Sara and I will have been married thirty-five years this fall. We have a framed photograph on the wall of our bedroom that depicts a pivotal moment in our relationship. In it, we are meeting His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is on the left in the photo, in orange and yellow robes that leave his brown arms bare to the shoulder, his head thrust slightly forward as he gazes at me, listening with a smile as I speak. Sara is on the right, eyes downcast, smiling shyly but with obvious joy, dressed in a cream-colored linen jacket and orange-red silk blouse. Her brown hair was cut short then, well above her shoulders. I am the tall, bearded young man between them, about to surprise all three of us with a bold request.

The setting was an oceanfront hotel in Newport Beach, California. Sara and I were there for a conference featuring the Dalai Lama in dialogue with Western scientists, psychologists, and philosophers. Since I represented one of the organizations funding the conference, we were invited to a private reception where we had a few minutes alone with His Holiness. On the spur of the moment, I told him that Sara and I were engaged and asked if he’d say a prayer for our marriage. Sara blushed and he blinked, clearly not anticipating such an appeal. Then he recovered, leaned forward, and peered intently at each of us in turn. I felt as if he were looking at something we couldn’t see, and suddenly I feared that he’d shake his head and decline, having seen that our relationship wouldn’t last. Then he smiled, took our hands in his, bowed his head, and quietly chanted a blessing in Tibetan.

Sara says that was the moment she knew it was okay to marry me.

Control

We were blessed by the Dalai Lama in October, 1989. I had experienced my own moment of knowing some sixteen months earlier, when we gave up our separate apartments and found a small house in San Francisco’s East Bay hills to rent. There is no photograph to mark the events that took place twelve days after we moved in together. The only image I have of them is one indelibly seared into memory.

I was preparing to leave the house for work. I expected to be home late, for that night I’d be hosting dinner at a local restaurant for participants in a three-day research symposium I’d organized. I kissed Sara goodbye and was filling my travel mug when she called out with a cheerful reminder. “Drive carefully! That’s the only car we have!”

“I will,” I replied gruffly, knitting my brows in annoyance at the assumption that I might not drive carefully. I am an excellent (if aggressive) driver, and she knew it. Then I shrugged and let it go. What she said was true—we did have only one car, her yellow Subaru wagon. My car had died on the day we moved in together. It was a faded gray Toyota Corolla that had served me well for almost fifteen years, carrying me through college in South Carolina, graduate school in Texas, and my first seven years in the San Francisco Bay area. Twice I had rebuilt its small but sturdy engine to coax more than 200,000 miles from it. But when it threw a rod on the first of May, 1988, I had it towed to the curb of the home we’d just rented and never drove it again.

By the time I reached Sara’s wagon, I was mentally reviewing my schedule for the day and planning the stops I needed to make on my way to the office. As I backed out of the driveway, though, her warning came back to me. I had to have the last word, if only in my own mind. I always drive carefully, I thought, and, anyway, I’m not the one who tends to break things.

This had recently been a sore point between us. I tend to take very good care of things, or at least not to damage them through carelessness. I had come home one evening to learn that Sara had accidentally dropped and broken a bowl in the kitchen. After looking at her to make sure she was not physically hurt—but not asking about that—I frowned at her explanation of what happened and curtly inquired, “Why can’t you be more careful?” Skillful, right? She glared at me and the battle was engaged. When she finally shouted, “You care more about our damn things than you do about me!” I retreated. Her accusation stung, but I was too angry and defensive to admit it. Eventually both of us went to bed upset. As we lay side by side in the darkness, unspeaking, the words from an old Simon and Garfunkel song surfaced.

        Hiding in my room, safe within my womb, 
        I touch no one and no one touches me. 
        I am a rock, I am an island. 
        And a rock feels no pain, 
        And an island never cries. 

Sara reached out seeking contact, but I turned away and withdrew behind the walls of my fortress. It was a lonely place, but safe, and I did not have to risk sharing feelings I experienced as weakness. At least not when I was in control and had a choice.

Collision

That had been days ago. This morning, having completed my errands in the East Bay, I followed Buchanan Street to the freeway that would take me over the bridge to Sausalito, where I worked. The on-ramp at Buchanan was a case study in bad design, with a blind curve and sudden, mad merger into the fast lane of traffic on the freeway. There was no margin for error, but I had used the route hundreds of times and knew how to make the quick judgments required. Coming into its blind curve, I glanced forward to ensure the ramp was clear, then looked back to study oncoming traffic. Once I decided which gap to enter, I accelerated rapidly and looked forward again.

Just in time to see a tan pickup truck stopped dead on the ramp where no vehicle had been just a moment before. I stood on the brakes and for one long second hoped the car would come to a miraculous stop. Then the truck’s tailgate filled my vision, we collided with a metal-rending crash, and I hurtled toward the windshield before being flung back by the shoulder harness that saved my life.

Absolute stillness followed. I was stunned but conscious. Disbelieving. Desolate. Grateful to be alive. Then I shuttered my feelings and focused on action. I had to check on the other driver.

Steam hissed from the engine compartment as I forced open my door and limped forward. A woman about my own age sat with head bowed, shock slackening her features. She wasn’t bleeding and said nothing seemed broken, but tears traced a path down her cheeks when I touched her arm.

“I was afraid,” she said, almost to herself. “I couldn’t see any way to get into traffic. And then I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw you.” Her voice quavered. “I knew you’d never be able to stop.”

I stayed by her side till the Highway Patrol arrived, both of us in shock. The next hour passed in a series of clear, focused conversations with police, medical technicians, and others on the scene. Both vehicles would be towed for scrap. The woman I’d hit went to the hospital in an ambulance. When I declined to do the same, an officer familiar with this section of highway said, “You’re lucky to be walking away in one piece.” I nodded, but I was already more concerned with how I was going to commute across the bay for the conference I had to chair than with my own well-being. “Go home,” he said. “You’re running on pure adrenaline and don’t know it.”

I watched a snowy egret poised motionless in the marsh nearby, its delicate white feathers ruffled by a light breeze, and listened to the traffic that roared by at sixty miles an hour only yards away. A friend who was driving by saw me and stopped. After getting a ticket for stopping at the scene of an accident, he took me back to Sara’s office.

Grace

Sara worked for a small publishing company on the third floor of an aging brick building in downtown Berkeley. I climbed its wooden stairs with reluctant feet, every step echoing in the cramped, narrow stairwell. With each step, my dread grew. Drive carefully, she had said. That’s the only car we have. She had every right to be furious with me. Emotions I had held in check since the moment of impact filled me; I bit my lip to contain them. Then I took a deep breath and pushed open her office door.

A co-worker came forward and asked pertly, “Can I help you?”

“I’m here to see Sara,” I stammered, just as she stepped out into the hallway. Pleasure and puzzlement crossed her face at the same time. Then she noticed my expression and hurried forward. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

I could hardly speak. I tightened my face against tears welling up and croaked, “I totaled your car.”

And steeled myself, waiting to be attacked: You did what???

I was undone by what followed.

Gently placing her hand on my heart, eyes gazing into mine, she asked, “Oh, Tom! Are you all right?”

That is the moment I remember. Her brown eyes, filled with concern. The warmth of her hand on my trembling body. Her love, holding me up.

Being defenseless, and being embraced.

There was no question about the car. She didn’t say or think I told you so. I stood before her waiting to be judged and she saw only someone she cherished, needing care.

In that moment, I knew I was truly loved.

Since then, I try to drive carefully.

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Spring is upon us in the foothills of the Blue Ridge.

The sassy yellow of daffodils sparks smiles, splashed against the greening grass or clumped on roadsides. Redbuds, forsythia, and pears flaunt red, gold, and white blossoms radiant with light.

Birds that wintered farther south have returned for the summer—gray catbirds, brown-headed cowbirds, yellow-rumped warblers, tree swallows, and more. Bluebirds and phoebes are pairing up and building nests. Mockingbirds and brown thrashers compete to sing the most varied songs.

Days are warming. Red maple and viburnum are budding. Any day now, we’ll be awash in new life, bold colors, and green everywhere.

At this turning

I find myself pausing to ask—as you might:

What is emerging in my life now? What new life is taking shape within?

What is falling away, no longer mine to do? What is it time to let go of, that I no longer need?

What deeper truth am I invited to embrace?

I am often surprised by what emerges. This year I am also curious. How is it that some deeper part of us knows the answers?

The soul’s attunement to time

The answer that Sara and I have come to is this: the soul knows right timing. It knows when to embrace a new opportunity or leave a worn-out relationship; when to uproot and seek a new home—or settle in place and lie fallow for the winter; when it is time to shed an identity and live in the house of vulnerability for a while. The soul knows when silence ripens into speech, and when stillness must give way to action.

Perhaps more fundamentally: the soul knows where we are and what time it is in our lives.

This knowing is not given so that we can manage our lives more efficiently or program the process of becoming better versions of ourselves. It is given so we can participate more truthfully in our own becoming.

To sense timing is one mode of soul’s knowing. Our innermost self is attuned to the rhythms and patterns of change at several levels—the right time for action or restraint, the longer arc of development throughout life, the wisdom of cycles and seasons, even our sense of the historical hour we are living through now.

I first experienced the soul’s attunement to time as a sudden, heart-rending realization one cold winter day that now was the time to leave an organization and work I had loved for many years. As the shock of that realization subsided, I started to wonder why it had to come as a thunderclap. Had I been missing signals all along?

In the decade that followed, I learned that the deeper self does send signals before such changes occur. If we pay close attention, we can discover how those signals arrive as life transitions approach. We’re then less likely to push for change prematurely or stay too long in situations that aren’t right for us.

Knowing what time it is

Yet to live with fidelity to what is most deeply true can feel counter-cultural when it comes to time. We challenge the world’s addiction to speed by slowing down. We take ourselves off the clock and let ourselves be more fully present in the moment. We turn down the volume on voices urging “act now!” and listen instead for a quieter pulse, usually overwhelmed by the noise of the world and the demands of our lives.

Slowing down to connect with ourselves more deeply can feel selfish or irresponsible. We may struggle to take the first step, and we almost always experience relief and gratitude when we do. It often feels like coming home—home to our bodies, home to what’s in our hearts, home to the soul’s knowing of what truly matters. We make room for the indwelling presence of spirit and remember our belonging to the more-than-human world.

No longer captive to the clock, my relationship to time changed. I started to notice that time manifests in several overlapping ways. I could sense other, more organic patterns of movement and ripening. The body’s rhythms of activity and rest. The strong, steady currents flowing through things that take time to mature and bear fruit—our most cherished relationships, our life work. Our long, slow shaping through the stages of life.

All of these patterns had a different character—and I began to discern their features.

Six ways the soul knows time

I’ve come to think of time as having different registers, analogous to our emotional register. Just as we can feel different emotional tones at once, we experience time in overlapping ways. What happens in the moment can be timely, developmental, and sacred all at once.

Time in this sense is the living medium of our becoming.

Sara and I gradually came to recognize six recurring registers of time in soul’s knowing. They are simply distinct patterns we found in our experience, not rigid categories. Five of them unfold within ordinary time; a sixth permeates them all. Each has its own rhythms, pressures, invitations, and forms of guidance.

As we learn to listen across these registers, we can choose in ways that are more true to both who we are and who we are becoming.

See if you recognize these in your own experience.

Sensing timeliness

There are moments when we know, with surprising clarity, exactly what we have to do. To act or not to act. To say yes or no. To speak or be still.

Guidance here may come as a sudden, sure knowing; a gentle inner nudge; a gut feeling; or simply as something moving in us in response to the moment. Counterfeit timing guidance may send the same message, but it has a very different root—loneliness, panic, the need to prove ourselves, a craving for connection.

Our experience of timeliness tells us what is needed now, what is being called for, what the moment asks. It has to do with what is ripe in us and the immediate field. What we and others are ready for. It is an intimate expression of our interconnectedness with others—and, perhaps, with the living spirit that flows through all.

This is the first register, and it co-exists with all the others.

What is most needed in your life right now? What is the minimum, elegant next step you are courageously poised to take?

Embracing cycles

Our lives are profoundly shaped by the cyclical rhythms of embodied experience—bodily rhythms, the diurnal cycle of day and night, the lunar cycle of waxing and waning, the seasonal cycle of winter, spring, summer, and fall.

Many of us have lost touch with these cycles, but our bodies are still finely tuned to them. The deeper self carries their wisdom and knows when something in us is gestating, breaking ground, blossoming, or ready for harvest. When we need to lie fallow or rest and renew ourselves. When our energies are at their peak and we are most productive—or when we have pushed too hard and gone too far.

Recovering a sense of cyclical time can be a relief. Something in us relaxes when we remember that not every season is for blooming. Yet honoring cyclical time can be challenging, too—the ego has its own designs on time and can chafe at having to slow down or retreat. Ignore the wisdom of cyclical time long enough, and both health and effectiveness suffer.

What is your body telling you now about what you need?

The long arc of development

Soul’s knowing is not only concerned with our next timely choice. Some guidance has to do with who we are becoming—our growth and development over time. Beyond our ideas about who we are and where we’re going, our innermost self tracks the nature, intensity, and pace of our soul’s maturation. This is developmental timing.

There are many different kinds of development, of course, and each has its own patterns. Our physical, psychological, social, and spiritual development unfold on different time frames, with different rhythms. Our journeys through relationship, family, vocation, and community have stages we recognize, even when our individual journeys are unique.

To describe development we talk of birth and beginnings, growth and expansion, endings and death. We notice leaps and regressions, peak and valleys, sidetracks and dead ends. We picture spirals, loops, cycles, paths, the branching patterns of trees. We know that development is nonlinear, that it can stall or accelerate, and that all of us are mature in some areas and underdeveloped in others. One thing we can say with confidence is that development is never linear or formulaic, however much we may long for predictability.

Amid this diversity, the soul’s work is the same: to know where we are and where we are going—and to guide us accordingly. To signal when a professional transition is approaching; when it is time for a relationship to end; when our identity as a parent or spouse must evolve; when the gravity of spiritual life asks us to surrender.

Awareness of developmental timing bestows dignity, counsels patience, and asks us to be humble, mindful that in daily life we often don’t see the longer waves and deeper currents at play. It sometimes offers compassion, too, granting us glimpses of the hidden pattern that connects all of the disparate choices and events of our life.

What on the path I am walking still has meaning? What in me is genuinely ending, and what is merely tired? What wants patience rather than pressure?

Thresholds of radical change

But not all growth and development is orderly.

Sometimes we are shaken by powerful experiences that radically transform us. Events that re-order identity. Crises that disrupt our lives and everything we had planned—deaths, divorce, advanced cancer, hitting bottom with an addiction. Meeting your soul mate and falling in love. Noetic revelations of deeper orders of reality.

We don’t always have advance warning of these ordeals, but sometimes we can sense something on the horizon, the way we sense a storm coming well before any overt signs are present. We feel ourselves nearing a threshold beyond which—we sense as it draws near—we will not be the same. Hence threshold time.

Metanoia is the ancient Greek term for such experiences, meaning a fundamental shift in being. They often have a mythic quality, invoking archetypal symbols and the imagery of quests, thresholds, wilderness, descent, dismemberment, resurrection, healing, gifts. They are marked by the breakdown of ordinary reality and our usual modes of problem-solving. We must shed old skins to free the person we were always meant to be.

These thresholds are life-changing tests, and not every crisis is navigated successfully. They often come unwanted and are not pretty. They change us whether we are ready or not; the question is what in us survives, yields, deepens, dies, or arises. Trust in grace and the generosity of allies is the only way through, until we settle on a deeper ground.

Where in your life is an old way of being no longer adequate? What is being asked of you at a deeper level?

The call of world time

We stand, as a species, at a civilizational threshold—on a planetary brink. Science and technology are reshaping our sense of what it means to be human. Climate change is destabilizing the conditions of life. Cultures, economies, and communities are under strain and on the edge. Yet, everywhere, people are innovating, rebuilding, resisting, and learning again how to nourish life. Waking up.

It feels as if the entire world is groaning, in the throes of death and the pangs of rebirth. At some level, we all feel the world’s pain and the pressure of this moment in time. We may not be conscious of it, but the deeper self is—and the guidance it offers reflects the hour in which we are living.

That is what we mean by world time. It asks us not to retreat into private spirituality but to stay awake and bear witness, even when what we experience is overwhelming or incomprehensible. Not to use inner guidance to distance ourselves, but to engage where we find ourselves or feel called, even if we we doubt we can make a difference.

