What is the soul? What does it do?
Wikipedia’s answer includes: Plato believed the soul to be the person’s real self. An immaterial and immortal dweller of our lives that continues and thinks even after death. Aristotle sketched out the soul as the “first actuality” of a naturally organized body—form and matter arrangement allowing natural beings to aspire to full actualization.
My (Liz Jackson) understanding of the soul grew from many discussions with my own soul. It is nothing but an energy that can go, and move anywhere it chooses. The only thing is that it cannot feel or have emotions. For that, it needs a physical being: a horse, a human, an insect, a tree, a ……car? – the cantankerous old beast seems to break down in the most inconvenient places.
Unfortunately, this often means it wants to try things that don’t suit us. Perhaps it wants to experience overcoming circumstances: Hostile surroundings, while feeling incapable, then taking a huge leap of faith to overcome it. This is explained quite well in the extract from Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch, called “The Little Soul and the Sun“.
So then, though many of us believe we are human beings who have a soul, it is more correct to say that we are actually a soul who wants to have an experience, so it choses two humans who would bring up a child in the kind of circumstances that would make it insecure and, maybe a little clumsy, or cannot form sentences the way most would, while intellectually they know what is required of them. Then that person would become faced with a situation where they can choose to remain quiet and hopeless, or go for it despite having nerves of jelly and a belief that they will probably fail.
In the eBook (available as my gift to you) called 10 Elements of Self, I mention in Element 4 that the soul has a little snicker when something goes wrong. It may cause you to trip over nothing, or start to pee before reaching the toilet, get bitten by a dog, or have your wallet stolen. Imagine living for all of eternity and only being able to feel through a physical being. Some of them have been around for quite a long time so, just like a bored child, it may get a little restless and naughty. Pranks and tragedy are nothing but great experiences to them, and the feeling of your anger, or sadness – even the ultimate devastation of losing a tiny child or your closest family member, is a triumphant success to your soul.
Imagine knowing all of that and creating a program that resets your life and body so that none of that happens anymore. A program that is so brilliant that it makes it so that your soul changes into a perfect Angel and never does anything terrible to you again. It makes you be skinny, no matter what you eat; let go of vices and addictions without side effects or cravings; makes you successful without really trying; rich; happy all of the time and having great relationships. You even found a way to make that program deliverable easily through a website.
BUT
Your soul (Liz Jackson’s, to be precise) decided to make it impossible in every way, shape and form, to get the program out; provide all kinds of pain, to prove that it didn’t work, so I couldn’t tell anyone about it; kept me broke so I couldn’t get help where I needed it – taking forever to get a website working, so I faced insurmountable challenges, while others happily declared that they threw up a website and started making money straight away. EVERYTHING TO KEEP ME SMALL, IN PAIN, FAT, BROKE, AND SHOWING ALL OF THE WORLD THAT I DIDN’T KNOW ANYTHING. I even ended up in hospital with one leg missing, just so I was held back and so my soul didn’t have to stop doing nasty things.
I was diagnosed with Diabetes six years prior but chose to ignore endless finger pricks to test my sugar levels every day, or giving up my favorite sugary foods or drinks, when I knew that what I was doing worked – I had already lost 45kg without changing my food or exercise habits. I was told that Golden Staph infections are fairly common but when coupled with high blood sugar, it creates a savage weapon that went right to the bone of my left leg. All of the time I was telling myself that “I’m a healer, I can heal it”. This is not supposed to happen!!!!
I was in a personal growth workshop many years prior and remembered hearing the facilitator say “The woman said Walk a mile in my shoes”. It turns out that my soul saw this as a challenge. It dragged me through so many humiliating situations: homeless, penniless, definitely not painless – anyone who has had Peripheral Neuropathy will know what that is like. obesity, fractured family relationships, separation from a long-term relationship, and a website that didn’t work. I believe there was more than just a snicker from my soul. It was having a field day.
The only thing that kept me going, through the tunnel with no light at the end, was knowing that what I was doing worked. I knew why it wasn’t working. And it hurt like hell to suffer physically and emotionally, but I knew that as my second foot went black from another infection, I wouldn’t lose it because my Purpose was to be on the world stage, helping people just like you, to have A Fabulous Life.