Soul Calling

A soul calling is the sacred tug of your deepest self trying to get your attention. It is the quiet pull toward what feels most true, alive, and meaningful within you.

When people don’t know what the soul is, I often describe it as the truest place within us: the quiet center beneath our personality, our productivity, our wounds, and our worries. It is the part of us that existed before the world told us who to be, what to prove, and how to belong. It is the part of us that recognizes truth before the mind can explain it.

Your soul is where deep longings come from, where inner wisdom lives, and where love is the truth of your essence.

We don’t have to define the soul in a religious or mystical way to understand it. We all have one. You can think of the soul as the deepest part of you: the part beneath your roles, fears, habits, and expectations. It is the inner place that knows when something feels aligned, when something feels false, when something is complete, and when something new is asking to be created.

A soul calling is our soul asking us to pay attention.

It is not always loud or dramatic. Often, it begins as a whisper: a longing, a restlessness, a repeated curiosity, or a sense that there is more love, truth, creativity, courage, or service wanting to move through your life.

I feel soul callings as a repeated nudge, a restlessness, a longing that will not leave, or a tenderness toward something I can no longer ignore. For you, it may show up as a dream you keep dismissing, a hurt that keeps asking to be healed, a gift or talent that wants to be used, or a leap of faith that wants to be taken.

To listen to a calling is to become still enough to hear what is deeply stirring within you. It is to notice what feels like an opportunity for expansion, softening, becoming who you are meant to be, and allowing your heart to stretch in the best ways.

Listening to a calling means learning to pay attention to what keeps returning.

What idea won’t leave you alone? What ache feels like sacred ground? What kind of beauty, injustice, healing, or possibility keeps tugging at your heart?

A calling usually does not arrive with a full map. It often reveals itself one small step at a time. To listen, we have to become quiet enough to notice what brings us expansion instead of contraction, peace instead of performance, and aliveness instead of approval.

The soul is quiet. It waits for us in stillness, in longing, in wonder, and in the question: What is life asking of me now?

Think of epic movies like Field of Dreams, The Hobbit, Star Wars, The Wizard of Oz, The Lord of the Rings, and almost every Disney movie. We watch a character feel this inner stir to build something, go on an adventure, fight for justice, leave home, help someone, or test their abilities.

Our soul calls us toward expansion multiple times in our lives.

Enrolling in seminary at age 40 was a soul calling for me in 2013. I wasn’t sure what I would do with that education, but I knew my soul was longing for theological and existential exploration. I couldn’t see the map of the journey ahead, but I followed each nudge week by week. After four years of study, it led me to founding Compassion Fix, writing a book, and building a beautiful community of like-hearted people. And in the years since 2013, I’ve felt my soul was content… until this year.

I started feeling the restlessness of my soul nudging me again in this first year of empty nesting.

My children are launched to college, my parents are thriving in their mid-80s, my business is humming with a great team and administrator, my marriage is beautiful, our dogs aren’t old yet, and multiple sclerosis is quiet. It feels like the right time for me to explore another level of soul expansion. When I first noticed the nudge this year, it felt like a solo travel experience and deep spiritual journey were brewing.

I’ve spent the last few months trying to listen closely to what my soul is calling me to do next. Once again, I can’t see the whole plan ahead, but I am honoring the call to walk the Camino Francés in Spain this September and October to see what unfolds.

After this past year of studying and teaching on ten world religions and more than twenty Christian mystics, it is time for me to walk this sacred Spanish pilgrimage of St. James to Santiago. This feels like a “must do” for me: to walk 500 miles, integrate all of my learning from this past year, and see what alchemizes during the experience.

I’ll tell you more about the walk in the weeks to come, but this week, I am inviting you to consider: What is your soul calling you to right now?

It might be stillness. It might be adventure. It might be something you can think of a hundred reasons you can’t do. Just entertain it and allow it to present itself to you.

Noticing the soul calling doesn’t mean you have to act on it right now. Just listen.

I’ve found that soul callings uncover themselves over time, not like a sudden epiphany, but more like pieces of a puzzle coming into view one by one. For me, the pieces this time were: spiritual, solo, extended time, quiet, physical strength, depth, travel, global, writing, wandering, and peace.

Now is the time for me to go walk, seek, and share with you what I find along the way. 

Are you feeling the nudge of a soul calling too?

Here’s to honoring our soul callings together.