Soul Wisdom is a weekly newsletter. Please feel free to share parts of this letter that connect with you, or send to someone you love. A special shout out to all the new subscribers who joined since the last newsletter. Thank you for valuing my work when there are so many things that can take your attention online. I appreciate you. It means everything. 🖤
My friend’s partner has chosen to listen to his parents and not choose her. Although they both love each other, his parents don’t approve. It got me thinking about how living our life for other people will never bring happiness because we’re continuously chasing outside permission and acceptance. Once we realise we don’t need permission from anyone and we only need to accept ourselves, we’re truly free. It can be scary breaking free from our parents beliefs because we are biologically wired to stay connected to them. The umbilical cord nourishes us for 9 months then it physically gets cut. But, many of us don’t cut that second energetic umbilical cord. We are still energetically connected to them and allow them to have unnecessary influence on our lives—living a life they envisioned, often born from fear and lack in their own lives. Beyond that an authentic path awaits us.
I’ve had to make a series of choices in adulthood that went against what my parent’s ideals are. It was a choice between my intuition and their acceptance. It hasn’t been easy but I think about how I want to feel about my life in the end.
“Everybody’s got their dues in life to pay” is a line that really spoke to me in a different way when listening to this classic:
I had a conversation with someone close to me about how his dad passed away and how he was never physically there. He has all this resentment harboured inside because his dad abandoned him. It got me thinking about all the people who have parents physically present in their lives but are emotionally disconnected. They were abandoned too. That comes with its own version of grief.
A client I’m working with lives in Austin, TX said he felt sad because 50 miles from him floods took the lives of 80+ people. 30 of them were children. It’s wild to think how one moment we’re here and the next we’re gone. It could happen anywhere, any time. My partner
later shared with me how her friend’s brother-in-law got shot and killed on his driveway around 2020. He was 19. I then thought about the story of my dad’s stepbrother who had a 9 year old child who ran out onto the road in India and got crushed by a truck. His mother watched it happen. I think about rhe grief that lives inside all these stories around the world that we don’t know about. The human collective is grieving on multiple levels at all times.It’s sad to witness how some people are so wrapped up in their problems their inner world continues to shrink as their grudges for the outside world grow. The pain from their past is so vast that they become consumed by it. They lash out and demonise others because somewhere along the way the whole world became the devil. They stopped believing in angels and started bullying the world into submission because that’s the only way they’ve ever known to survive. I want to acknowledge those who choose to be kind, gentle, loving, and compassionate because they know the pain of feeling alone.
No one teaches you to grieve the dead, or the living. A friend of mine lost her friend recently and in the same week her nephew was born. Life and death intimately woven. A snapshot of the entirely of life in one week. A reminder to grieve and celebrate all at once. Hold all of it.
I think about the ashes of dreams that we once had.
When I feel creatively flat I’ll absorb other peoples art. Whether it be a tv series, music, words etc. Soak it all in and it soothes the soul. If I don’t feel creative then I’ll try to surround myself with it in different forms. Eventually, it sparks something in me. One candle lights another.
I love discovering new music and this song really resonated this week. I can feel the raw and authentic emotion in his soul:
I don’t remember the exact moment, but somewhere along the way in my teenage years, I stopped just hearing the music and started listening to the lyrics. That’s when everything changed. I realised each song was telling a story—a slice of someone’s life, their soul captured in a moment and woven into a few minutes of eternity.
There are years of tears waiting to come out in many of us. I noticed that this past week my old selves needed to grieve and let go of past pains. I let the river flow freely. Without judging, just witnessing and allowing my body to do its thing. Crying feels like a clearing and energetic release and reset of an imbalance in the system.
Some people would do anything to go back in time because no amount of money can buy that. But, honestly, I wouldn’t. The best of my life is happening in the here and now. It’s all the footsteps I am taking to create a new life. Yes the path behind help shape me and I acknowledge that, but the path ahead feels so much brighter.
Sometimes you have to lose people and lose versions of your old self to discover who you are today underneath all the rubble of your past.
One day this week my body woke up randomly at 444am and I caught the sunrise and just stood there in silence for a few moments taking it in. Who knows how many sunrises I have left to see.
Reminder: You’re allowed to have your own opinion and your opinion can change.
“When you fall in love with someone you gotta fall in love with them 15 times in their life because they’re gonna change.” is what yungblud said in a podcast I listened to. Hannah and I have been together 3 years and different versions of us have appeared, disappeared, and reappeared, many times over. Love is a repeat choice you make over and over and over. However, that doesn’t mean you choose someone who continually rejects and disrespects your boundaries. As with anything, use discernment and nuance. Life is not black and white.
Something else he said that struck me in that same conversation; “Art is the explosion of the soul”.
I’ve struggled with my body image a lot over the years and as a man I don’t find many other men talking about this. We’re bombarded with pressure to look a certain way. I’m still figuring out my way home to my body.
A TV series I really enjoyed watching recently is A Thousand Blows. It tells the true story of two friends from Jamaica who come to London to make a life for themselves and end up in the east end boxing world. It’s fascinating to think about all the journeys in history that took place, the heroes journey that each of us have taken that are not written in any history books anywhere.
With love,
V
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Thank you for putting so much in perspective in this piece. We are in the river. I will be celebrating the closing of my 57th trip around the sun this week. The older I get the more gratitude I experience - for all of the steps I have made and the choices that have brought me right here. Also, I feel more strongly the realization about just how quickly it all goes.