Your soul is not only your true nature, it is your true place in nature.
We’re all born to occupy, serve, and nurture our place within the ecosystem of the universe.
But tragically, in the 21st century, our species has come to perceive existence as something to consume and use, rather than to truly forge a relationship with and appreciate.
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Finding your Soul Place, while an unusual and largely forgotten avenue of self-discovery, can help us reconnect with the living earth, and therefore ourselves.
Table of contents
- Lessons From the Magical Australian Outback
- What is a Soul Place?
- What We Can Learn From Indigenous Cultures
- Examples of Collective Soul Places
- How to Find Your Soul Place
- 11 Signs You’ve Found Your Soul Place
- Do I Have to Find My Soul Place to Be at Peace?
- Your Soul Is Not Only Yours; It’s Also Part of the World’s Soul
Lessons From the Magical Australian Outback
A few years ago I had an experience in the Australian outback.
On a walk, I found a beautiful stone lodged into the earth. After picking it up and admiring it for a bit, I put it back down and continued walking.
The Aboriginal man that was with me laughed, shook his head in disbelief, and exclaimed, “It’s strange! Usually, white man always wanna own everything he sees and touches.”
I pondered his words and realized that something (a stone in this case) only retains its beauty and value when in its own setting.
Away from the Outback, the sand dunes, and the sun, the stone simply becomes a “thing” to be hoarded and left to gather dust on a bookshelf.
Just like this rock, we too have places and spaces that most resonate and ‘fit’ us.
And when we’re put in foreign settings that don’t match our energy or essence, we inevitably feel out of place.
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What is a Soul Place?
The concept of having a special ‘Soul Place’ in this world is not new.
We see mentions of this fascinating concept from ancient shamanic cultures who believed in power places to modern psychologists such as Bill Plotkin.
In essence, a Soul Place (or power place) is a special site or spot where we experience unique feelings of belonging, empowerment, expansion, and energetic rejuvenation.
We all have at least one Soul Place in this world.
As I mentioned before, many eco-centered cultures knew of Soul Places. The Australian aborigines, for instance, believe that each person has one place in the natural world where they most belong – a place that is as much part of us as we are part of it.
In finding that place, we also find and reconnect with the soul within us.
What We Can Learn From Indigenous Cultures
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
– David Wagoner (Lost, Traveling Light)
are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
and you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
you are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
where you are. You must let it find you.
Indigenous cultures and shamans have known for thousands of years that there are special places in nature that have a sacred personal connection to us.
Unlike our modern ecologically disconnected cultures, their awareness of the Spirit realm allowed them to create ceremonies that were specifically aimed at initiating them into spiritual maturity through nature-based practices.
Here in Australia for example, the aborigines have a cultural tradition called the “Walkabout.”
A walkabout occurs when an aboriginal youth wanders through the bush completely alone for weeks, sometimes months. As the youth wanders, they avoid all human interaction, going in search of a place they feel at home.
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Another example can be found within the indigenous people of the Sahara, the Tuareg.
Saharan women who are pregnant occasionally wander into the nearby desert with the intention of finding – or being found by – a sacred site.
This sacred site would then be the place for birthing their child.
While this rite of passage sounds terrifying to the Western mind, these women report not feeling alone or scared because they feel a great depth of relationship and bone-deep kinship with the land.
Examples of Collective Soul Places
While a Soul Place might sound personal, it isn’t. Soul Places can also be shared by collective groups of people.
Examples of collective Soul Places include Bear Butte in Wyoming and Uluru in Australia.
There are also human-made power places such as the Great Pyramids in Egypt, the megalithic temple of Stonehenge, and the mind-boggling subterranean passageways at Chavín de Huantar.
Soul Places can also be formed through religious and spiritual beliefs. Majestic examples include the Great Mosque of Mecca, Saint Peter’s Basilica, the Golden Temple, and the Shrine of Baháʼu’lláh.
How to Find Your Soul Place
Most shamans have special places in nature that hold personal significance to them. These places might be locations where they enter the Spirit realm, or places where they first experienced their callings or spirit guides.
However, as exotic and mysterious as a Soul Place might sound, it doesn’t have to be.
Soul Places can be simple, humble, local, and even largely unknown (or ignored) to others.
Your Power/Soul Place, for instance, could be a local park, hidden creek, or back-alley bookstore.
Your Soul Place could be near an ocean or woodland, or a childhood home filled with memories.
Your Soul Place could even be the restaurant where your partner proposed to you or a chapel you happened to stumble into on one rainy day.
Our power places can be virtually anywhere!
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So how do you find your power place?
The most important thing to look out for is a place that allows you to experience deep emotions.
Pay attention to any place that feels intimate or divine to you; a place that allows you to experience timeless moments of beauty and hyper-awareness.
These holy places will facilitate your ability to go inwards and touch something deeper. You may experience moments of awe, gratitude, joy, and interconnectedness with life.
Whatever the case, your Soul Place will be a whimsical friend of your soul.
11 Signs You’ve Found Your Soul Place
Many people wonder how to identify a Soul Place. Is it a space where you feel cozy, like a nook of your house? Do you have any mystical experiences?
Here are some signs that may help you to confirm that you’ve found your Soul Place:
- If it’s a new place, you’ll feel a sense of familiarity.
- Colors may look brighter, almost like a surrealist painting (this happened to me in my first encounter with my Soul Place).
- You’ll feel a greater sense of inner and outer harmony.
- You might intuitively sense that “you’re finally home and can rest now.”
