It’s Friday night and I’ve just got home from a couple hour’s ride on my motorbike.
I was supposed to go to do the week’s shopping. I was supposed to stop by the optometrist and book an appointment.
But I didn’t.
After the week that’s been, I just needed a little soul time. Or as my best friend Nats would say a little “Topping up tanks time”.
And now I’m writing this blog when I should be cleaning my apartment.
But you know what? This is my soul time.
Why do you need soul time?
Man, have you stopped to look at the world lately? It’s a crazy crazy place.
Never mind the world, If you look at your own life, I’m sure you wonder how you just get through some days.
Training, work, kids, family, friends, that hour on TikTok each day…
And then we wonder why we’re exhausted, stressed out, and anxious.🤷♀️
You need soul time to reconnect with yourself. To remind you of the wisdom you have when you need it most.
Soul time is something I’d call a necessity in this day and age.
You need it to cure all sorts of ills like heartbreak, and living in a world of speed.
Body, mind, heart and soul
There are a few indicators that we humans have at our disposal when it comes to where we invest our time and energy.
We can listen to what our friends and experts tell us. Or we can listen to our own;
- Gut/intuition 🧠
- Mind 🤯
- Heart ❤️
- Soul 🌟
And it can often seem that these are all at odds. And in a crazy world, they all get muddled.
There are a million different ways that these aspects of oneself are classified on the internet. The important thing is to decide for yourself.
Personally, I go along these definitions;
Your gut is your gut instinct and your intuition 🧠
It tells you something that you’d often describe as ‘just knowing’. I just know. Call it intuition or call it your gut but sometimes it’s a very strong voice typically on why you need to do something or shouldn’t do it. I just got a gut feeling about him. There’s growing and compelling research describing the gut as your ‘second brain,’ so it makes sense that it is one of the main sources of this deeper knowing.
Gut/intuition = inner knowing based on immediate events, people and places. It’s usually felt in your body.
Your mind is the logical part of you 🤯
It makes a whirlwind of decisions each day based on largely qualitative data. It often bases decisions on associations or what’s happened in the past or even the information you feed it each day. The mind uses the activity of thinking self-using logic and/or reason to arrive at insights and conclusions about people, events, belief systems, and life.
It often starts with what you “should” do.
Mind = cognitive intelligence which is typically expressed in thoughts.
Then there’s the heart ❤️
Listen to your heart goes the saying. The heart is the seat of desire… of longing. The heart is deeply connected to our emotions. Our heart is meant to take the lead on emotional processing, on values and on our connection with others; at its best, it is the source of passion and compassion.
Heart = love and connection and it’s typically felt explicitly in levels of joy or love.
And the soul 🌟
In many religious and philosophical traditions, the soul is the spiritual essence of a person. There is much debate and argument over its definition and whether it even exists but given that I’m not here to convince you that it is, we’ll not go into any debate.
In the dictionary of my life, the soul is my guide. Like the song by Sting, “Let your soul be your pilot”.
That’s it! It’s the pilot driving the plane even when you’ve fallen asleep, or are going through some difficult circumstance. It’s all the time guiding you. It’s guiding you more, or less, depending on how much time you make to listen.
Your soul is not your physical body, nor is it the thoughts, emotions or physical sensations you experience. Your soul is the one experiencing them.
Soul = peace and decisions based on your life path
All of these matter but more about that another day.
How to listen to your soul?
You don’t actually have to worry about trying to listen to your soul. It will speak to you if you just give it space.
Things like;
- Journalling
- Travelling
- The mountains
- Forest
- Walking
- The ocean
- Alone time
For me, that’s always been by being out in the mountains or more recently being out on my bike.
It brings me absolute peace. It also just so happens that it makes my heart very happy so that’s cool too but above all, it brings me a level of peace that lets me know that everything is okay.
I spend ALOT of time and energy fighting life. ALOT. 😂
You’d think I’d have got tired of it by now at my age but nope I’m still out there every day fighting what is.
So I need soul time to remind me that life is far more than work, goals or achievements.
And that all the dots are connected and that I don’t have to fight so hard. And that I can rest and allow things to be.
Write your list of soulful activities
I remember a few years back living in London I got depressed. I was trying so hard to get my life together but no matter what I did, it felt like the odds were against me.
It’s only when I look back now that I see how it all came together.
I remember living there and going for walks. It was maybe thanks to those walks that I eventually left London and eventually found my home.
And the fact that I wrote in my journals a lot.
Bottom line?
Ironically at the times we usually need it the most, we are least likely to give ourselves soul time.
Soul time isn’t necessarily a happy time. It’s not being out with your friends at a party and loving their company – that’s heart time.
Soul time is when you can just be resting. Truly resting and I don’t mean physically.
You can;
- Be riding a mountain bike and still be internally at rest.
- Be riding a motorbike and be at rest.
- Walk along the ocean and be at rest.
When you take soul time, it will return some level of peace to you.
Want to try it?
Try;
- Journalling
- Deep breathwork or meditation
- Walking
- Being out in nature
- Watching the ocean
- Gardening
- Painting
- Deep conversation or deep listening.
Let me know what happens.
