An Educational Experiment
By: Alicia Cahalane Lewis
Tags: Writing, Editing, Decluttering, Soul, Personal Development

An Educational Experiment

Begin Again.

MAKING ROOM FOR THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL

Every once in awhile, I erase everything I’ve ever written (in my mind…! I have paper copies of it all). I erase the past. I erase the demand I’ve put on myself to create some piece of “great art.” I erase expectation. I erase what I thought I was doing to make room for what I had no idea I might do. I tear up the script I was writing. I make new combinations of words. I take out, take away, realign.

I do this in my writing, and over the years I have begun to recognize how I do this in my life.

I’m not a proponent of celebrity makeovers or best selling closet organizers whose names are now synonymous with perceived happiness and emotional tidiness. These bloggers and home editors are perfect for their followers, but I stir my proverbial coffee with a different fork. I’m all for editing and erasure, but never at the cost to myself or what I perceive as important.

I have a reputation in my family for throwing out clutter, for reorganizing, rearranging, giving away, and even moving furniture around to try it in different rooms of the house. I am perceived as tidy, and that’s probably true, but behind the perception of a tidy person is a pretty chaotic assemblage of thinking that goes into this way of erasure. I’m quite thoughtful about what I erase. And I do it so often now I have to explain. I can let go of random unread pieces of papers, strings of sentences, entire manuscripts, an old sweater, unused glassware, not because I have the courage to let something go that I no longer want, but to give pieces of myself away so that I can make room for the evolution of my soul.

Did you ever stop to think that our souls are constantly evolving?

That buying a new suit or a new pair of shoes and cleaning out the closet to make room for them would transpire to mean that you were evolving your soul? I mean, has there ever been reason to dissect your life this way? We have a lot on our minds. A lot. Cleaning the closet, for one, editing a novel, for another, are my examples, but if you think about it editing and clearing are two of the same actions that move energy not only from your closet, but from your being.

Editing is soul work.

Did you ever stop to think that our souls are constantly evolving?

THIS IS MY EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT

I attend a transformational school, the one where I am encouraged to lift myself out of my past to make room for my present being. Why wait until I reach some greater place in the sky to do soul work? Why not do it in the here and now? I mean, if the prophets are correct, and I will eventually go to this great Heaven, what guarantees are there that I can do any better work to my being in some celestial place? Isn’t Earth a celestial place? After all, she is a floating ball of light, a piece of the stars.

So I have to ask this question.

What makes us interested in cleaning? In erasure? And why is it easier for some of us than others? Is it when we’re living in the present that we can make these changes for ourselves?

Perhaps it is when we are living in the past, that part of ourselves we can’t let go of, that causes us to hold onto the pieces of ourselves we no longer need. But by rearranging, realigning, redistributing, we clean out the closet of our being which gives us more room to look at our own evolution. As much as we love our celebrity home editors, what I think we really love is the motion, the permission to shift, to erase, to clear, and to clean greater aspects of ourselves.

WE DON’T NEED PERMISSION TO DO SOUL WORK

We don’t even need to know that we’re doing it, but I guarantee you this: Earth coughs up old energies, makes shifts to her terrain, and causes us to do the same. Every day our planet is moving and shifting. Inch by inch, the waters recede or flood, the land masses move closer together so perhaps one day these land masses, our continents, will retro fit themselves back into their original formation as they were before they broke apart. I think about this a lot. What part of our being needs to come together again? Are we like the continents regrouping and shifting back into our original formation?

We’re nothing but these broken fractions of ourselves scattered about trying to do it all, be it all, accomplish what we perceive as it all. We’re land masses ourselves on a soul’s journey on a planet. Period.

I’m convinced we’re on this journey together and we’re hanging onto some semblance of a past to save us from our unknown future, but by cleaning out pieces that no longer belong we can invite a new being, a new sentence, a new Earth, a new formation.

It’s just a thought, but I think by erasing a few old manuscripts from my mind and starting a new work I can invite my being to look at herself and what she has to say in new words. New thinking. New beginnings.