In this register, I find myself asking: What am I called to offer or build? Where do I show up and who am I bound to, by love or choice? What must we protect, mourn, or celebrate?

And if my neighbor’s sense of world time and what it asks is different than mine? We must have the courage to talk that through—with courage, humility, and commitment to the health and integrity of the whole.

What hour are we living through—and what does it ask of me, now?

Sacred time

There are moments when time seems to stop or deepen. When we are transported from ordinary time to timelessness. When Presence enfolds us. This is sacred time, the register that permeates all others. Its gift is illumination and mystery.

If the first five registeroperate in chronos, linear historical time, then sacred time is the sphere of kairos. Eternity intersecting the present. Kairos opens in the moments when grace touches us, when we know in every fiber of our being that we are part of a divine order, a greater whole suffused with meaning, wisdom, creativity, and love. A blessed few may live in this space, but most of us experience it more sporadically.

Humans have honored sacred time throughout history in seasonal festivals, liturgical calendars, and the great “wheels of time” in many traditions. Personally we have been touched sacred time in ceremony, ritual, spiritual practice, and everyday life. Sometimes in moments of prayer, deep silence, grief, or awe. In unexpected experiences of oneness or communion, in visitations of grace, in encounters where the veil between worlds grows thin.

These experiences reveal the other meaning of kairos: it is the “anointed time” when the field is charged with spiritual power and we feel blessed, transformed. This can happen in any moment. Perhaps every genuine experience of soul’s knowing takes place, in some sense, in sacred time, where we as finite beings encounter our eternal ground in the divine.

Where is grace present? If I looked at myself through God’s eyes, who and what would I see?

Invitation to explore

These six registers overlap and interpenetrate. A single experience—say, a crucial conversation—might be timely in its occurrence, developmental in significance, and sacred in its tone and feeling. Our sense of world time might infuse a journey of initiation that transforms our sense of who we are and why we are here. I might find myself personally in the fallow time of winter even as a new phase of professional development is unfolding.

They are not a model; they don’t reflect any theory. I share our experience hoping you’ll explore “what time it is” in your own life: what is most needed now, what cycle you may be ignoring, what is ripening developmentally, what threshold you may be approaching, how the world’s time is moving in you, where grace is breaking through.

A simple prayer

I have viewed time in many ways—as a race to be run, a resource to be managed, a taskmaster, an enemy, an illusion, a weight—and yes, occasionally, as a gift. Only now am I welcoming time as the crucible of our formation.

The older I get, the more I feel we are called to participate in these streams of time, not to stand apart trying to manage or control them. The task is not to bend time to my will—or carry it as a yoke—but to enter into right relationship with my own becoming.

So in this season of greening and new growth, my prayer is simple:

Teach me right timing.
Help me be patient when I move too quickly.
Give me courage when I fear letting go.
Help me notice what is emerging, what has life, what is dying.
Show me what time it is, and what it asks of me.
Remind me to bow to the Mystery.

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At this time of year the dawn chorus is astonishing, uplifting, joyful. Close your eyes and the trills, clicks, tweets, caws, chirps, warbles, and buzzes come from everywhere—you float in a world of sound. Listening to the birds wake this morning reminded me of a different time, when the song did not come … till something woke within.

The voice in my head bores me. Every 
       single thought feels stale and

all my stories are bullshit. Beliefs 
       long shaping my life are 

imploding, while dreams once 
       rich in meaning seem 

faded maps I can no longer follow. 
       I am hollowed out 

and have no voice. So I turn 
       to the more-than-human world 

where nothing needs to explain itself 
       or be more than it is. 

A wooden bench at meadow’s edge 
       gives refuge. Sit 

and grow still: the world 
       comes freely to the body’s 

starved senses. Little bluestem 
       nodding in the breeze, honeybees 

plundering purple aster, scent 
       of star jasmine—simply 

to be present is enough. Nothing 
       needs me to name it. Weariness 

lifts, like morning fog. From the field, 
       in the body, a rippling 

rises—a word, perhaps,  
       or a warble.

					— Thomas J. Hurley

First published in Passager Journal, Poetry Contest Issue, Fall 2024

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Sitting on stone in the shadow of an oak
	I thought about the poet’s work 
		and how to find my way. 

Words that form in the fertile dark 
	have power, a voice in the acorns 
		on the ground whispered. Wait 

and what needs to be spoken 
	will come to you. A song sparrow sang
		in the branches above. 

All is alive and gifted 
	with its own voice, in this world 
		of inter-being. Listen 

as much for the mystery 
	as the meaning. The grasses 
		nodded, talking softly. 

One wind blows through all, 
	and each moves in its own way. 
		Touch and be touched 

by all you meet, and all will echo 
	in your song. The oak’s dappled
		canopy netted the sky.

I saw its beauty and its scars, the lore
	of time, and heard the beings 
		who shelter there. 

Learn the alchemy of the seasons.
	Sing the seed and spring’s green 
		giving, fall’s brown going— 

life’s wondrous web of inter-feeding. 
	All return, in their time, to the elements 
	and to Source. 

In the gloaming, the air hummed 
	with voices. The first stars pricked
		the blue-black sky.

					— Thomas J. Hurley

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Have you ever felt lost, shrouded in self-doubt, all your efforts at change stymied? Without clear direction, your plans crumbled, seemingly on your own?

That’s how I felt in a pivotal transition period of my life almost thirty years ago. Though I confessed this to no one at the time, I was scared. I had surprised friends and colleagues by stepping away from a leadership role with an organization I loved—one I had helped grow for seventeen years. I had been guided to strike out on my own, but six months after leaving I was floundering. Every promising opportunity had evaporated; every path I explored had petered out.

Had I made a terrible mistake? Was my guidance flawed? Some days I felt like I was chasing my own tail.

When the map fails

In that dark time, I chanced upon these words from Thomas Merton*:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

In the trackless void

Merton’s words have accompanied me ever since. At times, they have literally been my prayer, words whispered in the trackless void. Yet even when the way seems clear, the next step given, they remind me to hold my assumptions lightly: that I really know myself, that I can see where the path I’ve chosen will take me, that the world depends on my figuring it all out.

Merton’s prayer also highlights the centrality of intention and calls me to responsibility. While expressing absolute trust in God—however you conceive the divine source of all that is—he implies that we still must choose and act wisely, lovingly, awake to the world and our part in it. Between the lines, Merton calls us to live in the creative tension between knowing and not-knowing, agency and acceptance, intentionality and grace.

He is calling us to embrace both courage and humility.

As we walk that path, Merton’s words are less a plea and more an orientation, as if some taproot of our being were daily growing into deeper soil where a different source of nourishment is found. Where trust abides, not as a wager or wish but as the essence of our relationship to the ground of being.

Becoming

I still turn to the deeper self for guidance when I have questions, but I hold the answers more lightly than ever before. They are the day-to-day manifestations of a more fundamental and enduring process: the transformation of being—our becoming—drawing us forward, step by step, whether we feel guided or not.

Perhaps being lost is a prerequisite for letting ourselves be found.

* From Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton, originally published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1958.

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This week is the anniversary of my mother’s death in 1993. I share this essay, first published in Noetic Sciences Review in 1994, both in remembrance of her and in honor of all who stand at the edge of the abyss with an aching heart and questions that won’t go away. I continue to dwell with the mystery.

I

I had never imagined that my mother could die. Louanne Murphy Hurley was a strong, resilient and active woman, always in control, dedicated to helping others and devoted to knitting our large, far-flung family together with news of one another’s lives. Yet the day after my thirty-eighth birthday, she walked out the back door of her house in Aiken, South Carolina, down a few steps to her yard, and dropped dead of a massive heart attack. It was shortly after noon on a dry, crisp day in February, with high thin clouds that diffused the sun’s light and gave a weak, watery quality to the air. The pink dogwoods my mother loved were not yet in bloom and the oak trees that filled the back yard were still bare.

I was not there when she fell. No one was there. She lay on the cold stone for an hour before my father found her. She had been leaving the house to run an errand, so her absence was expected. Her failure to return was not. A year later, I still can’t picture the moment without tears forming. It is partly the crushing finality of that instant and partly the image of her dying alone that troubles me. She had a husband, seven children, and a mother-in-law for whom she was now caring, but she had no one by her side when her heart convulsed and she crumpled to the ground. Perhaps she knew she could not leave as long as there was anyone present who needed her or would cling during her departure.

My mother was sixty-three years old when she died. We had assumed, if we thought about it at all, that we had another decade to share with her. That she would see her grandchildren grow. Her death came like an earthquake that shook the foundations of our lives.

I later learned she had told friends, in the months before her death, how tired she was. In retrospect, perhaps she was ready to let go of life. Perhaps she also knew death was near. When she called me the day before she died, something in the tone of our conversation had been unsettling. The question I remember was whether my son Gabriel had been baptized. Still, when my father phoned the next day, I was unprepared for his news. Neither he, nor I, nor my brothers and sisters were in any way ready for her passing.

II

I flew across the country the next morning, numb with sorrow and loss. The flight was an ordeal; I moved in a world far distant from those about me. The external world paled, seeming almost unreal; my in-flight meal went untouched as I teetered on the brink of an immense inner void. I felt as if I were stretched across the skin of an immense bubble of sadness and grief that would overwhelm me as soon as it was pricked. It was shot through with an anguished sense of unfinished business. There were so many things I would never be able to tell her now – how much I loved her, how grateful I was for the love she had given me -- and she would never see her grandson grow up. The agony I felt seemed incapable of relief.

Each of us expressed our shock and pain differently. One of my sisters snapped bitterly at everyone who approached her; my brothers were stoic and withdrawn. My father’s hard, protective shell was smashed, his unshaved face gaunt with guilt and loss. In our childhood home, we found solace in each other’s company even as we grieved alone. We went through the familiar activities of preparing food, eating together, and cleaning up, but they were lifeless copies of the happy rites we had perfected through years of gathering the clan at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Never again would meals around the dining room table be the celebration of life and family they were with my mother.

A Catholic wake was held three days after she died. My mother’s one request, expressed long before her death, had been that a rosary be said at that service. In a room of muted grays at the funeral parlor, we sat in cushioned chairs in neat, precise rows and recited the Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s I knew by heart. I prayed by rote, striving to revive childhood faith, but my hollowness and sense of loss only deepened.

III

Then a wholly unexpected and extraordinary thing occurred.

I saw my mother’s soul leave her body.

Or, perhaps more accurately, I felt something rise from the casket and expand, for I perceived with a subtle sense that combined sight, feeling, and sensation. The room glowed with light. I was filled with joy, peace, and wonder. My eyes widened and my lips parted in surprise; I fell silent as those around me continued to pray. A moment earlier I had ached with loss; now I was filled with exultation at my mother’s liberation.

Later, my wife Sara asked if I had experienced anything unusual during the rosary. To my surprise, I discovered that she had experienced the same thing at the same time.

The funeral was held the next afternoon. At the mortuary, I had a few moments alone at the casket before it was closed. I knew at once that she was no longer there. Her body was cold and hard, made up by the mortician’s art. Her strong face with its large, slightly hooked nose and high cheekbones was peaceful, but her cheek was waxy to my touch. Yet I had a powerful sense of her presence in the room. I still felt the peace that had enveloped me at her rosary, but in that last moment with her body I experienced anew the knife edge of remorse at not having stayed in closer touch. With tears in my eyes, I bowed my head and prayed for her help and guidance in my family’s life.

Then I received a second gift. In the vast black space behind my closed eyes, I sensed her presence and felt seen by her. I knew without question that she understood who I am in this life, at a soul level, and that she loved me. I also realized that I knew who she was, in essence. My sense of unfinished business vanished.

In the year that followed, waves of sadness and loss would well up without warning, usually when I saw a woman who looked like my mother or heard someone clear their throat in just the way that had always alerted us to her presence, even when we couldn’t see her. When these feelings arose, I simply made room for them, remembering to breathe. I sometimes wished I could give the process of grieving more conscious attention, but the demands of work and of family seemed more pressing.

IV

I am left with questions. Before my mother died, I would not have taken a position on the question of whether something in us survives death. The story I had been taught as a child no longer made sense to me, but nothing had replaced it. I now know from experience that something in us does not die with the body. But what is the nature of that spirit? Is there a personal soul? If so, what is the nature of its journey after death and is there anything we can do to facilitate it for those who have died?

In that vein, I wonder what my mother experienced at the moment of her passing. Paramedics said she was probably dead before she hit the ground, and we took a small measure of comfort in knowing that she had not suffered. But surely there is much more to the moment of death than pain or its absence. I also wonder what my father might have done to ease her soul’s transition as he sat there with her awaiting the ambulance. When he died three years later, we closed the room in which we had held him while he breathed his last and for the next seventy-two hours entered it only to pray for the safe passage of his spirit.

After her death, I realized how little I knew about my mother’s life. She was the youngest but one in a household of nine daughters and one son, part of an extended Irish Catholic family on the north side of Chicago. Beyond that, I do not know what she loved as a girl, what dreams danced in her head as a teenager, or what hopes she had for her marriage to my father, a handsome young nuclear physicist from Notre Dame University. I can only guess at how wrenching the transition must have been when she moved from life in a closely knit family in a large city, teeming with diverse ethnic communities, to life alone with her young husband and a rapidly growing brood in rural South Carolina. She raised her children well, touched countless lives through a pre-school and kindergarten she ran for African-American children, and was an integral part of her church and community.

Are those the yardsticks by which her life should be measured? I celebrate her dedication to family and unstinting service to those in need. Yet I also look at photos of her as a young woman and see a light in her dark brown eyes and a lilt in her smile that I don’t remember in her as my mother. Had she not been led away from the clan, had she not borne seven children in eleven years, who might that tall, bright, saucy girl have become?

V

It is difficult to sustain the awareness of death, even when we have lived in its shadow for a time. It is painful; it seems morbid; it distracts us from the daily task of making a living. Yet the more courageous and vulnerable we can be in opening to dying and loss, the more fully we can allow the deep and mysterious movement of spirit in our lives. The more intimately we will know ourselves, others, and the world. Death pushes us in the direction of fundamental questions about who we are and how we are choosing to live, questions we can only answer with our lives. We do well to craft a vital relationship with such questions, for the questions themselves are as important as our answers at any given time. Today I embrace death as an integral part of life and its continuous renewal. While I do not seek it out, I do not fear it, either.

I never imagined my mother’s death could nourish me so richly. While I miss her keenly, I still sense her presence and talk to her when I am unsure, concerned for my family, or lonely. Sometimes she responds with a word of wisdom; always I feel her care. My wife Sara, with whom my mother had a brief but special connection, has on three or four occasions prayed to her in emergencies and always found help appearing in sudden, unexpected ways. I do not know that I am wiser because of her passing, but I do feel closer to the sacred for having dwelt with the mystery of death. My life cuts a deeper channel. And I can honestly tell my son that death can be a friend, even when it shakes the foundations of our lives.

Originally published in Noetic Sciences Review, Spring 1994, Number 29. Reprinted with light edits.

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Since launching this Substack, I’ve been revisiting early conversations that helped shape my understanding of soul’s knowing. I’ve already published an interview with Angeles Arrien (Part One and Part Two), and this post features highlights from a 2005 conversation with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.

Reb Zalman, as he asked to be called, was a rabbi, writer, and activist who founded the Jewish Renewal movement and played a central role in interfaith dialogue for several decades. His love of God and humanity shone through his eyes and infused his words. An earthy sense of humor buttressed his realism about the human condition and the state of the Earth. I was inspired by the depth and freshness of his views.

Our conversation moved quickly through mysticism, psychology, ethics, and the social cost of waking up. Reb Zalman treated the soul’s knowing like a diamond, turning it in his hands and viewing its many facets from several angles. This is the story that emerged as we talked:

Most of us aren’t blocked by confusion. We’re in a trance, bribed from within and pressured from without. With sincere practice and good teachers, we learn to attune to higher levels of being. With courage, humility, and aligned companions, we can discover new ways forward together.

Holy unrest

For Reb Zalman personally, and perhaps for most of us, the search for another way of being started not with clarity but unrest. At the beginning, we may not know what we’re looking for—only that something is missing or awry.

