Brave Enough To Be Bliss

Chapter 11 — A Soul Connection

“You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” C.S. Lewis

One of the most impactful things Ginger helped me do was connect with my soul. When I couldn’t make progress and got painfully honest and down to the core of what was holding me back, I truly felt like there must be something inherently wrong with me. That deep down, there was something so terribly wrong with me that it is why I had been hurt the way I was, why I had been treated the way I was growing up, and why I was ultimately so unlovable. I still can vividly remember the day when she asked me how I would describe a person’s soul . I described it as the part of a person that is deep within that most of us don’t access it often. The part of us we are born with that is pure and good and is where love and light and joy originate. She followed that answer asking if I thought some babies were born with bad souls. I had to say no because I really don’t believe that there are bad souls. I think people just get hurt and their minds and maybe even hearts get messed up and hardened by the world, but that the core of their existence, their soul is still there as it was. T hey just can’t connect with it through all the pain and evil other people and the world has created. And that was an epiphany moment for me that changed everything. If I really believed what I had just said, which I did wholeheartedly, then that meant there was not anything inherently wrong with me that caused me to be hurt. And that is when I could begin to see myself in a different light and with real compassion because I truly did believe my soul was good. My soul became the part of me I could then build from. I may have hated everything else, but I did not hate my soul. So, I started there and began to be able to see myself through the lens of my soul, the lens of compassion. The Bible or other religious texts can be quoted or taken out of context in a way that not only offends hurt people but hurts them further. When people grow up in a loving environment, heal their wounds, have self-love and feel loved by someone else, believe in a Higher Power and feel love from that Higher Power… religious passages can all make sense and seem so reasonable. But when a person is abused, hurt, or abandoned early in life, hasn’t healed, hasn’t been introduced to or relate to a loving Higher Power, oftentimes none of this makes any sense at all. And when people of faith try to shove it down their throats, as abusers have sometimes literally or figurately done with their bodies, objects, thoughts, or words, even the most well intended behavior can have the opposite effect. As a leader, and more recently through realizations along my own healing journey, I’ve come to believe that the “ best of intentions ” is only that, an intention. But an intention is meaningless and completely ineffective when the approach does not meet the receiver where that person is in life versus where the person trying to deliver “good news” of any kind is coming from. Hurt people must be met where hurt people are before an element of trust can be established. Only then can they drop their defenses enough to hear the message, then someday begin to understand it and perhaps one day be able to accept it as their own. It occurred to me that when I have talked about hating myself, I chose to say it that way because I couldn’t even fathom the thought of saying the “really big” word in the same sentence with me. In other words, I could have said I didn’t love myself, but that wouldn’t have been true. Love couldn’t even be in the sentence because it was the complete opposite of that. It was pure hatred, and love was nowhere in sight. It was not a possibility. Until And the sliver of hope I had initially found with Ginger widened significantly. “ Preach the Gospel at all times, and if necessary use words. ” Francis of Assisi

297