What is Soulful Impact and How Do We Create It? (Part 5)
Step 5: Repeat
Welcome to Soulful Impact, a newsletter exploring the territory of remembering our true nature and realizing our full potential.
This is Part 5 of a 5-part series introducing the concept and practice of Soulful Impact:
As always, I’d love to hear what resonates and I welcome your comments and feedback. Thanks so much for being here.
Step 5: Repeat
“This isn’t a journey about becoming something. It’s a journey of unbecoming who we’re really not. It’s a journey of undeceiving ourselves.”
— Adyashanti
In the final step of the practice, we get to go back to the beginning.
Once we’ve completed Steps 1-4, we’re ready to meet the next layer of the onion in our ongoing journey of personal and spiritual growth. We’ve completed a cycle — stepped up to the plate, faced our fears with love, remembered the deeper truth of who we really are, and given our gift. As one cycle completes, the next one begins.
Because this is a journey of realizing our full potential by way of remembering our true nature, it doesn’t stop until we have “un-become who we’re really not.” It doesn’t stop, in other words, until we no longer fall back asleep into the illusion of the separate self. (Not that I’m there yet, by any means. 😉)
Until then, as much as we might like to linger in the glorious glow of Steps 3 and 4, our souls have other plans. “Sorry to break it to you,” I imagine them telling us, “but our purpose isn’t to make you feel good. It’s to collaborate with the alchemical crucible of life to help you remember your true nature and realize your full potential.”
I experience this journey as moving through an ever-expanding spiral. Each time I make it through a cycle, I expand my awareness of what’s possible. I expand the range of experiences and parts of myself that I am capable of fully being with from a place of open-hearted equanimity. I expand my understanding of what it means to give my gift. I expand my upper limits of aliveness, peace, play and joy.
Then, something happens. Life presents a situation that feels more complex or problematic than what I’ve been able to accept and experience with equanimity thus far. I have an experience that triggers some darkness that’s been lingering in the shadows. Parts of myself get scared and shrink back into my smaller separate identity, taking my awareness with them. I feel like a victim, run away from discomfort, thrash around and resist.
The gift of the trigger is that it brings me right to the edge of where I have the opportunity to grow, heal and expand next. It’s as if my soul knows exactly what I now have the strength, capacity and readiness to experience, process, burn through and release, and collaborates with life to present me with just the circumstances I need to meet that opportunity.
As I continue through these cycles, the spiral of my experience expands in all directions. Of course, the highs get higher. Those moments of dancing in the dynamic balance between agency and surrender, breaking through to a space of wakeful awareness and love, and being the channel for my gift to flow through are unquestionably some of the most exquisite experiences of my life. And they just keep getting better.
But that doesn’t mean I’m immune to the lows or done with the work. If anything, as the light gets brighter, the darkness gets darker. Each time I peel back a new layer of personal identity, I encounter aspects of darkness that feel more intense, scary and painful than ever. This challenges me to expand my capacity and willingness to experience the things my ego tends to run from the most.
When it comes to undeceiving ourselves, we must let go of attachment to the arbitrary preferences and hierarchies created by our egos. This includes the wanting, as understandable and valid as it may be, to cling to the highs and stay away from the lows. Because ultimately, we are neither the highs nor the lows. We are all of the above, and everything in between.
The Fruits of the Journey
While this journey is not all sunshine and roses, it sure does bear its fruit.
There’s a particular kind of sweetness that we need to learn to let go of, or at least hold lightly and release our attachment. That is the sweetness of winning, being right, being better than, or having things turn out exactly the way that we wanted them to. The sweetness, in other words, of conditional joy. Of the preferences and desires of our smaller self being momentarily met.
There’s nothing wrong with having preferences and beliefs, and they can actually be useful to us in finding our way — but we need to learn to hold them lightly. As soon as we get attached, and think that a certain outcome is better than another because it’s what our egos want, we’ve lost our connection to the deeper truth of who we really are.
This includes letting go of our attachment to the sweetness of giving our gift. As soon as we get attached to that experience, we are identifying with it — thinking that our gift belongs to us (instead of belonging to something much greater than ourselves that simply uses us as a channel) or that the impact our gift has on the world means something about who we are.
Instead of getting attached, we get to learn to let go. We stay open to what arises, follow the flow of the moment with presence and curiosity, and stick to our practices of Steps 1-3. We hold our expectations lightly and let life show us the way.
Then some of the fruits of this journey will emerge — namely, the experience of unconditional joy.
Unconditional joy springs forth from connection to truth and devotional attunement to life. It’s not circumstantially dependent, meaning things don’t need to be a certain way for you to feel it. It can actually be derived from opening to, experiencing and accepting great darkness — welcoming it all home into the infinite heart of your being.
Unconditional joy is what we feel when we recognize that this, too — yes this, and even this — is sacred. This too belongs. Even that which we have feared our entire lives and spent countless days, hours and years running from. Even that which we most loathe and despise within ourselves. Yes, all of that. And that, too.
I am not suggesting that as we practice Soulful Impact, we lose touch with our ability to take a stand for what we want to see or change or stop in the world. Quite the contrary — this practice us enables us to be the being who can actually create the resolution that we seek. But it doesn’t come from a place of attachment, fear or right vs. wrong. It springs forth from a place of love, divine vision and inspired creativity.
The practice of Soulful Impact is ultimately a journey of self-healing, and it is through that healing process that we awaken to and become capable of realizing our full potential.
In this journey, we return to and relax into — again and again and to an ever greater degree — our innate wholeness. We sink more and more deeply into the bone-deep remembering of who we really are.
As that happens, we discover, cultivate and give our gift because we literally become it. Our healing journey opens up new ways of being within ourselves and a new universe of creative possibilities outside of ourselves.
As we return to and embody our true nature more and more deeply, we let go of our ego’s smaller agendas, submit to the greater vision of our souls and inspire others to do the same.
“Our greatest contribution is to heal the illusory divisions within ourselves. That’s the ultimate gift we have to humanity. That’s what’s going to change humanity.”
— Adyashanti
Thank You
If you’ve made it this far and completed this series, thank you. I’m so grateful for your time and attention. I’d love to hear how it all lands with you, and what you learn from putting it into practice.
Remember, there’s no finish line. The journey literally is the destination.
May you travel safely, with great success, and may you thoroughly enjoy the ride.
Soulfully yours,
Brooks
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Find prior installments of this series below:
I love this series and it deeply resonates with me. Thanks for elegantly putting deep thoughts into words that inspire. Scared, hopeful and trusting for my Vision Fast!
“Unconditional joy springs forth from connection to truth and devotional attunement to life. It’s not circumstantially dependent, meaning things don’t need to be a certain way for you to feel it. It can actually be derived from opening to, experiencing and accepting great darkness — welcoming it all home into the infinite heart of your being.”
At your finest Brooks.
Bravo.
With admiration,
🙏