Shepherds of the Soul / by Maré Hieronimus

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The journey of each human soul is profound and mythic. It is the most epic story that we can possibly imagine. It contains within it the beauty and power of the most monumental archetypes and legends, and it is the stuff recited by the greatest storytellers throughout the ages of life on Earth.

Each soul tapestry contains within it the most delicate embroidery, the most complicated twists and turns, the most incredible victories and the greatest tragedies. This ecstasy and sorrow lie at the center of every human heart. In the field of maya and duality, it can be no other way.

This is the very nature of the human experience. These are the oceanic waves of Shakti herself, the rhythmic and continuous beauty and suffering as we swing between day and night, dark and light, expansion and contraction, pain and ecstasy, seer and seen, witness and experience, internal and external. These pairs of opposite exist, and do not exist.

Beyond the pairs of opposites is the great field of unity, the profound and conscious understanding of the wholeness of all of the many parts, and the oneness of light and shadow.

This truth is expressed in infinite ways in every moment through our earthly experience: that the day and the night are but a reflection of a single unified movement of the passage of the sun; that the inward and outward shifting of the tides expresses the cyclical stations of the moon, that the magnificent mountains and the deep valleys of the heart are part of a much larger weaving of exquisite beauty and epic dimension. This beauty reflects the movement of the great path directly inward into the Self, which inevitably is also the direct path outward into cosmic consciousness. It is both inward, and outward.

When we begin, on our own terms, in our own language, and through our own sacred experience, to track the journey of the soul, to listen to the soul’s voice, to feel the winding path into the center of our cosmic bones, to witness the depth of our experience, we become shepherds of the soul.

There are infinite ways to commune with the soul and listen to soul story.

We can do this through engaging dreamtime, deep sensing into the wisdom of the body, listening to the song of one’s pulse, singing the melody of one’s experience, dancing one’s soul mythology, or composing soul prose. We can work with plant, animal and spirit medicine and guides, engage sacred objects and talismans, sacred sites, and sacred books. We can work with the mineral kingdom, shining light through crystal prisms which reflect and refract into the the subtle body, building our luminosity through our own incredible healing. We can work with methods of divination, not to determine what we think might come to pass, but to unearth the impulses, ingredients and bones of our own mythic unfolding.

The techniques are endless, and become unique to each of us, as unique as the path of one’s own being.

These techniques and forms help us to learn the language of the soul, and help us to commune with the deeper aspects of one’s being. In learning the soul language and story, we begin to truly bear witness to the profound and winding journey that each of us has been on.

It is only then, through our own embodied and unique experience of soul voice and expression, that we truly begin the long and winding path back into the heart of our own sacred divinity, and into the realization that we were always whole, we were never lost, we were never broken, we were never separate, we were never alone.

We become the seer and the seen, and are unified through the process of our own profound and expanding awareness. This is the phenomenal voyage that each human soul embarks upon in every incarnation.