Embodying Soul: A Return to Wholeness
Prologue: Family Flags
Dear readers: I’ve always pictured myself as pure soul, standing on the precipice of the Soul Realm, ready to jump into the Earth Realm to begin a new human life. I’ve always wondered what my soul would have to say about the choices I’ve made, and the greater purpose of some of my lessons and struggles.
In this book, I brought these imaginings to life—by pairing my Earth Realm stories up with Soul Realm stories. As such, I definitely suggest reading the book in order, as trying to pick it up in the middle would be confusing!
Enjoy your journey to the Soul Realm, and may it bring you clarity, peace, and joy.
Here is the Prologue, which takes place in the Earth Realm:
“Let’s begin today by going back to your childhood. What would you say were your family’s core values?” asked my rosy-cheeked, spiky-haired, middle-aged therapist while holding a ballpoint pen an inch away from her yellow legal pad, ready to scribble my family wisdom. Her office, tucked in a basement in a suburb of Minneapolis, was comfortable and quiet. On the wall behind her were several framed diplomas and on the wall to my right some abstract art, but the wall to my left, where a clock should’ve been to ensure clients didn’t overstay their sessions, was blank — like my mind.
With a mug of steaming peppermint tea cupped in my hands intended to calm me, I considered what my childhood could have had to do with my current anxiety. I’d already had a few appointments with this therapist during which we’d concentrated on the impact of anxiety on my life. I had told her about the emptiness I felt, my mind’s lack of clarity, my trembling body. I had explained how the anxiety also made me feel cold, even while sweating across my lower back and under my arms enough to soak through my clothing. I had revealed that nevertheless most people never suspected my inner turmoil, because I hid my true feelings under layers of self-discipline.
She had asked me what situations triggered my anxiety, and I had identified the group settings where participants had to share something personal, like my yoga classes, workshops, or trainings. I explained that when teaching yoga, a group setting where I was in control of the agenda, I rarely experienced anxiety unless it was the first day of a new class, and that, once I got to know my students, no one guessed that I suffered from anxiety. So, I had told her, when some occasion triggered anxiety I just waited for it to dissipate. Teaching yoga, I explained, was a calling that made me feel more whole and alive than in any other area of my life, and I would not, could not, give it up.
She had listened to my revelations and called my anxiety “social anxiety,” though I would have called it “lack of control” anxiety. She had then asked what calming techniques I’d tried. I explained that although I knew all kinds of breathing techniques and positive visualizations and affirmations, in moments of debilitating anxiety nothing worked and all I could do was wait for the situation that had triggered it to end and my body to return to normal. Those had been embarrassing admissions of weakness, but the questions about my feelings of anxiety had made sense so I’d answered them honestly.
But now she was probing into my childhood, which did not seem to honor the urgency of my situation: I was thirty-four years old and married; had two children, both colicky as babies; had spent the last six months battling my fourth case of hives, necessitating my first emergency room visit and a steroid prescription; the yoga classes I was teaching were on hold due to my illness; my marriage was on the verge of failure; and when I had finally felt strong enough to leave the sanctuary of my darkened bedroom to drive to Blockbuster to rent a movie, the energy required to engage in retail pleasantries had exhausted me so much I had gone home and fallen asleep, no longer interested in a movie. And here my therapist was inquiring about my long-ago childhood. What did she want to know — the kind of cake that had been served on my fourth birthday? I wondered, sarcastically.
In an attempt to avoid encouraging what I considered my therapist’s nonrelevant rerouting, I bit my lip and said, “I’m sorry, I don’t really understand.”
“Many families have sayings that bond them, like ‘We all stand together’ or ‘Blood is thicker than water,’” she explained, patiently.
“Not mine,” I asserted, a little defensively, then gave an apologetic shrug.
“Well, let me ask this: Did you receive any kind of verbal instruction about your family identity or how to present yourself in the world?” asked my therapist.
Suddenly, a memory formed in my mind like a single raindrop, and I revealed. “When my brothers and I asked my dad what he wanted for Christmas, he always said, ‘Good kids.’”
“Okay, and what did that mean to you?” she inquired, encouragingly.
I dropped my head, expecting a protective curtain of long, brown hair to fall around my face, forgetting that I’d recently had it cut short, and replied, “Follow rules, don’t cause trouble, stay out of the way. It was just a joke, though. We usually got him socks or something.”
“Were you the kind of kid to cause trouble?” she then asked, pressing me further.
I sniggered and answered, “Hardly. Goody-Two-Shoes is more like it.” My self-loathing released a stream of something like endorphins through my body, which felt good, like a smoker taking a long-awaited drag on a cigarette. At least it felt better than being confused and vulnerable.
“Any other instructions or mottoes from home?” she inquired, smiling, her cheeks forming small apples beneath her eyes.
The fact that she wasn’t letting this probing go made me suspect I was failing to adequately answer what must’ve been to her a straightforward question. I felt anxious, imagining her other clients rattling off family mottoes. I set the tea on a coaster on the polished glass table before me, rolled my eyes upward, and strained to hear some other slogan, statement, or manifesto from my childhood inside the cavern of my mind. But all I heard was the North Dakota wind howling.
“I can’t think of anything else,” I said, attempting a tone of finality.
“Well,” she continued, unfazed, “think of it another way. If your family had had a flag flying outside your house, what would it have said?”
I stifled a chuckle. A flag flying outside our house? We never would have let ourselves be so visible. We were a quiet family living a simple, frugal life, with a sense of duty and pride — not an outer pride of flag-flying but an inner pride that worked like an invisible rubber band of resilience, helping us snap back into shape when the world’s cares pulled on us — except for me, apparently. I wondered what my family would think if they knew I was seeking help from a shrink just to get by day to day and paying for it with hard-earned money, not even my money but my husband’s money, since my little hobby of a yoga business didn’t pay the bills and my business degree was sitting in a drawer turning yellow rather than proudly displayed on a wall like my therapist’s degrees. My parents wouldn’t have had time for such psychobabble but would have persevered through any pain, if indeed they had been forced to recognize it.
I considered the two choices I saw before me: A) tell my therapist what I thought about her nosy, irrelevant question, storm out, and never return, or B) tell her nothing about my discomfort, grit my teeth, and muster up a good enough answer to her searching question, as championed by family habits. I knew that option A was not a viable option; at the time, showing frustration or confusion was to me synonymous with admitting weakness, which I felt would leave me dangerously vulnerable.
“Do what you have to do now, you can panic later,” my mom had always said, even though I never really saw her panic later. I only heard her crying once, quietly, as I listened at her bedroom door and knew better than to ask her about it, then or later. From her, I had learned that dwelling on emotions, or complaining, solved nothing, pulled energy away from urgent daily tasks, and took the focus away from building a good reputation.
So option B was what I took. Like opening up a family album that had been tucked away in a closet for years, I creaked open my memories of childhood, figuring that my therapist would soon see that my ancient past had little relevance to my present concerns, and then we could begin addressing my anxiety or, if not, I could simply stop making appointments and move on with my life. What I didn’t see at the time was how certain family behaviors would turn out to be red flags, revealing internal barriers I would need to surmount before forging an inclusive and loving relationship with my emotions and myself — the very definition of embodying one’s soul and a potent beginning for a return to wholeness.
“Embodying Soul: A Return to Wholeness” is available for purchase here.
You can read reviews here, or here.
Read Next