Soul Gifts

Tangled Web

What is a soul gift?

Soul gifts hide in the tangled web of life. My soul gift took the form of prayer. I prayed for help. I prayed for guidance. I prayed to get through exams and mountains of homework. I prayed to be a good person, to become a better one. These were my prayers in my teen years.

Know the Path

I prayed in my later years as an adult, too. I prayed for help to know who I was to be or what I was supposed to make of myself, for my path. I prayed to understand myself. I prayed for help with the problems I found there. I prayed to be a better person, the person I was always meant to be.

 

For awhile I prayed less often, little snatches here and there in between nursing babies and the myriad other tasks in life. I spent more time making a living. One day I got to the point where I needed some help with my work. I needed help with a client that was too difficult for me to handle alone. I needed help with the emotions this client stirred up. I thought I’d pray about it, but it was time for my therapy session, so I talked with my therapist about it. The feelings got easier.

Hovering Threat of Death

Somewhere in my forties, my soul came calling very loudly. I began to pray again. One parent had died. Another was ill. Another family member needed help too. The hovering threat of death brought prayer back into my life. I prayed, but often my prayers went walking into doctors’ offices and into support phone calls. Prayers with shoes. Prayers with an ear and a heart and a voice.

Then death drew really close. My husband had a bad health scare, my life partner almost swept away. That was too much.

Five years later, it was my turn to be swept up in a maelstrom staring death directly in the face. It was time to start praying more deeply, to start meditating. I had meditated before, but not with the regularity I needed now. Meditating was like prayer on steroids! It aided my healing. It helped me change my path in life.

 

Meditation

It came to be that meditation became a way of life for me. It felt like another soul gift, and it was. Meditation helped me write. It put me more deeply in touch with my soul. It helped give my soul a voice. Meditation had a way of shaping who I am. I began to see what my life was all about, where my path was leading.

Meditation put me in touch with parts of my higher self that I had not previously known existed.

Meditation helped me find compassion on a level I had not yet experienced. Meditation was a source, for me, of joy and peace. Meditation enlarged my outlook on life. It helped me remember who I was.

Meditation opened up the energy pathways in my body.

Morning Hours

And then one day the fire that burned within my soul shifted. As long as I was working as a psychotherapist, I was helping one or two people at a time, or perhaps a family. It was time to address another audience. I had been photographing for about fifteen years. I went to Africa. Encountering elephants opened up another gift: I wanted to help save them from extinction. Elephants are a remarkable species. Their social structure, their multiple modes of communication, and their capacity to be empathetic to human beings who have empathy for them make them of great value and worthy of study. Their numbers have been dwindling profoundly.

How is wanting to help save a species a soul gift?

Well, I’ll tell you. Soul gifts are meant to expand us, to help us reach greater heights, to overcome unbelievable depths of scorn, of hatred, of impatience, of apathy. There are problems so great that it seems nothing can overcome them. We work with ourselves for years only to reach a ceiling that we cannot break through. Then we are given a soul gift, something that allows us to break through the ceiling.

 

Soul gifts help us move beyond ourselves, beyond our own miseries if you will. They move us in directions we did not think we could go. They put the power, the know how, the love where we need it in our lives, so that the means opens up to accomplish our ends. Soul gifts help us stretch ourselves.

My dad had a soul gift. It was building. He could build anything from scratch. He built the two houses we lived in while I was growing up. He built two others too. But the important thing is what building did for him. He was quite depressed in my early childhood following the loss of my mother whom he loved dearly. Then one day he decided it was time to build a new house, which he then did. He created something beautiful, something enduring.

My father did something remarkable: he overcame a serious depression using his soul gift of building.

 

The View

My father had another gift, a soul gift. It was living past the horrible, the horrific. In childhood he learned to live past the dust storms of the dust bowl. He learned to live past the poverty of his youth. He grew up living in a dugout. By the time he was in his forties, he had built himself a home with a view atop a hill in a forested area. A magnificent home at that! The death of my mother nearly killed him in his thirties. Going back to school in his forties revitalized him.

Native Chief

Learning was another one of my dad’s soul gifts. He was never without a book or two or three that he was in the midst of reading. He was eager to learn about a lot of things, some relating to others and some relating to himself. He read psychology books by the handfuls, but he also read about the Native Americans. He read about the environment. He read about peace. My father was hungry for knowledge and ideas.

My father used his words to help people. He used ideas to shift his thinking in more positive directions. He used knowledge to challenge the thinking of others and himself. He was in constant search of ways to overcome his past: his poverty from the dust bowl days, his depression from him years of mourning, his war years.

The war had taken a toll on my father. Part of the Army Corp of Engineers, he and his comrades were strafed as they built bridges across the Rhine, all the way to Marseilles. Once there, a man, a German tried to kill him. A buddy rescued him from the jaws of death. That moment traumatized him, and he had scarcely a sober moment from then until he and his platoon made their way through the forests back to headquarters. It left him with PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder.

He fought the alcohol and the PTSD for much of the rest of his life. What helped him most was getting cancer. He read up a storm about how to get rid of his lymphoma. He tried allopathic and complementary alternative approaches. No alcohol allowed! No time to relive past traumas when his life was currently endangered! He learned how to set his intentions, how to corral himself, how to let go of negativity. It saved his life. He lived nearly another 17 years  and died of something else at 86.

His soul gifts were exceptionally well fitted to the trials and tribulations of his life.

Listening to the Heart

What are the things you most value about yourself?

Are they soul gifts?

Which ones are soul gifts?

Did they appear all at once or over time?

How have they changed your life?