The grain of us

This month's Soul Story & poem

Feel free to save this image or share it.

(To listen to this newsletter on a walk or with a cup of herbs - just click the play button above. Don’t forget the journal questions at the end of this transcript)

Fellow steward of the Heart,

We are working hard on becoming more us, less windswept, less stormwater, less squall matter.

And it is work - endless filtering of sediment from the pure water that we are.

But do we also remember that there lives a wild, soulish, instinctive part of our psyche that has the intelligence to naturally heal, without much interference from our behalf? It only requires that we move with it and not against it.   

We each possess a natural grain. You have one particularly unique to you. It’s not a texture imposed upon you by trauma, or life’s hardships but a pattern you came into this world with, from the loom of Soul. It tells you what is you and what is not. What thoughts are aligned and which aren’t. Which way to go and which are dead ends. What is deep nourishment, and what will make the heart anemic.   

You can feel this soul grain inside of you now.

Just self-induce a little anxiety, add a deadknot of fear here and a tightcurl of uncertainty there - and you will feel the grain of you being coarsely rubbed against. Pain is natural to our human condition, but long-term suffering isn’t.

This is what the body knows, and this is what we have forgotten.

When we are at ease, doing what feels right, living from a place of wisdom and depth, life moves across us like a silk scarf caught in the wind.

The natural grain of us is a psychological-soul pattern that cares only for the texture of our minds and not the situations of our lives. It has a medial quality that navigates between the spirit and the physical, tending to the fire within us by providing somatic experiences that either enkindle or cremate us.  When we value our soul grain, we lose our dependence on the external world for joy and the habitual mind for freedom.   

Surrender is our path back to the unique pattern we came here with. Surrender is also a verb, a psychological discipline that allows us to rediscover our innate wholeness, which is unsheathed by trauma, external conditions and our own expectations.

“The Fates lead the willing, but drag the unwilling.” Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Some of the darkest moments in my life have acquainted me with a profound kind of surrender. It was because of my willingness to be at the mercy of life, that life became incredibly merciful.

Only through surrender do we become the slack thread that then is able to be pulled back into the knit, reuniting us with the cyclical patterns of healing that live instinctively within the body.  

Returning to the pattern

My own practice of returning to my soul grain calls me to simplicity. Simplicity glides with me. It asks me to return to the art of mending, of observation, of slow cooking, of tending to a garden, of sipping tea on the grass, and of walking out in the night to speak with the moon.

This sounds, perhaps, primitive, or worse, trendy.

But when I return to the simple arts in life, the simple ways of being in my environment, the simplest ways of being in relationship with my body - I return to my deep self. I no longer question my rootlessness, my mental health, my inability to be a participant in the world… I just am, and I’m profoundly whole because of it.  

“The loss of soul amounts to a tearing loose of part of one’s nature.” Carl Jung

Somewhere along the timeline of my life, I lost Soul; my ability to mediate between the body and the spirit (often called dissociation.)

I lost the internal pattern of who I was to a new weft of fear, trauma, other people’s stories of who I was. I lost it to heart-domestication and the constant dissatisfaction that comes from living in an era where perfection is normalized.

I grew unsightly internal burls and nodes which still show up every now and again, no matter my fine sanding. But I am deeply present to the greater loom that longs for the weight of my yarn, my design, and this makes healing a matter of surrendering these things that have found their way into my weave.   

To me, the greatest discovery of our time is neuroplasticity.

A fabric of the brain that proves our ability to return to our innate wholeness by changing destructive thinking patterns.

“Spiritual and emotional recovery are possible because the human brain is a living organ that we can transform by making new choices and being in non-shaming recovery-based environments.” Christopher Dines

We can spend our time trying to create new neuropathways - or we can heal the ones already made by allowing more space, more stillness, simplicity and a whole lot more surrender to inhabit our minds.

With more space inside of us, our old patterns fall away, allowing something else to come through. This something else, to me, is an intelligence far beyond the mind. It’s a braid of knowing that connects us to something so wise, so paradoxically ancient and yet unimaginably evolved.  

Being with what rubs us raw in life is our way back to soul.

It is soul speaking to us through somatic language, letting us know that this way of thinking or being in the world is not meant for us. And that there is a way, a very practical way that asks us to let go in order to return to what is uniquely and innately ours.

The feather in the underworld is surrender. As is the underworld a place of divine wisdom. We must become an apprentice to both in order to return.

In fellowship,

---

Every Monday, I write to a beautiful and growing community of patrons. We start the week with a theme (in the form of a poem or meditation) and share personal notes on our healing experiences. Would you like to feel the support of an intentional, soulful tribe? I’d love to help you grow inwards. You can upgrade your subscription via your Substack profile.

---

Journal Questions To Deepen Your Journey

The most important question in emotional healing is:

What is familiar here?

What about your situation, your mindset, your mood, your experience is what you’ve known before? How can you respond differently?

What patterns have become ingrained by external situations and people? And what can you do right now to follow your natural grain of ease and joy?

See you next Monday!

---