The Shape of Your Soul
When I was a little boy trying to make sense of my life and wondering how I ended up in a family where I felt so different from everyone else, so at odds with the rest of the family, I remember thinking that somehow, for some reason, my soul must have chosen this life for me.
I had the intuition that life was a kind of school where the soul needed to learn particular lessons in this lifetime. I don’t know where I got this idea. We didn’t have any spiritual or philosophical books in our house. We didn’t even have a bookshelf, just the usual children’s books and some random thrillers and romance novels that my mother had lying around. And yet, there was this peculiar idea that offered the only explanation for how I ended up in this peculiar family.
Later, when I got access to different books (I was a voracious reader and had my mother write me a note so I could check adult books out of the library) I found out that I wasn’t the first one to have the idea that our soul chooses our parents in order to fulfill its destiny. We can find variations on this theme everywhere from Buddhism to the early Greeks.
James Hillman writes about this beautifully in his book The Soul’s Code. In it he offers up what he calls The Acorn Theory. The idea is that when our soul comes into the world it carries with it an image of who we are born to be, just as an acorn carries within it the image of the oak tree it will become — if it manages to survive and thrive. Whether it fulfills that final image or not, every acorn at least carries that potential. The rest is left up to fate.
I like the image of the oak tree in the acorn, and the idea that we, as individuals, are all as unique as each individual oak tree is unique, and that our final form is shaped by the environment we grow up in, the weather patterns, access to sun and rain, and what kind of nurturance we get (and give ourselves).
A different image struck me this morning during my yoga practice, and I was reminded of that old saying that can be used as praise or put-down: “They really broke the mold when they made you.” What if the mold wasn’t broken when we were born? What if it’s only broken when we die? What if the mold was made when we were born — a soul-form — and our job is to craft our life as a work of art by filling it with the right stuff? To fulfill our destiny is to fill full the soul-form we were born into.
Edouard Dantan, A Casting from Life (1887)
Maybe our job is to find the right life experiences — work, relationships, hobbies, music, art, spiritual practice — that fill out the unique form we were born with. As that form gets filled full, it begins to shape our life in a way that either fits or doesn’t fit. Perhaps anxiety is a symptom that the shape our life is taking (the shape we’re making) doesn’t quite fit with the form of our unique soul. To say it another way — we feel uneasy when the shape of our life isn’t true to the shape of our soul. It’s not true to the form.
The word “true” is an old craftsman’s term for bringing “an object, wheel, or other construction into the exact shape, alignment, or position required.” If we were to “live our truth” — as so many self-help books and life coaches tell us we should — then it must be trued (aligned, fitted, formed) in accordance to something else, some original image or form.
What if our job is to craft our life in such a way that it conforms to the shape we were born into? “Living your truth” would then mean continually checking (truing) to see if what we’re doing with our life “fits.” One way to check is to, as Joseph Campbell famously said, “follow your bliss.” That’s one way — to find what feels good, what brings joy and satisfaction. The other way, as mentioned previously, is to pay attention to symptoms like anxiety — what doesn’t feel good, what doesn’t bring joy and satisfaction.
What if discontent is the feeling we have when we’re not filling our soul-form with the right content? Depression could be the feeling that our soul-form is empty. We feel the depressions in the form — sensing the absence of substance, rather than full-filled. A visitation of depression tells us that we haven’t been doing our job of filling the soul-form with life experiences that have substance. Video games don’t have much substance. Most television, movies and books these days don’t have much soul stuff either.
So much light entertainment is like trying to fill the soul-form with air or gas. There’s no weight to it and it doesn’t hold the form once a crack appears. It all just leaks out, leaving us empty and unfulfilled. We often make the mistake of trying to fill that emptiness by buying material goods and filling our houses, garages, attics, basements and storage units with stuff. But this strategy never works because depression isn’t a material, physical ailment — it’s a symptom of spiritual unfulfillment.
As we travel along our path in life we inevitably hit some bumps in the road (and take some hits) that crack the soul we’re trying to craft. Sometimes it all hits us so hard that we fall apart completely. The true soul-crafter doesn’t write it all off and sweep the pieces into the dustbin — she starts putting it back together. When we’re able to find the gold in the trauma, we can put our soul back together in a way that’s better than it was, like the Japanese art of kintsukuroi (“golden repair”.) In that craft, the potter will repair cracks in the vase or bowl with liquid gold, which makes the repaired vessel even stronger and more beautiful.
Finding the gold in the trauma is a matter of seeing how what didn’t kill you made you stronger — it made you more unique, more beautiful, more resilient, and more true to the shape of your unique soul-form. The lonely only child discovers that they are quite happy being alone later in life, with the riches of their imagination to keep them company. The child with absentee parents becomes the adult who knows how to meet their own needs and look after himself. The awkward child who spent so much time alone in their room reading will continue to be fed by a love of books and learning for the rest of their life. And so on.
This image of the soul-form that I’ve been exploring is just one myth. There are many myths which can guide our life. One of the reasons why so many people feel lost in the world and lost in their life is because our culture has destroyed all the old myths that used to give us meaning and direction. Instead we have the myth of consumerism: “You won’t be complete until you have this. Buy more to feel better.”
It’s a shallow and soul-destroying myth to try to live by. We can see the evidence of it’s damage in the pandemic of anxiety (trying to force our soul into a form that doesn’t fit), depression (not fulfilling the soul’s desire, leaving it empty and hollow), addiction (filling it with the wrong substance) and suicide (throwing away the broken pieces of a life half-formed).
Our consumer culture is littered with mass-produced, throwaway objects and it’s been busy churning out copy after copy of the same few soul-forms over the past 75 years or so. It attempts to force unique and diverse individual souls into standardized education systems, health systems, economic systems and systematized jobs (what we GenX writer Douglas Coupland called “McJobs”.) We feel it as the pressure to conform (oppression), exerting its force on us until something breaks — either us or the system — and, thankfully, our systems are finally starting to show some cracks.
Golden Repair, Brian James, 2021
24x24" acrylic and gold ink on canvas
Are we going to fill the cracks with gold or smash the whole thing into dust? I can certainly empathize with those who are intent on doing the latter, but until we have enough individuals who have proven they can craft a soulful life of their own (let alone create a soulful society from the ground up) it might be best to be like the kintsukuroi craftspeople and work on repairing the cracks in the existing system to make it more resilient and more beautiful.
So I think it’s increasingly important that we each take up the task of finding a personal myth to live by that helps us craft a life that is true to the shape of our unique, individual soul. Crafting a soulful life isn’t just personally full-filling, it is an offering to a world that thrives on diversity and beauty. And if we follow this myth of the soul-form to its end, we realize that we have only one chance to craft this one unique and precious life, and get it right by staying true to our soul.
Think of the people you admire who are now gone. When you remember their life and what they made of it, including all of their idiosyncrasies and eccentricities (the cracks that made them uniquely them), you are invoking their spirit. It’s through that inspiration (in-spiriting) that they live on. Isn’t that the ultimate legacy? To leave an artifact of a well-lived and artfully-crafted life, true to a form that will never again be replicated, that will continue to inspire those that come after us for generations? That’s why living a life that is true to your soul isn’t a selfish act, but rather, an offering to the world.
So maybe the question isn’t how to find happiness for myself, or even how to make a better world, but rather, how to craft my life as an offering to the world. Not to be copied, but to inspire others to craft a life of their own that is true to their soul, further contributing to the beauty and diversity of the world soul.
