Writing Down Your Soul: How to Activate and Listen to the Extraordinary Voice Within

“Think of it,” Brian said, “as you are sitting around with all the parts of yourself. One part might be a chairman of the board, another part a small scared child, another part a huge yelling parent. There's a different level of empowerment when one sees that all the parts are integral to the whole.”

Or as Ghandi more simply put it: Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny.

Each question is a bridge between where you are and where you want to be, what you know and what you want to know, who you are and who you want to become. Notice, too, that these questions can be repeated a day, a month, a year later. These are soul probes that penetrate further and further into your core each time you ask them. These are not quest

Writing can't change the story, but it can change how you think about it. It can change how you feel about it. It can change what it means to you. It can expose little nuggets of truth buried in the sand of your story. It can change the spiritual lessons learned and the spiritual risks taken. It can change your relationship with the people involved

inside your story. Trust the process and know that you are on the right path, and you will, in perfect time, touch that golden box. And when you do, you will look back at your soul's journey and say, “This is very, very good.”

The unconscious mind, it's important to know, has no awareness of past or future. For the unconscious there is only now. For the unconscious mind, the pain didn't happen last week or last year or last decade—it's happening right now. For the unconscious mind, a scary thing isn't happening in the future;the fear and worry about it is happening right

Rainer Maria Rilke said this most eloquently in Letters to a Young Poet, which he wrote in 1929 to encourage a nineteen-year old writer: I would like to beg you, dear sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very fo

How can I create a life on the outside that looks like the me on the inside? In what ways am I blocking that congruent life from coming into being? What needs to happen for my outside to start matching my inside?

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn't make any sense.

Your critic might put on a creepy “Eyes” mask. This mask appears as fear that someone will read your journals, or worse, learn all your secrets after you keel over. If you fall for this one, you'll never really pour your soul onto the page. For starters, tell your critic to cool it with the fear factor. If it'll make you feel better, make a securit