It dawned on me that if I was to launch a brand and business based on the celebration of soulful experiences then I had to explore the essence of the soul more. Not just from a personal perspective, but to understand the collective consensus of what a soulful experience meant to all of us wandering around in our human earth suits.
So I went to the best in the business in Bali, Jeremiah Abrams. A Jungian Therapist, Jeremiah is a leading expert on the ‘human shadow’ – and I’d recently come to realise that the answers to the depth, nature, and significance of the soul didn’t come from talking shit about it over a long black and raw cheese cake – but rather delving into the shadows head first, and in this case with a blind fold on…
“Integrating your personal Shadow – the person you would rather not be – is the apprentice piece of self-development that has the promise to awaken you to your own unique transformative path in life.” ~ Jeremiah Abrams
A “shamanic breath work dreamtime journey” was the core experience from which we were to receive imagery from the psyche (soul) and interpret these over the following three days of the workshop. Ultimately be guided into an altered state through breath work and music (rather than LSD), inciting the soul to speak to us through a journey of images and experiences. It was one hell of a trip!
The actual dreamtime journey was one of the most profound life experiences I’ve had; and felt like the culmination of a lot of personal work I’d been doing over the past five years. But the goal here was to better understand the soul, so I will digress on the personification of the experience and focus on the collective…
There were some specific points of reference that revealed themselves over the few days, whether it was through my own personal reflection or from Jeremiah’s innate philosophic ability to deliver some jewels in open discourse:
- Soul is the generation of meaning from experiences.
- The strength and courage to live with the paradoxical nature of life is where the soul can be found, and is required.
- Soul can be lost ~ just go visit a prison for clarification on this.
- Soul can be grown/expanded; and embracing and integrating your shadow is a great place to start.
Above all else I realized that Drifting Sol could only ever be the channel to a soulful experience – it is the individual that has to kick the door wide open and grab the gold.