If we don’t experience meaning in our lives, we have no compass by which our inner being can steer. So let me begin with the feeling of unrest that we have when we are not on target. Without a compass, we bribe ourselves with our desires. We are attracted to something we desire and move one way; we experience repulsion to something else and move another way. We aren’t often in neutral. What brings us back … is that feeling we’re not on target …

This grounds us in the gritty soil of our everyday experience. The ache we feel isn’t a problem to fix or a symptom to alleviate. It’s our inner compass quietly suggesting we correct our course. Reb Zalman takes it even further: the ache has a sacred source; the magnetic quality of the longing comes from God. In his words:

We are theotropic beings. Just as a sunflower is heliotropic, attracted to the sun, we are theotropic, attracted to the divine … In fact, what attracts us is the flow of grace toward us, which Rudolf Otto called the mysterium fascinans, the mystery that fascinates and draws us.

Attunement and global ethics

This is often where grace intervenes. As a teenage refugee in Paris, Reb Zalman met a Hasidic master whose presence touched him. It wasn’t the mind alone that led him out of the wilderness of longing—it was learning to resonate at a different frequency. But first he had to clear the way in himself.

At the seminary, I learned the power of attunement … I realized I was in the presence of someone who is attuned to God, who vibrates strongly at a particular level of consciousness. I felt a longing, a need, to vibrate with that. So what do I do? First, I have to let go of my own expectations, because they will hinder me.

Most of us like to think we could do that. It’s the next step that Reb Zalman took that may be more challenging. It has taken me decades to embrace it.

Then I have to surrender—to give my master, in Robert Christian’s words, “the power of attorney over my soul.” Only then can I become soft and tunable, able to attune to the frequency of his awareness. Very often, I don’t have the sense that he’s talking about something; I have a sense that he is describing what he is in touch with. I want to be in touch with that, too.

I felt myself quickening at this point in the conversation—as if Reb Zalman was speaking from that attunement to a higher frequency, not just about it, and something in me felt the power in his words. Then he introduced an ethical dimension often missing in more individualized accounts of spiritual experience—not abstract principles, but a felt sense of equity, rightness, and responsibility.

With that higher attunement, we feel certain cosmic laws of equity. Anything that isn’t equity feels wrong. We feel pangs of conscience … To see oneself as separate doesn’t make sense anymore. We are part of Gaia. And the outcry of the Earth is also what urges us to become more conscious at this time.

The sharpest claim here is relational: our choices matter, not just to us but to all the communities in which we participate, both seen and unseen.

Breaking the trance

Twenty years on, many feel something fundamental is off, but that intuition creates more heat than light. The dominant culture expertly directs that energy into channels that don’t fundamentally threaten it. Reb Zalman described the core human dynamic clearly. I had mentioned that one of my own early assumptions about soul’s knowing is that it would separate me from other people. Of course, he responded—that’s why we self-edit. And he doubled down.

Why do people think it will take them away from others? Because it will! It will take them away from social consensus, from the status quo, from the social trance … The status quo doesn’t want to be upset. We can almost hear it saying, “If you are going to be a whistle blower, I’m going to kill you.”

In the world today, this is literally true. But it’s also true in subtler forms: exclusion, ridicule, silencing, retaliation. Reb Zalman spoke lightly, but his words have teeth. The social world we inhabit isn’t neutral. It exerts a gravitational pull—and our inner wish to be free must be equal to it.

The more people in that trance, the stronger the pressure of that trance to impress itself on our consciousness. To make us conform. So you can see how strong the impulse for the soul’s knowing has to be in order to overcome that.

This means tolerating discomfort, for the soul’s knowing will often challenge our identities and routines, not reinforce a current identity. If we can’t distinguish genuine guidance from other energies and influences that present themselves as such—whether fear, egoic desire, an unconscious need, or some other inner force—we will usually find ourselves following a virtuous path that doesn’t ask us to risk anything.

Put more provocatively, if our “guidance” never challenges our current commitments, never costs us anything, never asks for a real act of truth—perhaps it’s little more than a private comfort, an inward glow that lets us feel good while keeping us safe. A spiritual accessory worn inside the trance.

Reb Zalman soberly reflected:

If I am wholly bound by the morals of society, then my spiritual attainment will serve for nothing else but to keep the status quo as it is.

The multitude within

When Reb Zalman talked about the power of a reflective practice called examination of conscience, I was touched. The word “conscience” is powerful. When I feel a quiet pang in the heart, do I honor it? I noted how quick we are to rationalize our behavior, but Reb Zalman cautioned me against turning the mind into an enemy.

I used to ask my students to come in with two lists of people: Who is in your inner audience? Who is on your inner board of directors? You see, the notion that we have one superego is not the right one, because there are so many beings sitting in our craw, each one with something to say. We have to allow all the voices to come out inside of you, including the voices that we ordinarily want to drown—either because they make us anxious or because they bring us back to this deeper dissatisfaction that we feel.

If soul’s knowing expresses our wholeness, then all parts of us participate in that. This is discernment as hospitality: letting the inner family speak without letting any single voice dominate.

Freedom in relationship

Reb Zalman continually put our individual experience in a broader context. He emphasized the power of the ensemble in contrast to a very modern pattern: isolated seekers on a solo journey of awakening. He refused the lone-wolf hero narrative. For him, the most sustainable path forward involves people in small circles learning to tune and stay tuned together.

He also spoke of the relief in discovering we’re not alone—and the power that comes through relationship with others on aligned paths.

There is a sweetness when we meet others tuned to the soul’s knowing. If we act alone, we can be dismissed by cynics as dreamers. But when we cohere, the subtle signals get stronger. When we work in ensembles and soul’s knowing becomes a group’s knowing, then a different kind of power is manifest.

Freedom can spread through relationship, even as a different kind of accountability holds us. Intention is key:

When a group’s intention is strong and clear, you can feel it. Focused energy. We can also sense when we are wavering from the intention.

The uni-verse in each person

As our conversation neared its end, I asked Reb Zalman about individuation and destiny—the sense that each person is unique, with a “soul’s code” that shapes the unfolding of our lives. He first acknowledged that he often speaks of soul’s knowing as something cosmic, not individualized, then shared Marc Gafni’s idea that we each have a unique soul-print. Our conversation closed with him drawing these two perspectives together in a way that I loved.

I suggest that our word “universe” encodes these two polarities. One polarity pulls us toward the uni-, toward the One, and the other celebrates the –verse, our individuality, uniqueness, and diversity. The line between the “uni” and the “verse” is the person.

Invitation

Re-reading our conversation today, I’m touched again by Reb Zalman’s vision and compassion. We have so far to go, yet the only step we can take is right in front of us—and perhaps we gain courage and capacity in the company of others.

If any line in this resonated with you—if any question arose as you read—share it with one other person who will recognize it as a gift. Notice what becomes possible when the ensemble begins and you are no longer listening alone.

As always, I welcome your comments. And if by chance you knew Reb Zalman, please share a personal reflection!

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Soul's Knowing Resource: Guidance For The New Year

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A reflective exercise for the turning of the year, designed to help you sense the deeper currents in your life.

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Here in central Virginia, icy snow blankets the ground and another winter storm is coming. The deer have eaten everything green and birds flock to the feeders all day. Yet two red-shouldered hawks have landed in the wild cherry tree. They’re a mating pair that we see every year, and their presence is an early harbinger of spring.

What is returning in you—quietly, faithfully—before you can see or fully describe it? What would it cost to tend it?

Our bodies often know what is coming before we do.

Imbolc, first day of spring

My ancestors in Ireland would have celebrated Imbolc at this time of year. The word Imbolc is thought to come from the Old Irish i mbolg, which means “in the belly,” referring to the time when ewes became pregnant. After the dormancy of winter, spring is almost invisibly stirring: life is quickening in the womb and in seeds germinating unseen, underground. Imbolc honors this quickening of life, of healing, of growth within—and the gestation which follows.

Imbolc is one of the four cross-quarter days on the Celtic calendar, falling midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Now commonly observed on February 1-2 (beginning on the eve of February 1), it marked the beginning of spring and was dedicated to Brigid, the Celtic goddess of spring, fertility, poetry, hearth, healing, smithcraft, and fire. (Brigid today is a figure who braids goddess, saint, and archetype.) Celebrations were rooted in family, hearth, and home, with communal bonfires, rituals for a good growing season, and shared meals as people moved from one house to another.

Two Christian feast days keep company with Imbolc.

St. Brigid’s Day on February 1 honors St. Brigid of Kildare, one of the three patron saints of Ireland. In many parts of the country, families would weave St. Brigid’s crosses on this day, then hang them in the house as blessing—symbols of protection, health, and prosperity. Many now honor Brigid at Imbolc in small, everyday ways: planting seeds, writing poetry, taking time for reflection, tending the hearth at home, clearing dusty spaces, making room for what is coming.

Candlemas on February 2 honors both the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple and Mary’s rite of purification—images of consecration, humility, and inner transformation. In many traditions, it marks the end of the Christmas season. Around the world, candles are lit and blessed to signify the light of Christ coming into the world, banishing darkness and restoring hope.

Seasonal wisdom

Together, these feasts and the fire festival of Imbolc carry a basket of deeper meaning:

We are emerging from the dark time—
even as, in the dark, the sacred seeds 
of new life are stirring. 

Light is strengthening; energy 
is quietly returning. 

We take care and prepare, knowing 
we need not rush. We sense 
the presence of a living spirit 
that knows how to heal, to renew, 
to bring forth what is needed 
in due time. 

A deeper intelligence that knows 
how to nourish life. 

Patience, trust, and gratitude 
are the gifts we can offer, 
to ourselves and 
to one other. 

A soul’s knowing practice

In a sense, Imbolc is an opportunity to tell the truth about what is emerging in our lives—and what we need to do to support it. Like the hawks returning to the wild cherry, something in us knows when it’s time. Here is a simple practice that can help:

Find a quiet space where you will be undisturbed for at least 15 minutes.

Light a candle, symbolizing the inner light—waking, warming, returning.

Take a few moments to center yourself and be more fully present. Sit in silence.

Ask your deeper self three questions, allowing time after each for guidance to appear:

• What is being born in me … or in my life?

• What is most needed now to support this?

• What one small step can I take today?

With each question, simply notice what comes—through words, images, sensations, feelings, or any other channel. Be patient and stay open, without chasing answers. Listen for what’s true, not comfortable. Accept what arrives before you start interpreting it.

When you feel clear, write a short paragraph that expresses what you’ve received—and what you are willing to do to tend it.

Please share your comments—or your soul’s knowing: What’s quickening in you now?

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How do you most commonly experience guidance? Appreciating that is the first step in learning to live with fidelity to your own deepest knowing.

In this post, we’ll outline the many ways guidance can appear. The heart of it is a “channel guide” that might help you reflect both on your tried-and-true ways of accessing deeper wisdom and on where guidance might be showing up without you fully recognizing it.

In a later post, we’ll explore the process of discernment—how we distinguish genuine guidance from all that masquerades as the voice of our innermost self. In practice, though, these two dimensions of our inner guidance system are twinned.

Guidance and soul’s knowing

A word on terminology. Guidance is ever-present and comes to us in many ways. Soul’s knowing is both our experience of guidance and our discernment of its truth or rightness for us now. It’s our conscious recognition of—and consent to—the guidance we are given.

I make this distinction because sometimes we are guided but don’t recognize it at the time. I’ll come back to that. When we do recognize and embrace the guidance that’s available—soul’s knowing—we become more conscious co-creators of our life and becoming, at deeper levels.

Our primary channels for soul’s knowing

In my conversations with Angeles Arrien, she described how guidance appears for her as both “fire in the belly” and “water in the heart”—and how she has learned to make sure they are aligned. Her metaphors beautifully convey how she personally experiences the power, fluidity, and elemental energy of soul’s knowing.

I experience soul’s knowing intuitively, as a calm, clear certainty at the center of my being. For example, if I turn inward with a question, the answer will most often come as an “inner whisper” that is immediate, specific, concise, and matter-of-fact. Sometimes an image or sensation also arises, sometimes not. For me, that calm, clear knowing is usually centered in what the Japanese call the hara, an energetic and spiritual center just below and behind the navel. When I register the guidance, something in me relaxes and settles, as if hearing the truth helps ground me (even if it is challenging).

My wife Sara experiences soul’s knowing in a similar way, with interesting tonal differences. Her knowing, too, is clear, precise, and grounded in the body, usually but not always the belly. However, her knowing also uses the quality of light in her inner space to carry information. If she’s considering an action that is not right for her, that space will be shadowed or dimmed and she’ll feel: This is not for you. If there are no red flags and she senses the possible path is right in some way, her inner space clears or brightens and the message is: Yes—explore this, be curious, and pay attention. If the decision or action is absolutely on target, the light shines, she feels joy, and the inner voice says: Let’s go! These moments feel like a blessing.

For Sara, the heart is central to her knowing, the locus of illumination, spiritual light flowing into and through all things, uniting the inner and outer worlds. My experiences of soul’s knowing in and through the heart are powerful but less frequent (though becoming more common as I mature). For me, these are deep, expansive, and wordless experiences of love, presence, compassion, and belonging—to Spirit, to people, to place—that waken the greater self and tell me: This is home.

In addition to these primary channels, we experience guidance in a wide range of ways. Some are spontaneous and ephemeral, like repeated nudges in a particular direction; others result from more intentional practices, like guided visualizations or “soul’s knowing conversations.” Sometimes, powerful images or symbols have appeared in dreams or meditation and then unfold their meanings over time, illuminating archetypal patterns at work.

I’ve come to trust that we live in a field of guidance that is both around us and within us. Our deepest self, or divine intelligence, can use any “channel” to communicate with us. So guidance appears in many different ways—through our mental, emotional, and physical centers; through our ordinary, subtle, and extended senses; and with diverse qualities that are unique to each person.

These are ways guidance speaks to us. But guidance has many tongues. Let’s take a broader look at the varieties of inner knowing.

Reflect on your own experience

All of us privilege some types of experience and pay less attention to others. Take a moment now and ask how your deeper self already speaks to you.

As you peruse the “channel guide” below, consider:

• How do I most commonly experience inner guidance? Which channel is strongest?

• Where might I be receiving signals from the deeper self that I don’t yet recognize as guidance?

If you are just beginning to work with inner guidance, focus on becoming familiar with the most common ways it comes to you. (For some it is easier to see guidance in action around major decisions; for others, it shows up most readily on mundane questions.) If you are more experienced, reflect on which channels you might be neglecting.

Be open to guidance, and you’ll start noticing it. Broaden your view of how guidance can appear and you may start finding it everywhere.

A “channel guide” to guidance

There is no master list of all the ways that we can experience guidance. Here’s our working map.

It reflects both our personal experiences and what we’ve witnessed in working with others. It’s illustrative, not exhaustive, and some of the channels overlap. That simply reflects reality.

Most importantly, your guidance may not neatly fit our map. If so, use this primer to sharpen your own sensing. Trust your experience over our categories (or, as our friends in the birding community say, trust the bird over the guidebook!).

Cognitive channel

Intuitive knowing that is immediate, clear, and unarguable—“I just know”; sudden synthesis that fosters breakthrough insight; “cutting through” to the essence of an issue or question; flashes of insight.

Somatic channel

Body-based knowing—gut feelings or belly wisdom; “felt-sense” knowing; bodily reactions that signal yes or no, attraction or repulsion; sense of rightness, relaxation, or flow; tingle or charge when something “rings true”; energy or aliveness when deeply drawn toward something; things you feel moved to do.

Affective channel

Emotion that expresses a deeper knowing—noticeable mood shifts such as a flattening of happiness, a wave of peace or joy, or a surge of worry or concern; powerful emotions such as grief, love, anger, loss, or awe; an alarm bell in the heart; a joyful sense of heart-based connection; the heart opening, expanding, glowing, becoming clearer; feeling deeply at home.

Auditory channel

Guidance experienced as a voice—words or phrases that may be directives, questions, answers, or cryptic statements; internal or external locutions.

Imaginal channel

Inner sight; spontaneous images in the mind’s eye; visual metaphors (red/yellow/green stoplight); powerfully charged symbols or archetypal motifs; dreams; hypnagogic or hypnopompic fragments; visions of your future self.

Noetic channel

Direct knowing of deeper truths, often ineffable; spontaneous mystical experience; “downloads” from a transpersonal source; communication with non-material persons or beings; experiences of unity.

Relational-resonance channel

Sense of deep attunement with another; guidance as synchrony or dissonance in connection—“this is my tribe” or “I don’t belong here”; experiences of knowing arising from the social field.

Pattern-recognition channel

Synchronicity; an uncanny sense that “the time is now” or that everything is falling into place; sudden seeing of how events have led to just this moment; repeated experiences that suggest something deeper is afoot; sense of having been called to a particular place.

