posted August 12, 2009 12:19 PM
Chapter 3Discovering Your Soul Mission
From Who You Are to Who You Want to Be
Having a fundamental working knowledge of your soul and your personality and being aware of their spiritual dynamic will help you align them in such a way that you can experience living your soul mission. You gain access to your personality through your intellect, your sensations, and your feelings. You gain access to your soul through your intuition.
”When the personality comes fully to serve the energy of the soul, that is authentic empowerment. This is the goal of the evolutionary process and the reason for your being. Every experience that you have and will have upon the Earth encourages the alignment of your personality with your soul.”
Gary Zukav, The Seat of the Soul
When you soul and personality are aligned, you will finally be able to devote yourself to your soul’s mission, your life’s work. You will experience an unparalleled level of satisfaction and purpose, leading to a fundamental inner peace. In The Seat of the Soul, Zukav discusses the relationship between personality and soul:
”When a personality is in full balance you cannot see where it ends and the soul begins. That is a whole human being.”
Your soul mission is always that which you say you cannot do. It is your growth path-the singular, distinctive purpose that represents your fulfillment. Your soul mission becomes your journey to reaching your fullest potential, to become something you haven’t been before. It is diametrically opposite to your comfort zone.
Your North/South Nodes
The North/South Node process is fundamental to learning and living your soul mission. Through your North and South Nodes, you uncover words and symbols that you will use to bridge the gap between past lives and this one. You don’t have to believe in reincarnation or past lives and this to benefit from the North/South Node process, but if you believe life has some purpose and meaning, it’s easier to grasp the concept.
The nodes are points in the heavens where the moon intercepts the earth’s orbit around the sun. Your North and South Nodes are thus represented by astrological signs that diametrically oppose each other in the cosmos. If your North Node is Cancer, your South Node would be Scorpio, and so on.
The South Node, which we will refer to as your Soul Pattern, embodies the type of person you are when you exhibit your old, predictable habits and behaviors. It represents you most familiar thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. It tells you the past lives you need to remember, karmic debts you need to repay, and the relationships that will support your vision. (A karmic debt is an unresolved issue from a previous life.) It shows you your unresolved themes from the past that are causing you pain and frustration in this life.
Martin Schulman, author of Karmic Astrology, describes the Soul Pattern (South Node) as
symbolic of a man’s past. [The South Node] is not symbolic of one incarnation, but [rather] a combination of events, ideas, attitudes and thoughts from every incarnation whose accumulated unresolved effects have created the current life. For some the South Node can be limiting, whole for others whose past foundations are firm and large it can be just the factor which brings the present life to fruition and achievement.
You must evolve from the habits and tendencies confirmed by your Soul Pattern to reach the possibilities signified by your North Node, which we will refer to as your Soul Potential. In the simplest terms, your Soul Pattern represents your past, while your Soul potential represents your future, your soul mission.
Each of us brings specific tendencies or issues from one life to the next because they are unresolved. Once you learn the lessons your soul wants you to learn, you need not carry that “karmic baggage” into your next incarnation. Your Soul Potential offers you a road map of words and concepts helping you to understand who you need to be to achieve soul mission. It could be described, fundamentally, as what scares you the most, eliciting feelings of insecurity or fear, because it seeks to take you into new, unfamiliar terrain. We are all drawn to our Soul Potential, as a moth to a flame, yet we are terrified of it at the same time.
Once you embrace it, your Soul Potential will provide you with a clear path to a life of profound joy, purpose, and congruence. Schulman explains one’s Soul Potential (North Node) as
the symbol of the future. It represents a new experience as yet untried. For the individual this is the new cycle to which he is looking forward, carrying with it all the apprehensions of the unknown and as yet untried experiences. This nodal position nevertheless has a curious, magnetic allure, pulling the soul to its future growth….It symbolizes the highest area of expression to be reached in the current life and therefore must be interpreted by the highest qualities of the sign and house in which it is placed.
