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The Soul Perspectives From Two Yoga Teacher Trainings
In yoga teachers trainings the topic of the soul comes up; here are to yoga teacher perspectives of what the soul is:
Perspective One
There are 7 core emotions – anger, fear, joy, excitement, disgust, sexual excitement, and sadness. These core emotions happen unconsciously and because of this, it is easy to block and avoid our emotions.
Being A Counselor
From my experience, as a counsellor, most people are not aware of what emotions they are feeling. They are unable to tell me what sadness physically feels like to them, for example.
If they do recognize and can identify the emotion they are feeling, they spend a great deal of time either avoiding their emotions or blocking them all together.
Blocking
For some, avoiding and blocking joy and excitement is also true. Avoiding and blocking our emotions is painful – it is a feeling of discomfort. Actually allowing ourselves to feel our emotions can also be painful, but our authentic self lies on the other side of processing our feelings. Our authentic self is a place where we feel calm, clear, confident, and curious, to name a few.
For me, my soul is the result of the whole process described above – my authentic self. When I am calm, clear, and confident, I feel alive. I feel free. I cannot see my emotions, but I can feel them physically and if I know the physical feeling of each emotion, I can tune in and allow myself to process the emotion.
Anxiety
My soul becomes hidden when I am avoiding and blocking my emotions. Inhibitory emotions such as anxiety and guilt, actually block emotions whereas worrying, judging, and being sarcastic are ways to avoid feeling emotions.
There are many ways to avoid our emotions. While I am stuck either avoiding and/or blocking my emotions, my soul is hidden from me and I cannot feel its presence. It is not until I stop avoiding and blocking that I am able to tune into myself and physically determine what it is I am feeling and as I process my emotions I get closer to my soul, which for me is my authentic self.
Growth
I allow for change to occur in my life – I embrace change. It is through change that growth occurs, and in order for me to grow, there must be some level of discomfort.
This discomfort is coming from the processing of my emotions, allowing myself to physically feel my emotions, which, based on my experiences and perceptions, are constantly changing. Because of this, my soul is constantly changing because as I process new fears, new angers, new joys, my authentic self changes.
I become more confident in areas where confidence lacked before for me. I become more calm and clear and courageous in other areas of my life in which those may have not existed.
Water
Let me end with an example I often use with my clients. Can you swim? If the answer is yes, then think back to the first time you went into water.
Water went up your nose, you swallowed water, at times you believed you were going to drown, and the emotion you were feeling was what? FEAR. Were you scared of drowning or never being able to learn how to swim.
For those that kept trying to learn how to swim, they allowed themselves to feel their fear. They processed their fear, and they learned how to swim. Once they learned how to swim, they were calm and clear and confident and courageous when in and around water.
Fear
For those individuals that never learned to process their fear around water – today, they avoid or block their fear, they live in pain every time they are around water and they spend their lives avoiding and blocking their emotions by feeling anxious or worrying or preoccupying themselves. These people can never experience their authentic selves around water.
Their soul remains hidden from them in this case and growth will not occur in this area of their lives until they learn to process their fear and learn how to swim. Once they learn to swim, around water they feel free and alive – they have changed; therefore their soul has changed.
The Soul Perspectives From Two Yoga Teacher Trainings: Perspective 1
The soul has been described as indescribable. To speak of the soul is like the illusion of knowing. In pondering the definition of the soul, I consider if the “spirit” is the same notion. Is the soul the source of shared consciousness?
Do we each have our own soul or do we share it in spirit? Perhaps each of us have our own soul, in which we are able to deeply relate to other people and beings through recognizing each other’s soul.
Loving
In considering what the soul is, I believe we each have a purely loving soul, although most of us have been contaminated, corrupted and/or hurt, leading to unloving actions and/or words.
Perhaps as the notion of soul is thought to be undefinable, by looking to define or describe it, we may touch upon truths of the soul that may not be possible to
be confirmed within the human state. So, theoretically speaking, I believe within each of us is a source of pure love and light and perhaps this is the soul.
Music
“Soulful music” is a popular term, and when I think of soulful music, it is music with emotion that makes you feel various emotions. Perhaps our soul is what leads us to
feeling certain ways, and our brains take these emotions even further by the way we often identify with our emotions. It’s like our soul recognizes different energy and our minds help us to feel these through various chemicals in our brains.
Often our emotions feel like reality, but our experience of reality are filtered through the perspectives in our brains. Maybe our soul is the truth of how we feel and our brains are simply trying to keep up.
Mind and Body
We often hear yoga described as a “mind, body, soul connection,” and I love this acknowledgement that our soul is not one in the same as our mind. It reminds me of the way I may want something but I am reminded that I don’t need it, as if my mind holds these desires but my soul knows deeply about what I do and don’t need.
Perhaps our soul speaks to us through our intuition. I see differences in the way some people may act impulsively and some people may act intuitively (perhaps many people act in both ways), and often I see the unfulfillment in impulsive actions as compared to the fulfillment of those who act intuitively.
Perhaps by practicing yoga and developing our “mind, body, soul connection,” we may find more guidance from our intuition.
Peaceful
To consider the soul, I look at my true intentions and I see a difference between these intentions compared to my desires in life. I imagine my soul to be happy with peacefulness and non-attachment. Then, when I think of my desires, there is a sense of superficiality.
Perhaps when my desires turn simply into intentions of love, my soul maybe satisfied. Perhaps each of our souls are satisfied, only distracted by our bodies and minds. Perhaps when our distractions are relieved, we may meet our souls; our true selves.