Multi-channel communication

Our innermost self will often use multiple channels to communicate with us, particularly regarding longer-term or more systemic matters. For example, if we are approaching a major life transition or have a health condition that needs attention, we might experience recurring signals through spontaneous imagery, shifts in our energy or focus, unexpected waves of emotion, dreams, and more.

If you find yourself noticing related signals appearing regularly over time, take a step back and reflect on what they might be telling you.

Guidance through engagement

A common misconception about guidance is that it has to come from within or it’s not “my” inner knowing (the phrase “inner knowing” itself probably contributes to this). But sometimes guidance isn’t a message we receive. It’s something that emerges when we are in relationship and open to learning, in the ongoing conversation between ourselves, others, and the world.

For example, think of the times when you’ve had an aha! by virtue of something you’ve just heard or read; when something you encounter in nature—a tree, stone, or running water—speaks to a deeper part of you; when the energy shifts and a deeper space suddenly opens in conversation, everyone feeling we’re on the verge of something important here; or when actions you take or events you experience trigger a sudden, crystalline clarity about what you need (or don’t need) now.

These are not accidental or incidental experiences. They show us that a deeper organizing intelligence, however we conceive it, is present not just inside us but flowing in and through all our relationships with the human and more-than-human world.

Guidance can go unnoticed

Earlier I noted that sometimes we are guided but don’t recognize it at the time. This probably happens more often than we realize, but sometimes we have the good fortune to see at least part of the larger pattern.

For example, earlier in our lives, my wife Sara and I were looking for an integrative medicine doctor with very specialized expertise to advise on a health matter. We weren’t even sure such a person existed and were having no luck in finding them. Then a friend unaware of our search offered Sara a book on healing, which she took to honor her friend’s generosity, without expecting to gain much from it. Yet the book led to a website, which led to a YouTube video, which led to exactly the person we were seeking. Our prayers had been answered—but only in hindsight could we see the breadcrumb trail.

A skeptic might say we are projecting the story of being guided on a random series of events. Perhaps, but I choose to learn something else from the experience: being present in each moment, as fully as possible, to the potential magic in each interaction. Who knows where an angel might appear next?

One practical next step

Discovering how your inner guidance system functions in everyday life is the best way to develop a relationship with it—and that begins with understanding the channels through which guidance tends to communicate with you.

You only have to begin noticing those channels. For a few days, try this simple practice:

• Assume your deeper self knows how to reach you—and give it permission to do so.

• Name your question or concern clearly—and stay open to guidance outside your frame.

• Keep a small part of your attention tuned for the quiet whispers, gut feelings, and inner signals that reflect a deeper knowing.

• Capture these messages (through a written note, voice memo, or other means) and revisit soon.

If you are already familiar with how your deeper self (or Source) communicates with you, consciously monitor one or more channels that are less familiar.

And before you go, ask yourself this: What is your guidance telling you right now—and how is it showing up for you?

As always, please share your stories, questions, and comments.

A concise summary of this post is available as a free PDF download here.

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I want to describe my perspective on soul’s knowing more fully.

Not because I think my view is the view, nor because I’m seeking agreement. I simply want you to know where I’m coming from. The better you understand my assumptions, the deeper our inquiry together can go.

For me, these perspectives are not abstract ideas. They are working hypotheses that have emerged from the laboratory of my own life, work, and study. They are grounded in experience and provide touchstones for practice. My own understanding of them is continually evolving. The process of writing for this Substack has already helped me sharpen a few key concepts in significant ways.

I hope your thoughts in response to this post will foster further insights. Please challenge me, ask questions, or share your own experience and views!

Why the word soul matters

Recently I mentioned to a friend who is a practicing Buddhist that I had launched a Substack on soul’s knowing. His immediate response was, “I don’t believe in the soul.” We didn’t pursue the question at the time, but his comment stayed with me. Why do I call it soul’s knowing?

For I do use the word soul intentionally. Not to promote a particular metaphysical position, nor to be poetic or trendy, but to highlight a point I consider fundamental.

When I talk about soul, I am talking about our individuality, our uniqueness, and our essence. Each person is irreducibly unique and miraculously alive, not a replaceable unit in a cosmic machine. Soul connotes the singular self who is here to love, to learn, to create, and to contribute in ways no one else can. (If soul still doesn’t work for you, substitute your word for the unique and precious nature of each human life.)

At this time, this matters—for each of us personally and all of us collectively. The forces that reduce persons to economic units, data profiles, and social roles are real. And unbridled individualism is corrosive. The language of soul helps us affirm both the intrinsic worth and dignity of each person and the call to right relationship and collective well-being.

Soul is my shorthand for the sacred self that walks that path, and soul’s knowing is what guides us on the journey.

Nine touchstones regarding soul’s knowing

Here’s a roadmap for those who like to have a sense of what’s coming. The first four touchstones describe what soul’s knowing is and how it arrives. The next two describe how it matures over time. The final three describe what it asks of us—and why it matters.

1. Soul’s knowing is our lived experience of an intrinsic inner guidance system.

Each of us is blessed with an inner guidance system that orients us toward truth, healing, wholeness, integrity, and right relationship. Soul’s knowing is our experience of that guidance system at work—and our recognition of the guidance it provides.

2. Soul’s knowing illuminates what is most deeply true and right for us now.

Soul’s knowing illuminates what is right, healthy, healing, and true for us in any given moment. It highlights the choices and actions that foster soul growth—not worldly success—guiding each of us toward the life only we can author. It is not fantasy, wish-fulfillment, the voice of the superego, any “should,” or the part of us that wants certainty so it can avoid risk.

3. The guidance it offers is personal and precise, not generic inspiration.

The guidance we receive through soul’s knowing is personal and precise. Soul’s knowing is not a generic “inner voice” delivering one-size-fits-all wisdom. It doesn’t serve up platitudes. It’s exquisitely tuned for each of us with our unique histories, callings, character, gifts and wounds, life circumstances, and needs. It will often challenge us.

4. Soul’s knowing arrives through many channels—sometimes in stereo.

Soul’s knowing can reach us in many different ways. For some, it arrives as quiet clarity or a deeply felt knowing. For others, it’s a bodily sense of yes or no. It may arrive as a dream, a persistent inner calling, a holy unease. Sometimes it’s multi-modal—a softening of the heart, a symbol, a sense of direction—arising together. If you’re looking for a clear signal, it helps to know the channels your inner guidance system uses most often: body, dream, meditation, nature, conversation, intuition, rest, or many others.

Here’s an example of what I mean by soul’s knowing arriving through different channels—being multi-modal. During a time of transition when my priorities were shifting, I was invited to co-lead a new project that was both important and interesting. There were good reasons to commit: I liked and trusted my potential partner, the project would break new ground and require us to be co-creative, it had great long-term potential. Yet as I contemplated saying yes, something in me stirred uneasily. That night I dreamed about getting dressed for a concert; in the dream, I couldn’t find my shoes, so wore others, even though they didn’t fit. I shared all this with a trusted friend the next day. She asked the obvious question: “Whose shoes are you trying to fill by saying yes?” My body relaxed at the immediate realization: this opportunity was inconsistent with my new priorities and deeper knowing about the direction I needed to go. The body’s unease, my dream, a conversation—all contributed to the moment of soul’s knowing. I was left with a harder but cleaner conversation to have.

5. Knowing now and coming to know are two different modalities.

Knowing now is the gift of guidance as it shows up in the moment. Coming to know is the process by which we are led step-by-step to greater clarity about deeper or more complex questions and the critical choices in our lives. And sometimes the experience is neither—it’s silence, when the old map is failing, the new map hasn’t formed, and the most skillful move is to stay honest, attentive, and unrushed. Discernment, humility, and courage are the keys to deepening our relationship with soul’s knowing.

6. As we strengthen our connection, the ego’s control lessens and guidance becomes more integral.

The more regularly we turn to and trust our soul’s knowing, the more it becomes the central organizing principle in our lives. Over time, our relationship to it evolves. In nonlinear and cyclical ways, we move from occasional experiences of guidance to engaging our inner knowing more consistently, and then from integrating soul’s knowing to emptying ourselves and surrendering ego ever more fully. This is not the dissolution of individuality; it is the revelation of our “original nature” and its unique expression in and through us.

7. Soul’s knowing encourages integrity with our innermost truth, not self-optimization on the ego’s terms.

Soul’s knowing offers a life path, not a life hack. It calls us to live in integrity with a deeper truth. It’s not primarily about optimizing our life, being more successful, feeling better, or even being “authentic” in the modern self-branding sense. True guidance often challenges us to take risks, sacrifice, or be willing to let go of roles or identities that no longer fit the person we are becoming. It invites us to deeper relationship with people, with place, with the living world, with the sacred—and often asks us to take responsibility rather than escape it. And yes, sometimes the message we receive is to step back or withdraw. Not to evade accountability, but to set healthy boundaries, protect a wound, or re-establish an honest relationship with ourselves.

8. Soul’s knowing guides us toward the life that is truly ours to give, not the life charted for us by others.

Every person bears a vocation of becoming—and the function of soul’s knowing is to illuminate, step by step, the life that our innermost self seeks to live. Not the life our parents expected. Not the life the culture rewards or our peers strive for. Not the life we settle for because we’re afraid of disappointing others or of experiencing our own inner nobility and greatness. And when we begin to organize our lives around coherence rather than comfort, around fidelity more than fear, we become less governable by the usual levers: approval, fear, status, scarcity, shame, loyalty, obligation, responsibility. This does not mean being less accountable or immune to feedback, but our center of gravity—where we find meaning and value—shifts.

9. Our inner authority is sacrosanct—and must continually be tested.

No outer authority automatically outranks our direct knowing. This has two corollaries. One is that we be conscious of how we choose to live our inner truth in a world that may not welcome it. The second is that we continually test our knowing, to avoid self-delusion.

A brief story to illustrate this. A little more than a decade ago, I was invited to lead a new organization. All the ordinary signals were green, and part of me was ready to say yes immediately. Yet I distrusted my own eagerness: was this the right next step—or was I being led by ego and ambition? I slowed down, teased apart the inner dynamics at play, and consulted three people who knew me well and could be lovingly objective. After meeting with the other principals involved, I saw that the role would lead me down paths I no longer wanted to take. My initial yes became a clear, quiet no. I felt grateful, grounded, and surprisingly relieved, even though I was turning down a great opportunity. From one perspective this was ordinary due diligence. From another, it was discernment: cutting through noise to hear the deeper signal.

That’s what I mean by testing inner guidance. I rely on four core practices:

• Cultivating personal discernment with objectivity and rigor, which includes becoming ever more familiar with all the parts that masquerade as guidance.

• Being with and listening to people who can skillfully inquire, gently challenge, and offer their own life wisdom as “soul friends”—anam cara, in the Celtic tradition.

• Judging the guidance I receive by its fruits: do I feel and act with more integrity, openness, clarity, peace, and caring—or do I feel dogmatic, self-righteous, superior, entitled, or comfortable in my certainty?

• Staying grounded in relationship with those I love, with the wider living world, and with what I experience as sacred.

All models are wrong

One of the maxims in my leadership development work—a field in which people love models—was:

All models are wrong, and some are useful.

I find the “map of the territory” I’ve sketched above to be useful, but your experience and assumptions may be different. So take what serves you and set aside the rest—or hold these ideas as hypotheses until you test them.

As I personally reflect on what might be “wrong” regarding these touchstones, I find myself wondering about the universality of my views. Can I prove that every human being has access to soul’s knowing and is blessed with an inner guidance system? No (although many spiritual traditions would agree). What I can say is that all my experience suggests there is a deep directionality in our nature. When we create the conditions for self-reflection and discernment—stillness, openness, honesty, insight, compassion, time, and the guidance of wise, experienced companions, among others—something in us reliably re-orients toward truth, integrity, and care. Something in us awakens; something begins to grow, to ripen, to flower. In reality, of course, access to those conditions is uneven. Conditioning, wounding, culture, and chronic stress can occlude the signal, and what we experience as “guidance” can be contaminated by fear, self-protective mechanisms, and identity needs. Still, I am very reluctant to say that some people do not have access to soul’s knowing.

Our understanding, our practice, and our experience co-evolve. Deepening any one of these axes will enrich and influence the others. Sometimes the most useful model is the one we outgrow. Ultimately, our aim is the transformation of our lives and being.

An invitation

Which of these nine touchstones resonates most with you—and why? Which one(s) do you resist or doubt?

And what hard-earned perspectives on “living in harmony with your innermost truth” would you offer?

I’d love to know your thoughts.

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I was raised in the Roman Catholic tradition and always delighted in the Feast of the Epiphany, which we celebrated on January 6 (though the exact date and even the meaning of the Epiphany vary for different Christian churches). What I didn’t realize then is that Epiphany is also a remarkably precise story about how guidance works—especially when it asks us to risk.

In the story we were told, three Magi (or “wise men”) from the East were guided by a star to Bethlehem, where they presented gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the infant Jesus. This is the story celebrated in Nativity scenes around the world at Christmas time, and is considered the revelation of Christ to the Gentiles.

To me as a child, the Magi seemed like mysterious, exotic, and powerful figures committed to an uncertain, noble quest based only on trust in a strange star. Their journey was fraught with risk, yet they freely chose it. Why? They weren’t Jews and had nothing to gain. I loved the subversive beauty in their story.

As I grew older, I learned there was more to the story. The Magi’s journey was grounded in Old Testament prophecies about the birth of a new king of the Jews, who would be the Messiah. Seeing the star, they first went to Jerusalem—where they assumed a new king would be born—and there met with Herod, the despotic King of Judea who feared the new king would threaten his rule. Herod asked the Magi to find the child and then return with his location, so Herod could worship him, too. The star then reappeared and led the Magi to Bethlehem, where they found Jesus, bowed, and presented their gifts. The Magi were then warned in a dream that Herod planned to kill Jesus, so they returned home by a different route and avoided him.

With utmost respect for the Christian tradition, I want to reflect briefly on this story through a different lens. This is not to supplant the Christian meaning—Christ revealed to all peoples—but to explore a secondary gift of the text: how it reveals an archetypal pattern that many of us have experienced, Christian or not: a light that calls, a power that resists, and a path that changes us.

For today I find myself thinking about the Epiphany as a parable for the soul’s knowing.

Following our innermost star

In this context, we can think of soul’s knowing as the guidance faculty of our innermost self. It is our recognition of what is right, healthy, healing, or true for us, in the deepest sense, at any given time. This guidance can manifest in many ways and is always available, once we learn how to open to and embrace it.

What strikes me about the Epiphany story is that it elegantly dramatizes several aspects of how guidance and the soul’s knowing actually manifest in our lives. I’ll focus on seven here: attraction, unexpected channels, direction, partial knowing, apparent darkness, discernment, and course correction.

The divine light draws us toward it

Both in the Christian tradition and from a broader contemplative perspective, the Epiphany story is fundamentally about the divine light incarnate and our soul’s recognition of it. The radical Christian claim is that God makes the first move. A signal in the world meets a readiness in our soul and we respond. Our deep hunger for connection with our divine Source takes on direction. The soul’s knowing is not a function of effort, but attraction: the divine light draws us toward it. Our Yes was quietly waiting within us.

(If the language of “divine light” does not resonate with you, please use your own: truth, love, conscience, the deepest good, or simply Source. However we name it, there is a higher force at work in and through us that transforms us when it touches us.)

Guidance can arrive through unexpected channels

Even when the call is unmistakable, the way it reaches us can be surprising. Sometimes guidance comes through the body; sometimes through a dream; sometimes through an image in the mind’s eye, a line of music, a stranger’s story, or an experience in nature that lands with unusual force. The Epiphany features a star and a dream—outer sign and inner knowing—side by side. This reminds me to stay open: while each of us has ways we are accustomed to receiving guidance, it may also appear in unusual, unlooked-for ways.

What guidance might be offered to you now, in a form you don’t recognize?

Guidance comes as a sense of direction, not an answer

As a friend of mine put it, the Epiphany is a story of “revelation-as-navigation, not revelation-as-download.” Yes, we can pose questions and turn to our deeper self for answers—that’s an important, everyday practice. But sometimes the guidance on which our lives will turn does not come in answer to a question, but as a deeply felt sense of being called or nudged in a particular direction. It provides a bearing for our journey—toward an area of interest, a place, or an aspect of our life that has been untended.

