Embracing Soul Care: 6 Ways To Love Your Soul
Soul care is listening to the deep needs of your unique soul.
So often, our deepest needs are left unmet.
Soulfulness is my area of passion and expertise, as I’ve been coaching the soul for over 10 years.
Caring for the soul is the only way to know what your innermost self needs. Here are six transformative ways to practice soul care.
Introduction to soul care
The soul is the place of truth within you.
And it holds the roadmap for your life.
Soul care is listening to what the soul needs.
Otherwise, you become restless, dissatisfied, and you’ll feel as though you’re not living fully.
And even worse, you may be in a job or situation that feels soul crushing to you… and you need some resuscitation asap!
Whether you believe in God, Source, Universe, Buddha, nature, science, etc. your soul does not exist in a vacuum. What does this look like for you?
Here are six ways to care for your soul, and be a whole person… with many sides to you.
1. Self-knowledge
Soul care encourages you to know your true self.
The good, bad, and ugly.
The soul has many sides.
The soul doesn’t need you to be successful at any particular thing, it just needs you to do it your way.
As you grow in self-knowledge, you’re being soulful because you’re deepening your relationship with yourself.
Soul searching is an important part of soul care because you take the time to know your soul better.
Soul Care: Look closely at how you will use your life in different areas.
Four ways you can know yourself better…
Ask: How will you use your life?
You grow in self-knowledge as you understand how you will use your life.
We tend to ask this question very loudly after we turn 40.
A lot of people like to talk about… what is their purpose.
Yet, this question can have a negative effect because people get hyper-focused on some grand, drum roll please, way they are supposed to serve mankind.
It’s too much pressure.
So instead, ask:
How will I use my life?
How do I want to share my gifts in the world?
What do I love? What comes naturally?
These are questions that can shed light on how you can use your life.
It’s important to stay connected to your soul through this process.
Here are a number of other ways to define the soul.
Examples of how you’ll use your life
Maybe you have a purpose in your work life, in your career, and you may have a very specific purpose in your home life.
At work, we may do something that has a ripple effect that will affect dozens, hundreds, or millions of people.
Or, you may do something that appears small in the eyes of the world, but it’s actually a big deal in the eyes of the universe.
At home, what you give can be raising children, teaching teenagers something, or impacting a specific child, in a specific way.
In my work as a life coach and soul coach, I’ve seen “purposes” ranging from impacting one person to many people.
You never know the magical residual effect of something you do in the world.
What you need to learn
You grow in self-knowledge as you understand what you need to learn.
Human beings are creatures of habit and we unconsciously keep repeating the same mistakes until we learn from them.
So, the same problems keep presenting themselves until we approach them differently.
For example, in relationships, we might keep attracting the same kinds of people who will hurt us until we learn what we need to learn.
Once we’ve fully digested the lesson, whether consciously or not, we will attract better relationships.
Soul care in this example would be learning to love yourself enough to choose people who will not hurt you.
It’s a process!
Eventually, we learn from our mistakes, hopefully sooner than later.
Knowing what you need for fulfillment
You deepen self-knowledge when you know what fills you up.
What do you need?
What you need… are the deal breaker things: If you don’t have it in your life, life will feel under-lived, and unfulfilled.
For example, if you NEED creative expression, and you don’t have a creative outlet for genuine, satisfying expression in this way, you will feel restless and unfulfilled, if not worse.
People who do not do the very thing their soul is designed to do, are slowly starving the soul.
What you need in love relationships
Knowing what you need in love relationships helps you know yourself better.
Relationship expert, Barbara De Angelis explains in Are You The One For Me: Knowing Who’s Right and Avoiding Who’s Wrong, that we often seek out emotional situations in relationships that are similar to those we experienced in childhood, regardless of whether those situations were positive or negative.
She says that we keep “going home” until we heal that old pattern of behavior.
It seems almost cruel that we can be born into painful situations, and then we have to figure out how to get ourselves out of that cycle!
However, the universe wants us to learn through experience in these situations, so the past is an opportunity to heal.
Just as knowledge in the world is power, self-knowledge is power for the soul.
2. Self honesty
Soul care includes us being honest with ourselves, rather than critical.
As we look at our mistakes with self-compassion, with the desire to learn from them, we’re tending to the soul.
As we grow in self-love, self-honesty doesn’t sting so much!
Soul Care: Which parts of you are you cutting off? Meaning, you hide it, don’t acknowledge it, or run away from it. The work is growing in self-love by accepting all of our sides.
Shadow qualities
Our shadow is the part of ourselves that we avoid, but it’s right there following us around.
Shadow is the thing you don’t accept in yourself like your anger, insecurity, fear, etc.
Our shadow qualities are an important part of soul care because we learn from them.
For example, as we learn from our fear and anger in life, we are taking care of the soul’s deep need to express fear and anger.
A great soul care question to ask yourself is: What situations have I tolerated?
There’s the old saying: We get what we allow… and sadly, it’s true.
3. No more self rejection
Part of soul care is growing self-esteem and not rejecting any part of yourself.
This is wholeness.
Be a whole person with strong and weak, fantastic and flawed:)
Can you imagine?
It’s not easy!
However, as we grow confidence, self-love, and self-worth, we reject ourselves less.
