soul work Archives

Identifying Your Core Story – BLOG

October 4, 2016

Yesterday I started writing my book and if you’ve heard that before from me it’s because I have a few books going – it has been equally as frustrating for me, but you know how I say, “Sometimes the story tells you, and sometimes you tell the story“? – well, this is one of those times. I’ve been looking for the legs to the title of this book for a year or so and every time I thought I found it, it would sink weeks later into the sand and vanish, that is until I stumbled on to this.

My Core Story.

I won’t go into it much because it’s something you kinda just gotta surrender to. To be brief it looks like this. You have two questions to answer, and as much as possible, you have to let yourself answer them as plainly, honestly, and without decoration as possible (which is hard for us mind-centered, or feeling based people because we think we’re so beyond that, ahem… as if we could be). The one thing we all have in common is a primal need to be seen, heard and most importantly known – or as some self-helpers call it: to belong, and we’ll do anything and everything in our power to protect that possibility, including lie to ourselves, or worse, sugar coat it all so that we bare absolutely no responsibility for the possibility that someone in our 360 degree global peripherie ever feels like they might…not…belong.

From my perspective, none of us ever truly belongs and only in allowing the incredibly daunting human truth of that to be so will we ever tumble into the sense of belonging that we’re all scrambling to find. We gotta let it go because there is no proof. We can make some up, throw some names around, some labels, some arrows, some bullet points, share some aha moments and more… but the reality is, the only belonging we can every truly ‘prove’ is our very own personal sense of it, and even then only we, individually, can ever really believe it to the level that it seems real….

How bleak right? Oh gawwwwwd we’re all alone….?

Yep and in that, it’s how we’re totally not. That’s humanity. That’s where our connectedness is. That’s how our sameness shows up. It’s in our fragility matched only by our magnitude that our beauty is realized. How frickin’ gorgeous is that? And damn confusing I might add.

So I have two questions to help us identify how we don’t belong so that we can belong. At this point I’m either making you nuts or you dig my message. Wanna stay for more?

Two questions – that’s it and trust me when I say, they’re ridiculously simple to answer and insanely challenging to be known. I’ve been offering inquiry sessions with people as I develop this work and I can tell you, out of the countless people that I’ve chatted with, only three have been truly willing to answer the questions with all masks down right away and those that did let their core story tell me before their mind could (an example of ‘when the story tells you’). For the rest of us, most of the time we can tickle out some clues over the hour, like breadcrumb words we’re following to get there. Sometimes our core story shows up as expressions first before we can nail the one phrase that gives us goosebumps, or knocks the wind out of us.

It’s truly amazing when it happens. It’s beautiful to witness for sure.

So… now I’m writing a book. Forty five years of this story chasing me and now it’s ready to be given to the world. It’s not an autobiography, though it will be peppered with personal stories.

Okay, but before I do that, you’re thinking: What are the dang questions???? Well here they are, and if you struggle to find an answer, drop me a message below and we can book a complimentary inquiry session okay? I just may be able to help you out with that. Anything you post in the comments below go directly to my email – I don’t publish them. Now, if your core story does reveal itself to you and you don’t know what to do with it, also let me know and we can book a call to follow the thread together.

Here are the questions:

Question #1: What is the one thing you always give people (and the world) no matter what?

Question #2: In your deepest, darkest moments, what is the sentence you have always said to yourself ?

Here’s a clue: They are usually the opposite of each other, but not always. For example, my answers are:

Tina’s Core Story:

Core Love: You matter

Core Pain: I don’t matter, nothing matters, this is stupid, why bother.

I’ll explain more later… but for today, here’s an excerpt from the opening of my book that is all about this work and how it arrived for me:

an excerpt from You Matter – Identifying your Core Story

…So there’s this thing that you run from right? I do. I have most of my life. Even in my forties when I think I’ve stopped running, I forget, Oh yeah, I’m human, I run from everything. I think we’re master escape artists which seems kinda strange doesn’t it? Why would we want to escape the very thing we’re here to live. I suppose none of us had a choice in the matter and somewhere deep down that bugs us. Because we showed up here kicking and screaming, well some of us did, others came into the world all wide eyed and peaceful – I’m sure that I wasn’t one of them. I bet I came into the world fast – like a blow torch afraid I’d lose my flame if someone wasn’t holding me. Foooooosh, scorching the doctor as I came out.

