Listening To Your Soul Voice: Need To - Have To - Get To

Looking at ways you can shift your life to being more about you and your path by adjusting the priority order of what you're doing and allowing yourself to pay attention to...well...yourself.

Transcript

Listening To Your Soul Voice: Need To - Have To - Get To

Most, if not all of us, have learned the hard way how to discern the wisdom of our body and mind in any given situation - the pain (emotional/physical/mental) makes the problem obvious and time gives us experience in how best to resolve the situation through variations of fight/flight/freeze, act/react/pro-act.

For most of us, however, it is much harder to discern the wisdom of our soul. It's not loud nor obvious to us as we Whack-A-Mole the problems of life and doesn't often offer grand gestures or extra ordinary events as signposts to guide our way. This is, in part, why people are so determined to find and follow a passion. Having a calling or passion increases the soul's voice in volume so it matches that of the body and mind, even overriding them in order to achieve its goals and agendas.

However, and all current spiritual advice to the contrary, a great portion of humanity doesn't have a calling or passion. Instead, they have lives which are a creative, amazing, tragic, surviving, thriving mix of themselves, the people and things they love, and the rest of the world. Which, when looked at objectively, is a beautiful mosaic. But life isn't lived objectively from a distance. It's lived in the mundane moments of what to eat for lunch and how to get this done before that so we can go here.

The logistics of living can and do drown out the wisdom of the soul and overtime we can lose touch with its importance and find ourselves somewhere and being someone we don't recognize and don't want to be.

To counter this, it's helpful to realize the soul doesn't need to compete, to be louder than the problems and solutions of our life. There are many ways to make space for our soul's voice. Silent retreats where we give our brain so much space it finally runs out of things to say so we hear something else is effective and even pleasant for people who live busy lives. Long hikes, nature or forest bathing, or even just a vacation away from it all can give us the space we need to breath into ourselves and feel our essential self begin to unfold. Sweat lodge, medicine journeys, Akashic work, meditations to connect with the higher self and other more directed spiritual work can amplify and clarify our soul's voice giving us direction for the path it/we want to walk.

But life is busy, complicated, and interconnected in ways which can make even the time, let alone the will, to engage with the soul at this level overwhelming to contemplate or just exhausting as it becomes one more task in a mountain of tasks to accomplish. Connecting with our soul, our goals for this life, and our unfolding suchness shouldn't be a punishment or destroy our quality of life, and it shouldn't become the bludgeoning tool of "I should..." which we use to abuse ourselves into being something we're not. Luckily, we can put the punishment down for the moment as there are gentle ways we can incorporate our soul's wisdom into our daily life. 

The soul speaks fairly clearly without shouting and all we need to do is turn a bit of our attention to it. One of the easiest ways to do so is by listening to our own words.

The Need To - Have To - Get To's

Our brains are amazing at pattern recognition, structure making, and problem solving. Not just consciously, but in our day to day. Part of how we do this is by categorizing things into priority buckets. The one's I'm listing here are the most common ones, although there are more, and they can have a variety of names:

Need To: These are things which we don't necessarily want to do, may or may not be good at doing, but are part of achieving a goal, maintaining a relationship, or manifesting something we desire into being. Getting groceries before a busy week, replacing the tires before a road trip, studying late for an exam in order to graduate are things we often decide we need to do.

Have To: These are chores or actions which are required for living such as taking medication, brushing our teeth, showing up for work on time, paying bills, or even saying the right thing the right way so as to avoid negative situations or consequences. Have To's aren't limited to, but do include survival tasks and behaviors like carrying mace, hunting for the gas station with the lowest gas price, clipping ALL the coupons, working the job you can't stand but can't afford to quit and making everything stretch as far and as long as it possibly can.

Get To: Often, we think of these things as the big jackpot events like vacations, new cars, new clothes, the best job and so on. But they come in all shapes and sizes from just having the morning to yourself to eating out at the restaurant you actually like, not having to do some chore to buying a cup in your favorite color. A Get To can be having colored pencils at your desk to doodle with in Zoom Meetings or being able to work from home a few days a week. It can be having time to walk in the grass before going home or spending the weekend away from it all rather than doing one...more...chore... Get To's are anything which makes us happy and fills up our energy cup rather than draining it out.

