Undam the River of Your Soul

On Spirituality and Rewilding Ourselves

In a recent conversation with a mentor, I came to a new level of willingness to claim one of the roles that I play in my work: the role of spiritual guide. As I write those words, I feel a threat response in my body – constricting in my throat, chest, and belly – and some familiar voices show up with their warnings.

“Who do you think you are? You don’t deserve to claim that!” “You’re only 33 years old. You’re not nearly wise enough.” “Get over yourself… step down off your high horse and come back down here with the rest of us.”

With respect and appreciation for these voices, who have worked hard my entire life to protect me from perceived threats to my wanting for approval, control and security, their concern rests on the fear that calling myself a spiritual guide is equivalent to saying I believe I am superior or better than other people. While I certainly have an ego that is quite skilled at playing the comparison game of better than/less than, I’ve realized that being a spiritual guide actually isn’t about that. It’s about recognizing and accepting those rackets my ego runs, and then choosing to operate from a part of myself that is much bigger than my ego – a part deeply rooted in trust. 

Being a spiritual guide doesn’t mean being better or wiser than anyone else. It simply means having more trust. Trust in what, you might ask? Well, in short, trust in life. Trust in what is. Trust in the medicine that is inherent in all beings and the way things are.

The Key to Trust is Remembering Who You Really Are

So often, we resist the way things are. This is incredibly human, natural, and deeply understandable. Life is full of encounters and experiences that provoke experiences of threat, discomfort, and difficult emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness. There is beauty in the resistance; it can be energizing and motivating, create a temporary sense of satisfaction, help us connect and relate, and lead to a lot of learning. If we never felt any resistance to life, it would be hard to call ourselves human.

At the same time, we get to choose how to be with our resistance when it comes up. This is where trust comes in. In moments of feeling triggered, threatened, or resistant to our external circumstances, we can ask ourselves: What part of me is feeling threatened right now? Who, exactly, is at threat? 

If you’re willing to look deep enough, you’ll find that the part of you at threat is some aspect of your ego identity or personality. It’s the part of you that conceives of “you” as a separate self, an independent being whose boundaries end at the edge of your skin. It’s the part of you that makes circumstances feel personal, as if they mean something about who you are. It’s the part of you that believes you must be a certain way and do certain things to be safe, loved, and in control. This part of you believes that if you do just the right things, exist in just the right way, and create just the right external circumstances, then and only then will you be free.

Of course, it’s a trap. As the Buddha taught, all suffering comes from attachment. When we buy into our ego’s perceived need to control ourselves and our circumstances, we perpetuate our own suffering. We get stuck in the delusion that freedom and fulfillment exist outside of ourselves. We wrap ourselves around the axles of our lives in the never-ending pursuit of the idealized circumstances we think we need in order to feel how we want to feel. By striving to change ourselves and our lives, we distract ourselves from the awareness that we already have everything we are looking for within ourselves.

At the same time, we need our egos! We wouldn’t be able to function in our flesh-and-blood world without them. They serve and protect us with diligence and passion, and are a key aspect of our humanity. What’s more, our egos give us our capacity to create. To build a brighter future, we need their help. The key is remembering that they also have a tendency to forget the truth of who we really are.

When we remember that the truth of who we are is encompassing of and much greater than our egos, we begin to relax and open. Our sense of threat begins to melt away and an opening appears to fall back into trust. Our compulsive need to manage and control ourselves and our lives falls away. We reconnect with the part of ourselves beyond the ego – that which is connected to the whole, and our access point to wisdom. We not only find trust, but also a new sort of clarity and direction from which to send our egos into action. We give our egos a higher purpose beyond themselves, and in so doing, we realize that perhaps this is what they were craving all along.

Inevitably, we’ll continue to forget. All the time. Something will happen, our identity will perceive a threat, and we’ll shrink back into our separate selves. No big deal! Just another opportunity to practice. Another opportunity to accept ourselves for being scared, remember the truth of who we are, and sink more deeply into trust.

