I have spent more than a decade writing about the soul.

I’ve written about soul hunger as that restless, aching sense that something essential is missing even when life looks fine from the outside. I’ve written about the dark night of the soul, about soul lessons, soul commitments, and soul purpose. I wrote an entire book called Awakening a Woman’s Soul. And yet, until now, I have never sat down to write a blog that simply answers: what do I actually think the soul is?

I think part of me was still living into the answer. Perhaps I still am.

But after thirty years as a nurse, a decade of my own awakening, and countless hours sitting with people in their most tender and transformational moments, I have something to say. Not a definition borrowed from philosophy or religion. Something lived.

This is that.

The Soul as the Seed of Your Becoming

When I use the word “soul,” I am pointing to something very specific.

The soul is energy. It is the seed of our becoming and represents the unique spiritual fingerprint that we are meant to live through our personality. It is not separate from our human life. It animates it. The soul is the living force inside each of us, always urging us toward growth, toward wholeness, toward the fullest expression of who we were born to become.

I think of it this way. A turtle has a shell, and the shell is real, necessary, and worth having because it provides structure, protection, and the means to survive. But the turtle is not the shell. The turtle is the living creature inside.

We are like that.

Our personality, which includes our habits, our roles, our conditioned ways of thinking and feeling, is the shell. We need it. It gives us our three centers of intelligence: body, heart, and mind. It allows us to function, to survive, to navigate the world. There is nothing wrong with having a strong personality. Nature designed it that way.

But the shell was never meant to be the whole story.

The soul is the living creature inside. And the tragedy is not that we have a shell. The tragedy is when we mistake the shell for ourselves and spend our entire lives in the protective structure, never coming to know the life it was meant to house.

Our personality helps us survive. It is our soul that helps us thrive. We need both.

The Bridge Between Human and Spirit

I think of the soul as a bridge between who we are as human beings and who we are as something larger.

I am not religious, but I am deeply spiritual. And for me, that “something larger” is not an abstract God sitting outside of us in judgment. It is the intelligence of nature itself. The same force that causes trees to release what we breathe and us to release what trees need. The same intelligence that runs through everything living.

We are individual expressions of that. Not separate from it. Part of it.

The energy of that spiritual essence is what we feel in our best moments when we’re filled with love, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, and compassion. These are not just emotions. They are the felt experience of being in alignment with something larger than our individual survival. Expansion, as opposed to the constriction of fear, anxiety, and separation.

And the soul, as I understand it, is the bridge between those two realities. It is what connects our small, particular, very human life to the larger whole it belongs to.

The Soul Always Moves Toward Wholeness

Here is what I have come to know most deeply: the soul does not stand still.

It is always moving. Always propelling. Always urging us, sometimes gently, sometimes through disruption, toward more wholeness, more growth, more truth. Children never stop growing. They take what they learned as a toddler and integrate it into being a child, then a teenager, then an adult. That growth was always meant to continue. When it stops and when we stop integrating, stop learning, stop becoming, that’s where the suffering begins. That’s what I came to call soul hunger.

The soul, from my experience, has three fundamental needs in this lifetime:

To integrate the past, not by endlessly analyzing our wounds, but by asking: what was I meant to learn? What am I meant to release? What has accumulated in my nervous system that needs to move?

To be present by actually living the life in front of us, not the remembered past or the imagined future.

To keep growing, because growth is not optional for the soul. It is its nature.

When we stop doing these things, the soul withdraws its energy from a life that isn’t serving its purpose. We feel it as a developmental depression, restlessness, that quiet but insistent sense that something is missing. The soul is not punishing us. It is calling us home.

A Note to Those Without a Religious Framework

I want to speak directly to those of you who, like me, came to all of this being spiritual without a religious container.

I had no inherited beliefs about what the soul was, which meant I had no doctrine to untangle, no fear-based framework to unlearn. In many ways, this was a profound gift. I came to my own understanding the way I came to most things in the second half of my life: through curiosity and experimentation.

I paid attention to coincidences. I followed intuition. I sat in silence. I worked with the Enneagram, not just as a personality quiz but as a map of consciousness, a way of understanding the terrain between who I had been conditioned to be and who my soul was calling me to become.

I explored many traditions, from Buddhism, Christian mysticism, ancient wisdom teachings, and took what resonated without adopting any one doctrine as if it’s “the truth”.

What I discovered is that the soul does not require a religious framework. It only requires your attention. The tools like meditation, stillness, self-inquiry, the cultivation of compassion and forgiveness are available to anyone willing to practice them. The soul doesn’t ask you to believe. It asks you to listen and cultivate the inner capacities that grow us towards healing and wholeness.

The Question the Soul Is Always Asking

After more than a decade of living into this, here is what I keep returning to:

The soul is not something we need to find. It has been here all along. It was here in the moments of your life that felt most real and most alive. It was here in the ache you felt when something important went unexpressed. It was here in the love you felt that surprised you with its depth, and in the grief that told you what mattered most.

The soul is always present. What changes is our capacity to hear it and our courage to follow where it leads.

Because the soul will always expand us. It will always point toward the edge of what is comfortable, toward the life that is meant for us rather than the life we have settled for. And following it will ask something of you.

But that is the conversation for the next blog.

For now, I want to leave you with one question. Not to answer quickly, but to sit with:

If the soul is always orienting you toward wholeness and toward the fullest expression of who you were born to be, what is it trying to tell you right now?

You don’t have to have words for it yet. Just notice what stirs.

If you feel called to share, our community would love to hear from you in the comments below.