What is soul searching and how to soul search? I wanted to focus on soul searching, what it’s all about, the reality of soul searching, and some ways that you can do your own soul searching.
When we hear soul searching, we usually think it’s all about figuring out what it is we want out of life, what our purpose is, or perhaps a spiritual retreat comes to mind, but I feel like soul searching is a lot bigger than that.
These past 2 years I dedicated a lot of my time and energy to my own soul searching journey and the reality is, it’s a hard and sometimes painful journey. It’s not always as peaceful as it sounds, but on the other side of your journey there is a new sense of calmness and peace in solitude.
It’s almost as if you have gone through a total rebirth, striping away your old self, and allowing this new sense of self to form.
In this post I am going to share my own soul searching experience and how to soul search.
If you’d rather listen:
How to Soul Search – The Power of Soul Searching
Reconnect with your Intuition
We are all born with intuition, it’s that gut feeling that tells you what choice to make, or when you intuitively know what is best for you. Our intuition is connected to our soul and it always knows what’s best for us, it’s like our inner compass.
Unfortunately, at a young age, society conditions us to push this intuition away. This is usually because it’s easier to control others with fear. If we all were able to rely on our intuition to guide us through life, we wouldn’t fear as much as we do.
At a young age we are put into school which conditions us to think a specific way. In school they push the narrative that you need to go to college in order to be successful, even if intuitively you feel that college isn’t right for you. They use fear tactics to push you in that direction anyway.
“If you don’t go to college you won’t have a good paying job and you’ll struggle.”
So you fall for the fear tactics even though your intuition is telling you “it’s not the right choice for you”
Society is always trying to control our decisions and choices with fear and this blocks our intuition. It’s exactly what they want because it gives them more control. This is a huge realization I had through my own soul searching because through soul searching I became reconnected with my intuition.
There were many times in the past that I pushed my intuition away and followed the status quo due to fear, but it never worked out for me. This is because it wasn’t the path I was meant for and my intuition knew that, but I did learn a lot along the way.
When it comes to soul searching it’s all about reconnecting with our inner compass, our intuition.
Embrace Solitude
The reality of this soul searching journey is that in order to get reconnected with your intuition, it’s going to have to be a journey of solitude. It is a journey that you need to do alone.
This doesn’t mean you need to break up with your partner or drop all of your friends. What this means is that you need to have moments of solitude where it’s just you and your thoughts. This can be very triggering for some and it can be hard.
When I started my own soul searching journey I quickly realized that this is a solo journey because only we can connect to our soul and intuition in a way where we can uncover what it is our soul desires. Having external voices and opinions affects this process. Usually this experience comes during a time where you find yourself surrounded by people who aren’t on a similar path. You may feel like the lone wolf, but this journey of soul searching and solitude will help you find a state of inner peace, healing, and discovery of what brings you a sense of purpose.
Making sure you have moments of solitude to quiet your mind and really connect with your thoughts is going to be important. This is often achieved through meditation or journaling.
It’s important to note that when you start this soul searching journey, it can bring up triggers. It can feel lonely in the beginning and you may have some realizations that your current reality isn’t the reality that’s best for you. Often through our soul searching journey we realize that we were hiding parts of who we are due to unhealed wounds. We also realize we may have relationships in our life that aren’t healthy. These relationships may no longer align with our vibration by the end of our journey.
We come to this realization that there is so much more waiting for us to discover it, but for so long we’ve held ourselves back.
As much as this journey can feel lonely, scary and long in the beginning, by the end of it we unlock this potential within us that allows us to truly create the reality that we were always meant to have. We take back control of our reality and no longer allow fear and external experiences and people choose our life for us.
Self Reflection
Once you embrace solitude, now what?
It’s time for self reflection. A huge part of soul searching is going inward and self reflecting. What parts of your reality don’t feel aligned? What parts of your reality are draining you? What parts of your reality make you feel anxious and upset? What beliefs are your beliefs and what beliefs were you conditioned to believe through society, your parents, and community? I have a helpful post here that is all about re-writing your limiting beliefs.
