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The
Soul of Simplicity
by Janet Luhrs |
A Buddhist nun asked my meditation group to describe
our souls. We sat looking at her, a sea of blank faces
struggling with the concept. Then she asked us to
imagine that we, as human beings, were laid out in parts—the
arms, legs, toes, noses, and so on. Was that
"us," she asked? We could easily describe and
see a leg, an arm, skin, teeth. So, was that a human
being? Was that what made me different from you? Well,
on one level, yes. My eyes and my legs are different
from yours. But what about the bad jokes I tell? Where
do those come from? What about the twinkle in your eye?
What is that all about?
We squirmed. What is that all about? Where does it
come from? What is this soul, anyway? It’s so much
easier to live in the concrete world where we can
categorize, label, describe, and be certain. But we all
know the soul is there. If we took the soul out, we’d
be lifeless… no twinkles, no tears, no bad jokes,…
just legs, arms, and noses, covered with a new outfit,
maybe a briefcase in hand, maybe beautiful hair, maybe
fingers on the wheel of a red sports car. But no
twinkles.
Once I had a partner complain to me that I never
danced with him. He didn’t mean literally dance—he
meant stop and listen to his soul. It was a plead to go
deeper, past his skin and into his essence, past talking
about what he did for a living, what he thought about
the latest events in the news, past all that, and into
the music of his heart.
Music of the heart is Simple Loving—connecting two
people at the mysterious level underneath the outfit,
briefcase, car, legs, and hair. Connecting at the poetry—the
drama and magnificence—of each of us. It is not about
the dulling of our existence or leading lives of quiet
desperation, as Henry David Thoreau put it. If the soul
is nourished, it takes us beyond the torpid ache that
continually whispers, "There must be more than
this." It reaches for the absolute height of our
splendor, yet also allows for the depths of our despair.
It is not shallow. It is both the mystery and the
madness.
Simple Loving calls us to unearth the soul that we
have masked with our outward lives. We’ve covered our
souls with jobs, new cars, more clothes, tools, gadgets,
and toys. Many of us have become so adept at masking
that we’re hardly aware of our souls being in there:
in a blur we go to college, get a job, earn money, rise
up the corporate ladder, get married, buy a house, raise
families, watch TV. Day after day we’re out of the
house at seven-thirty, going to a meeting at three,
convening for drinks at five, skiing on Saturday, fixing
the car on Tuesday, meeting the deadline at the end of
the week, taking the kids to soccer after school,
reveling in the promotion, shopping to allay our tears,
eating to feel nourished. Who’s in there? No time to
think about it. As James Hillman, author of "The
Soul’s Code," says, "We’re living in the
shallows of meaninglessness. We are not put here on earth to simply do the daily rounds."
Indeed, the more we’ve got going on the outside,
the more successful and important we seem. Being soulful
doesn’t mean turning away from worldly pleasures and
successes, rather, it means balancing those things with
our inner selves and not defining who we are and where
we stand in the universe by those outward
manifestations. On the outside, those things make us
look as though we’re fulfilled. On the inside, it can
be another story.
Often we remain on the surface because it’s safer
and easier than revealing our depth. Sooner of later we
notice that we are lonely, because those whom we most
want to be intimate with—our partners—have only our
top layer to love or even exist with. How many people
have we all met (including ourselves) who tell us how
alone they feel in their marriages? They connect with
their partners over the kids, the chores, perhaps the
vacations and the plans, but not with their souls.
You can tell when people connect with each other’s
souls, rather than merely on the outside. The soul
connections say things like "She touches my
heart" before they mention what she does for a
living. The soul connections place more emphasis on
sharing similar values, rather than sharing similar
activities. Someone who shares your soul is more
concerned with your well-being than with what outfit
your are wearing tonight. The soul connections live
fully in the world, as much as anybody, but they’ve
added another dimension, and that is the core of who we
are as human beings.
Simple Loving is all about that unexplainable whistle—the
connection that is soul to soul, rather than career to
career or ego to ego. James Hillman likens our soul to
an acorn: we are all born with our destiny written into
the acorn. "It’s already there," he says,
"[but] we dull our lives by the way we conceive
them. We have stopped imagining them with any sort of
romance, any fictional flair."
We could say we are leading pseudo lives—plenty on
the surface, but not much underneath. The Wall Street
Journal carried an article that described this style of
living. "Achieving balance isn’t easy. By the
time most people acquire a casual chic wardrobe, a
vacation home with rustic country décor, get married,
have children, get them into private schools, buy a
utility vehicle, work out, master the Internet, and
climb a mountain, they are exhausted. That may be why
the antidepressant Prozac is also quite hip."