One example. In my early thirties, I felt an inexplicable pull to work with people who are dying. It puzzled me. No one in my life at that time was near death, and nothing in my work took me into that context. I ignored the pull for some time, but it was persistent. So when I had an opportunity to attend a training, I took it. The course was powerful, helping prepare me for deaths among family and friends that would follow. Reason enough for the guidance, perhaps—but the truly fateful outcome of that decision was meeting my wife Sara in the training! By taking a single step in the direction I felt called, my entire life changed course dramatically.

What might guidance be inviting you to explore, without your knowing why?

We know the next step, but do not see precisely where it will lead

Guidance is always calibrated precisely to where we are now and usually illuminates only the next right step. We are not given full knowledge of what lies ahead or what the next step will reveal. As with any GPS, our inner guidance constantly updates in real-time as our lives unfold, as we walk the path we are being shown. The path we are co-creating as we walk it. In my view, this is not because our ability to know is limited—although it is, in numerous ways—it is because we live in a participatory reality that is shaped by our choices. At almost every turning point in my life, and in virtually all relationships where sensitive matters are at stake, I only ever receive guidance concerning what’s next: have this one conversation or explore this opportunity or simply say no. We learn something with each step that may completely alter any plan. This is unsettling if we seek control. It is enormously empowering if we trust in the ground of our being and live with both fidelity to our knowing and humility in our not-knowing.

Is there a step you are called to take but feel hesitant about, not knowing precisely where it will lead?

The light does not desert us

Our assumptions will often color how we interpret the guidance we receive. How could they not? When the Magi first saw the star that inspired their journey, they recognized it as a sign but assumed the new king would be born in Jerusalem. Traveling there, they met Herod, whose scribes revealed that the child would be born in Bethlehem. The star then moved again, guiding the Magi to the exact place Jesus had been born. How often do we start with clarity about our goal and then find ourselves stuck? Sometimes the light we have been following fades; the way ahead is dark; and all our efforts to see the way forward fail. The world feels flat, as if the music has gone quiet; perhaps we lose faith or feel abandoned. Yet what if our being stuck is a necessary part of the process, so we slow down and pay attention at a deeper level? What if the darkness is protection, as something else is taking shape in us? What I’ve learned in these times is not to push for guidance but to relax, to not rush, to dedicate myself to small daily forms of integrity and faith. A journaling practice. Walks outside. Quiet conversations with Sara. Kindness toward those I meet in passing. And when I’m not seeking it, the light returns.

What if being lost is exactly where you are supposed to be now?

Discernment tests identity

The moment a true call appears, something in us wakens or shifts—and something in us is threatened. Herod is the archetype of threatened power: the part that cannot bear a light it doesn’t control. Discernment requires that we recognize the call and the voices that speak in the language of prudence, respectability, fear, or “common sense” to distract us. (My “inner Herod” always sounds quite rational; he is simply terrified of leaving the house and risking exposure.)

The sacred is not contained by our maps, and guidance is not correlated with status: it comes to those who are ready to receive it. In Matthew’s telling, the first ones to recognize the sign are outsiders. That’s telling—and also diagnostic. One of the most reliable signatures of guidance is that it draws us beyond the identities we’ve been inhabiting. It asks us to risk leaving the known world and to free ourselves of unconscious loyalty to role, reputation, tribe, or self-concept. But it doesn’t just clarify. It re-routes.

Where and how are you being asked to examine your relationship to something that has defined you?

Following our own star means changing direction

If we are faithful to the light we are given, our path may be quite different than we ever imagined. Being warned in a dream that Herod intended to kill Jesus, the Magi changed their plans and returned home by a different route. This is not just an interesting twist in the story. It’s exactly what happens when we embrace our soul’s knowing. When we translate guidance into action, with courage. When we refuse to let ourselves be sidelined by fear or seduced by the voices that would keep us on the path we know—and co-opt our guidance for their own purposes. We find ourselves taking a new direction, establishing a new boundary, embracing a harder truth—even if taking our own path means disappointing someone we respect or being misunderstood. Slowly we learn to live with the ache. Step by step, the old voices fade as we grow freer.

To reach home safely

Perhaps it is fitting to end this post with both a prayer and a provocation.

First the prayer.

May you let yourself be drawn by the divine light within you. 
May you trust that a direction may appear before you know the destination. 
May you let yourself be guided step by step, and have faith when the light grows dim. 
May your discernment be keen, to protect what is holy. 
And may you reach home safely.

And now the provocation: What might have to change in your life if you stopped negotiating with Herod and started following the star?

Write down one “star” of knowing that has appeared to you recently—and a “Herod sentence” that tries to dissuade you from following it. Then name one small action you can take in the next 24 hours that aligns with the star.

Blessings and peace.

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Soul's Knowing Resource: Guidance For The New Year

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A reflective exercise for the turning of the year, designed to help you sense the deeper currents in your life.

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At the end of each year, I find a quiet time alone to reflect on the year past and the year to come. That’s not unusual—but I don’t end the process with resolutions that have no roots, that will be carried away by the river of responsibilities that demand attention, day after day.

I’m listening for the “river within the river”—for both the deeper currents of soul-life seeking expression and what it’s time to let go.

The outcome, for me, is more clarity about where I am in my life and relationships—and a deeply felt sense of where I want to grow and what I want to nurture in the coming year. This takes the form of three to five “aims” (each just a few words) that I write down and keep visible. I revisit them regularly throughout the year and reflect on whether they still feel meaningful, how they’re showing up in my day-to-day priorities, and where I want to put more attention and energy.

These aims are not goals in the conventional sense. They’re guidance for the year to come. They’re orientations I’m being called to cultivate—guiding principles I’m being moved to embody. They’re not “shoulds.” They’re the wisdom of a deeper self, pointing me toward a richer life of meaning and contribution. For me, their focus is usually on what is emerging or what seeks sustained care, while holding in the background what is passing or complete.

A few examples, from years past:

• Deepen joy in everyday life with my beloved

• Let the land teach me how to live in place

• Shed the old skins and leave them where they fall

• Listen for the deeper call

These won’t have the same richness or meaning for you as they did for me. I share them for three reasons. First, to show how simple, clear, and sometimes poetic the guidance can be. Second, to point out that each of these can be embodied in many different ways—and should be, if it’s to become an integral part of your life. And finally, to highlight something important: the soul’s guidance is often calling us toward how to be as much as—or more than—what to do.

I’ve outlined the exercise I do below. Fair warning: when we really open to our inner knowing, we may hear something that invites commitment and change, not just an aspiration that makes us feel better. That’s how I know I’ve touched something real.

(If you don’t resonate with the word “aims” or the language of “soul,” please use words that have heart for you. That show the direction the deeper currents in your life are flowing. That express the knowing beneath the noise.)

A soul’s knowing practice for the turning of the year

I recommend setting aside at least 30 minutes for this practice. If insights come quickly for you, you may be done sooner; if you want to reflect in depth, take more time—perhaps even returning to the exercise a second time for a different layer of insight.

Prepare: Have a pen and paper available, or a digital notepad. Settle in a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted. Silence your phone.

Be present: Bring your attention to the present moment. Feel your body. Be aware of your breath. Gradually let your mind settle.

Where am I in my life right now? Start with the big picture and your feelings about it. Briefly bring to mind your entire life journey so far—and your expectations about what lies ahead. Note how you feel about where you are, what you have accomplished, what is unfinished. Capture key insights.

What were the major themes in my life over the past year? Remember your experience of the past year. Go month by month, recalling key events, important relationships, and high or low point experiences. Then use these touch-points to ask yourself: What was this year really about? What were the deeper currents that ran through it? What did I learn and who am I becoming? Reflect on the overall flow and feel in different parts of your life—work, family, health, friends and community, creative activities, your inner life. Make a few notes.

What are the few key areas of focus for me in the year to come, from a soul perspective? With an open mind and open heart, simply notice what arises. Write down key phrases without editing or analyzing. Make a note of any strong feelings, body sensations, images, or intuitions. Sit in silence with the question for a few minutes, waiting to see what else might emerge. Let your listening draw forth the quietest inner voice.

When you feel complete, continue.

What is the essence of the year to come? While staying reflective, distill your notes into a short list of three to five aims or orientations that reflect both the substance and the feeling of what emerged. Use language that feels true to the place the guidance came from; be careful not to turn this into a list of goals or tasks.

Conscious of your earlier reflections—where you are in your life and what the major themes of the past year were—ask yourself:

• Does this guidance feel quietly, deeply true?

• Does it feel like my future drawing me forward?

• Can I whole-heartedly say Yes?

Let yourself steep in the rightness of what you have written before you decide what to do with it—and be kind to yourself as you embrace what it asks of you.

Refine and review: Sleep on it. Review your aims and finalize them. Print them so you can see them every day, and keep them accessible in digital form as well. Read and reflect on them regularly.

I welcome your reflections in the comments. If you do try this practice, consider choosing one small, concrete way you’ll honor at least one of your aims in the next week—something modest, but real.

And if you have other practices you find useful at this turning of the year, please share them.

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In this post, Angeles Arrien and I continue exploring her experience and understanding of the soul’s knowing (see Part One here). In these excerpts from our 2005 conversations, she describes the role of symbols and synchronicity, how archetypal patterns shape character, and destiny as the long arc of many smaller callings. Angeles also speaks passionately about keeping her message sacred, in passages particularly relevant for our time.

Angeles was a brilliant cultural anthropologist and beloved author whose books included The Four-Fold Way, The Tarot Handbook, The Second Half of Life, and Signs of Life.

Soul moves first, the culture follows

Following the “Woo!”

Tom: Angeles, you mentioned being asked to write a book about Tarot. How did that opportunity arise?

Angeles: I got into Tarot when I wrote a paper on the psychology of superstition while at UC Berkeley. Just as I was completing it, I saw that the great Egyptologist Wallis Budge was featured in an exhibit at the university. I went and was looking at one of his old books when something fell out of it. I thought it was a bookmark, but then saw that it was covered with odd symbols—Oriental, medieval, Greek, Egyptian. I didn’t recognize them. So I took it to the librarian and said, “This is an amazing bookmark. Do you know what the symbols mean?” She said, “That’s not a bookmark. It’s a Tarot card.” Then she tore it up and threw it away.

Tom: What moved you to learn more? This was an odd card that had fallen out of an old book.

Angeles: Again, something in me went “Woo!” when she threw that card in the wastepaper basket. So I started reading about Tarot and was dismayed by what I found. Most people felt it was fortune-telling, but I saw its origin as a book of wisdom. So I went out on a limb, and was way ahead of my time, when I got Tarot accredited at the California Institute of Integral Studies and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.

Tom: This was before Joseph Campbell’s work became popular. He helped us understand myths and symbols as languages for bridging the interior and external worlds.

Angeles: Right. I found it all very interesting, but some considered it the work of the devil. My book was actually banned in a couple states.

Tom: You were touching a nerve. How has it fared over time?

Angeles: It’s still in print and has sold really well. In 2005, of course, yoga, meditation, and Tarot are nearly mainstream topics. But for me, in the beginning, it was simply the soul’s knowing saying, “Study these symbols.” Like stories in the clouds, I saw that there were stories in symbols, things that were concealed and revealed simultaneously.

Symbols are the soul’s language

Initiation and deliverance

Tom: Symbols lead us into a deep, interior landscape that I’ve always found both meaningful and mysterious. Is there a dimension of soul’s knowing that helps us find our way in the world of symbols, toward what has the greatest heart and meaning for us?

Angeles: Yes! Symbols are the soul’s language. They often get our attention through synchronicity. I also think that persistent images are sometimes messages from the soul saying we need to pay more attention to something. I’m thinking of repetitive dreams, recurring images, symbols that stay with us for a decade.

Tom: Do they point toward potentials yet to be realized? Work at a soul level yet to be done?

Angeles: I have come to believe that what the personality resists, persists in the soul’s imagery.

Tom: So where the personality is rigid or fixed, so the soul can’t grow, we’ll have these persistent images coming up?

Angeles: Yes. I think that’s true. For example, in the last decade, during the time I was working on my book The Second Half of Life, I’ve had images of hands and feet arising. In my dreams, in daydreams, and in the outer world. An unexpected hand would come in front of me, or suddenly I’d be looking at someone’s feet. Children’s hands and feet, elders’ hands and feet. Now symbolically these are initiatory aspects of the body—and they came to me when I was deepening into surrender and acceptance, both expanding and deepening at the same time. That process felt in part like an initiation, but even more almost like being delivered—as if brought forth into a new life. Sometimes, I think, symbols and myths are mechanisms of deliverance.

Let me give you another example. I was working with a student who’s a very competent woman in the professional world. Her inner imagery was filled with flowers. She kept telling me, “I constantly dream about incredible fields with wildflowers. Poppies are blooming. I smell the herbs.” So I asked her if she gardened. When she said no, I suggested it might help her relax. So she started gardening and soon created a wildflower-and-herb garden that is just unbelievably beautiful. The dream images delivered her into the deep feminine, so now she’s a much more grounded person. Her work in the world isn’t quite so obsessive. The flowers as symbols led to a humble soul’s knowing that she’d hit a ceiling and it was time to grow.

Tom: You’re also implying something important. When we work with these inner images, we’re inviting the soul to grow without knowing where it will take us.

Angeles: That’s right. It reminds me of John O’Donohue’s poem “Fluent.” He writes:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I would love to live 
Like a river flows, 
Carried by the surprise 
Of its own unfolding.

Angeles: And that too is the soul’s knowing.

Tom: The beautiful mystery at its heart.

Learning to pay attention and trust

Always something bigger afoot

Tom: Part of what strikes me in your stories about the soul’s knowing is that sometimes it speaks to us from within—in images or dreams—and sometimes it takes the form of a stranger who hands you a UC Berkeley catalog on the steps of the Sorbonne.

Angeles: Who wouldn’t go away until he found out exactly what I was thinking.

Tom: Like the herald or the helper in a hero’s journey, inviting you to adventure.

Angeles: And the Tarot card being torn up, opening another stage in the journey. That was a simple act on the librarian’s part, but I had such a strong reaction to it! I’ve often wondered why. So, yes, it’s interesting how different outer events catalyze the soul’s growth. People come into our lives all of a sudden, have a deep connection, and then are gone—but the whole process facilitated mutual growth that couldn’t have been done any other way.

Tom: Something else I sense in your stories is the importance of rhythm and timing, as if there is a larger pattern or flow to our life’s unfolding. Perhaps one of our soul tasks is to recognize when a phase is ending and when we’re being called into something new.

Angeles: I’ve experienced it both ways. When I map the inner and outer events of my life by decades, I always feel there’s something bigger afoot. I also think there’s an important stranger that enters my life every decade. Somehow this gives me comfort about what lies ahead. If I just stay in touch with that deeper flow, I’ll be protected. I’ll be taken care of.

Tom: Have you ever felt you’ve gone astray?

Angeles: Trusting my soul’s knowing has never led me astray. It has never led me into things that create shame or self-diminishment. In fact, the only times that I’ve felt self-diminished were the times when I haven’t listened, as we talked about earlier. When I confused emotional intensity with the sound of the heart’s fountain. It can be hard to distinguish between the two, to know when the heart’s aligned and when it’s not.

Tom: The souls’ knowing is always present. The question is, do we listen? If we’re not attuned, it keeps sending signals in the form of images or dreams or body symptoms...

Angeles: ...or an actual person...

Tom: ...and it will keep doing this throughout our lives until we do listen. Or something will happen that gets our attention in a big way—an accident, illness, or job loss.

Angeles: Sometimes we’re tackled so we have to stay in one place. We break our legs or get seriously ill, so we take time to reflect. We lose our job and think about what we really want to do. If we use these events as a wake-up call, they can provide us with such enormous blessings that later we look back with gratitude.

Keep ego in the passenger seat

The message is sacred

Tom: How do you keep your ego out of the way?

Angeles: I always go into the passenger seat. There’s no way I’m going to let the ego drive because it will ultimately be a very narrow, uninteresting, and unsatisfying experience. I’m a co-partner, an adventurer and explorer, but I’m not in the driver’s seat.

Tom: There’s magic and mystery when you live this way.

Angeles: And wonder, as in “I wonder what’s going to happen next.”

Tom: Do you believe that if we do listen to and let ourselves be guided by the soul’s knowing, that everything will unfold smoothly? Or will we still experience challenges?