Listening to the Voice of your Soul

You can hear your soul speak throughout your normal daily routine by paying attention for your use of these three phrases. The key is to not let our brain tell you what falls into what category and start making plans based on these assumptions or, really, commands. To hear your soul you must use active listening skills. Don't assume, don't let your mind talk over things, be the journalist and listen.

For some people it can help to get yourself a little pocket/purse size tablet and write down throughout the day when you say these phrases and what specific things/events they are connected to. This will also serve to show you how many times you use them, therefore how actively you're reinforcing this structure in order to keep your life moving in its current patterns.

I recommend doing this for 1-2 weeks, conscientiously, as a spiritual practice. Don't worry about the information you're getting or if you're doing it right/enough/perfectly. If you're doing it at all you get a gold star. But 1 week will give you the minimum amount of data to see the full range of how you use these phrases in your life. 2 weeks takes into account the ways in which our lives are not necessarily routine or regular and so allows you to see how these phrases play out when there are extra events in any given week like book club, movie nights, children's sports events and so on and so on.

Gently Implementing the Wisdom of Your Soul

While the wisdom from your soul can be a call to revolution because what you really need and deserve is to become a digital nomad, get yourself a tiny home and go live in Cozumel for the next year, often what your soul is talking about, to start, is far less extensive and more approachable.

Reverse your life's priority order.

We all have the priority list of things by which we structure our lives. Or in the case of small babies and pets, have our lives structured for us via their priorities. These start with the Have To's such as needing to shower and dress before leaving for work or getting on the Zoom Meeting. Brushing your teeth so you avoid the dentist and offending the neighbors as their flowers wilt when you smell them. Things like this come first and form the basic structure of each day without our giving things a second thought.

Then there's the Need To's which take priority because if we don't get them done, we won't achieve our goals, but we feel we won't do them naturally, so they need to be at the top of the list to make sure they get done above all other things.

Somewhere between these two we have the needs of our loved ones, our friends, organizations we're a member of and so on so our day quickly fills up, as time is linear and there is only so much of it and us.

At the end of all this is the "Get To's" which become a carrot or prize we win if we get everything else done. So, we rarely win it, kind of like the claw game where the stuffed animals slip out of the claws just before you can get it settled over the exit chute.

To change this doesn't require more work, herculean effort or a new inspirational anything. Just reverse this priority order.

Put the Get To's first.

You don't have to change the things you're doing in your life, just change the order they go in. If the Get To you keep trying to get to in a day is having 30 minutes to yourself, then have it be the first thing you do in the day. Afterwards, go ahead with the rest of your day like normal.

If what you want is a break from the demands of work, then don't login, check in, or respond to anything until you absolutely Have To. You'll find if you look at where your current Have To about work and when you engage with it actually resides, it's quite a bit different, even an hour or several sooner than absolutely necessary. Just reclaiming even a few minutes of space is healing and empowering.

Or perhaps your Get To is doing something in the evening for yourself. If you move this into the Need To bucket, then you will start structuring your day to accommodate it. If your Get To is a priority, then when you run errands changes, saying "Yes" to other's needs and wants becomes less frequent, and people start seeing a new boundary around this time of day and may even start to respect it or ask to join in.

The biggest surprise most people experience when they put this into practice is the same amount of Have To and Need To things get done. But how they are done often gets more streamlined, less energy draining, and people spend less time mentally and emotionally on them. This allows more energy to go into the Get To's which feed their lives, and both of these things allow for an improved quality of life, all without needing to commit to a new regime of fasting, meditating, or crystal scrying. (Although if these are on your Get To list then fabulous. Indulge as much as you wish and a bit extra for good measure. You deserve it, after all.)

As you are a unique piece of divinity, your soul is speaking to you and everyone around you throughout your day and your life. Creating a relationship where you are able to tune in to it can start with just a small shift in your attention and a notebook. What's in your Get To bucket?