There are moments when I know something without being able to say exactly where that knowing comes from. Not in the sense of a certain answer, and not as a voice giving me a finished path to follow. It is more a quiet feeling that makes itself known beneath all the thoughts. A sense that something no longer fits me. An unexpected calm around a decision that my mind has not yet fully understood. Or the gentle realisation that, over the past few weeks, I have been so occupied with everything coming at me from the outside that I have barely heard myself within it. For moments like these, I sometimes use the word soul. Not because I could claim to know exactly what the soul is or where it begins. For me, the word describes a very inward part of my experience, one that does not constantly argue and yet can make itself felt when things grow quieter around me and within me.
For a long time, I judged decisions mainly by whether they were sensible. I gathered reasons, weighed up consequences and tried to understand as clearly as possible what might be right or wrong. I still do that today, because I value my mind and do not want to replace it with some spiritual idea. But I have experienced decisions that appeared perfectly logical on the outside and still felt unfamiliar within me. Conversely, there were paths where not everything had yet been resolved, and yet something about them touched a place in me that felt very calm and right. In the past, I was more inclined to dismiss such feelings because they could not be proved. Over time, I came to realise that I do not have to prove everything I perceive within myself in order to take it seriously. Taking something seriously does not mean following every feeling immediately. It simply means not silencing it reflexively.
That happens more easily than I once thought. Our everyday lives are full of voices telling us what matters, what success means, how we should live, look, work, think or develop. Some of these voices come from people close to us, others from society, the media or ideas we adopted somewhere along the way. Much of this has become so familiar that I can barely tell whether a thought truly comes from me or whether I have simply been repeating it for years. I notice this most clearly when I catch myself pursuing something I supposedly want very badly and suddenly can no longer say why it matters so much to me in the first place. Then that strange question arises: Do I really want this, or have I simply learnt that I am supposed to want it?
For me, listening within begins precisely in moments like these. Not with an extraordinary spiritual experience, but with a small sense of unease. Something no longer fits together. My outward actions and my inner feelings are no longer speaking the same language. As long as I stay busy, I can ignore that tension for a surprisingly long time. I can keep functioning, making decisions and organising my life. Only when I become quieter does what lies beneath begin to show itself more clearly. That can be pleasant, but it does not have to be. Listening within does not mean discovering only beautiful truths about ourselves. It can mean recognising that I adapted out of fear, that I am holding on to something that has long since passed, or that I am fulfilling a role that once gave me security but has now become constricting.
That is exactly why I do not think of the soul as something that constantly speaks to us in a gentle and comforting way. When I use the word, I do not mean an inner authority that already knows the perfect answer to everything. For me, it is more an image for that deeper level on which it is not so easy to lie to myself. I can still explain many things to myself there, but some of them simply no longer feel true. A sentence I have believed about myself for years suddenly loses its obviousness. A goal I have pursued for a long time no longer brings any joy. An old pain shows itself not because it wants to punish me, but because at some point I can no longer cover it over with busyness. I do not see such experiences as proof of anything supernatural. For me, they are forms of inner perception that possess a depth of their own.
I have also learnt to be careful with the idea of an inner voice. Not everything that comes from within me is automatically wisdom. Fear speaks from within me too. So do old wounds. Desires, expectations and habits can be very persuasive. If I desperately want something to be true, I can easily mistake that wanting for some deep inner knowing. That is why, if I continue to use the word soul, it feels less to me like a voice giving precise instructions and more like a movement towards greater truthfulness. It does not necessarily tell me what I should do. But I can feel more clearly where I am moving away from myself, where something within me opens, or where I am constantly having to argue against myself inwardly.
This experience connects very strongly for me with New Reiki – Back to the Source. In my exploration of Reiki over the years, I have increasingly lost the desire to fit every perception immediately into a predefined idea. I have found that inner connection often becomes clearer when I do not decide beforehand what I ought to feel. The less I try to force a particular experience, the more honestly I can perceive what is actually there. For me, this is also what returning to the source means. Not returning to an idealised past, but returning to direct experience before knowledge, expectations and other people’s interpretations overlay everything. The soul, if I may call it that, does not need spectacular signs for me. It needs more a space in which everything has not already been explained.
Perhaps this subject touches me so deeply because, over the course of my life, I have realised how easily we can lose ourselves without anything dramatic happening on the outside. It is enough to pay attention for long enough only to what works. What is expected. What looks sensible. What reassures or confirms others. At some point, we can find ourselves living a life that appears perfectly coherent from the outside while inwardly something is barely involved any more. This rarely happens from one day to the next. It is more a gradual moving away. And the return can begin just as quietly. Through a thought that can suddenly no longer be ignored. Through a tiredness that tells us more than merely that the day has been long. Through an inexplicable longing for something simpler, more truthful or more our own.
So when I say today that the soul speaks again, I do not mean that a hidden voice from another world suddenly becomes audible. I mean that moment when I take myself seriously enough not to immediately brush aside what arises within me. It can be a very quiet moment, completely unremarkable from the outside. And yet sometimes that is exactly what changes something. I sit somewhere, look out of a window or walk along a familiar path, and for a moment I do not have to explain anything. There is only this feeling of being a little closer to myself again. Perhaps the soul never stopped speaking. Perhaps my life was simply too loud for a while for me to notice that it was still there.