cravings. If someone else is navigating your ship, it must be your ego. If your ego wants control, then you are in an ego vs. ego combat and no lasting good can come from it. Whereas your ego-attachments you hold you back, your soul-responsibilities to other people, places and things that you accepted when you signed on for this journey have the potential to help you move forward.

Your soul and its intentions stand at the opposite pole from your ego. Passionate desire—soul’s "call"—opposes ego’s "gotta do it" craving. Your soul takes command with love, the power of spirit. Remember that souls come here to love, to be loved, or to teach love. Your love of the other navigator will touch that person’s soul and release it from your ship’s helm. Intention is a process (like success) that keeps extending (stretching) beyond that which you have achieved up to this point. Intention gives you an aiming point on the horizon of achievement. It calls your soul to a Universal adventure. The intentional journey is personal and soul-centered, independent of the tribe, and yet contributing to it … no longer secular, but sacred.

Intention is a birthright of your soul. When you pay attention to your talents and passion, your calling in life reveals itself to you.

Your calling in life is your work. It is never a job. Your "job" is simply a way of putting bread on the table and clothes on your body without any spiritual investment. Your talents can have a direct bearing on your choice of a job but without any spiritual investment. Remember the Zen expression, "Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water." Put your ego’s "job" in a spiritual context, and it becomes your soul’s "work."

Your will:

A central axis connects these two poles of intention and attachment — your will. The energy of creation that God gave us depends on your will for its success. The will comprises four qualities: strength, skill, ethics, and spirit. Will is the mental property by which you choose a course of action. Such a choice is always deliberate. Will is essential to movement and creativity. Without will, you cannot get out of your attachments and move to your intention.

Soul and ego, a further contrast:

As the soul extends from its Universal perspective, it empowers rather than controls its environment and thereby removes all limits to personal creativity. The soul’s transpersonal power extends over and beyond ego with love, compassion, and forgiveness. The soul’s presence transforms the eego’s attachments into responsibilities. The archetypal power of the talents, temperament, and core passion flow without limit along the central axis of your will, and the intention at the upper end of the axis glows on the horizon, calling us to it.

Ego creativity functions on a me-first, win-lose model of who sells the most product. Soul creativity functions on an equal partnership, win-win model of living in service. Ego model shuns service and servitude, equating them with slavery. You need now to call together your circle of friends who make up your SoulCircle, show and tell them your story, and describe your inventory. Take your time. Savor your experience.

Clarifying Your Intent:

Setting, holding, and moving toward an intention bring meaning, value, and purpose to all life. There is growing awareness that modeling our lives after the life of the Universe has its own built-in rewards. Intention shares the dimensions of space and time with the rest of the physical Universe. Stating an intention is similar to saying a prayer. Think back over the processes of your life. Think of the times when you set intentions and how they materialized. It is time for another. And this time, you will create a picture of your intention—that glimmer on the horizon, that beckoning muse. It develops out of your story held in the light of your form, talents, temperament, passion and will. It’s fun to try your hand at expressing your soul’s intention this way. As soon as the image begins to come up in your mind, take the second sheet of easel paper and your drawing materials and let the image flow onto the paper.

Affirming Yourself:

This is the final step in SoulCircling—empowering your intention with an affirmation. A simple sentence (subject, verb, and object) repeated out loud to yourself where you can see your face and hear your words make the most powerful affirmations. State the object of your intention clearly, even if you believe (as we all are prone to do) that you’re never going to make it. Don’t worry; three weeks of repetition will change you. Ah, yes, you will change … and that is scary. However, it is the reason you got into SoulCircling in the first place—the old ways were no longer working well. The structure that your finite ego thought it could impose on life has begun to come apart at the seams. Your internal soul with its depth of compassion can embrace and reassure your ego while it leads the way back to the constancy of change that inheres in the Universe.

What I have to say next, I direct at your ego. Your soul knows all this already, and it knows, too, that to read about such things helps in understanding them.