Eight keys to living a soulful life – or: your roadmap to wisdom
Key 2: Practice
So you want to live a soulful life. You want to grow, spiritually, and shine radiantly. Live from love, not fear.
They call it a spiritual life sometimes and that’s fine, as long as we don’t get all spiritual (read why not here).
My book Simply Spiritual (Eenvoudig Spiritueel), my illustrated guide to a meaningful and soulful life, was only ever published in Dutch and now disgracefully marked remaindered. So for all of you who missed this opportunity, I’m outlining my 8 keys in a series of blogposts. Your roadmap to wisdom.
As souls living in a body, we have to live with this dichotomy: the ego cannot be enlightened, the soul already is. So in order to live from that inner source of wisdom, we need our soul, not our ego, to be our pilot. However, we weren’t taught how that can be achieved. And much as we’d sometimes like to, we cannot ditch our ego. It’s part and parcel of this being human.
So we’re trying to compromise, to be in this world but not of it. And that, my dears, takes practice. And the practice never ends. It goes on and on (as far as I know; I’m 50 now and still practicing ;-).
We are hard-wired for survival. We can’t help going into survival mode at the drop of a hat. And that is o.k. We can practice compassion, with ourselves and others. This is how we roll. Painful sometimes. But we try. And although (meditation) practice actually changes the brain, we can never sit back and relax, we’re never done. It’s like a muscle: use it or lose it. So the soulful life asks for a little discipline too. A (preferably daily) spiritual practice. Choose wisely 😉
Practice: Gratitude
A great way to outsmart the ego is to practice positive mindstates. Gratitude is a beautiful one, it’s a high vibration emotion and you simply cannot feel anger, resentment, anxiety or fear when you are experiencing gratitude. So at the end of each day, go through your day and pause a moment to reflect on three things you are grateful for. Write them in a special notebook.
