My One True Thing
One of my favorite writing prompts is this one:
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Write one true thing.
It doesn’t have to shift the alignment of the planets, or find you quitting your job. It doesn’t have to be greeting card worthy, or even rhyme. It just needs to be something we believe to be true.
This prompt is not as easy as it might seem.
What is true? is a question that could keep us philosophical types spinning for a lifetime. As a spiritual seeker, this question is why I feel in love with yoga and the larger spiritual, healing, self-realization, and New Age worlds.
In these worlds, I sifted through the truths that were presented to me through books, magazines, blogs, teachers, and teachings. In the beginning, I tried to make space for all of it to be true, for I had not yet cultivated a practice of discernment.
But eventually, as the truths I was collecting challenged or even outright contradicted each other, I had to refine my practice of hearing truths, processing truths, and deciding what to do with each one. I learned that many false things (and people, and movements, and philosophies) masquerade as truth all the time.
And so, as I sat down to write my first book, Embodying Soul: A Return to Wholeness, I began with the same “prompt” as I had been given in my writing workshops, and wrote the one true thing all the other truths had finally distilled down to:
We human beings, who were born in and from wholeness, can choose to return to wholeness.
This truth can then broken down further into these true things:
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As souls, we all come into our human lives and our human bodies in our wholeness.
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Eventually, we are all broken by the world, after which we are slowly and often painfully conditioned to fit inside it.
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Not until we acknowledge our brokenness, and the pain that inevitably comes with it can we begin a path of returning to our wholeness.
I realize now that all these years of studying spirituality, I wasn’t really seeking enlightenment, or salvation, or some kind of perfection. Maybe my ego wanted these things, but what I really wanted, deep down, was wholeness.
A World Without Soul
Some years ago, while in a yoga workshop with Judith Lasater, she asked a simple question:
Imagine a world in which every single person, man, woman and child loved and accepted themselves as they were.
How might that impact our world?
Instantly, I could see communities of people, each filled with a love for themselves so complete, so true, that they did not hesitate in complimenting, being happy for, or helping out their neighbor.
I visualized leaders of countries so wise and accepting of their strengths and weaknesses that they knew how and when to surround themselves with supplemental intelligence and wisdom.
Without our own wholeness, we fail to recognize that we are all the same. We see ourselves as separate, and vulnerable in this separateness. Disconnected, lonely, and fearful, we treat others who are not like us with suspicion, jealousy or worse, disgust and contempt.
Without our own wholeness, fear delights in telling us lies about our differences, beliefs about “us against them,” and makes us believe that there’s not enough resources—not enough love, acceptance, success, belonging—to go around.
With this false belief in lack, we cannot evolve into a kinder, gentler, more compassionate human being. Without wholeness reminding us of our interconnectedness and providing us access to the bottomlessness of Who We Are, there is little hope for true, authentic joy and communion in our lives.
But there is room for hope: collective wholeness for a society begins with just one person. One person who comes into wholeness can inspire the next, and the next, and the next, until we reach a collective tipping point.
A tipping point, from the book of the same name by Malcolm Gladwell, indicates a point at which an idea, concept, or truth reaches a critical mass and goes on to affect the whole globe, regardless of distance or boundary. The tipping point is the moment at which our collective consciousness shifts/expands/rises to accommodate the new, higher vibration the minority has been working for. This is when the entire culture takes a giant step forward. This is how things go global, or viral, or become common knowledge across continents. This is how we tip paradigms.
But who are the individuals who can best answer this call to reach the tipping point?
A Soulful Revolution
Those of us paying attention know that our world is in a tenuous state. It is a time of both incredible transformative possibility and planetary destruction. Meanwhile, the deep, seemingly irreconcilable divide and mistrust of the intentions among our people collectively tears at our individual hearts.
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The loss of trust and faith in authority figures, scientific fact, and even the evidence of our own eyes and ears has found us all running around with our own set of “alternative facts,” a spiraling condition portending a truly Orwellian world. At a time when the window to reverse the imminent danger of global climate change is rapidly closing, we face a wall of denial and/or apathy, while profit margins, greed, and willful ignorance insist on maintaining the status quo.
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The wall many wish to build on the southern border is only a representation of the many walls that are going up in our lives—designed for protection, but actually creating isolation, loneliness, depression, anxiety, pain, and suffering.
As long as our individual and collective ego continues on demanding and forging its own way, we are one step closer to destroying ourselves, each other, and this earth we live on. Can we not see the writing on our melting ocean walls? This critical transformation, which is truly an evolution of humankind, is all that matters to our soul.
The first critical step to healing, to wholeness, to progress, is remember that the overarching desire of our souls is to be recognized, honored, and fully embodied within the human experience. The soul is not afraid to walk this earth. Quite the contrary; the soul longs to walk this earth.
The soul yearns to be unveiled and witnessed. To be expressed. To be seen. The desire of the soul is nothing more complicated, and nothing less exquisite.
But for all that the soul may knock, it is only we who can open the door.
We all experience this knocking of the soul, this inner hunger that drives us to seek for our “one true thing”. It may be felt as an inner urge for “something more.” It may be a secret ache, an itch, a calling into a different way of life.
If we open the door to soul, we begin to move towards a more soulful, truthful life. It may not be graceful, but movement is movement. As the soul is embodied, we, like a flower, open—each and every petal of us, no matter how long forgotten, how repressed, how much feared or despised will unfurl and lay exposed. And the soul will shine light on all of it without prejudice.
As we learn to stand in our wholeness and as we come to stand with our wholeness, we awaken to greater and greater truths. We find our own “one true thing.”
It’s no small endeavor. It’s no small ask. But it’s a small but potent new beginning: a “Welcome home” to our soul.
This welcoming home is what my journey is all about. It’s what this publishing company stands for. I invite you to join me—by following along on social media, reading the books we publish, submitting your own for consideration, or just reaching out to share your journey.
Welcome to Curiosa Publishing.
Release your stories, not to make them go away, not in aversion, but to put them to use as servants of the world. Set them free, let them speak, let them be heard, let others learn and grow from your stories as the teaching tool they are.