I was premature. My mom was only sixteen when I was born. I joke about it now, well, not really. I joked about it when I was a kid. Adoption is one of those things that isn’t weird or hard, or difficult, it just is. When you’re a kid, it’s just part of the clothing you forget on the bus because it’s truly so irrelevant. When you’re a kid you don’t care how you came into the world, you’re just so damn glad to be here. Wow, look at that tree! It’s HUGE! Holy smokes I think I could climb that! Hey! I got a lemon twist for Easter! Watch me! Wait a minute how come my hair is so twisty and tangled and hers so straight? I like music. I sing all the time. Like all the time. I’m still singing la la la la la… I live between three churches and nobody in my house prays. How come? My dad is French Canadian and he likes to make home-made wine underneath the stairs. Sometimes we have fruit flies… See? Who cares if you’re adopted, you have lots of other things on your mind, at least I did. I used to tell my friends in highschool that I was a ‘back seat baby’ – I mean, where else do you have sex when you’re 15 years old right? I thought nothing of it. Of course, now I’m a mom to three of my own children, and I’m really close to my mom (biological), we’re kinda like sisters and I never, ever, ever blamed, judged or was angry with her about giving me away even when my mom (adopted) died when I was eight… Truly. I actually always knew that I was chosen some how – but still… that’s the mind, not the body. And you know, I still don’t care if I was conceived in the back seat of a car, but I do care about the rest of stuff.

The adoption thing became a traceable pattern. It was the first mirror of how this human experience was giving me exactly what I needed for who I am to expand (but that’s a whole other conversation, we’ll get there later). It was the first time I was experiencing my core story that I don’t really matter. It was the very first time, on a cellular level, that my body wasn’t sure if this place was where I was supposed to be. It was the first time my eyes couldn’t make sense of a moment, of a missing hand, of a warm chest, as I searched for the eyes of my mom, and the scent of her body. Yes I was only six months old and I could totally be making this up, but I’m not. Because we know stuff we don’t want to know. On some level, that’s what was going on for me, I just didn’t have words yet, but I understood that I didn’t matter.

More to come…

xxT

TinaO is a Core Story Specialist, a writer, speaker and the founder of TinaOLife – a hub for all things worth living for, and the workshop Live Your Best Story. She’s also a professional network marketer with a decade in the industry and she teaches: selling isn’t slimey and marketing isn’t make-believe. You can be yourself and be successful in Direct Sales.

Dear Soul Dude – What is my Life’s Purpose?

April 25, 2016

Yesterday I announced that Soul Interpreter, Chris Dierkes will be sharing a regular post here on TinaOLife. If you missed it, here is what I’m so thrilled about.

Today we launch Chris’ column “Dear Soul Dude” and he’s chosen to nail a biggie: the soul and your life’s purpose. Oh boy. How many sleepless nights have you had rolling that question around over and over and over and over and over…? It makes my stomach flip just thinking about it. A few years ago I would wake up between 3am and 4am almost every night just twitching with this question. I would sedate myself with netflix in order to go back to sleep, usually by 6am, just when my ‘duties’ as mom was starting.

I love that we’re opening up Chris’ column with this delicious topic. Have a read. What are your thoughts? What are your questions? We’ll be sure to respond just as quickly as time allows. Ready? Let’s dive in!

I want you to help me find my purpose.

I want to discover my purpose in life.

When I talk to individuals considering entering into a soul work process this is the most common complaint and desire they bring with them.

I empathize with the sincere desire that underlies the statement. I think framing the the issue as finding or discovering one’s purpose is causing people huge amounts of unnecessary suffering and pain.

I believe wanting to discover your purpose in life is really problematic. But please hear what I am and am not saying in that statement. Undoubtedly the desire to express your soul is genuine. Conceiving of and framing that desire as finding or discovering your purpose is very bad.

Why? Seems sorta nuts to oppose people finding their purpose in life no? It might be a foolhardy quest but I’m going to try to persuade you that trying to find your purpose is an unhelpful approach to life. In order to get there however we first need a little background on the nature of the soul and its desires. Once we do that I hope you’ll understand why I’m arguing against looking to discover or find your purpose in life.