The best way to begin to learn about your soul journey is to consult your Soul Pattern. Like your Sun sign, your Soul Pattern sign is determined by your date of birth, providing you with information about your past lives and showing you how you’ve manifested certain past life tendencies in this life (see the charts in Chapter 4). Your Soul Potential, on the other hand, represents your soul mission, and symbolizes your future. It gives you a conscious understanding of your life issues that have-up until now-been dormant. By confronting certain life issues via your Soul Pattern and extracting the negative habits and behaviors that have held you back from pursuing your dreams and goals, you can focus on traveling the road to your Soul Potential, to live the kind of life endeavored by your soul.
Why Breaking Old Habits Is Spiritually Therapeutic
“T0 fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.”
Miguel de Unamuno
Your soul is on a perpetual growth path. It wants you to evolve to a higher order, learning lessons cumulatively from one lifetime to the next. It wants you to encounter new experiences. Remaining stuck in an old and familiar Soul Pattern hinders your evolution. Your life circumstances may feel familiar for now, but your Soul Pattern will eventually arouse you by creating an unpleasant or life-jarring experience.
Most people, when they are content with the status quo, do not make wholesale life changes. They change only by having to confront a problem-specifically, one they created themselves via their Soul Pattern. At some point in each of our lives, our soul says to us, “You’ve got to do something different now.” But leaving your Soul Pattern behind for good of your soul mission is at best comfortable and at worst downright terrifying.
[i]”Ill habits gather by unseen degrees-
As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.”
John Dryden
Unlike your personality, your soul is not judgmental. It assesses your experiences not in terms of whether they are positive or negative but rather if they are new or old. Your soul is interested in exposing you to discovery, in plying you with new experiences and insights that will lead you to your next incarnation.
Why We Fear Change
The fundamental reason we fear change is that, consciously or unconsciously, we equate it with death. Our mortality is the ultimate transformation, but most of us see it as a finality rather than as a new beginning.
”The sun…
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs.”
John Milton
Those who fear change often say they feel as though they have lost touch with their spiritual center. But being in touch with our spiritual energy is part of our soul journey of discovery, change, and novelty. If we don’t allow ourselves to continue on that journey, we get stuck. A journey implies movement, and those who refuse to take action are paralyzed by their fear of change, of finding themselves in territory that is unfamiliar.
In order to follow our Soul Potential, we need to trust our soul and take a leap of faith. Many of us, as youngsters, were fearful before we took that first dive into the pool, and we see the same terrifying feelings in our own children as they take their first dives. The same apprehension prevents us from seizing new, promising business opportunities, making dramatically different career moves, or cultivating meaningful and fulfilling relationships. Nothing could reduce our fear of entering the water headfirst but the actual first dive itself. Our Soul Potential is about not knowing, but trusting our soul that it’s right. Invariably it is.
”In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy of sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”
Edith Wharton
Influenced by the misguided adage “Don’t rock the boat,” many people have been conditioned to believe that dramatic change is not worth affecting. Most of us were raised by parents in a society that valued security. In the history of the world, the individuals who are now considered agents of change-from Plato and Galileo to Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Sanger, and Martin Luther King-were often condemned and ridiculed for their visionary beliefs in their respective times.
Greek officials shut down Plato’s learning academy because he was teaching innovative aspects of physics that they determined to be “dangerous.” Galileo was arrested and ostracized for his adoption of the Copernican belief that the sun not the earth, was the center of the solar system. Because of their ground-breaking efforts in furthering the causes of women’s suffrage and birth control, respectively, Anthony and Sanger both suffered at the hands of society’s mainstream: Anthony paid with her life and Sanger was jailed. At a time when blacks did not share the basic inalienable rights that America’s forefathers had mandated for its citizens, King emerged as a voice of love and reason and, most of all, change. His efforts cost him his life.
Three Reasons Why We Fear/Loathe Change
1. Most of us equate it with fear of dying.
2. We’ve been taught not to rock the boat.
3. It is not a logical process but an emotional one.
Why Intuition Is Essential To Your Soul Mission
In our culture we are taught to value and trust logic in making decisions. We look askance at our intuition, considering it “weird” when we receive a major revelation. Logic is based on what we already know, but intuition defies what we already know. A stop-the-world moment, intuition itself can drastically alter our lives. Insight creates change, and insight that comes from intuition yields the greatest change.