After you figure out what doesn’t align, you then want to figure out what parts of your reality make you feel fulfilled. What lights you up and brings you joy? I like to go back to my inner child when doing reflection because often our inner child knows what lights our soul up. What did you enjoy as a child? What did you love to do? What made you feel alive?
I was doing some of my own reflection the other day and I had this realization. As a child I LOVED buying books that were related to personal growth. I don’t know if anyone else remembers those journal prompts books as a kid, but I used to always buy them. If the book had questions about myself where I had to answer them, like self reflection questions, I absolutely loved them.
I also used to create graphics all the time online. Creating my MySpace profile was always fun for me. There was also this website called Buddy4u that I used to spend hours every day on just creating content and writing. It was so much fun for me.
I would also create worksheets and pretend to be a teacher. These were things that I loved to do as a child and now that I am older I am incorporating bits and pieces of this into my career.
These are just some examples of how I reflected on my own inner child to remember what I used to love and enjoy doing as a child because often that can give you clues to your soul.
Inner Healing
Once you figure out what you loved to do as a child, ask yourself, why aren’t you doing more of what you love? Why are you settling for those parts of your reality that make you feel unfulfilled? Why do you stay in toxic relationships? Why do you stay in a job that doesn’t value your worth?
This will bring up triggers for you, but you have to pay attention to those triggers because those triggers will often point towards unhealed wounds. I’ll use my own life as an example.
I had many relationships in my life where I felt like I couldn’t be myself, where I felt like if I didn’t appear a certain way, that I wasn’t good enough, valued, or appreciated. Even though I felt this way, I still held on to these relationships and it was because I don’t like change. I always struggled when it came to conflict and I struggle to let go.
A huge step in my soul searching journey was recognizing these wounds within me and making those necessary changes in order to step into the reality my soul desired. The hard part about soul searching is making peace with the dark in order for you to embrace your light.
We all have shadows. This is the trauma we push into the depths of our being that we never had the chance to address and heal. That’s why we always hear people talk about shadow work. I have a helpful post on shadow work here.
When you do your soul searching it’s important to make peace with your shadow side. It’s important to allow that side to come to the surface so you can recognize it and work on healing from the pain you experienced.
These unhealed wounds often stem from childhood because in childhood there’s many times where we don’t feel safe to acknowledge our pain or our emotions. Many of us grew up with parents who may not of had the chance to heal themselves.
Often times our parents were taught to brush things under the rug, to get over it, to suck it up and to not cry. Since that’s what they were taught, they then take those lessons and the cycle repeats with their own children.
This creates generational trauma and a repeating cycle of humans who don’t want to recognize their emotions, pain, or trauma.
When we push these emotions away we end up storing these emotions within our body because we didn’t feel like it was okay to deal with them at the time which then creates triggers.
When we go through an experience that triggers or reminds us of painful situations from the past, our body responds and lets those stored emotions out little by little.
How you react to your triggers will be different for everyone, but an example for me is that in my childhood I was always aware. My awareness was heightened because I wanted to make sure that I was keeping the peace within my environment. My parents were always fighting and my dad was always angry and because this kept me on edge, I tried my best to not upset anyone at home.
This created people pleasing tendencies where I would often sacrifice my own inner peace to keep the external peace for a moment. I also created a “I need to fix this” mentality.
I never recognize just how much this persona I created affected me until I went on my soul searching journey.
When we haven’t allowed ourself to make peace with our shadows, we tend to still hold on to this masked version of ourselves.
It’s this version of ourselves that we created to protect ourselves as a child, and we are still wearing this mask because our inner child is still hurting. This is why we continue to seek out relationships and experiences that remind us of childhood because that’s what’s comfortable to us, even if it’s toxic
The universe tries to get us to recognize these unhealed wounds by sending us partners that remind us of our parents or we attract situations that reflect back to us the wounds we have yet to truly heal.
It keeps those cycles repeating and holds us back from being our authentic self. When it comes to soul searching it’s so important to recognize cycles that are repeating that stem from unhealed wounds.
Whether it’s continuously dating emotionally unavailable partners, or continuously ending up in a work environment that feels toxic. It could be continuously attracting bosses into our life that make us feel worthless or make us feel like we can’t be heard.