Be Careful (How You Frame) What You Wish For

The soul works through irresistible impulse, deep desire, and profound pull. The soul is a kind of generative germinator, a locus of longing. The soul is tidal; it’s energies build and gather intensity like the ocean’s waves. The passions of a soul incite it to movement and motivate it to action. The soul’s surge is an impulsion; it is kinetic, charged, dynamic.

Impulsion, drive, longing, these are the urges and surges of the soul.

Now the next step is to learn the fine art of creatively and judiciously beginning to ride those tidal impulses of the soul, to put those soul impulsions into concrete language. This path involves giving voice to these deep urges of the soul by letting them coalesce into intentions.

Intentions act as frames, as containers for these deeper-than-words groanings of the soul. Intentions give shape, consistency, and meaning to the soul’s sighs.

Intentions then are crucially important. There is a sweet spot where an intention has enough concreteness to give tangible shape and profile to a soul longing and yet is not so dense that it flattens the soul’s desire. This process of moulding a soul’s instincts into a life-giving intention is an art not a science. In other words, not all intentions are created equal. Some intentions, some containers are more congruent to the subtlety and power of a soul desire. Some less so.

The soul is more like an inclination. Soul longings incline in certain directions. They incline away from other directions. But these inclinations, these urges are not yet to be so narrowly defined as to efface the multiple ways that these longings can be practically realized and expressed.

The soul is more like an inclination.

As it comes to this particular topic of life path, the deep longing, the primordial urging of a soul, is to express its true nature, to irradiate the world with its singular light. This is universally the case for all souls.

That impulse is deeply felt by people. It’s a beautiful one. It’s very real.

Here then comes the mistake (in my view). That beautiful impulse of a soul is then interpreted and framed as needing to “find my purpose in life.” In naming the deep soul longing as such the person has inadvertently already begun to lose touch with the deeper impulse. They accurately sensed it but they have unfortunately mislabeled it and badly framed it.

The impulse is valid. The framework of interpretation is not. The latter distorts the former. What is needed then is the felt sense of the underlying tidal surging of the soul AND a more adequate frame to understand it, to seek to concretely surf it.

Finding Means Something Is Lost

If you begin with the proposition that you want to find your purpose you are describing your purpose as lost. When people say to me “they are looking for their purpose in life”, I’ll point my eyes up to the ceiling or look out the window or under the chair I’m sitting on. Looking for your purpose? Where? Where would a soul’s purpose happen to be?

I hear people describe finding their soul’s purpose or locating it like it was a buried pirate treasure. Unfortunately far too many practitioners (in my experience) play into this problematic dynamic. They sell themselves as helping someone “locate” their lost purpose as if it were indeed some kind of buried treasure. Practitioners will even claim they have some special map to their client’s purpose, complete with an X to mark the spot of the (other) soul’s inherent desires. Once someone becomes the expert on locating your lost soul purpose, they can immediately sell you this fanciful dream (or is it a nightmare?).

Looking for your purpose? Where? Where would a soul’s purpose happen to be?

The central error here is that the purpose of a soul is intrinsic to the soul itself.

The purpose is not somewhere else. Consequently you do not need to go on a journey to locate your supposedly lost soul purpose. You need not look outside yourself. There’s no reason for you to adopt some formulaic three, four, five, or ten step formula to activating your soul’s growth, potential, and purpose.

There’s the old saying of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” In this case it would be “if it ain’t lost don’t find it.”

Your soul’s purpose is not lost. It’s inherent to the soul of you, to the soul of anything or anyone. The philosopher Aristotle described the soul as the animating principle, the essential mover of a being. In other words, that deep generative longing. That is inherent to you as an incarnate soul.

So there is no need to bring in some outside set of actions in order to “locate” your soul’s purpose. All that needs to happen is to let your soul out. What people call their purpose is really just the unfolding of their soul.

Consequently there’s no reason to abdicate your soul’s sovereignty to someone else, to some expert (self-proclaimed, valid or otherwise). All that is needed is learning to attend to the generative impulses of your soul that are always already motivating you from the depths. And then from there learning how to let them move, form, and solidify into life-giving, creative, loving action.

