A PATH FORWARD

IF YOU REMEMBER ONE THING from this column, remember this: Being out of harmony with your soul or with the demands of your spiritual nature is like having a rock in your shoe. It is going to bug you until you fix the situation. If you remember two things from this column, add this: Your soul is not about happiness. The rock in your shoe is not unhappiness. What our soul or spirit wants is to be fully present, innocent, and vulnerable to the vibrancy of life—to show up fully to life, whatever it brings.

- PAUL SUTHERLAND

PAUL SUTHERLAND is a professor of education at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, South Africa. He is a speaker, thought leader, and author of many illustrated books. Visit paulhsutherland.​com.

To put this another way, love, pain, heartbreak, jealousy, envy, anger, happiness, joy, sorrow, and even what now seems an overwhelming epidemic of anxiety are all integral to living. Life is not good when it feels okay or bad when it causes pain. Life is about being fully alive to what is. Living in harmony with your soul includes ups and downs, from joy to sorrow, from suffering to ecstasy. Living in harmony with your soul starts with listening. Then it moves to setting goals and owning your destiny as best you can. Its end result is behavioral, in which you make intentional, ongoing choices about how you are in this exact moment and what you do right here and now. The overriding goal for these choices is called right practice.

I grew up in the cold snow belt of Michigan. In the winter, we put on thick coats, heavy boots, and lined gloves, and we made sure the car had plenty of fuel before we set out on the 30-mile drive to the grocery store. We went prepared, and if the weather was really bad, we just stayed home. In other words, we made choices so we could avoid serious consequences like frostbite or worse. Those choices sometimes required us to slow down or stop and reevaluate, but never to be lazy.

Being out of harmony with your soul or with the demands of your spiritual nature is like having a rock in your shoe.