Soul Purpose & The Pinch That Reminds Us We Are Awake and Alive -

Detachment is a lesson I thought I had learned.

I hadn't.

I hadn't learned about detachment and integrated what I learned at the depths I know now.

I was shown in these last months the sweet subtle methods of choice even when the only guarantee in making that choice is that one will feel sadness.

What I didn't remember is that the pinch of sorrow is also the pinch that reminds me this life is not a dream and I am indeed awake and alive.
A pinch usually says mild shouts of "owie!" but this year's pinch evoked a gutteral cry that reached up from the soles of my feet and shouted out the top of my head.

This year's pinch was a surrendering-to-what-is ache, a decision to create space for meaningful change to rise out of the earth and into my heart.

Coleman Barks describes it like this in his "The Soul of Rumi"

"I want
a howling hurt. This is not a treasury
where gold is stored; this is for copper.
We alchemists look for talent that
can heat up and change. Lukewarm
won't do. Halfhearted holding back,
well-enough getting by? Not here."

This year I remembered again what passionate detachment feels like. It isn't like a cake almost done or a dress that almost fits, it is a full throttle sort of release. It is giving one's entire soul-self without focusing on what one receives as a result of the giving. Receiving is occasionally what happens - it isn't the soul (or sole)- purpose.

The soul purpose lives within the heating up, the alchemy, the mettalurgy.

The sole purpose lives in the transformation, the one hundred percent and more. It is running as fast as one can, the singing at the top of one's lung and holding that note out.... and out some more.

It howls when it doesn't have "the right" words and knows translation, for the beloved, isn't necessary.

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Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy and mixed-media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people's creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming Winter 2015 and beyond.

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