If you say you are looking to find your soul purpose then you will seek outwardly in vain. You will seek elsewhere than directly where you need to, namely the core animating tides of your soul. I use words like tides, urges, impulsions to describe this mysterious quality of soul because they speak to the subtle nature of the soul, to the soul’s fluidity.

Looking for your soul’s purpose is disempowering. It’s meant to be empowering but sadly it’s the exact opposite.

That’s the main reason I believe looking for your purpose is well-intentioned but nevertheless flawed. There are a few other major reasons as well, which I want to mention just briefly.

Such as, the soul is not bound by a or any purpose.

The soul doesn’t have a purpose. The soul is purposeful.

The key is to express the nature of your soul as it is. That is intrinsically meaningful, purposeful, and creative. It is so much simpler and more heartfelt than “finding your soul’s purpose.”

Peace, Chris

Chris is a long time spiritual practitioner and teacher. Raised in the Roman Catholic tradition, he has had a lifelong love affair with the Christian mystical tradition, however he is also well versed in a diverse range of lineages and teachings. He’s a strong advocate for shamanic forms of healing work and consciousness, as well as being a Reiki Master in three lineages of Reiki.

He works with with clients from a variety of backgrounds: from different religious traditions, spiritual but not religious folks, agnostics, seekers, and atheists.

He spent four years living as a monk in his twenties and later worked for three years as an Anglican priest in Vancouver.

He is a soul interpreter and an energy healer.

Chris lives in Vancouver with his beloved wife Chloe (a doula) and their daughter Sage.

Have a question for Chris? Want to check out his blog? Want to find out more? Check out his website and be sure to leave him a message below okay?

Announcing – Dear Soul Dude with Soul Interpreter, Chris Dierkes

April 24, 2016

Sooooooo this is a beginning I’m a little nutty about. Why? Because if it ain’t for my ‘soul dude’ – a lot of things wouldn’t have began for me last year while so many pillars of my life were crumbling into ruin.

You’ve heard me talk about him. You’ve watched me shout out about him, and now I’m really, like really thrilled that I can share him with you too.

The truth is he has more humility than I do. He doesn’t need a website named after him, nor a desire to have his face or voice plastered all over everything (ahem, like I do), and yet, here we are. I’m going to do my absolute best to keep his roster full of clients and his website pinging with subscribers because he’s just that good. Damn good. So damn good.

And he cares.

I’m not a fan of the ‘woo-woo’ movement, nor the ‘selling of spirituality’ craze that seems to be taking off as an answer to the soul-less world we’re building and weirdly celebrating (Oh Trump… Don’t even get me started), and so announcing to all of you that TinaOLife is bringing in a Soul-Interpreter to add to the life giving hub that we are might look like I’ve just filled our life-school hallways with Coke machines as a thirst quencher…

But I’m not.

He’s the real deal. I’d say he’s ego-less but that would make him non-human. I’d say he’s got his shit together, but that would mean he’s complete, finis, and that ain’t true either. Come on now, he’s a dad to a pre-schooler, how together can he be?
I am saying that he’s a guy who speaks the language of the soul. He has a rich spiritual and religious background (is this a good place to let you know about his 4 years as a monk?). He’s versed and practiced in multiple healing practices and he’s damn funny too. Okay, a bit dry, maybe a lot dry and beautifully articulate.

Please join me in welcoming Chris Dierkes, my ‘soul guy’, TinaOLife’s ‘soul dude‘, and now yours too. Tomorrow we’ll share his first article.

I kinda want to break into the Blues Brother’s Soul Man, but I bet he gets that all the time.

Tune in tomorrow…

Ps… Just gotta shout out to TinaO’s Tara Caffelle for putting the two of us together.

XxT

TinaO is a writer, speaker and the founder of TinaOLife – a hub for all things worth living for, the workshop Live Your Best Story, and her coaching practice: Tall Poppy Living. She’s also a professional network marketer with a decade in the industry and with her Tall Poppy Living for Network Marketers Coaching Program, she teaches: selling isn’t slimey and marketing isn’t make-believe. You can be yourself and be successful in Direct Sales.