“I think I’ve discovered the secret of life—you just hang around until you get used to it.”
–Charles M. Schulz
“Man has no body distinct from his soul, for that called body is a portion of soul discern’d by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this age,” writes Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Life cultivates soul. The more we live, the more soul we develop (unless we go the other way and check out before we die, which happens all the time). Soul is deep knowing, deep seeing.
There is no path or way apart from the body. Understanding means to stand in the midst of. We must experience the truth. We must live it. And this takes a little bit of courage and warrior spirit.
But being a soul warrior may not look or feel like we think. It doesn’t necessarily mean buckling ourselves into armor or repressing our feelings. Just the opposite. As Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron writes in The Wisdom of No Escape: “It isn’t easy and it’s accompanied by a lot of fear, a lot of resentment, and a lot of doubt. That’s what it means to be human, that’s what it means to be a warrior. You go through the process of taking off the armor that you might have had some illusion was protecting you from something only to find that actually it’s shielding you from being fully alive and fully awake. Then you go forward and you meet the dragon and every meeting shows you where there’s still some armor to take off. Take refuge in the courage and the potential of fearlessness of removing all the armor that covers awakeness.”
The great paradox is that it is only by hanging around living that we can wake up. It is only in via this body that we can find the deeper truth, that we can have in-sight, that we can under-stand.
Tracy Cochran 
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