A client asked:
What is the difference between your spirit and your soul and how does one relate to the other?
Jason
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Hi Jason & Elaine,
You know, this is a question that I’ve wondered about too.
I have no idea if this is “right,” but here’s how I’ve resolved it for myself…
I think of my spirit as being my energy self or energetic essence that imbues my body with life, and my soul being the part of me that is growing and changing and evolving. I see them as separate but together. I guess I tend to think of my soul having consciousness and planning ability. But I think my spirit has a consciousness too, one that transcends growth or even personal/spiritual awareness. Seems more playful somehow.
I have no idea if that’s right!!
I think Sonia Choquette uses spirit and soul interchangeably?
Hope this helps,
Jenna
Hi Jason,
The way I had the difference between our spirit and our soul explained to me (and I’m sure there are other definitions out there) is that our souls are defined by how much of our spirit we can bring into our body. I think Gary Zukav said something like if we brought all of our spirit into our body we’d self combust.
The way I tend to think of it is that our spirits are that part of oursevles that can never be touched by any circumstances, thoughts, or feelings; our spirits are that pure-awareness beingness beyond our observer self. Whereas our souls are growing as we live, and pieces of our souls can be split off from us or at later times brought back to us. (Hence the name, soul retrieval, for the shamanic technique of bringing back lost parts of ourselves)
I’m sure there are other ways of looking at this. Anyone else have a good definition?
Elaine
Hi Elaine,
A friend of mine got a new book from her friend Hank Wesselman entitled Spirit Medicine, Healing in Sacred Realms. I browsed through it and found some info you might be interested in, as it relates to the question about soul. Here is a quick summary of some of the book. Feel free to pass it on to your other friends if you feel it would be of interest to them.
The Soul Cluster:
Many cultures consider that there are 3 aspects of the self. For example:
Pythagoras – physical (body), mental (mind or psyche), spiritual (immortal)
The Lakota – woniya (physical self), nagi (cognitive self), nagila (divine spiritual self)
The Inuit – 3 souls: anerneq (breath soul received at birth), ateq (name soul that is given to us at birth), tarneq (immortal, spiritual soul, our true essence)
Hawaiian – unihipili (lower soul/self aspect, the body), uhane (middle soul/self aspect, the mental or conscious egoic mind), aumakua (higher soul/self, personal supernatural)
These 3 aspects form a cluster, the personal soul cluster. With each soul aspect being a part of the totality, ultimately originating from the same source.
The higher self is known by various names; God self, angelic self, transpersonal witness, overself, oversoul. This oversoul is often what is met in mystical experiences and interpreted as a benevolent being or deity.
Our oversoul is with us our entire life, though not interfering with our choices, it may serve as one of our spirit teachers. It communicates through inspiration (dreams, visions, ideas) and is the origin of our intuition. It is the ultimate source of who and what we are, the totality of character we’ve developed across lifetimes. An energetic hologram of it resides within our body, carried in by our first breath and taken back with the last breath to the oversoul upon our death. (The latin word for breath and spirit is the same; spiritus. The Hebrew word for spirit and breath is the same; ruach.)
At birth, the oversoul enters the body soul; the composite holographic field of the the mother and the father which is a spiritual-energetic matrix that carries ancestral imprints from both lineages.
The mental soul can be considered the ego, the rational mind that is also the source of our will, imagination and intentionality.
All these are interwoven in the field of humanity’s soul, the human spirit, or what Jung called the collective unconscious.
Wesselman seems to have a good description of the subject, at least one the mind can grasp as an overview of a possible model. My current interest, due to some recent rich experiences, is in soul family, soul partners, soul group. These aspects in-between the individual and collective aren’t mentioned much by Wesselman, so if you all have any good info or references, I’d be very interested.
Mahalo,
Ken
Here’s something from Empowered by Empathy by Rose Rosetree:
“Your soul expresses your spirit in its complete human form – it’s an earthy, here-and-now part of you. By contrast, your spirit is the unique spark of God that makes you an individual. Thus, your spirit offers wings; your soul demands roots.”
She also says, “… one of the most important aspects of soul is its ability to recognize and validate choices that move you forward most rapidly along the path of spiritual evolution.”
– Jenna
Intuition is the way we both know our own soul and the way that our spirit communicates with us. The soul doesn’t need to communication with us so much via Intuition as the Spirit does since soul is eternal and not so concerned with our life struggles as spirit is.