Feeling All the Feelings

The Bridge between the Soul and the Body

Picture of sunrise, Spring Equinox, March 20, 2025

Recently, my son was hovering in that delicate, sweet place between sleep and wake. I was moving his hand and inadvertently grazed his arm with my nail. He was instantly awake and very upset with me, his sleep disrupted. We sat together for what seemed like a long time, my son in tears, me apologizing and acknowledging his pain and him asking me why I had done it.

I am watching my son as he figures out how to make sense of the range and intensity of his feelings and how to respond, as he tries to make sense of what it means when someone hurts you without meaning to. The I didn’t mean to and it hurt both are true at the same time.

It feels like a developmental juncture where I, as his parent and primary caregiver, have the power to shape how he understands the world - what to expect from others when they hurt you, how to respond and take responsibility for your actions, how to be kind to yourself when you are the person who did the hurting.

It is so messy being human.

By being human I mean the tender, the messy, and the painful parts of this experience in a human body. Spiritual practice itself can be a very creative, crafty way to avoid the tender messiness inherent in being human. John Welwood, a Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist coined the phrase spiritual bypassing in the 1980s. He noticed a tendency, both in himself and in others in his community to use spiritual practice to avoid emotional wounds, unresolved issues, and unfinished developmental tasks. It goes something like this: I am spiritual and enlightened, therefore I do not experience any of those messy hard things of human life - that to be awakened, liberated, spiritual, I must always rise above being a vulnerable, imperfect human.

Being human can feel very hard. There can be a lot of profoundly good reasons to want to escape.

When I use the word spiritual what I mean is that I acknowledge a Divine intelligent life force energy that holds us all in the in between spaces with a womblike loving stillness that births all possibility. There is a bigger unfolding I can not see but I am an active part and participant in. A spiritual practice is the step by step guide that helps me bridge the seeming chasm between my Divine, infinite, sovereign knowing (my soul) and this dense, finite, human body.

In Daoist cosmology there is a concept of a veil, called the Zhi Yi Tian. We pass through this veil as we step down from the soul level, as a Divine, infinite energy that is pure vibration to become a dense, physical, fully formed human being. The Daoists have different names for our soul. One for the more infinite version before we pass through the veil – the Shen Xian. And the other - the yuan shen - to refer to the stepped down version of our soul that resides in our human body, in the heart specifically, after we cross through the veil.

My spiritual practices exist to help me navigate all the layers and density between my human self and who I was on the other side of that veil. They are training wheels we use as we learn to embody the subtle, nuances of what it means to be pure vibration and energy in a dense physical. Body.

Because in this stepping down process we forget what that Divine, infinite part of ourselves knew. And the connection back to my soul is my yuan shen. And the yuan shen is centered in my heart.

I believe that when we were given the opportunity to be born into a body on the earth that we were brimming with excitement and readiness to experience what a body feels like. We actually wanted to be here, in this exact moment and time where we find ourselves.

All the layers of meditation and Daoist practices I learned were helping me to do one main thing. Remember and re-member. Remember as memory and re-member as a reorganizing of the parts of myself into a new configuration with enough space to hold both my energetic formless and human form in BIG love, in my heart.

The guiding principle of my spiritual practices, the literal foundation and the first thing I learned is a practice called the inner smile. The inner smile is a practice of love and acceptance of all the parts of yourself. It is smiling and loving through layers (read generations) of social conditioning, trauma, in the collective and in our own individual lineages.

It sounds so simple, the inner smile. Deceptively easy. And yet it is anything but. Because to do this practice you have to be willing to acknowledge and face all the parts – the anger, hurt, rejected, abandoned, betrayed, the parts that have hurt others – and love them all. Love these parts of ourselves that were (and are) trying to figure out and navigate this messy, often painful human experience. Love these parts that very resiliently and very creatively learned how to navigate how to live in a human body. And try to be safe. And try to protect ourselves from the very real pain we experienced and very rightly decided were too much to bear.

The connection back to my soul is centered in my heart.