How do we care for our souls? Where do we find nourishment for our innermost being? If we have belief in a religious faith we tend to look to the time-honored sanctuaries of the soul--church, synagogue, temple, mosque, perhaps the sacred grove. Other seekers try to nourish the soul with meditation and ritual, by talking to angels or walking with power animals. And yes, these certainly can nourish the soul, and nourish it well. But I also feel that in our hunt for spiritual meaning, we can lose track of simpler ways of soul nourishment and self-care. Sometimes we can touch the soul just as deeply with a carefully prepared meal as we can with an intense sweat lodge. A genuine conversation with a neighbor can be as nourishing as an hour of prayer or meditation. I suppose I'm talking about soul nourishment as a daily practice. It shouldn't be a chore, yet one more thing to squeeze into an already overcrowded day; but a pleasure, a break, a moment aside. It's about loving yourself--even the bits you don't like. It's about being kind to yourself. It's about accepting that life is not all angels and transcendent experiences, but also about disappointment and routine--but that our souls can find treasure here too. It's about looking out for our bodies; it's about being kind to our feelings. It's a kind of coffee break for the soul.

I can almost hear a collective cynical intake of breath and a rather ambivalent "hmmm". I know what you mean: finding the soul through the humdrum, particularly in the body, sounds a contradiction in terms. Surely our souls are as far removed from our earthy, mundane, physical bodies as the sun from the earth? Not so. One of our greatest mistakes is to shun the body and seek the soul only in other, more "elevated" places. After all, who out of us truly knows where the soul lies, where it makes its home? We tend to think of our souls as residing somewhere in or above our heads, glittering in our auras or floating gracefully at a discrete, rather coy, distance from our fleshly being. But other cultures claim the soul lies in the heart, that steadily pulsing great muscle deep in our chests. Others believe it hides in the liver, the great detoxifier; or in the stomach, the great processor; or in the lungs, the great inspirers; or in any number of corporeal places: the spleen, the gall-bladder, the solar plexus. Who is right? Maybe they all are. To my mind, we can do far worse in our soul nourishment than to look within, to discover the wonder of the body.

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© Copyright Jane Alexander. This article was originally
published at our website, SoulfulLiving.com, in April 2001, as part of Soulful Living's "Soul Nourishment" Issue.

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