Listening In

The other day I was mountain biking at Skeggs and I had a terrific accident.  I flew off the side of the single track trail over a cliff, doing a forward flip in the air and then a sumersault down a ravine.  Luckily I landed on a net of thick branches that had collected across a small stream.  I sat there for a bit, taking inventory, checking for missing skull fragments.  Miraculously, I was pretty much ok.  I knew I was in shock, my hands were shaking, my heart was racing, but I felt like laughing!

I had been practicing simple jumps along the trail.  I used to be pretty afraid of jumping and I was trying to get comfortable with it.  I had just traded places with my friend J, who egged me on.  I took the first jump we saw with gusto, and noticed an even better one right up ahead.  I scrambled to get in position, I was was going to fly. As I was getting closer I was starting to think that I should just let this one go.  I was coming at it at the wrong angle for how the trail turned ahead, and I was rushing it. I took the jump anyway.  I was flying toward the downhill side of the trail, which was turning into the hill.  I tried to angle myself toward the hill in the air but it wasn’t happening.  I landed in the detritus next to the trail and there was no way I was going to avoid going over the cliff edge where the trail turned.  I ducked over my bike to try and get my feet in front of me.  As I was floating through the air, I realized that I had no idea where the bottom was.

My knee was banged up and bruised, but not wrenched or anything.  I was able to climb out and ride most of the few miles back to our vehicles. My knee started hurting and swelled up pretty good, I was going to have to lay off sports for a while.

Later, I was pondering why this happened.  I really could have been seriously hurt.  I fell a good vertical 12-15 feet before my first landing and I didn’t have a helmet on and the fall could have been much worse.  I felt I needed a good talking to with myself.  What could I learn from this?  From a mundane point of view, I needed to be more careful and maybe practice jumping in a safer place, certainly I needed to stop forgetting my helmet.  I tried to look at it in a bigger picture.  Why was I being reckless? Should I use this as a wake up call?  Was I being reckless in other areas of my life?  I tried to look at it from a conspirational view of the universe: was I spending too much time doing the physical activities I would now be prevented from doing instead of working on other areas of my life?

I was telling my friend D about the story on the way to surfing the next day and she pointed out that it was cool that I had heard that warning voice before taking the jump.  That thought has been echoing around in my head since.  I had totally taken that for granted, but it WAS cool that I had had that voice, and that was an awesome reminder: to listen, to be more in tune with that little voice.  That little voice says a lot of things: it warns me of danger, it tells me to be patient when I am anxious, it tells me to be kind, to express my appreciation, to act spontaneously, to ask for forgiveness, it reminds me whats important and tells me whats not. It whispers the truth and is always there.  Its timing is impeccable.

Yes, I need to be more careful. I need to be more trustworthy with myself and to listen better, and to trust. Does the universe conspire with me?  I sure have a lot to be grateful for.

Opening Up and Out and Through

Sometimes you have to put down a thought and pick up a new one.  I thought I was going to work on a post about listening and trusting that little voice inside, and instead I am going to just listen to it, and get to writing about it later.

The question is: Once we’ve discovered our souls, how do we keep the door open?

I am feeling less angst about the answer to that question than I did before, mostly because I am appreciating the question more, because an answer lies in the questioning itself.  The answer is to love ourselves enough to live a life asking that question, right Rilke?  How do we keep the door open to our souls?  Keep looking for openings and use them; let love in, and let love out.

We can love ourselves by doing the most trivial things, it really doesn’t matter the things we do, just that we do them with intent.  Tiny little precious gifts, like some time to play, doing something special just for ourselves, something on purpose to nurture our soul.

Our soul needs attention, not greedy me, me, me attention, it needs someone to care about how its doing, to ask questions of it it, to just be with.  It needs to be able to express its own caring and to be heard and listened to.  It needs to be treated with kindness and respect, to be treasured and revered and valued.  It needs to be shared.

There is something about sharing that I didn’t know was so important.  Questions of the soul really are about as personal as it gets, right?  Its an internal road to travel with our souls.  So what is it about sharing?  Maybe its the giving and the willingness to be vulnerable? Maybe its sharing that demonstrates value?

I don’t know! But I think there may be something synergistic about sharing this journey.

I found an opening in my soul after I gave up on a lot of bullshit I was living and made a choice to wake up and do the right thing for myself.  It was the making of the right choices and the effort of doing the best I could for myself even though it meant giving up on my ego.  Being willing to look at the mess I had made and own it it and take responsibility.  To be forgiving and compassionate instead of choosing resentment and bitterness towards myself or who I was feeling hurt by.  It was giving up all the answers that I thought I had and accept that I really didn’t know myself as well as I thought, and that I really hadn’t been very nice or caring or respectful or loving of myself on purpose for a while.

I don’t know, I think that I really did give up on something. Its almost like I was keeping the door closed, and I just decided to finally stop struggling to keep it closed.  Maybe the answer to how to keep the door open is to quit trying to close it. 

Why Soul Talk?

A week or so ago I took it upon myself to rescue a poor misguided, ahem, soul, from her apparent inability to see an obvious conflict between who she really was (from my perspective) and how she wrote about certain things that were important to her,  namely things that had to do with the consideration of the soul, and some of her efforts to to care and nurture it.

I jokingly suggested soul talk desensitization training for both of us because I too get embarrased about talking about spirituality.  Even asking, let alone answering, obvious questions like ‘What do you really believe??’ is difficult for me.  Sharing my own piecemeal efforts to cobble together spiritual satisfaction is awkward and uncomfortable.

So this blog is intended to provide an anonymous place to talk about things related to my own personal soul. 

Wikipedia says that a soul, according to many traditions, is ‘the self-aware essence unique to a particular living being’.  That sounds ok, but its not saying much, so I am going to ad-lib.  I am going to go with a version of the soul that could be described as your ‘true self’, the who-you-really-are part of you that doesn’t change with your mood.  I’ll also go with a version that is involved or connected with the universe, or reality,  whatever you want to call it, in a way that is not necessarily tangible or physical.  I’ll leave it as vague as that, though feel free to chime in with your own personal definition of soul!!!

By spirituality, I mean the process or practice of discovering,  understanding,  and nurturing our souls. 

Whew! This is going great! I already feel embarassed!

–SoulTalkHeckler

 

Part II

I have decided to expand the scope a little bit to include other things that I am embarassed to talk about but shouldn’t be — the soul is big topic though, so maybe it include the other stuff I want to talk about.