Recognizing these patterns will help you figure out what inner work needs to be done in order to break these patterns. Often these patterns are a clear indication that there’s change that needs to take place.
The only way to break a cycle is to create a change. If you continuously do what you’ve always done, you will get the same results every time.
Doing the reflection and making peace with your shadows will help you create necessary change and break those patterns. This will help you deepen the connection you have with your soul. I like to think of it as getting to know yourself.
Question Your Reality
This next step in your soul searching journey is all about questioning your reality. I know this sounds crazy, but it was a huge step in my journey!
I started to question a lot of things like,
“Why should I have to work hard at a job that doesn’t appreciate my value?”
“Why should I keep someone in my life who doesn’t make me feel valued or appreciated?”
“Why should I allow other people to make my decisions and choices for me?”
“Why should I have to burn myself out in order to make money?”
“Why should I have to go to college in order to be successful?”
I started to question my current beliefs about my reality and I started to recognize that a lot of my beliefs were taught to me. These beliefs conditioned and greatly limited my connection between me and my soul.
My life path has been far from traditional. I go against a lot of what society would consider to be “the truth” and that’s because I desire free thinking. I connect more with my feelings and intuition than I do with logic. I have a very free spirited approach to life and part of my belief is that I believe we should be able to make our own decisions in life. That we shouldn’t be controlled to have decisions made for us and what’s best for one person isn’t always best for the next.
When people start to try to interfere with your intuition, that’s when there’s problems, because our intuition knows best. If intuitively a decision doesn’t feel right for you, then you should be allowed to lean into that feeling without someone telling you that you shouldn’t trust that intuitive nudge.
But often in today’s society, intuition is pushed to the side. There are so many ways that we are conditioned to not listen to our intuition and it’s alarming.
A lot of people don’t want to recognize this, but one of the most important steps in this soul searching experience is to connect deeply with your intuition because our intuition is our soul. It knows what’s best for us, it can see our potential, but it’s all the outside BS that holds us back. Those external opinions, people who try to control our choices and decisions, people who guilt us into believing that the intuitive decisions we want to make for ourselves are wrong and all the fear based media that society is always pushing.
It’s time to get to know YOU by connecting with your intuition and doing the reflection to recognize what it is YOU want, and what may have been holding you back from living out that potential.
Something that helped me on my soul searching journey was being opened to perspective. Everyone wants to believe that their perspective is truth and that if someone else views the world or a situation from a different perspective, then that person is wrong.
There is no right or wrong when it comes to perspective. We all view life and experiences through a lens that is based off of what we went through. When you have the ability to see someone else’s perspective, you create growth.
When you step out of this “I am right and you are wrong” mentality, you learn compassion. Your reality is not everyone’s reality.
We all experience life differently and that’s the point, to experience life in different ways.
Through soul searching I learned how to not be so narrow minded, I learned that a lot of our perspectives and opinions are based off of the trauma we experienced throughout life. The way I view life is not how everyone views life and that we aren’t meant to view life the same because if we all viewed life the same and if we all thought the same, there would be no growth.
Too many people out there are wanting everyone to think and view life the exact same way and so many people out there are trying to push intuition away. A lot of people are disconnected from their soul and I truly believe life doesn’t have to be as hard and painful as we make it.
This is the reality of the world right now because this is the narrative that has been pushed upon us for so long, but what if we collectively came together to change the narrative?
Even if we can’t collectively shift, the more we embrace our intuition, rediscover our soul, and channel that compassionate energy, just maybe it will be enough to create some sort of change.
I challenge you to embrace your soul searching journey, to become the observer of your own thoughts, to change the narrative and realize that you can heal and live life from a state of inner peace and compassion. Your reality could completely shift.
Maybe society’s truth all along was just a way to keep us on the hamster wheel? To keep us from connecting to our intuition because they knew that once we connect to our intuition, the game changes and they don’t have control over us any more. Because when we are connected to our soul, we have faith over fear.
I know this sounds preachy, but there’s so much potential within you. If you read this then that means you are desiring a soul connection. You desire to live a life that feels passionate and fulfilling, but do you believe you can have that?
That’s the question.