Angeles: There will always be challenges. The soul is always more committed to growing than to comfort. In hindsight, I can see how much of my life at any given stage has been preparation for the next thing. So even though it might seem weird now, it will make sense later. But I’ve had many more blessings than great challenges. They don’t come from my desire or will, they arise because of my deep commitment to faith. They come from my connection to a greater force, that best friend to whom I’m never disloyal on a conscious level. They’re usually a call to service and often carry a particular message or invitation. And I think “Really? How do I step into that?”

Tom: Maslow suggested that sometimes we fear our highest potential even more than failure. If true, this could affect our embrace of the soul’s knowing. Did you ever experience that, or is it different for you?

Angeles: I do not want to be famous. I don’t fear success or failure. I have a greater fear of becoming the focus. The message should be the focus. The work is service. I want to be under the radar.

Tom: So you’re not out there hawking your book, seeking celebrity.

Angeles: The books will do whatever they’re going to do.

Tom: What is your soul’s knowing about fame?

Angeles: My soul’s knowing is that these blessings come to serve something larger than the personality. A greater good. So I stay away from anything that’s celebrity-oriented, because that’s all about the personality. The message is more important than who Angeles Arrien is or is not.

Star status desacralizes something really significant—at least for me. There are others for whom that’s part of their destiny.

I won’t let material like the Four-Fold Way be co-opted into the media machine. The perennial wisdoms are soul-driven. Poetry, symbols, mythology, and the archetypes are soul-driven. They come to create a common good.

So when the blessings come, great discernment must come, too.

Archetypes as the crucible for soul’s knowing

Soul embodied in wisdom, joy, and compassion

Tom: Since you mentioned the Four-Fold Way, what relationship do archetypes like the warrior, teacher, healer, or visionary have to the soul’s knowing?

Angeles: The archetypes are the soul’s crucible. They’re like soul pathways we explore.

Tom: When you say “crucibles”—do you mean they create the conditions that help us develop certain capacities related to soul’s knowing?

Angeles: Yes. At one level, it’s simply about character development. But we might also talk about the authentic voice, or truth telling, or living with heart.

Tom: Perennial virtues associated with integrity.

Angeles: Yes. The archetypes can be seen as pathways for expressing certain universal human capacities. Every culture in the world has laws, practices for healing, ways of learning, the creative arts, sports—these are archetypes through which people express the soul’s knowing. I wrote The Four-Fold Way so people could work with archetypes like the warrior, healer, teacher, and visionary in conscious ways. When we do that, we grow and it moves the collective intelligence.

Tom: I’m starting to see that a different kind of presence takes root in us if we follow our soul’s knowing consistently. A subtle quality infuses our whole being, transforms our character. This is very different than living in egoic consciousness and occasionally checking in with our intuition for guidance.

Angeles: It’s very different. I think the word infusion is exactly right. It’s as if something comes into the physical structures of our body where our intrinsic soul qualities are rooted. Soul becomes embodied. It’s seen in presence, in wisdom, in joy, in compassion. But I like the word infusion a lot because it speaks of our being filled.

Tom: We’re permeated by the greater force you speak of. So ultimately we see that it’s the totality of our life that is to be infused with the soul’s knowing.

Angeles: And that it’s not intermittent. Or conditional. Once we plug in and really trust, it’s not conditional on belief.

Tom: What do you consider the intrinsic soul virtues?

Angeles: Love, compassion, joy, charity, honesty, mutuality, collaboration. That’s the ultimate—collaboration with the mystical. If I don’t have that, then I’m not really creating anything bigger than the simple mutuality we find in transactional relationships.

Destiny and calling

Each of us is here for a purpose

Tom: How do you understand destiny in relation to all of this?

Angeles: Another word for destiny is calling. I’ve always been called, and I think the end result of many different callings is our destiny.

Tom: In my work, I’ve been surprised by how many people resist the idea of calling, perhaps because in a sense of responsibility comes with it.

Angeles: There’s a real resistance to destiny as well.

Tom: Some think of it as grandiose.

Angeles: Or see it as something associated with fate. Yet what’s true is that destiny and death are our two lifelong companions. Each of us is here for a purpose, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. Even so-called identical twins are unique. Each of us is a grand creation that the mystery wants to partner with.

Tom: Each unique and yet mysteriously interconnected in ways that continually surprise us. Usually we only see the connections in retrospect.

Angeles: I agree with you. Many people use phrases like “critical mass” and “tipping point” to talk about this interconnectedness. These are real phenomena and these concepts help us become conscious of our interdependence and relatedness. But there’s no way in my journey, listening to my soul’s guidance, that I could have appreciated how all the people, conversations, organizations, and cultures were connected.

Honoring soul assignments

We are all called to be where we are

Tom: Do you think there are experiences of the soul’s knowing at an interpersonal, group, or collective level?

Angeles: There is a soul’s knowing that places me in a group, so I somehow contribute to the collective intelligence. So I’m always interested to see where I’m being called—and when I am called, I make sure I show up because I know there’s a reason I’m being called. I show up, learn, and share.

Tom: Knowing everyone was called there in some way.

Angeles: Yes, but maybe for different agendas. If you’re really going as a soul’s assignment, you show up differently. You listen and share differently because it’s a soul assignment. It’s not a power assignment, not a status assignment, not a political assignment, not a strategic assignment.

Tom: We’re talking about an entirely different way of moving through life, attending to things on a more subtle level, while not getting trapped—for too long, anyway—in…

Angeles: All the other stuff?

Tom: Exactly. The full catastrophe, as Zorba the Greek put it.

Angeles: We waste so much time in all the dynamics of power, status, politics, and strategy. We can shift this. Even if just five people in a large group are there because of the soul’s calling, they can affect it very quickly. It’s harder to do if you’re the only one, but I believe that, at a deeper level, all people are called, though most are not conscious of it. At some deep level, beyond the ordinary stories about family, work, or culture, we’re all called to be where we are.

Tom: Because we have something unique to contribute. Yet there have also been times when I’ve shown up somewhere, ostensibly for one reason, and in the process of tuning in to the group I realize I no longer need to be on this path anymore. That’s a very liberating soul’s knowing moment!

Angeles: That’s exactly right. You are with a team, or an organization, and when you think about it afterward you realize they’re in a very different place than you are now. So you complete your commitment honorably and respectfully, but don’t prolong it.

Tom: Even if we don’t know what’s next. Trusting the soul’s knowing means we’re always on the knife edge of knowing and not knowing, simultaneously.

Angeles: That’s true. It’s a razor’s edge. I can just trust the next step.

Tom: Angeles, thank you so much for your time, stories, and wisdom.

Angeles: It has been wonderful. I’m so happy with what you’re doing. It’s such important work.

Tom: Thank you.

Reflections

I’m honored to share these stories and insights from Angeles. She touched the lives of countless people around the world through her books and teaching. To those who knew her well, she was a loyal and caring friend. The world lost a treasure when she died in 2014.

As in the first post, I find much here that still sparks reflection.

First, Angeles highlights the role of symbols in guiding us toward initiation and mediating deliverance—deep, mythic soul processes that unfold beneath the surface of our lives. For me, that mythic dimension is most easily sensed during major life transitions. Being in one now, I want to pay closer attention to the images and symbols that keep showing up—it’s one way I can lean into the mystery.

Second, having coached many people in life mapping as part of my leadership development work, I enjoyed hearing Angeles reflect on how each decade of her life brought an important stranger and new opportunities. Doing this exercise now at year’s end—and the older I get—the more I am coming to feel, like Angeles, that there’s something bigger afoot. “The end result of many different callings is our destiny,” she said. I find that oddly reassuring, and I wonder if some of you do, too.

Finally, I found Angeles’ commitment to keeping the work sacred particularly powerful. If turning away from celebrity was a challenge in 2005, it is far more so today—and the sacred is far more easily and widely commodified. How do we practice guardianship of the sacred today, both personally and collectively?

Let me offer these questions for reflection. If you’re so moved, share your thoughts in the comments:

• What “soul assignments” are you engaged in now? Where are you still called—and which might be complete?

• When you look back at your life, how do you see guidance appearing in different decades—through inner or outer experience? How is your soul’s knowing reflected at different stages?

• What images or symbols are showing up regularly in your life now? What does your intuition suggest they might be telling you?

Thank you and blessings.

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How do you experience the soul’s knowing in your life? When has it shaped your own life choices? And what hard-earned wisdom would you offer on deepening our relationship with inner guidance?

These were the questions I explored with my friend and colleague Angeles Arrien in 2005. A brilliant cultural anthropologist, Angeles exemplified “walking the mystical path with practical feet” as described in her best-selling book The Four-Fold Way: Walking the Paths of the Warrior, Teacher, Healer, and Visionary.

This is the first of two posts featuring excerpts from our conversations. Here, he describes her lifelong personal connection with guidance, how she experiences the soul’s knowing, how “water” and “fire” figure in her knowing, times when she was drawn out of her comfort zone, and the power of seemingly chance encounters to change our lives.

Guidance is not separate from us

Belonging is the ground of knowing

Tom: Angeles, you’ve been one of the earliest supporters of my work with the soul’s knowing—the ever-present source of guidance within us. Thank you for that. It’s a really rich topic to explore with people.

Angeles: Because we all know it. The soul’s knowing is not something separate from us. We know when we’re connected and when we’re not.

Tom: What does the soul’s knowing mean to you?

Angeles: For me, guidance is embodied—and constant. I’ve always been connected to the soul’s knowing, ever since I was very little, and I’ve never lost that connection. It was a surprise to me as I got older that other people weren’t connected. I thought everybody had these kinds of experiences and trusted something really deep inside.

Tom: How did you experience that connection?

Angeles: I was always outdoors, so I often experienced it through my body and nature. That was part of the Basque mystical tradition, too. For us, life is a mystery and our connectedness is part of that.

Tom: I feel a kinship with that, given my Celtic heritage. Did you sense presence in the mystery?

Angeles: Yes. Totally. An unshakeable connection throughout my life. Even when I’ve gone through periods of what I call the wasteland, I’ve always felt that presence. I’ve never felt alone, never felt alienated, never felt isolated, never felt lonely. Because being connected is such a big part of what living is. So for me this presence has never been something separate. It’s more like having a best friend, a lifelong companion. I’m always talking to them, always listening to them.

Soul’s knowing begins in the “secret silent places”

Connecting with a deep interiority

Angeles: I thought other children had this connection, too. When I first came to this country, when I was seven years old, I knew American kids who talked to what we now call imaginary friends. I used to think, “Oh, they know.”

Tom: Do you think they felt connected to a higher source of guidance?

Angeles: I think they did until they were told that wasn’t something they should be doing. I think it was exactly the same for them. I also remember that we used to have these short periods to lay down, with our towels, to rest—except that I thought it was time to journey.

Tom: You didn’t get the memo!

Angeles: I thought it was great that everyone knew about the secret, silent places—until it didn’t continue. I had to learn that it was about rest, not journeying, and was only for the younger kids. It wasn’t about the secret, silent places. It wasn’t time for connecting with a deep interiority.

Tom: What was your experience of those secret, silent places when you were young? When you journeyed, where did you find yourself going?

Angeles: I had an interesting connection with clouds. I’d be on my back, in nature, and I would see things in the clouds. I often saw an angel, or birds, and I sometimes saw a funny little rabbit’s face. They were all part of stories the clouds told. They entertained me for hours. I had the same connection with stars at night.

Boundaries as guidance: “That’s not mine”

I always felt safe

Tom: What was most meaningful in these connections?

Angeles: I always felt safe. They gave me deep comfort and solace. I was never alone as long as I could see the clouds and I could see the stars. I learned to trust something I’d feel in my body—something that kept me from getting involved with friends who were in trouble. One friend in particular kept trying to draw me into an unhealthy situation, but I’d say “No, that’s not mine, that’s for you to work out.” I had that clarity very young.

Tom: So you felt both a deep connection and a clear sense of boundaries, through your body.

Angeles: In a deep, instinctual belly place that still signals when something’s not right—for example, when everyone in a group wants to move forward, but something tells me the timing’s not right. My instinct will often be borne out later. So from early days I’ve never let peer pressure sway me from my own knowing. This is true whether the topic is spirituality or politics or strategy—I’m not swayed because I’m listening to something else.

Tom: Many have a connection to their inner knowing but lose it when they feel a strong pull from others. For you, the knowing is a constant presence.

Angeles: Yes. It’s like a fountain. It’s always flowing. But that doesn’t mean I never lose contact. Sometimes, when I’ve been impetuous, when I get too excited or too lost in possibilities, I’ll suddenly realize I don’t hear the fountain. Then I know I went somewhere else. It’s water or fire for me, in my body.

Discernment through different centers

Fire in the belly and water in the heart

Tom: What do you mean when you say “water or fire”?

Angeles: I hear the fountain like running water. So I often think, “I’m in the river of things.” And I sometimes feel this gut fire of intuition, in the belly. I associate fire with the belly, and water with the heart.

Tom: Are they always aligned, in concert?

Angeles: That’s a good question. I know that I’m really susceptible in my heart, so I always check. And they always have been, except twice. Once my feelings for a particular individual got in the way of trusting the fire. The fire was saying, “No, no, no, no, no,” but I was so initially in love with this person that I let my feelings override the belly’s knowing. Now I don’t do that. I know I’m a heart person, especially with people I deeply love and care about, so now I always ask, “What’s the belly doing?”

Tom: Was the knowing in your heart out of synch with your belly, or was your emotional passion so intense it overrode your water wisdom? Maybe there are times we can experience the belly’s fire intelligence but not the heart’s water wisdom, because our emotions are so strong.

Angeles: That’s very true, and well said. What I’ve started to learn, maybe over the last twelve years now, is that I don’t hear the water when my feelings are too passionate. When I’m emotionally invested and don’t want someone I care about to be hurt, especially when I feel emotionally flooded, I have to check the belly first and then come back to listen for the water. Then, when I can hear the water in my heart, I’m in a more pure, aligned place.

Tom: When we try to control what’s going on, we lose contact with water wisdom and fire intelligence. They tend to be most clear when we’re not attached to outcomes.

Angeles: That’s right. One of the benefits of aging, for me, is that I’ve come to trust in something deeper and larger than the personality or ego consciousness. Something in me knows that as long as I stay connected, everything will be just fine. When I’m not, I know it within 24 hours, as with these two experiences I mentioned earlier. When I’m out of my center, it’s in my face.

The deeper Yes can be challenging

Can we talk?

Tom: You gave me an example of a time when your intuition said “No, this is not right.” Are there times when it says, “Yes, this is the way to go”?

Angeles: Oh, yes. And then my personality says, “You’ve got to be kidding. Can we talk?”

We laugh.

Tom: Can you give me an example?

Angeles: Two examples. First, when I was called to South Africa to do a program with Bishop Tutu for 300 youths. That was nowhere in my field of awareness or experience. But the intuition of my heart-listening said, “Yes, yes, yes” while my personality was saying, “What in the world do you know about South Africa?”

Second, with my books. Writing was the biggest surprise of my whole life. I’d never really been called to it, but different publishers would come to me and say, “Would you write on the Four-Fold Way?“ or “Would you do a book on the Tarot?” or “Can you say more about these five shapes you described in a keynote? Invitations to publish always came to me and at first I always said, “Nooo…”

Tom: Why? You’re an excellent writer. Your books are always very clear and accessible.

Angeles: Because I’m such an oral traditionalist! So the mind said “Nooo...” while inside me the deeper voice was saying, “Yes, we’re going to do this!”

Tom: Do you now have a sense of why you were called in that way?

Angeles: At the time, no. Now I think it was a way of teaching me that the message is more important than the messenger. That getting the material out where it could help other people was more important than my ideas about how the message should be shared. With books and tapes, I was reaching people I’d never know or even be aware of. I was just an instrument, for service.

When a herald comes with guidance

Opening one path after another

Tom: Do you believe there’s a greater intelligence at work?

Angeles: Absolutely. If you had told me in my early 30s that I would be doing all the things that I’m doing locally, nationally, and internationally, I would have said, “No way.” I thought I’d be married and have five children, in the Pyrenees or the Basque community in Idaho. Following the soul’s knowing has provided me with a greater life experience than I ever could have imagined. My dream for myself was so small compared to what has emerged.

Tom: Our friend Willis Harman says the same thing.

Angeles: For me, the turning point came at 29. I was sitting on the steps of the Sorbonne, daydreaming, when a young man came up and asked, “What are you thinking about?” I thought he was just trying to pick me up.

Angeles: I tried to brush him off, but he said, “No, I’m serious. Tell me what you were thinking.”