According to Jung, we see our environment through four filters: intellect, emotion, sensation, and intuition. While intellect, emotion, and sensation are the filters related to our personality, intuition is the filter to our soul. It transcends the other three filters, allowing us to interpret and understand life’s events with more clarity and a deeper perspective. I call it a divine spark, a moment in time when a thought you’ve never had before helps you see things differently. A passel of growth workshops and self-help seminars can help yield you some insights-or “ahas,” as I sometimes refer to them-but insight that is not developed and acted upon fades away.
Soul Pattern: Old Predilictions
From your Soul Pattern you can glean information about the areas in your life where you persistently hold on to your past. Your Soul Pattern may be so familiar, you’ve become inured to the fact it even exists. Your behavior, intentions, attitude, and perspective-traits of your personality-are as much a part of you as the color of your eyes, the sound of your voice, and the way you walk, personal aspects you hardly consider in daily life. Mining these habitual characteristics through Soul Pattern exercises can yield a rare introspective look at yourself. Investigating your Soul Pattern allows you to peel back the layers of your psyche, to help you identify qualities about yourself that could be keeping you from achieving your soul mission that your Soul Potential has laid out for you without discovering the personal mysteries of your Soul Pattern.
Those with a Soul Pattern (South Node) in the sign of Capricorn, for example, tend toward rigidity and perfectionism. Having their South Node in Capricorn signals their strong need to be responsible, as well as their penchant for rules. Their bias toward order may hamper their ability to achieve their soul mission, which often is about taking a less restrained approach to life. But unless they become consciously aware of their rigid inclinations, they will continue to repeat the same behavior, fueled by the same obstinacy.
Four Things You Should Know About Your Soul Pattern
1. It provides you with your spiritual starting point, and tells you where and what you’ve been before, altering you to your toxic tendencies.
2. It identifies what is safe, predictable, and familiar to you.
3. If you are not aware of your Soul Pattern, you will tend to create problematic relationships based on it.
4. If you don’t tend to your Soul Pattern, it will, at some point rear itself as a major crisis.
Soul Potential: What You Can Be
Our soul mission terrifies us, like a hair-raising roller-coaster ride, because our soul takes us into unfamiliar terrain, full of unknown twists and turns we couldn’t possibly anticipate. Your soul reveals itself through your Soul Potential, evincing its personality, color, passion, energy, and essence. Those with a Soul Potential in the sign of Cancer, for example, would aspire toward understanding their emotions and learning how to be nurturing. Having one’s Soul Potential in Cancer signals the need to become the consummate mother, who expresses her creativity through caring for others with sensitivity and compassion. Needing to be needed by those they love is vital to their self-esteem.
Four Things You Should Know About Your Soul Potential
1. On a spiritual level, your Soul Potential represents the light at the end of the tunnel.
2. It provides you with information about the type of energy, characteristics, and traits your soul wants to manifest.
3. It represents a “stretch” in ambition, pulling you to do things that you are not inherently comfortable or confident doing but that will be fulfilling once you overcome your anxiety and ”take the leap.”
4. Your Soul Potential is not a destination to reach, not a static end product, but the journey your soul wants you to take, a dynamic ongoing process.
Embracing Your Soul Potential
When you aspire to live your soul mission, you commit to becoming more than you think you are. You glean happiness and fulfillment not only from realizing your soul mission, but from the process of striving for it. Life itself is a process, not an end product. Thus, we are always in the process of becoming what our soul wants us to become. The more we are able to stay on our soul road, the happier and more content we are, regardless of whether we ever definitively reach our soul mission. Staying on our soul road keeps us motivated and connected to our life’s possibilities.
Pursuing you soul mission and striving to live your Soul Potential take work and commitment. But the process doesn’t end when you reach your perceived destination; in fact, as you try to refine your soul mission and attain its highest levels, it takes on a different type of spiritual obligation. Once you identify your soul mission, you should try to do things that mesh with it but that you don’t think you can do.
”Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who…should get in a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”
William James
Once you have discovered its path, maintaining your soul mission becomes easier over time. As you grow older, you become increasingly conscious of eschewing your Soul Pattern and are more committed to embracing the life endeavors articulated by your Soul Potential. Achieving your soul mission can be elusive; the key is to continue to strive for it so that you never lose track of what it is.
When you are aware of your Soul Pattern and what it represents, you soul no longer needs to create obstructions to clue you in to your problem areas. Your daily life will look a lot different: more peaceful, less chaotic, happier, healthier, and more prosperous. The cosmic two-by-fours will dissipate, and when you do encounter a problem, you’ll be able to negotiate it with greater ease, channeling it into an opportunity for personal growth. Remember, realizing your soul mission is all about the quest for it.
Committing to Your Soul Potential
It’s essential that you make a meaningful commitment to reaching your Soul Potential, a commitment that will be reflected in a more positive way of life with a greater sense of purpose. Whether you succeed is predicated not just on making a commitment but on evaluating the actions that stem from that commitment-actions that your soul wants you to take. You have to ask yourself:
Do your actions represent your Soul Potential (your soul path) or your Soul Pattern (the path from your past)? You know you’re committed to your Soul Potential when you find yourself asking how you would utilize the energies surrounding your Soul Potential to handle an opportunity or problem.
Achieving your Soul Potential is the result of a conscious choice, but it is also comparable to the experience of buying a new leather coat: each time you wear it, it feels more comfortable and looks better. Similarly, the more you commit to and practice the soul mission symbolized by your Soul Potential, the better it feels. Your Soul Pattern, on the other hand, is comparable to your skin: it is ever-present, and wearing it involves no conscious choice.
Jim, whose Soul Pattern is in Pisces and whose Soul Potential is in Virgo, is a recovering alcoholic who hadn’t had a drink in ten years. When alcohol was part of his life, he remained in darkness and pain, unable to escape his spiritual agony. Although he had a college degree in music, he was employed as a janitor. A very talented musician, he couldn’t perform in public because he was so withdrawn.
Devastated and suicidal, Jim came to see me after his girlfriend left him for another man. I suggested he see a psychiatrist, but he refused. He wanted nothing to do with therapists and medication. I learned that most of his relationships had turned out the same way this one had: he would wear down his partners with his needful and codependent tendencies, and they would leave. In this latest affair, he had lost himself, having given up all personal boundaries.
We talked about Jim’s Soul Pattern in Pisces, about his being extraordinary sensitive and vulnerable to the energies of those who entered his life. We talked about how fragile and pure of spirit ha had been in his past lives. I told him that his previous personalities had coward from arguments, that he had been repulsed by expressions of anger and hatred. In one life he had lived deep in the woods, far from people and the savagery of his culture. He had been so empathic that he absorbed the energy from others and could not separate himself from them. However, his musical talent was a common theme, an emotional outlet for him in many lives, a means of expression by which he could honor himself. In previous lives he had been a healer, a priest, a nun, and a physician: all lives of self-denial and martyrdom. In this life, instead of living in the woods, he had sealed himself off from having to interact with people by abusing alcohol and working as a janitor at night.
Spiritually Jim remembered the beauty, harmony, and peace of the other side and had not been able to feel secure on the earth without his addictions. He had to learn the lesson of his Soul Potential in Virgo: to value the earthly plane and not to try to escape from it. We talked a lot about the beauty of the earth, and soon he began to feel a little more secure in it. He was amazed when I was able to show how judgmental he had been of the earth and the people on it. As he learned to value the earth, he learned to develop more physical structures of his own life, and to create boundaries by being more discriminating. He worked on other skills relating to having his Soul Potential in Virgo, including prioritizing and organizing his life.
Jim was thrilled to discover that he did have a logical mind. Soon, his emotional paralysis gave way to long-denied emotions. His shyness began to dissipate when he committed himself to helping people without totally losing himself in the process. He decided to return to school and become a music teacher. Teaching music enabled him to use his creative talent as well as be a healer again, this time with more solid personal boundaries and stronger priorities.
