Anyone who attends our weekly online tea Cosy (which you are all welcome to join anytime) or our practitioner Communitea knows how I love musing about things. Some may say I have far too much time on my hands! I love thinking about life, in particular how to be a good human in a world where we seem to have elevated ourselves above all other species, landing in a place where we not only seem to be doing more harm than good, but also feel the painful discordance deeply in our bones.
So this week I have been reflecting on the balance between acknowledging our insignificance as a tiny speck in the world, while also trying to find our true significance so as to make sense of our lives. My teacher Paul (www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk) often refers to a book by Daniel Quinn. It invites us to look back on our lives and recognise the times when our soul was calling to be heard.
We all know there is something out there for us, a role, a skill, something that would tap into what we are passionate about or joyfully good at. Back when we lived in a tribe, the job of the Elders would have been to see it in us and gently nudge us towards it.
Now we have so many other demands on our time, responsibilities that force us to make sacrifices and values and definitions of success that make us ignore our innate instincts. We can no longer hear how our intuition is trying to guide us above all the noise. So today, I wanted to share one of my ‘soul calling’ moments with you, one that stood out when I reflected back on my life.
As a 24 year old seeker, I was living in Australia and found myself at the beach in a place called Noosa heads. It was late at night and fairly dark, save a brilliant full moon that lit the ocean below it. I was sitting at the top of the beach with a friend and a torch and like a strange horror movie, hundreds of tiny creatures, spider-like, were scuttling towards the shore. It turns out this was the annual hatching of the turtles, who having only seconds ago been born, had already engaged their ancient innate guidance system to seek out the ocean by following the lowest point of light, which happened to be the moon’s reflection on the water surface. Magic.
In that singular moment, my life changed forever. Watching those incredibly brave baby turtles driven on by their intuition to be what they were born to be, I had a rare insight into that liminal space where both my individual place in the web of life and my absolute insignificance in the vastness of the universe came together. And then just like that, the moment was gone and I’ve been searching for that sense of wholeness ever since.
But in regards to the 'soul calling' part, what it did do was make me question what it means to be truly human, before all the layers of conditioning and damage and industrialisation and taming changed us. How do we strive to discover our potential and how do we choose to live more harmoniously in a world full of other beings?
Seeing how out of balance we have become inevitably led me into the world of healing and natural health and eventually into the magnificent sentient relationship I have with tea.
There is something intriguing about reflecting on your journey, joining up the dots to the here and now. We can find a new level of trust in a process that has existed long before us and will continue long after us, the unearthing of the human blueprint lying at the heart of us all. I look forward to hearing your revelations, so please do share!