I said, “If you must know, I was thinking that if I ever did any more schooling”—because I’d just finished graduate school at the University of Madrid, in international diplomacy and languages—“it will have to be something international that combines art, music, psychology, philosophy, and religion.”

He said, “I know what that is.” Then he reached in his backpack and pulled out a University of California at Berkeley catalog. Flipping it open he said, “It’s cultural anthropology.”

“Cultural anthropology?” I thought. “What’s that?” But I looked and, sure enough, the program description included music, art, philosophy, and the rest.

“I don’t need that,” he said, waving at the catalog. “You keep it.”

Then he disappeared. I never saw him again.

Tom: I get shivers down my spine as you tell that story. And that’s what brought you from Europe to the San Francisco Bay Area?

Angeles: A ten-minute exchange. Even now I look back and go “Woo!”

Tom: Was there a sense of recognition or knowing of any kind during the encounter?

Angeles: There was. Not with him, but with the program. As I read about it, the hair on my arms went up, literally. Then he was gone. I called after him, even ran down the stairs looking for him, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. But that fall I was at UC Berkeley in Cultural Anthropology—and cultural anthropology has allowed me to be called to many different places. The soul’s knowing has opened up one path after another.

Tom: Was this a case where your rational mind thought, “I can’t go to Berkeley, California,” or did everything in you line up behind “I’m going!”?

Angeles: Till then, I’d been thinking I should be satisfied with my life as it was. I had a great place in Madrid, my work was international, and I didn’t think I’d ever be able to put everything together—art, psychology, religion, and so on. I actually thought I’d probably get married, have children, and really like that. Then, in an instant, everything lined up in me and said “Go!” But here’s the thing. I made it safe for myself by assuming it would only be for two years.

Tom: The universe had other plans.

Angeles: Then Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson entered my life and from there it snowballed. And through it all I just kept thinking, “This is just so weird.”

Reflections

One reason I wanted to share these excerpts is that Angeles makes guidance feel less like a rare mystical event and more like a natural, ongoing relationship with a friend you know and trust.

There are no beliefs you have to adopt. There are myriad experiences you can learn to notice and appreciate.

Several threads stand out for me.

First, her experience of guidance begins with belonging. In her relationship to clouds, stars, and the mystery, she is “always safe” and “never alone.” Many of us were closer to nature, spirit, and our inner knowing when we were young. Remembering we belong to something larger might help us open and attend to the guidance that is present.

Second, for Angeles, guidance is embodied. It has texture and timing. It is fluid and has boundaries. It says plainly, “No, that’s not mine.” When she gets emotionally flooded, she knows the way back to clarity—through the body—belly fire first, then the water of the heart. And she’s honest about what happens when we don’t follow the guidance we are given.

Third, guidance can find us in many ways. It doesn’t come only as a private inner experience. In one pivotal encounter, it came in the form of a young man who she misreads. A ten-minute exchange on the steps of the Sorbonne, and a life changes completely.

Her experience on the steps of the Sorbonne also beautifully illustrates the relationship between guidance and soul’s knowing. Guidance appears as the herald—the young man—and the message he brings—the UC Berkeley catalog. Her soul’s knowing appears in the hair rising on her arms as she reads the catalog description of cultural anthropology.

Soul’s knowing appears in our encounter with guidance and in our simultaneous recognition of its truth or rightness for us—hair rising on our arms, a “click” in the belly, a door opening in the heart.

I’d love to hear about your own experience in the comments:

• Where do you most reliably experience “yes” or “no” as a clear signal—your belly, heart, head, or somewhere else?

• Have you ever had a “herald moment”—with a person, a place, an image, or something else—that fundamentally shifted the course of your life?

• What have you been carrying that is “not yours”?

In Part 2, we’ll explore the significance of symbols, life stages, and wake-up calls for soul’s knowing—and why Angeles insists on “keeping the message sacred.”

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What does the world 
whisper, when you grow 
still and listen?

Where does your soul go 
in the night, when you are 
free to roam?

Another is already 
living in you, more wild, 
free, and faithful 

to your destiny.
Let that voice 
lead, now. 

Open your door 
and take a first step.
You are ready.

			— Thomas J. Hurley

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As we begin to listen for guidance, many experiences of the soul’s knowing may occur spontaneously. These small moments of grace remind us that we live in a field of guidance that is usually outside ordinary awareness. We need little more than an open mind and heart to receive them.

When we first begin working more intentionally with this knowing, though, having some simple tools can be helpful.

In this essay, I’ll describe a process for engaging soul’s knowing in a more disciplined way that Sara and I found useful early in our journey and still find useful today. It’s particularly appropriate when you have a question to answer or a decision to make.

The process has seven steps:

1. Intending: Clarifying what you are asking for—and why, now.

2. Opening: Intentionally turning attention inward, toward the deeper well of wisdom within.

3. Attending: Being with all that arises in awareness—thoughts, feelings, images, and more—as you invite guidance.

4. Discerning: Distinguishing what feels most deeply true from other inner voices or signals.

5. Embracing: Listening compassionately to inner objections and clearing the way for skillful action.

6. Acting: Making a decision and taking action, or otherwise embodying your soul’s knowing.

7. Reflecting: Looking back on both the process and outcome, so you learn how guidance works for you.

We think of the first and last steps—Intending and Reflecting—as the container for the five core moves. This is depicted in the diagram shown here.

The model is relatively simple to understand, but allows for almost infinite variation in its use. In its simplest form, especially once you are practiced with it, it can be used to make better decisions much more efficiently throughout the day.

A personal example

When I’m invited to take part in a new project, or asked to help on something outside my sphere of concern, I consciously take a few minutes to walk through these steps. The process might look something like this:

Intending: My intention is two-fold: first, to decide whether to say yes or no to this request; second, to identify the next steps.

Opening: I take “time out” and find a quiet place to reflect.

Attending: With my question in mind, I notice how I feel about the invitation, what thoughts or ideas it stimulates, what my body is telling me, whether there is a subtle inner “leaning out” or “pulling back.” At this stage, I’m not deciding; I’m listening in on the inner conversation the request evokes.

Discerning: I let my awareness settle into a deeper place in my body. I ask myself: What’s most true for me now? What’s right—for me and for others? Do I really want to do this? Sometimes the answers come quickly: Yes. No. Maybe, if a few agreements are in place. And so on.

I pay close attention to how I feel in response to the information I receive. Do I feel more relaxed? Does my heart open? Does the guidance ring true? Or, does it ring true and feel challenging at the same time, because some part of me isn’t ready to accept it?

Embracing: I test my guidance by letting all the parts of me that might answer differently speak. The part that feels I am letting someone down or being selfish. The part that argues how important the potential benefits to saying yes are (if my guidance was no) or why saying no makes more sense (if my guidance was yes). The part that suggests taking more time to decide. I do a quick internal check to see if any of these questions or concerns fundamentally change my decision. If not, I plan how to respond appropriately. Here I might discover that some of these voices hold important perspectives—to be respectful and appreciative, not to burn bridges, to suggest alternatives, or, if I am saying yes, to articulate clear boundaries and agreements.

Acting: I respond as soon as possible, in terms that are clear and straightforward. The action itself is meaningful—and taking action sends a message to my psyche that I trust it. This strengthens the relationship and facilitates the flow of guidance.

Reflecting: For the two or three days, I actively monitor how I feel about the decision. If I am unsettled or second-guessing myself, I try to identify why I feel that way. In rare cases, what I discover may prompt further action, but in most cases it leads only to deeper understanding of unconscious beliefs and values. This helps me learn more about my conditioned identities and how my inner guidance system functions.

The pattern emerged from experience and observation

Sara and I developed this model by tracking what actually worked across many real decisions—not from theory. It has proved to be a very useful tool in many settings.

In particular, this process supports both knowing now and coming-to-know—that is, questions to which we get an immediate final answer and questions we live with and explore for a period of time. Even with the latter, though, we can always receive guidance concerning next steps.

An invitation to practice

We encourage you to practice and play with this model. Here is one exercise that will give you a good feeling for its potential. If any aspect of the design does not work for you, please adapt it using your own approaches.

Exercise for Engaging Soul’s Knowing

1. Intending

Find a time when you will not be interrupted and a place where you are comfortable. Settle in with a pen or pencil and paper at hand. Bring to mind a choice you have to make or an issue or situation that is “live” for you right now. For this exercise, choose an issue or question that is nagging at you, but not one that is complex, messy or “high stakes.” Think about the issue and articulate it as a question on which you want guidance. Write your question down.

2. Opening

Be sure there are no distractions in the environment (silence your phone!). Take a few slow breaths and bring your attention to the present moment. Let yourself stop pushing for answers. Hold your question lightly.

3. Attending

Ask yourself: What is most true for me about this issue or situation right now? How do I really feel? What do I really think?

This might include your assumptions or concerns about the situation; judgments or concerns about other people involved; how you feel about the issue; your hopes or fears; values that you feel are at stake (integrity, responsibility, loyalty, etc.); questions about capacity or resources; and, most importantly, what you truly want in relation to the issue or situation.

Be as honest and clear as you can and make brief notes as you go (usually a few key words or phrases suffice). Take a few minutes for this, then ask: Is there anything else that is true for me that I haven’t acknowledged yet? Jot that down, too.

Bring your awareness back to the present moment. Notice how you feel and what is happening in your body. Breathe naturally until you are calm and centered. Review your notes and be mindful of which notes have the most energy for you.

4. Discerning

Bring your initial question to mind again. Just for now, allow for the possibility there is a deeper knowing that can be consulted, already holding what’s right for you now. Open to that guidance. Notice what arises in your belly, in your heart, or as an intuitive “hit.” Welcome whatever arises. It may be a direct answer to your question; an image that carries symbolic information; a more important, related question that you haven’t explicitly asked. If nothing comes, be patient and ask: What more do I need to know before an answer to this question can come? Sometimes guidance does not provide an answer but gives you a good next step.

When what has emerged as guidance is clear, ask yourself: Does this have a sense of rightness? Does it ring true? Or is it fear, longing, my ego, or superego blending into what I’m hearing?

Sometimes the clarity of the deeper self comes as a relief. Sometimes it challenges us. Sometimes we immediately recognize the truth of what we have been given and our heart opens, our belly relaxes. At other times, we experience it as a shock and must give ourselves a moment to absorb it.

Take a moment to feel and appreciate the guidance you have received.

5. Embracing

Imagine yourself making a decision and taking action based on this guidance. What thoughts, feelings, hopes, or fears arise? Welcome them all — the good reasons not to do this; the possible consequences of your intended action; how others might feel and react; the deeper inner voices that whisper, That’s not me ...

These are the ideas and beliefs that have kept you from being clear and acting up to this point. If you aren’t conscious of them now, they will either sabotage your taking action or undermine your ongoing commitment. Yet they may also have valuable information with regard to how you embody the guidance you have received.

So take time to test your guidance against all the other voices. Does it still ring true? If so, use what they are telling you to shape skillful action, with full awareness of the impact of your decision both on yourself and on others. You might quickly ask yourself at this point, What does my guidance tell me about that? You might also seek input from others at this stage, if appropriate—and if the issue does require expert counsel of any sort, be sure you get that.

6. Acting

Make your decision and take appropriate action, or in some other way embody the guidance you have received.

7. Reflecting

Over the next few days, reflect on the impact of your decision (and action) both to see what additional steps are needed and to see what this process has taught you about working with guidance.

Download a printable handout of this exercise here

Guidance may take time to appear

If your question is clear and the issue is not too complex, you may get clear relatively quickly. If the issue is more complex, you may need more time for discerning or embracing. In that case, take time to reflect on what you are experiencing and where it’s coming from. Sleep on it. Turn to a trusted friend or colleague as a sounding board. Sometimes you discover a better question and start again.

If you hear nothing, welcome the silence. Continue to hold your question in mind and trust that an answer—or a better question—will come at another time.

We encourage you to experiment and to share your stories, questions, and insights.

Common pitfalls

As with any process, our efforts to access inner guidance can falter at any point. Here are five of the most common pitfalls we have encountered, both in our own lives and in working with others:

1. Not taking the time or making space to turn toward our inner knowing—staying lost in the swirl of experience.

2. Having ideas about how guidance should appear that prevent us from recognizing inner wisdom when it does emerge.

3. Accepting as genuine the first voice that presents itself as guidance, not recognizing fear, fantasy, ego needs, or the superego masquerading as guidance.

4. Not getting full internal alignment, so that our discernment never leads to action—or leaping from discernment to action without considering whether there are parts of us that will undermine action or ongoing commitment.

5. Failing to act, believing or hoping that the insight itself was enough and that we don’t need to follow through with action or embodiment.

Each step has pitfalls associated with it, and we will explore these in more depth in a later essay.

Be faithful to the journey

We have found turning to the deeper self with questions that matter a powerful and useful way of developing a relationship with our soul’s knowing. Use this model until you understand the principles involved in the process, adapting it as needed.

At first, it is the everyday self that manages the process. Unless you have some experience with inner work, it may feel clunky. As our dialogue with the deeper self grows easier and more intimate, the process becomes less linear, richer, and more surprising, as if a greater, creative intelligence is guiding it. Eventually the deeper self—Source or Spirit, however you name it—often seems to lead.

At every stage of the journey, we can trust soul’s knowing.

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I sit at my writing desk before dawn, watching the gray sky turn lavender and rose, then gradually brighten. Light descends on the land, chasing shadows into the forest and the thick thatch of winter’s meadow. Its straw-colored grasses are dusted with snow. Today, the air is still and nothing moves.

In our Welcome post, I described what Sara and I want to explore here. Now I am reflecting on the best next step—what stories to share and what questions to answer as we embark on this journey together. Perhaps it would be helpful to know more about who’s speaking and what brought me here.

So let me begin with a more detailed personal introduction—a story about my journey with soul’s knowing. It will help you understand where I am coming from, what this work means to me, and why it matters. It will further illuminate some of the landscape that Sara and I want to explore with you. What I mean by the soul’s knowing will become clearer as we go.

If your primary interest is in tools, practices, or prompts, set this aside for now and come back to it later.

Outside, two young song sparrows are creating small avalanches of snow every time one alights on another stalk of little bluestem, foraging for seed. Watching them, my thoughts turn to a very different time in my life, when I was young and searching. Travel with me back to 1981.

Light in the darkness

It is springtime in Texas. The days are warm. I have almost completed my graduate program in futures research and will leave Houston in a few months, though I don’t yet know where I’m going. I have a job offer from an international consulting firm in Connecticut, near New York City, and am intrigued by their focus and the opportunity to work outside the United States. Yet something holds me back from accepting.

I have been working in this program on “visionary futures research methods,” developed by professor Oliver Markley. They use consciousness technologies like meditation, visualization, Eugene Gendlin’s “focusing,” and others to foresee alternative futures and their impacts. I’ve used them numerous times in specific forecasting projects, with intriguing but unverifiable results.

I playfully decide to see if they will work when the focus is my own immediate future. Can I foresee where I would be in six months?

Now, I have never been a particularly strong visualizer. I can’t close my eyes and see mental images clearly or in detail. My way of knowing is more intuitive and grounded in the body. That afternoon, though, I set my intention, settled into an easy chair, closed my eyes, and let my attention rest in the darkness. Not expecting anything to emerge, I was surprised when a map of the continental United States appeared clearly in my mind’s eye. I was even more surprised to see a bright light flashing on and off where San Francisco is located.

Sensing into the image, I felt two impressions strongly: a professional opportunity and the presence of a woman who would be important in my life. That was the entire experience. At the time, my only thought was “That’s interesting!” I wasn’t exploring anything on the West Coast and didn’t know anyone in San Francisco.

The next afternoon, the phone in my apartment rang. I picked up the receiver and said hello. A voice I didn’t recognize said, “You don’t know me, but my name is Willis Harman. I’m president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and we have a position for someone like you on a new project we’re just beginning. Would you be interested in coming to the Bay Area?”

I ended up saying yes. The position Willis had invited me to consider was supposed to last for six months; I ended up being at IONS for seventeen years. And, yes, that’s where I met Sara. We will have been together forty years next fall.

If this story seems far out to you, don’t worry—it was an odd experience for me, too. Yet in the decades since, I’ve been surprised by how many people have similar stories that mark turning points in their lives. Whatever explanation we give to them, a deeper appreciation for their significance and impact is important. That’s part of what we’ll highlight here.

