Create With Soul

Every creation that serves an evolutionary purpose has its own soul, which holds the pattern for its perfect unfolding.

That Thing that’s been tugging at your heart recently, or maybe for the past many years… The one that shows up in your dreams, that turns up when you least expect it – when you’re gardening, cooking, drifting off to sleep, walking down the street. The one you catch tiny, tantalizing glimpses of before it disappears again, leaving the world a little grayer, leaving the taste of sorrow in your mouth.

That creation.

That creation has its own soul, which is intimately connected with yours. Maybe it’s part of your soul’s posse, and your bond with it was sealed long before you entered this incarnation. Maybe your relationship is relatively new, and its purposes and yours feather together so seamlessly that your creative collaboration is as inevitable as bird-wing and sky.

Not every creation that knocks on the door of your consciousness, asking to be let it in, is yours to bring into the world. You are a sovereign being, as is your creation. The relationship between you is one of mutual love, respect, and sovereign will. A creation that doesn’t fit into the shape of your life may not be yours to wed. Your own desire, genius, gifts, and capacity will determine which potential creations you’ll say an unequivocal Yes to, and which ones you will pass by, or ask to await their turn.

Before you say Yes to a creation, you’ll want to spend time communing with its soul, so you know who and what you’re saying Yes to.

The soul of your (potential) creation holds its essential qualities — love, wisdom, clarity, truth, tenderness, power, and more — as well as the form and pattern of its life. It has its own purposes, gifts, life-path, allies, and resources. If its desires and values are congruent with yours, and its purposes align with your soul’s purposes, then it’s worth exploring a partnership between you.

Getting to know the soul of your creation deeply, intimately, will help you understand if you are the right person to partner with it, to bring it into the world. By understanding your creation’s purposes, you’ll clarify if, and how, it will serve the folks whom your heart wants to serve. Do you want the same things? Do your energies blend together easily? How will partnering with this creation change you, reshape your life, serve the causes you love? Are you willing to be changed in these ways?

Getting to know the soul of your creation will also help you discern if you have the necessary resources of time, energy, creativity, money, and so on, to bring it to life. You won’t know the precise details of what it will require from you, any more than you can know what your business or your child will need from you over the course of its life. But by attuning to your creation’s soul, you’ll have a clear sense of whether you have the means and desire to give it what it needs, to flourish. Your own soul will tell you whether it belongs with you, whether you have the love, devotion, willingness and capacity to nurture its emerging life.

Once you’ve begun working with it, the soul of your creation can connect you with its own allies — those people, places, beings or organizations that can help you bring it from idea to completion within the time-frame you choose together. The soul of your creation cannot act in the physical world, except through you, but it can and will put you in touch with resources and opportunities that will show up in miraculous ways, when you ask for its help.

Whatever you feel called to create — a book, a home, a website, a business, a painting, a suite of programs, a baby – cultivating a relationship with the soul of your creation will bring it to completion more quickly and precisely than barreling ahead with plans and strategies unrelated to its soul’s purposes, and yours.

Our minds love to play what-if yes-but games. They love complications, schemes, inflated ideas only tenuously tethered to reality. Our souls, and the souls of our creations, on the other hand, emerge from the Mystery, as clear, purposeful, powerful and transparent as swift-flowing streams. Souls are focused on artistry, on expressing their gifts in service to the world, and on emergence — bringing to life that which wants to be born.

Your mind might want a massive, global stage from which you speak to millions of people. Your mind may crave applause, recognition, prizes, adoration, glory. Your mind, however, plays a very limited role in bringing your creation to life.

Your soul and the soul of your creation serve their own purposes – which may or may not include an audience of millions; may or may not include fame, fortune, status, adulation. The soul doesn’t care more about a cast of thousands than it does about your grandmother or the maple tree in your backyard. The soul’s desires are always about experiencing and expressing qualities of soul, and about serving the Sacred in the world by adding to the sum of love, kindness, beauty, compassion, truth, on this earth – whenever and wherever the opportunity arises.

Once you make peace with this difference between the desires of the soul and the cravings of the mind, you’ll be able to discern what you truly want, and what the soul of your creation truly wants. The actions you take will be effective and efficient because they will be aligned with your soul’s purposes, and those of the soul of your creation. You’ll do what’s necessary and sufficient to fulfill those purposes, without wasting time, energy, resources and effort chasing after dreams that aren’t yours to fulfill.

Success is the love child of soul purpose and inspired action.