Nathaniel Brandon, author of Honoring The Self: Self-Esteem and Personal Transformation found that people who don’t make progress with their problems, and they don’t seem to solve them, at the heart of it, they’re self-rejecting.
It’s important for soul care, that as we look at ourselves honestly in life, we don’t reject ourselves.
Instead, we can treat ourselves with kindness and self compassion.
Very importantly, self-forgiveness is an important part of soul care, so that you can move on from things in your past that you regret or are ashamed of.
Soul Care: In what areas of your life could you have more self-compassion, peace and self-forgiveness?
4. Authentic Self-expression
The universe gave you a special blend of qualities, gifts and experiences to make the world better.
To evolve the planet.
So, if you’re here to make people laugh… do that, in some way.
If you’re here to inspire others, go for it. In whatever way resonates with your soul.
If you’re here to lead 5 people, dozens, hundreds, or thousands, then until you do that, your soul will feel unexpressed.
Every email to my business email list for the past 5 years ends with: To your full expression…
You cannot ignore what’s within you.
But here’s a gentle head’s up…
The thing you’re meant to do may be the hardest, or not…
Sometimes, the thing we’re called towards comes with challenges.
Why?
So you’ll know the territory… So you’ll know how that particular road is paved.
If you’re meant to lead, that may come naturally, but you’ll fear losing approval.
If you’re meant to help people heal, at first, you may struggle with your own demons.
With calling comes hurdles
With the soul’s calling… comes hurdles to jump over.
Whether it’s a difficult childhood, physical constraints, or emotional challenges.
For myself… where do I begin?
Feeling called toward honest self-expression... I’ve often hidden myself.
I was ashamed of my early home life.
Feeling a desire to lead… I’ve often sat in the background or I’ve pushed myself too much into the center.
Keep in mind that the early steps in your life prepare you for things you’ll do later on.
For example, early in my career I sold computers for IBM. This was an important step in my soul’s evolution, because it prepared me very well for running my own company.
Soul care: Reflect on what you feel called to do and what the challenge has been.
Creative expression
In my 30’s, my creative side was put on the back burner, understandably.
So, I wrote in a journal…
I did crafts, and that certainly helped.
But for me, it wasn’t enough. What kind of soul care would have fed my deep desire for creative expression?
Maybe, writing that emanated from the soul, from a deeper place.
Possibly, poetry or short stories.
And writing more often.
OR… my soul care could have included acknowledging that I needed to dive into raising my sons, and honoring my poetry and book ideas in a place where they’d be safely kept until I was ready.
Honoring when you’re ready for more expression is part of soul care too.
It’s not that soul care should take a back seat while you’re raising children. However, It’s hard to find time… and you don’t want to stress yourself out.
So, maybe the compromise is to carve out time… even a little time each week.
Emotional expression
The emotional part of soul care is expressing how you feel.
Being able to say it or show it…. some how.
This takes time for most of us.
Healing our painful emotions is part of our purpose.
Here are over 30 emotional release methods to help you feel emotions in a way that feels safe and ultimately, let them go.
The saying is: We feel it to heal it.
Expressing how you feel is an essential part of soul care, because that’s how we heal the past.
Soul Care: What feelings are you bottling up or avoiding? Find opportunities to express them. This will take in miles in your soul care AND it takes self-love and patience with the process.
5. Taking care of yourself
Self-care is an important part of soul care.
We have many hats to wear and we need to balance this in our lives.
But, it’s much bigger than that.
When we ignore parts of ourselves, the soul gets very unhappy and symptoms show up in our lives.
When we’re able to care for ourselves and give ourselves what we need, we have more to give.
Self-care on a regular basis goes hand in hand with soul care.
Soul Care: Look at ways you can take better care of yourself throughout the day.
6. Belief in something bigger
You don’t need religion to believe in something bigger.
Belief in something bigger is having some context in which you live.
Even if something bigger is the big bang theory… it’s not just you alone on the planet.
NASA’s big bang theory short answer: “It is the idea that the universe began as just a single point, then expanded and stretched to grow as large as it is right now—and it is still stretching!”
Your soul doesn’t live in a vacuum… so what is your belief about where your soul comes from?
Whether you believe in a God or not, your soul is connected to something.
Soul Care: Cultivate beliefs that support your soul’s individual path and connects you to a larger, expansive, benevolent universe.
Your beliefs are personal
Whether you believe your soul emerged from science or spirituality, how did it arrive on the scene?
What you call it is between you and your soul.
And part of soul care is a belief system that does not degrade or discount any human being based on ethnicity, skin color, belief system, or sexual orientation.
Your soul is called to the highest good and greatest healing of mankind.
Religious, spiritual, atheist or agnostic… the soul is the soul.
An agnostic is described as, “A person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God.”
While an atheist is, “a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of God or gods.”
Final thoughts
Regardless of your spiritual or religious beliefs, whether you put your faith in God, Source, Universe, Buddha, Nature, Science, etc, you have a soul that needs your attention.
In my work as a soul coach, I’ve outlined soul care to help people express themselves, accept themselves, and fulfill the needs of their individual soul.
Soul work gives people a road map for self-love that’s comes from loving one’s own soul.
In addition, a phenomenal book I highly recommend is Care of the Soul: A Guide For Cultivating Depth And Sacredness In Everyday Life by Thomas Moore.
This book beautifully explores the many facets of the soul and how to tend to the soul.
