Soul Work

This week I've been listening to "Mother Night", an audio-course  with Jungian storyteller and author Clarissa Pinkola Estes. In her interview with Sounds True founder Tami Simon, Estes talks about curanderismo, an umbrella term for a spectrum of healing arts which realign a person with the treasure of his or her own soul. This has got me thinking about simple daily practices to nurture soul connection.

Five ways to stay connected to the soul:

1) By noticing the elements (earth, air, water, fire), and therefore blessing the elemental within.

Notice the wind.
Notice the air on your skin.
Notice qualities of light at different times of day, when clouds are in motion, when clouds are building.
Notice fire (bonfires, candle-light, firelight, love-light.)
Notice the earth element (leaf-piles, turned soil, compost, hills and mountains).
Notice water (rain when its falling, raindrops when the sun reappears, tidal action, streams, the wet faces of rocks, water from a faucet turned by a hand, tears.)

2) By creating ceremony (alone or with another, standing under a copper beech tree in November, receiving beauty).

3) By creating sacred spaces (one shelf, one surface that is completely empty).

4) By making something beautiful over time, or all in one stretch (a poem, a loaf of bread, a bowl of soup, an arrangement of beach stones, a card) and keeping it or giving it away.

5) By listening in new ways (to patterns of sound, to voices, to the stories of someone we love, to music, to the music in sounds we don't think of as music, like engines, footsteps, birds scattering seed).

How do you stay connected to the soul?