What is your soul anyway? Is it your consciousness? Is it your collection of life experiences? Is it something you’re born with that stays the same throughout your life? Or is your birth just the starting point and your time here on earth your opportunity to improve upon the hand you’re dealt?

Let’s go with the assumption that you begin with some cosmically set allotment of raw metaphysical material, and every experience you have, emotion you feel, and decision you make cumulatively contributes to your soul’s journey.

In other words, you start with something undeveloped and cultivate it — adding or subtracting along the way. That sounds remarkably like the place where I’ve been harvesting most of my metaphors from lately — the garden!

Your soul as compost heap? Why not? What led me to this wild comparison was a small piece of Styrofoam floating in our frog pond. This little scrap has been bothering us — as my design mentor, Louise Mann, used to say, “My eye goes right to it!“ Because of all of the things you cannot compost, Styrofoam is among the worst.

Natural food scraps like potato peels or apple cores can be transformed into healthy soil in a matter of days, (with the aid of our little bear named Lomi back in California it takes mere hours!) Here in France, we are old-school, piling kitchen scraps onto a heap, turning occasionally, and letting nature run its course.

So if your soul is your metaphysical compost heap, it follows that your memories, feelings, emotions, and life experiences are the scraps you feed into it.

Happy thoughts, healthy experiences, and joyful moments are what you want to turn into the foundation of your soul — easily, reliably, and regularly. Heavy toxic junk like grudges and grievances, self-pity and shame, need to be cleared and identified and safely discarded as soon as possible so that they don’t linger and poison your soul.

So back to Styrofoam. The internet tells me that it takes somewhere between 500 and a million years to decompose. A tin can takes much less. Even something a little less stubborn like a piece of wood can decompose and rot away in just a few years.

If you’ve ever known anyone who held onto a grievance for long period of time to the point where it became part of their identity, you might know what I’m talking about. You introduce them to someone, they immediately launch into their tale of woe, and your heart sinks. It’s as if that grudge is clogging up their life force as surely as a piece of Styrofoam that won’t decompose.

If they could only grasp the tool of forgiveness, and learn how to lighten up and let go. We have a brush fixed to the end of a five meter piece of bamboo that we use for clearing cobwebs out of the rafters in the barn. I was able to reach the middle of the frog pond without wading in to snatch the offending piece of detritus. Proper tools make all the difference.

If your soul is a blank slate coming into this world, there’s no question that you inscribe the story of your life upon it before you go. Stuff will happen to you, good and bad. We aren’t ducks who can simply stand up and quack and shake loose whatever trauma has troubled them, but fortunately we do have ways of guiding our consciousness up the spiral instead of down.

Life is about learning which tools work for you. But like trying to pull the muck out of the trash heap with your bare hands instead of using gloves and a shovel, letting go of trauma and that which hinders you takes different kinds of tools — they are out there if you’re willing to pick them up.

Any gardener will tell you that the fruit and flowers above the soil start with nourishing the roots below. Keep the cosmic debris out of your metaphysical compost heap so your spirit can bloom!

With you with trowel in hand till next week.

À bientôt!

M+

Mark Metz
Director of the Dance First Association
Publisher of Conscious Dancer Magazine