Bob, whose Soul Pattern is in Taurus and whose Soul Potential is in Scorpio, worked in a bank for fifteen years-his whole adult life. He came to me when he was 37, unhappy, stuck, and resistant to any form of change. His wife had given him a gift certificate to see me one year before he actually made his appointment. He admitted that he was afraid that I might induce him to change, which was anathema to him.
Bob’s life at the bank, however, was becoming increasingly restrictive and depressing. He came to me as a last resort, and I noticed immediately that he had come from many lives as a personality that valued the earth and all that it represented. Security and safety were old foundations that he believed would protect him. I mentioned that Taurus is the sign of the builder on the earth plane: before Bob chose to study finance in college, he had almost become an architect in this life. I shared with him Taurus’s fear of change, its need for stability. We talked about money as a symbol for that security. He admitted that he derived great comfort from going into the bank’s vault and just looking at the rows of money. He didn’t need to have it; he just liked knowing it was there. Taurus collects things as a form of protection.
Bob began to realize how frightened he was of anything that was transitional. He had even hated the interval between leaving college and finding his job because he loathed uncertainty. He would connect with people, showing a great deal of loyalty to them. He still communicated with a childhood friend, even though he really didn’t like him.
We zeroed in on a past life where he had been a housewife to a farmer in the Midwest. She had loved her uncomplicated pastoral life and had been a wonderful gardener and cook. Her life was good, Bob remembered, because it was predictable, unchangeable, and secure. His Taurean belief was that life had to continue unchanged if he were to be secure and safe. He recalled another past life as a settler whose farm had been burned and destroyed by a tribe of marauding Indians. That memory impressed upon him how quickly security can be destroyed by sudden, momentous change. In this life, familiarity and a need for predictability became his foundations, and the bank served as a symbol of that security. But now the old ways were becoming problematic for him. He was in the throes of a significant conflict.
Bob’s karmic issue around fear of change is very consistent with the energy of Taurus. Taurus needs the earth under its feet, and it values steadfastness and other endurable qualities. Many people with a Soul Pattern in Taurus have had lives as builders, bankers, farmers, potters, and architects. They are comfortable working within the boundaries of the material plane. But sometimes they get caught when the earth turns into mud. Taurus is symbolized by the bull, in its strength and in its stubbornness. It is the farmer who has the patience and the wisdom to know the growing seasons. And it is the banker who is obsessed with the accruing in his vault. Bob’s career was the perfect symbol for his Soul Pattern. He stayed in the bank for years, even when he felt unhappy and stuck.
When I told Bob that he needed to become more Scorpian, to emulate his Soul Potential, he was appalled. His father had been a Scorpio-and was a violent and vengeful man who had done irreparable harm to his family. The last thing Bob ever wanted was to be like his father. However, I helped him understand another side of Scorpio: a gentler, more sensitive, more emotional, transformative side.
This new side of Scorpio made more sense to Bob. His wife had complained for years that he held back his feelings, both emotionally and sexually. Once Bob learned more about his Soul Potential in Scorpio, he soon realized that becoming more Scorpian would be in his best interest. I explained to him that Scorpio stands for having the courage to confront issues and probe one’s emotions. For Bob, that meant forgiving his father.
I describe those with Soul Potential in Scorpio as “the Sherlock Holmeses of the universe,” because they are very interested in probing their own unconscious, to learn more about their emoticons desires, and needs. They also have a propensity for helping others transform and regenerate themselves passionately. Interestingly, Bob followed along this path, seeking not only to uncover layers of himself but to help others do the same. He has been studying psychology for some time now and is close to completing his Ph.D.
Bob’s journey to realizing his Soul Potential took him from a mundane existence to investigating the full range of emotions, both in himself and in others. Scorpio is about what “I want” and what “I need” and is unafraid to pursue its aspirations. From a person who was terrified of change with his Soul Pattern in Taurus, Bob evolved to a person who recognized that change is the only reality, a promising indicator of his Soul Potential in Scorpio.