Touching into The Soul

When I was in my twenties I bought Anis Nin's book "In Favor of the Sensitive Man, and Other Essays", 1976. Her writing introduced me to Rainer Maria Rilke"Letters to a Young Poet", and Otto Rank, "Truth and Reality, a Life History of the Human Will." I went to the library to find their work. This was during the time when I was studying the writings and theories of the pedagogy of Dr Maria Montessori for my teaching certification. My reading and insights gave me an understanding of my souls reality and my responsibility to my soul development. At that time I also was studying an Eastern Yogi philosophy book I found in a thrift store, "Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy", by Yogi Ramacharaka, 1931. I was taking transcendental meditation classes and in a transformational wilderness of the unconsciousness and on my own, often making poor choices and not fully taking personal responsibility for the consequences. Role models at this level of spiritual development were only in books for me at that time. The reality of transformation, the work of the soul, the development of self.

This morning I came across some writing that brought back these memories of my life as a young woman and my studies that gave insight and purpose to my many confusions of life that I was experiencing at the time. A process that is ever on going from one season of life to the next.

Here I am now, in the season of my elder years and for me, right now, over the last weeks and months, I have been sharing the mystery of life's confusions and gifts with my husband and friends. We have been sharing soulful insights trying to grapple with the tragedy of the wars of humanities creation, along side the joy and beauty of nature during this blossoming spring. Sharing life's gifts, and our individual and collective responsibilities.

Feeling thankful for trusting relationships and the memories of past and current soul work that continues through the seasons of my life. Like a flowing body of water that changes course and rushes in, creatng new streams. Streams of soul consciousness.

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

Rainer Maria Rilke

"For the only therapy is life. The patient must learn to live, to live with his split, his conflict, his ambivalence, which no therapy can take away, for if it could, it would take with it the actual spring of life."

Otto Rank