This week I invite you to enter into a story we tell in our book, Energetic Awakening (p. 77), that describes the two worlds of the ego and the soul. As you engage with the story (either by reading or hearing it), consider how you identify your ego and soul and navigate the path between them.

“ Thomas Merton is arguably the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, has sold over one million copies and he wrote over sixty other books and hundreds of poems and articles on topics ranging from monastic spirituality to civil rights, nonviolence, and the nuclear arms race. He also struggled with depression and anxiety. He yearned for complete contemplative solitude and often felt in the wrong place, like “a duck in a chicken coop,”and sought to secure a full-time hermitage for his solitude. He finally secured a hermitage on a hilled, wooded area and proclaimed himself unencumbered from monastery life and interfering monks. Story has it that he promptly and definitively walked up to his hermitage on Mount Olivet. After only a week, word trickled back to the monastery that he had complained that no one had made any efforts to find out how he was getting on. This small anecdote about Thomas Merton illumines that while we attune to the silent solitude of the soul, the You still rises often and regularly, it wonders and checks in with the outside world. We never fully arrive in a place in which our You is not present in the form of a depression, a loneliness, a flash of bitterness. It is the very meaning of being human.”

Perhaps you recognize a bit of yourself in Thomas Merton in your soul that craves solitude and silence and your ego that fears missing out and has to check-in. Honest stories like Merton’s help us understand that a soulful life does not mean we separate from our world. On the contrary, it invites us to lean more deeply into the world. But in a different way.

You may wonder how? Especially in a world that feels frantic and chaotic, a hermitage on a hill may sound idyllic.

To stay present to the soul while living fully in the world, our primary task is to identify when the ego is rising and immediately reorient. Some days it can feel easier said than done! I return to one cue that alerts me when the ego has taken over and obscured the soul. Effort. When we effort, we move out of our soulful home base. Efforting has clear physical cues, like tension, fatigue, tightness, dis-ease, offenses, etc… that can be our first sign of the ego bulldozing the way.

I invite you this week to live a bit more like Merton with some levity and lightness, firmly housed in the soul while remaining attuned to the world. For where we live from makes all the difference in then how we live in our world.