Exploring Your Soul’s Calling And The Call Of Your Soul.

Have you ever wondered whether there’s a difference between your soul’s calling and the call of your soul?

For those on a personal and spiritual growth path, discerning the difference helps navigate the awakening process to our true selves.

It’s important because both are necessary and intertwined, yet they’re different.

And although the process is not linear by any means, specific steps can’t leapfrog over by rushing to live our soul’s calling and fulfill our purpose. I wrote about this in The 3 Soul Commitments: How To Honour Your Awakening Soul.

In a nutshell, the call of your soul is an invitation to personal inner transformation, and the soul’s calling is about bringing the fruits of our inner journey back into the world to serve others.

The Call Of Your Soul

Let’s start by exploring the call of your soul and what that looks like.

In the blog post, The Call of Your Soul: 10 Signs Your Soul is Speaking to You, I share how our soul tries to get our attention.

These soul nudges arise when our soul is awakening after waiting patiently for the right timing in our development to come into our conscious awareness slowly.

The call of your soul is the beginning of what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey” – a journey of transformation that ultimately results in the person bringing what they’ve learned back to share with others.

People can and often refuse the call, which is understandable because responding to the call is often challenging. We must step outside our comfort zone and forge a new path.

The call of your soul requires that we integrate the past and the parts of ourselves we had to leave behind to adapt to growing up, be present in the now, and grow spiritually by aligning the outer aspects of our lives with our inner truths.

In short, the call of our Soul is about coming into the right relationship with ourselves, other people and the Universe.

Coming into the right relationship with ourselves requires that we begin to understand and see our dual nature. Our conditioned self, including our personality, causes constriction and fear, and in contrast, our true self, is energized by our soul and is expansive and the energy of love.

Our soul needs us to develop a healthy personality so that we can use our personality as an instrument through which our soul can be expressed. We want to use our personality and not be used by it.

As we embark on the journey to the right relationship with our personality, we often face how wounds must be healed. This requires courage and is a necessary step in responding to the call of our soul.

The soul also requires that we develop new capabilities. This includes using both sides of our brain, sharpening our ways of knowing beyond the five senses, balancing our animal instincts, and bringing our bodies, minds, and hearts into alignment.

The Soul’s Calling

If the call of your soul involves responding to the inner journey of transformation, the soul’s calling is about being of service to something bigger than ourselves.

For some, the soul’s calling may feel like something they must do, even though they may not know why. For others, it’s a conscious process of discernment that begins after the inner transformation work is well underway.

I’ve experienced these doorways to living my soul’s calling.

During the first half of my life, I responded to the call to be of service through my vocation as a Nurse. I didn’t know exactly why; I felt a deep call to service.

I fulfilled my soul’s calling for many years, and when I left nursing to retire, I began to get the call of my soul that I had chosen a path that wasn’t aligned with my soul.

Because we often don’t realize how important something is to us until we’ve lost it, I didn’t understand that being of service was a non-negotiable value for my soul.

When I neglected that value, I experienced the call of my soul trying to get my attention. At that time, I didn’t know I had a soul, and so I experienced a sense that something was missing; I wasn’t thriving, my health was starting to get affected, and I felt lost. I had what I now call “soul hunger.”

Fulfilling our soul’s calling begins to flow when we’ve embraced the inner journey of transformation and created a healthy personality to express our calling.

Consciously discerning our soul’s calling involves a process of trial and error. It requires that we follow lots of breadcrumbs and connect countless dots. This gives us endless opportunities to develop our newfound capabilities further as we create our paths.

Lissa Rankin, author of The Anatomy of a Calling: A Doctor’s Journey from the Head to the Heart and a Prescription for Finding Your Life’s Purpose, wrote a helpful article highlighting 10 Signs You’re On The Right Track To Following Your Calling. 

When the Universe decides it’s time for our soul to awaken, and we find the courage to respond to the call, our lives take on a new depth of meaning, purpose, and mystery. We leave the well-worn path behind us and learn to navigate, one step at a time, using soul nudges as our GPS.

If you feel called, please leave a comment below. Our community would love to hear from you!