Show Transcript: Hello magical soul and welcome to The Soul’s Human Experience Podcast!
I’m sitting here enjoying my pumpkin cold brew from Starbucks. Because I am basic and I am camp pro pumpkin drinks, and pro pumpkin everything really. It’s fine, you can call me basic but it genuinely makes me feel happy and fall is my favorite time of year. Kind of funny that I moved somewhere where fall doesn’t really exist and by that I mean it’s still ninety plus degrees every day here in Texas. It doesn’t have nearly the same vibe as the traditional fall that I love but that’s okay. I can still enjoy it just a different way, in shorts and a tank top.
I thought today we could go back to basics and discuss some foundational topics, and those being who you really are and why you’re really here. Because at the core of this human experience, remembering who you are and your reason for being here is what’s going to keep you centered when the denseness and gravity of earth is pulling you down, literally, no pun intended.
We can never be reminded enough of who we really are and why we’re really here. You know, it’s funny, even though I wrote a book about it I still need to be reminded too. Pretty recently I was gifted this reminder in an uncomfortable way. My spiritual practice has been pretty consistent for a while now and just when I think I’ve really got this down and it’s so great to be sharing with others what has helped me—I’m thrown a curveball from the universe. Which came in the form of feeling hurt by someone who I thought was my friend. The details of the situation are not important but as I was moving through feeling angry and hurt I also quickly realized that it was a gift. That’s one of the great things about having a spiritual practice is that you come back to center much faster each time you get thrown off. And I saw that what this was, was the chance to see it another way. It’s not a test to pass or a lesson to learn but an opportunity to practice. To practice coming back to my center of truth, and it was also an opportunity to practice forgiveness, and to practice boundaries. Because they and this situation are my teacher. I was reminded of who I really am, and who they really are too. We are both souls navigating this human experience. And I can separate their soul from their behavior. I can see them for who they really are, a fellow soul on the journey, and I can-on a human level-forgive their behavior. That doesn’t mean forgetting and it doesn’t mean excusing. Because I don’t think there is any good excuse for their behavior which means we are not friends. And that’s ok, because I don’t want to be friends with someone who behaves that way. I do forgive them because I don’t want to hold that energy of resentment. It’s a gift to myself. What’s also a gift to myself is distancing myself from that person moving forward. And I’m viewing it in this way not just because I believe this mindset to be the truth, but what is the alternative? Staying stuck in the energy of resentment and hurt? That only hurts me, not them, and I don’t need or want to punish myself. Sometimes we’re taught through love and sometimes through challenge and upset. Underneath the layer of human and the pain they are a beautiful soul. THEY also implies outside of me, separate from me.. But in reality, they are me and I am them. That soul-centered layer of perception is freedom. I needed that reminder of freedom. I’m finding myself now reflecting on that experience wanting to say thank you for it.
Okay so who are you really? You are an infinite soul incarnated on planet earth, living in this temporary body. We identify ourselves with the opposite until we relearn the truth of our being. We identify with our name, our job, our achievements, our age, where we live, our hobbies and all of these things that aren’t really us at all. Underneath all those things we are all the same and that is we are all spirit. We are all pieces of the universe. It’s very simple. All the other things we tend to identify with are earthy, human, 3D, and ego things. Remembering the truth of your being-who you really are is everything. I think we can all agree that incarnating here in this time is a pretty wild ride and so when things seem bad both personally and with the world, just taking a second to pause and remember that none of this is actually real, and the only thing that is real is the love of the universe of which you are a part, I find that very comforting. I know it doesn’t suddenly take away the problem, but zooming out to the bigger picture does help you gain perspective.
So if that’s who you truly are you might be wondering how the heck you got here and why you are here. Again, everything I say on this podcast is my opinion from both personal experience and research and you don’t have to agree with me. I believe we come here willingly and with intention. For a very long time I thought I was here against my will, that I didn’t ask to be here and I didn’t want to be here. I used to be very mad about that. That is until I learned that our soul chooses, voluntarily to come here. We choose our names, our family, and many many aspects of our lives, including our teaching themes. What are teaching themes? I believe our intention to come here, and I talked a bit about this in the last episode as well, is to uplevel humanity. And we do that by teaching each other how to be better humans. So we select a number of themes in which we agree to teach on. And yes I’m aware of the irony of using the word teach after talking about how earth is not a school, but you could replace it with instructor, trainer, or even expander, ooh that’s a good one, but the message is the same. You’re contributing to the uplevel in your unique ways. You expand on an individual level and then you automatically expand the larger scale. Whenever someone says they have no idea what they are supposed to be teaching, that’s ok! You don’t need to stress out about it, you can teach in small yet very impactful ways like spreading kindness and having compassion for others. Those are so huge and require very little effort. Start there and stay there until you get the hit to try something else. Don’t overcomplicate. It’s all actually pretty simple, you’re an eternal soul with a human body, here on a volunteer mission to make this a better place. And to enjoy the journey of that. We’re constantly walking the fine line of human and spirit. Until you awaken you walk more on the side of human. We’re born into this world that we think is real and we receive programming that reinsforces that and the rules of society and all of that. Then if you begin to question and begin to awaken from the illusion of this world, you start to step over into the side of spirit. I think it’s a balance and a delicate dance. Because living solely on one side is to attempt to reject the other. But we’re supposed to experience both at the same time. You are both spirit and human all at once. Embracing what it means to have a 3D experience and all that comes with it and at the same time remembering who you really are. That’s the dance of this life.