There we are. Busy covering all the surface bases of
our lives, with no time left over to nourish the spirit.
Perhaps Prozac is "hip" because we can only
deny our souls for so long. Something has to give.
Thomas Moore, author of "Care of the Soul,"
says:
The emotional complaints of our time, complaints we
therapists hear every day in our practice, include:
emptiness
meaninglessness
vague depression
disillusionment about marriage, family, and relationships
a loss of values
yearning for personal fulfillment
a hunger for spirituality
All of these symptoms reflect a loss of soul and let
us know what the soul craves. We yearn excessively for
entertainment, power, intimacy, sexual fulfillment, and
material things, and we think we can find these things
if we discover the right relationship or job, the right
church or therapy. But without soul, whatever we find
will be unsatisfying for what we truly long for is the
soul in each of these areas.
We may deny our soul in the way we conduct our
individual lives, and perhaps also in the way we relate
to each other. Most of us forget that at some level all
of our intimate pairings are soul mates—drawn to each
other to fulfill some destiny or other of the soul, and
not simply to go to the movies together. Relating at a
soul level allows for the full range of our imperfect
humanness—which, underneath it all, is what we all
crave so much. "I just want to be understood and be
allowed to be myself," we all say. "Why can’t
I be loved for being me? Why do I always feel that who I
am is not enough?
Loving the full range of our humanness is not living
a life swept under the carpet. Stephen Levine says,
"If we can’t share our suffering and can’t swim
in the reservoir of each other’s grief, we have a
shallow relationship. Most people withdraw when a
partner’s grief comes out. That’s the time to grow,
not leave."
Tricia Clark-McDowell said of her marriage: "We’ve
come to accept all of our moods, including melancholy,
which is a very delicious, bittersweet sadness. It’s
not depression. We honor it in each other—we know we’re
in this together, and so we accept each other’s ups
and downs. Usually people who are depressed go into an
escapist mode, by eating ice cream, or watching a video.
If it’s their partner who is depressed, they’ll
think, ‘if so and so is in a funky mood, I’m out of
there.’ I used to do that, too."
Simple loving, soul loving, is really no more than
loving first ourselves and then each other at the core.
We may still have our briefcases and cars, but we can’t
stop there.
Our core selves are so much more than our outer
personas and worldly labels… accountant, college
graduate, chef, homemaker, or farmer. We are more than
the books we have read or not read, the sports we play,
the exotic destinations we have visited, the facts and
figures we can rattle of at parties. We initially
connect at those levels. But Simple Loving does not stop
there. After all, what are all the boats, degrees, club
memberships, and clothes if we are not cherished at our
depth?
Loving simply takes time, and loving simply gives
time. The couples who live and love simply have given
more priority to their compassionate, open, cooperative,
loving souls, than to their outer, commercial layers of
success, "We’re not poor," they often say.
"We just measure wealth and happiness in a
different way—by our level of intimacy, our personal
and family growth, and by the fact that we live in
harmony,"
Loving simply nourishes our souls—after all, our
souls aren’t so concerned with wearing the right
watch, driving the right car, going to the right places.
That nourishment comes instead from connection,
intimacy, and authenticity. When the desire for intimacy
and authenticity is stronger than the desire for worldly
applause, many changes occur within a relationship: we
toss out the focus on power and status, we stop the
competition with each other. And when we feel so secure
within ourselves that we have no need to control and
dominate others, we open ourselves to loving
cooperation.
A woman quoted in Duane Elgin’s book,
"Voluntary Simplicity," said it well:
"Voluntary simplicity is an individual thing… It
has to be something that springs from the heart because
it was always there, not something you can be talked
into by persuasive people, or something we do because we
want to be different, or because we’re rebellious to
convention, but because our souls find a need for
it."
Copyright © 2001 Janet Luhrs. All Rights
Reserved.
Janet Luhrs
is the author of the best-selling book, The Simple Living Guide, Simple Loving, and publishes
"The Simple Living Journal." Her quarterly newsletter, which has been called "the nation's premier newsletter on voluntary simplicity" (Boston Globe), as well as her own personal simplifying journey have been features in U.S. News & World Report, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and on Donahue. A regular guest on NPR, she lives with her two children in Seattle, Washington.
The Simple Living
Journal is available by subscription ($18 a year) at www.simpleliving.com
or by calling (206) 464-4800.
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