One reason I share this story is that it’s where and how I met Willis Harman. Why that matters will soon become clear. I also share it to highlight that guidance can come to us in many different ways, from gentle nudges or everyday synchronicities to powerful dreams or lightning-bolt insights. We’ll explore the full spectrum in this space. For now, though, take a moment to reflect:

• What are the different ways you tend to experience guidance?

• Which are more common? Which are the easiest for you to embrace?

• If you have ever had more striking, unusual experiences of being guided, how did you respond? How do you understand them now?

Whenever I’ve explored these questions with others, we always discover that hidden within the story we usually tell about our lives is another story of how we have been guided, usually in quiet, mysterious ways we don’t recognize at the time. Any particular experience of being guided, while important in its own right, is also part of a much larger pattern that only reveals itself over time, in the overall tapestry of our life. It’s in that larger pattern that we discover who we most truly are and why we are here. While my own focus for a long time was on individual acts of engagement with what I came to call the soul’s knowing, today I am more attuned to the field of guidance in which we dwell. Even as I continue to learn to distinguish guidance, fear, and wishful thinking.

But I’m getting ahead of the story.

Turning point

Working at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in the 1980s and 1990s was a rich and exciting experience. Founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth person to walk on the moon, IONS was then one of the leading organizations in the world openly exploring mind-body healing, psychic research, meditation, and the broader field of consciousness in rigorous ways. We actively sought and explored the areas where science, spirituality, psychology, and lived experience were converging—and collaborated with the pioneers who were bringing forth a new, more expansive vision of human potential. We partnered with people in many fields and sectors who were inspired by Willis Harman’s image of “global mind change,” the quiet revolution that unfolds when people around the world change their internal image of reality and transform their lives. We worked from the view that consciousness is causal. Threaded throughout our work was the recognition that personal and social transformation are inextricably linked.

I was at the heart of IONS’ research and education programs for 17 years. I loved the work and even more the extraordinary people in our global community of transformational leaders, teachers, innovators, and researchers. The experience shaped my worldview and values to this day. Yet the most powerful and lasting legacy of my time there can be traced to a single conversation with Willis one evening after everyone else in our office had left.

We were sitting in the second-floor library, looking out at the sunset over Sausalito harbor. Boats bobbed in the marina, their pennants waving in a light breeze. I asked Willis whether he had a spiritual practice. While he wrote extensively about consciousness and spirituality, he rarely spoke of his personal beliefs or practices.

Willis said, “My spiritual practice is turning every question over to the deep intuition.”

I already knew what he meant by the deep intuition. In a paper he had shared with me, he had written:

Each of us has access to a supraconscious, creative, integrative, self-organizing, intuitive mind whose capabilities are apparently unlimited. If the creative/intuitive mind is so much more knowledgeable and wise than one’s conscious mind; if it has access to all the knowledge available to consciousness and more; then why stop at submitting to it only the specific problems that the ego-mind has classified as ‘difficult’? Why keep it for emergency use only? Why not turn to it with all decisions?

I cocked my head. “Do you really mean every question?” I asked him.

“Every question,” he replied. “That’s why my life has been so much more magical than I ever could have imagined.”

Willis’s matter-of-fact declaration marked a turning point for me. I’d had numerous experiences of intuitive guidance before then, all hinting at a deeper organizing intelligence at work beneath the visible aspects of day-to-day life. Inspired by his faith, I began to experiment by turning to the deep intuition with questions large and small—how to deal with difficult teammates at work, why I was resisting a crucial conversation at home, how I envisioned my career evolving, and ordinary, everyday questions such as what to have for breakfast or how best to spend a quiet moment alone.

I discovered that guidance was almost always available. Sometimes it would be clear and precise, pointing me toward a specific decision or action. At other times, the inner guide would not provide an answer to my question but would counsel good next steps in the process of living more deeply into the question—so that someday, to paraphrase Rainer Maria Rilke, we might live into the answer. I came to call these two modes of guidance knowing now and coming to know.

I also discovered that something begins to develop in us when we pay regular, close attention to the wisdom and guidance present in and around us. Just as gas and dust coalesce to create a star, our intention, attention, and energies coalesce to form a new, inner center of gravity that slowly shifts how we relate to ourselves and others. Increasingly sensitive to subtle signals, we start to hear our future calling.

Testing ground

I left IONS in 1998, having co-led a major strategic planning initiative that charted a new path for the organization and led me to realize that it was time to go, despite having been tapped as the eventual successor to the current CEO. I’ll share the story of my leaving in a separate essay, for it was an almost mythic experience of being led purely by inner knowing through one of the most pivotal transitions in my life.

Over the next five years, I was constantly immersed in new worlds. Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, asked me to lead a small consulting company called the Chaordic Alliance. We specialized in partnering with forward-looking leaders to create and grow organizations designed to flourish in times of rapid, transformational change—organizations with noble purposes committed to liberating the human spirit and nourishing all life. The simultaneous challenges of learning the consulting business with no prior training, working with clients on massively complex issues in technology, health care, and peacebuilding, and managing our own understaffed organization were a fiery crucible for profound learning and change.

My daily practice of turning to the deep intuition intensified. I sought guidance on questions that ranged from how to support our teenage son to managing complex client relationships and many others. While my results as a leader were mixed, I learned a great deal about how to help others (and myself) connect with their deepest knowing and give it form in the purpose, values, and vision for their work.

Truth be told, much of my own learning occurred when I did not embrace and act on the guidance I received. Knowing I needed to have a difficult conversation and continually putting it off invariably made the issues at stake even harder to resolve. Saying yes to a request when my gut said no! always led to my feeling overburdened and resentful. Neglecting to be more open at home when my heart knew better and longed to connect only increased the distance I had to bridge later.

Once I might have been quite self-critical about such “failures.” Now I realized they were an essential part of learning to trust the guidance I was receiving. They also taught me, step by step, about the inner and outer forces that work against our easily embracing what is most deeply true for us. Rueful reflection, remorse, and humility became familiar companions.

One experience from that time stands out. We were meeting with six leaders in a global NGO focused on women and children to plan a two-year organizational transformation process. The collaborative, multi-country initiative they aspired to launch would require a major commitment of time, and a willingness to travel globally, by almost fifty participants from around the world. Yet the leaders in this organization were volunteers with families, full-time jobs, and other responsibilities. They were individuals for whom “family is first,” and most were already overcommitted. Excitement about the initiative, and confidence in its success, suddenly waned. Unusually, money was not an issue, but suddenly everyone doubted the plan. I said, “Our vision is wonderful, but who would actually do this?”

The planning team was silent. I could sense the seed of doubt taking root and growing. Everyone looked around at the long faces of the others. As the silence lengthened, we all feared the initiative might fail before it had even begun. I was about to conclude that no one could actually commit the time and energy.

And then, in an instant, the way forward opened. A working mother with two young children cried, “I would do this!” She spoke with such tremendous conviction that spirits immediately brightened, as if a room lost in shadows had suddenly been flooded with brilliant light. That one vote of confidence, that single affirmation, re-invigorated the field of possibility in which we had been working. We completed our planning, issued a call for participation that elicited three times as many volunteers as were needed, and launched the project. In the succeeding two years, many lives were touched in ways that will never be forgotten.

Later I asked the woman who had fearlessly stepped forward why she had spoken up. She said, “I felt as if a door in my heart opened, and I heard our children calling from the other side. I had to say yes, for myself, for us, and for them.”

Wellspring

I stepped back from my leadership of the Chaordic Alliance when my own heart again whispered, It is time to go. While continuing my consulting work, I embarked on an intensive quest to discover my “true work”—the work I am in this life to do. The work I don’t want to die not having done. Unfolding over months, that journey culminated in an epiphany that was sparked by this question:

If everything I find most meaningful and enlivening had one thing in common, what would it be?

I was thinking about much more than my work at that point. I was contemplating my work, marriage, friendships, creative pursuits, intellectual passions, personal practices, and more. I honestly didn’t know if I’d find a connection.

Yet the answer came as two words flowing up from the inner depths as I took a break and relaxed with a cup of coffee one afternoon:

Soul’s knowing.

Their effect was electric. I felt I was seeing a hidden pattern in my life for the first time. I suddenly realized that my natural gravitation toward inner knowing was more than a private practice—it connected what I loved most in every part of my life.

I wrote the next day:

There is an ever-present source of guidance flowing from the core of our being.

I call it the soul’s knowing.

It is that in us which knows what is right, healthy, healing, and true for us in any given moment.

It represents our inherent wisdom, at the deepest level, about who we are, what we need for our soul’s development, and how best to contribute our gifts to the world.

The more often we turn to the soul’s knowing for guidance, and the more deeply we trust the guidance we receive, the more fully we will realize our soul’s potentials and lead the lives that are uniquely ours to live.

This still rings true for me today, more than 20 years later, though both my experience and understanding have ripened.

Expanding spheres

From then on, I consciously explored and tested the soul’s knowing—what Willis had called the deep intuition—with even more fervor. I journaled extensively on the process of working with inner guidance; took the ideas into community gatherings and university classrooms; interviewed friends and colleagues on their experiences; and created some simple maps and models to help people understand and start to trust how their unique “inner guidance system” works.

For three years, Sara joined me in facilitating retreats and workshops around the US. We discovered the power of our holding this work together, both for ourselves and others, and also the rich possibilities in exploring the soul’s knowing in the company of others. One myth about soul’s knowing is that it’s an inherently solitary affair, pursued privately in the depths of one’s inner world, disconnected from others. In reality, guidance may come from anywhere and we can play vital roles in support of each other. The soul’s knowing is always exquisitely tuned to our life in relationship—a topic we’ll explore in depth as we go.

As other parts of our professional lives flowered, Sara integrated the soul’s knowing into her counseling practice, and it became the heart of my coaching, facilitation, and leadership development work with Oxford Leadership and its sister company WALK, based in Madrid. We have both worked around the world, in settings that range from small circles of spiritual seekers to the C-suites of global corporations. Everywhere we have witnessed the hunger that many people have for more authentic contact with their own innermost knowing, free from dogma or expectations of any kind—and the creativity and sense of freedom that arise when we do embrace what is most deeply true for us.

Sometimes, of course, being true to ourselves comes with costs. More than once, I found myself saying no to invitations and opportunities that would have brought income, recognition, influence, or other rewards. At other times, taking a stand had consequences—being attacked, misunderstood, excluded. I would like to say that I handled these situations with maturity and grace, but in truth working through them usually provided many more opportunities to seek guidance on where I was still hooked and what “right relationship” required.

Coming home to who we most deeply are and leading the life that our soul guides us toward is almost never a linear process. Sara and I have worked for years on core issues both in and between us, slowly dissolving our inner fears and fixations, before uncovering the soul gifts they have hidden. I have watched clarity about my calling wax and wane over decades, with multiple conflicting passions pulling me in different directions. At times this unpredictability and nonlinearity have been frustrating, giving us the opportunity to surface and challenge assumptions about who we are, what really matters, and how we grow. Increasingly, we simply embrace the not-knowing and trust in the mystery of soul’s unfolding.

Horizon

In recent years, we have left the professional roles that gave structure to our life and embarked on a new stage of our journey. In some ways, that transition began when we moved from the San Francisco Bay Area, where we had lived for 35 years, to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in central Virginia. Here we live in daily contact with nature, re-wilding several acres of land, and find ourselves letting go of much that no longer seems to matter—self-judgment, personal agendas, old identities, and all the ways we defend ourselves against Presence.

When I first began working with the soul’s knowing, I treated it mostly as a resource—an inner compass I could consult when I had a big decision to make or my usual methods of problem solving failed. It has always been invaluable in that role. Listening to the wise inner guide has kept me from a few ugly mistakes and led me into work, relationships, and places I never could have planned.

Yet something in that relationship has changed. For both Sara and me, soul’s knowing is less like a useful ally on call and more like the wellspring of our being. Less a tool to help us make wise choices, more the way that what is most deeply true shapes who we are becoming. Less about us as separate individuals, more about emptying ourselves and letting Spirit lead (however we name it).

The stories I’ve shared here—the flashing light in the dark of a mind’s eye, the sunset conversation with Willis Harman, my “soul’s knowing about soul’s knowing,” and others—illustrate a small fraction of the ways that inner guidance has operated in my life. Your stories will be different in their detail, though not in their significance. A growing unease with a carefully crafted life; a sudden moment of Presence that rearranges the furniture of reality; a subtle, insistent call toward a new horizon—there are innumerable ways the soul’s knowing can show up.

This space is where we’ll be exploring that larger field: how the soul’s knowing speaks; how it gets tangled up with fear and fantasy; how it disrupts and heals; how it weaves through work and illness and money and love; how it calls us not only to feel differently but to live differently, more daringly, less divided. We’ll look at practices that help, patterns that block us, and the wilder edges where guidance doesn’t fit neatly into our plans. We’ll celebrate the gifts we are given and the costs we accept.

If some part of you recognizes yourself in any of this—if you’ve ever sensed a quiet, insistent “something” moving through your life, whether or not you’ve had words for it—then you are already inside the field we’ll explore here. Share your own language, metaphors, insights. This Substack is an invitation to walk this path with more consciousness, creativity, and courage, together.

And, if you’d like, please hit reply and share a story of when you felt guided. I read every note.

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We’re glad you’re here and honor the search that brought you. This space is hosted by me, Tom Hurley, with my wife and long-time partner, Sara, holding the field alongside me. I’ll be doing most of the writing here at first, yet much of what I share has grown in the soil of our life together. Over time, you’ll hear more of her voice as well.

This space is for all who sense the presence of a subtle, mysterious guidance in their lives and want language, companionship, and practical support for living from it more fully every day. We call this ever-present source of guidance the soul’s knowing. Here we’ll explore how embracing it can transform how we live, work, and co-exist in a civilization on the brink.

For over three decades, Sara and I have been learning to live with growing fidelity to our soul’s knowing—that in us which knows what is right, healthy, healing, and true for us in any given moment. Sometimes it comes as an intuition, inner nudge, or question that won’t let us go; at other times, it’s a fierce No! or a luminous Yes! Over time, learning to trust this knowing has transformed our sense of who we are, what truly matters, and why we are here.

It is not always easy. The soul’s voice is often quiet; our daily lives are filled with noise. We know how difficult it can be to discern the genuine signal of soul’s knowing when habit, fear, and conditioning are strong—and that acting on it can disrupt careers, relationships, and identities. At various times we have ignored it, argued with it, and sometimes followed it only when other options failed. Yet we’ve learned the hard way that ignoring our soul’s knowing has a cost.

If you have been working with inner guidance in your own life, you know what we mean.

Being true to one’s soul’s knowing has always been a radical act. As so many forces in today’s world threaten the essence of what it means to be human, it’s more important than ever. How do we nurture an honest relationship with our inner guidance, when the engines of culture commercialize the sacred and distance us from nature? How do we learn to trust our soul’s unfolding, even when it upends our lives and all we thought we knew?

What to expect

We’ll explore all of that here, in what we think of as a field for sharing stories, practices, and perspectives. We’re interested less in grand proclamations about awakening than in the hard-earned wisdom that comes from experience. Less in received truths or the latest theory about consciousness than in honest encounters with our own depths and what emerges from them. We’re not here to argue about who is right or to debate the state of the world.

We are here, with you, to midwife fidelity to our own deepest knowing together—so that each of us can lead the life our soul longs to live and never stops seeking.

You’ll find personal stories, essays that wrestle with real questions, practice tools and prompts, and conversations with others who are also learning to live from their soul’s knowing. We’ll draw on many paths and fields of practice, from the world’s spiritual traditions and consciousness research to poetry, myth, and the natural world.

Think of this as both a small hearth and a field: a place to sit by the fire, listen, speak honestly, and experiment with how soul’s knowing wants to move in your life. We invite your stories, insights, questions, and not-knowing, both in response to posts and in the Chat. We ask only that you come with respect for the sacred in yourself and in one another. We’re not here to prescribe beliefs or recruit anyone to a system, but to honor the many ways we meet, name, and manifest our soul’s knowing.

Everything in this space will be freely available. If you are moved to donate, we thank you.

Take a first step

Honoring the soul’s knowing can be as simple as listening to the wisdom of our bodies or saying no to something that does not feel right. Over time, it can mean faithfully stewarding work we love or treating a relationship as a sacred trust. And sometimes the soul wants to disrupt and re-wild—ending a relationship, leaving a job, finally speaking a long-hidden truth aloud, doing something out of character.

How do we know what is appropriate now? As a first step, simply ask yourself:

What do I know to be true about my life or work that I have not fully admitted to myself yet?

Sit with the answer and see where it leads you.

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