Here are some ways to recognise when your soul is calling for a change that will help you align with your deepest truths, and take you closer to your soul purpose.

If you’re anything like me, your default is your ego/logical mind. It’s easy for us to think in black and white – to think we know the way things are, how they’re going to pan out.

But the gold of your life is in the realm of soul. And one way to soul is through your imagination. If you need help shifting into the imaginal world (the world of your soul images), here’s a quick practice you can do every morning.

Womb healings are possibly my favourite type of shamanic work. A womb healing can be transformative. Your womb is receptive by nature, so it can hold heavy energy and wounding from events that have happened to you, like abuse, trauma and ancestral wounding.

Yes, your womb can hold ancestral wounds experienced by your mother, grandmother and women way back in your family line (not to mention in past or parallel lives).

It’s not always easy to live the life we were born to live – a.k.a, to live in accordance with our soul. Most of us are brought up without reference to the soul. Listening to our soul’s guidance can feel like trying to understand a language we don’t know how to speak, written in an alphabet we haven’t been taught.

Here are three ‘cs’ I’ve found to be an essential part of living soulfully.

Prayer doesn’t always seem to fit naturally with talk of a soulful life. Perhaps prayer seems more suited to the ‘upward’ journey of transcendence – mystical union, expansiveness, light. Not to the messy, downward, inward journey of soul. But to me, these two journeys are not separate. They are one and the same. Our bodies are the portal to the divine – to above, and to below.

I pray, even if I don’t call it that.

Sometimes, I catch glimpses of the soul as a mysterious animal, always just darting out of sight. This animal lives in the woods. It is mysterious – wise, kind, playful – and never completely knowable.

There’s a beautiful book by Parker Palmer, called Let Your Life Speak. It’s so short and simple, and it had a real impact on me.

In it, there’s a line that talks about ‘moments when it is clear – if I have eyes to see – that the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me. In those moments, I sometimes catch a glimpse of my true life, a life hidden like the river beneath the ice.’

When I read this, I wrestled uncomfortably with the feelings the words brought up.

Somewhere between your everyday life and the one you sense is waiting for you, there is a longing. It is this longing that makes you look for signs. Read books. Take courses. All the while, you wait. Maybe for years. You wait for certainty; a way to trust what you sense.

You get glimpses of who you are and what you are here to be, but it always feels just out of reach. Maybe you think you are imagining it.

It’s only in our modern Western society – where we think everything has an identifiable and ‘logical’ cause and effect – that this seems like an odd idea. But the truth is that, for example, difficulty with conceiving can be caused by ancestral traumas relating to a time when it was not safe to carry a baby. Disease can be caused by energetic attack (wishing harm on people). Physical pain can be caused by energy blocks. And sometimes, these things can be resolved simply by clearing the energy involved – as shamanic healing does.