A New Paradigm

A former version of myself might have judged this thinking as a spiritual bypass – a way to escape the burden to do something to change everything that is so terribly wrong in the world. “I don’t want to be a monk sitting in his cave while the world burns,” he might have said.

I’ve come to believe that, in fact, accepting and living from this greater truth of who we are might be the only way to really change the paradigm that we’re living in. Our current paradigm is characterized by separation – us vs. them, right vs. wrong, wild vs. domesticated, nature vs. humanity, good vs. evil. Really standing in the truth of who we are – owning that I am actually both us AND them, right AND wrong, wild AND domesticated, nature AND human, good AND evil – flips the script entirely. 

Far from a spiritual bypass (which would involve using spiritual beliefs to avoid feeling or facing something), this path takes me directly into facing that I am, in fact, all the things my ego doesn't want me to be. It forces me to feel the depths of my discomfort as I reclaim my darkness and my shadows – because the truth of who I am actually includes all of it. Through this process, I come home to my wholeness. I experience the true freedom of having access to the entire universe of possibility that lives inside of me, and not needing to run away, hide from, or fight against any of it. 

In one of life’s great paradoxes, it is only by coming home to the understanding that I am already perfect and complete that I unlock my ability to actually change. And by changing ourselves, we change the world.

Undam the River of Your Soul

I shared these insights with my wife Ashley last week, conveying my excitement and newfound sense of permission to really play full out as a spiritual guide: to crack open people’s identities, going in for the kill like a dog for a bone, and then be a space of love to hold whatever comes through. 

Beautifully and brilliantly, in her usual way, she made the comparison to the undamming of rivers. YES, I realized – that’s exactly it! This is what I believe rewilding ourselves looks like.

Removing a dam is likely to be ugly, uncomfortable, and destructive. A violent flood will release a bunch of smelly, stagnant and possibly toxic old gunk – formerly hidden in the shadows, now let out into the open. Old infrastructure, behavioral patterns, and ways of being built around the dam will need to be abandoned, at least for a while. Unexpected changes and challenges will occur. Things will not be like they used to be.

But because I believe in the healing power and wisdom of the wild, I trust this process. I trust the river and its surrounding ecosystem to not only recover from all that upheaval, but to reach a profound new level of thriving in its wake. 

As a spiritual guide, I simply trust the river of you to do the same. Breaking apart the dam of your comfortable, familiar, and deeply ingrained ego identity may be messy, violent, and uncomfortable. But your soul, like the river, knows how to heal itself, renew, and thrive. As a member of the wild world, the essence of your being knows how to collaborate with the rest of life around you and plow through obstacles when necessary in pursuit of your greatest aliveness. 

The same spirit of nature that guides the river, the very same life force, can guide us too. We just need to keep on remembering to feel it, trust it, identify with it, and collaborate with it. And we get to do that over and over and over again. 

Nature thrives on dynamic, creative tension – seemingly opposing forces dancing back and forth to keep the energy of the whole moving. Perhaps we are just the same. Our egos get to keep building their dams, and we get to keep playing the infinite game of cracking them open and seeing how much deeper into collaboration with life we can go.

Join Me

You too can be a spiritual guide for other people in your life. The world certainly isn’t short on work to be done from this role, in my opinion!

The only qualification is whether you have enough trust. We are all capable of building that trust. In my experience, there’s no better way to build it than by repeatedly going through the process of cracking open our own inner dams. The more we do this, the more we remember how to follow the wild natural flow of the river of our own souls, and the more trust we can embody to help others do the same.

So – what’s a dam you currently see within yourself? Where is your ego hanging on to a constrained idea of who you really are? 

As you look closely you might notice that this idealized self-image, like an old and tired concrete dam, is already starting to crack. How about we give it a little help? ;)

With love,

Brooks

Thanks to Deb Katz, Bill Plotkin, Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, Don Gato, and my lovely wife, Ashley Meyers, for your wisdom and insight that inspired this post.

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