I also want to talk about the question, are we living in a simulation? If you don’t know this about me I am obsessed with the actual science side of the universe too. For a short time I wanted to major in physics because I wanted to be a theoretical physicist and think about the laws of the Universe. But all the prerequisites that accompanied that major bored me because I didn’t care about anything that wasn’t related to the universe in that way so I went a completely different direction and majored in German. Anyway I love Neil Degrasse Tyson’s answer to this question (and I know he’s a bit polarazing, but) when asked are we in a simulation, he said, “Prove to me that we’re not”. And of course we can’t. In fact, I believe we are in some sort of simulation. And my theories about earth have evolved over time. At first it started as an analogy to a playground. I still like that analogy and I still use it. If you think of earth as a playground, suddenly you being here takes on a playful quality. Why do you go to the playground? To play of course, to have fun. That doesn’t mean you can’t get hurt on the playground. On the contrary, there are lots of ways you could get hurt! Then it’s not so fun in that moment, but probably not enough to keep you from going back and playing again. I once fell off the swings so badly I had the wind knocked out of me and that was super scary but the next day I was back on the swings, just holding on this time because I was doing one of those look mom no hands, which didn’t end well. Fights break out on the playground, so the playground is filled with challenges, physically and mentally. AND it’s filled with enjoyment, all at the same time.
Then I took it a step further, and this is the analogy I wrote about in my book, which is that earth is like going on a trip to an unknown place. to use the word “like” is not really even necessary because it literally is going on a trip to an unknown place. Unknown to your current human self that is, not unknown to your soul. Because when you go on a trip to somewhere you’ve never been, you basically have a blank slate. No comparisons or reference points, not sure what to expect. Everything is unknown. But what to you hope for when you go somewhere new? Probably to have a good time. To have new experiences and see new things. To expand your horizons and gain new perspectives and knowledge. And if you’ve ever traveled anywhere, then you know there can be challenges and not so pleasant parts. Like a kid kicking the back of your seat for 9 hours, yes that really happened to me once.
I actually want to read a small excerpt from this part of The Soul’s Human Experience.
Everything is different here. You learn from scratch how to adapt and navigate the experience. The experiences are all new, like viewing the world through the eyes of a child seeing something for the first time. You are homesick at times, wondering if coming here was the right choice. You will learn and grow a lot. It will be the experience of a lifetime.
I thought that was a more complete, detailed analogy than the playground but then I took it a step further. I started thinking more about the word simulation. And I was like, you know what might be the most accurate analogy is that earth is like a video game. Because it really has all the elements. You play a character, that you create or design, which is you in this body, with your chosen name and interests, and so on. So it covers the design phase before you even get here. Then once you get here, it’s a simulated world, a collective illusion to play around in. Because why do we even play games? They’re fun! Sometimes what makes them fun is the challenge of them. So we take on these challenges just like in a video game you have missions and side quests that are pre-determined and distributed to you. And some you pick up along the way. Imagine you get a pop-up that says are you interested in earning experience points around love and relationships? And you can click yes or no but you don’t know what it entails. Your human self doesn’t know that is, your soul may have planted it there for you to encounter. If you say yes then you’re thrust into some new or different kind of experience all with the goal of expanding and upleveling your character. In this video game of life where when you meet the challenge, you uplevel in some capacity. In the literal video game sense, you move up the levels, like you start at level 1 and when you meet the criteria of the task, you get to level 2, and so on and so forth. And every time you expand in some way, you uplevel yourself. And as I said before, when you uplevel, you automatically also uplevel the energy of the planet. We’re all here teaching each other.
The other thing that works really well about the video game of life is that it’s multi-player, interactive. Just like you can play a game online with other people from around the world, in this life your soul may have asked other souls to join in your game and play their characters. And vice versea, you are playing in other people’s games too. Because we’re all here teaching each other in this way. We can be in more than one game at once.
And that’s basically the evolution of my theories or analogies around earth. It has really helped me, and I hope it helps you too, to make sense of what’s going on here. It’s so easy to get caught up in what we think is real to us. But when you pause to remember that we are so small in this universe and reorient yourself to what’s actually happening, what is actually real, that can change everything in an instant.
I talked in a previous episode about how I don’t think earth is a school. I think it’s a video game. It’s an experience to take part in the design of our experience and a place we go to have fun and uplevel at the same time. And side note we don’t always expand through challenge, we can expand through love too. You don’t need to be thinking, oh great I need to resign myself to the one path of challenge being the way forward. It doesn’t have to be hard. It will be at times, but there are also profound moments of love through which we learn. Like have you ever had someone share something with you that you had never thought about before, and you really thought, wow that is great advice or you saw something in a new way? And it was coming from a place of love? And it sticks with you? Those are the golden nuggets of expansion.
Let me know what you think about this episode. And as always, send me your questions and stories. You can find everything in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening and I will see you here again next week.