- You can tune into the interconnectedness of life.
- A sense of awe, wonder, peace, and joy bubbles up inside of you.
- You’ll feel inspired and have spontaneous creative thoughts/ideas.
- You’ll feel a sense of freedom.
- You’ll feel introspective and contemplative.
- You’ll feel recharged and energized.
- You feel expanded, less centered in the ego, and more connected with your deeper essence.
Sometimes our Soul Places can also be imagined places within our minds.
If you’ve ever entered altered states of consciousness and pierced the veil of reality, you’ll realize that there’s no distinction between each of the different layers of reality.
In other words, the places within our minds exist in the world just as much as the places within the world exist within our minds.
Do I Have to Find My Soul Place to Be at Peace?
No. You don’t have to find your Soul Place to be at peace.
The whole point of the spiritual awakening journey is to live from your inner Home, no matter where you are.
When our inner peace is based on an external condition (which can be taken away), then we suffer.
So the point of finding your Soul Place isn’t to reach a promised land or escape your current life. Instead, your Soul Place is a doorway to accessing:
- spiritual guidance and direction,
- spiritual healing,
- inspiration,
- relaxation,
- conscious expansion, and
- Oneness
Your Soul Place is a gateway of Soul retrieval – it is merely a tool that can assist you in bridging the gap between the ego and the Higher Self.
It’s important to mention this misconception about one’s Soul Place because many people use this pursuit to avoid developing qualities of present-moment mindfulness.
When we learn to live in the moment, any place can eventually become our Soul Place.
As Sufi mystic Rumi once wrote,
Today, wherever you stand,
– Rumi (The Essential Rumi)
Be the soul of that place.
Your Soul Is Not Only Yours; It’s Also Part of the World’s Soul
Your soul is IN and OF the world, like a ripple in a river, a wave in the ocean, or a twig on a tree.
The human mind tends to fragment existence. But the closer we look, the more we see how interconnected everything is – and how connected to It All we are.
The reality is that we are an integral part of the Whole, just as much as a mountain, tree, whale, or cloud is.
The human Soul and the world Soul (or ‘Anima Mundi’) are inextricably entwined.
As such, mystical experiences of belonging aren’t divorced from the world around us. We don’t have to ‘ascend’ or leave this body and planet. On the contrary, Home is rooted in this physical reality!
The world’s greatest souls all found their sacred places: Moses on Mount Sinai, Jesus in the desert, Muhammad in a cave outside Mecca, and Buddha under the bodhi tree.
Your place of power is more than a sanctuary.
It is a place (or many different places) in the universe where you feel at home – it is a doorway into greater self-awareness, internal evolution, clarity, awe, and joy.
Where is your Soul Place? Let me know in the comments.
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I have been on the spiritual journey for a few months now after several attempts of trying to connect to my higher power and spirituality. I have come far in the past few months and have gone through many ups and downs feeling the loss of my nephew through a drug overdose. Spun thing I have learned on my spiritual journey is that no one can fill the hole in your world except yourself. I am happy to have come by this site cuz I think it is a message from my higher power that I need to be here. Even when I was reading it I looked at my TV on the screen and it flashed the time of 444. I immediately googled it and discovered that it is a message from my angel. I do believe now that the reason I found this was to discovered that there is a soul place and she goes searching for my soul place which I have a general sense about where it is. thank you and I am looking forward to all of the new information I’m going to be learning from this site
I recently visited New York City and came away with a certainty that I should live there. I thought it was crazy talk, but your list of “10 signs” is *exactly* what I felt when I was there. Honestly, it could not be more accurate if I’d written it myself.
Thanks for this post – it’s helped bring me some clarity. Now I’ll just let that clarity simmer for a while and then decide :)
I am a filipina, and ever since i have had this kind of strange feelings and emotions. Everytime i see a place or a photo or video, i feel nostalgic or sometimes i can feel the pain of those things that i have never felt before. Most of them are in U.K. or an old place..old things and other stuff. It makes me wonder why am i feeling that way? Or why me? I mean i am just an ordinary person in this ordinary place, and why me? It makes me feel anxious and sad most of the time because deep inside that i’ve never been in that place and i could never be. It’s hard and depreesing, this kind of deep emotion i am feeling. Because there is part of me somehow that i longed to be in those places. I longed for a home or a place where i can rest this poor soul if mine forever.
I clicked on this link without knowing that you’d talk about Australia. My place is Australia, Broome specifically. I had always been magnetized to Australia and always thought that I would visit the Great Barrier Reef. Once I began seeing pictures of red rock next to turquoise ocean, I knew I HAD to visit Western Australia. I really loved the energy of Broome, but didn’t get to spend much time there. But as I flew out of Broome to head back to Perth and then Sydney, I began sobbing. I really felt like I was leaving home. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. I came away thinking I’ve lived at least one life there. In this life, I make more sense when I relate myself to an aboriginal way of life. I wanted to go back before I even left Australia. Thank you for this article, it’s given me another clue as to why I feel such a strong connection to Broome.
California
I just got back from from a trip to Alaska. While getting ready to leave to come home, i felt nothing but a pit in my stomach, not wanting to leave. Before my trip, i was aware that there are places on earth where I could potentially feel connected to on a spiritual level, i just didnt know where that was.
I couldn’t help but feel so heartbroken, my stomach was in my throat, i could barely look at the mountains i was leaving behind because i felt such sorrow. Its been a few days and i was able to decompress and really feel these emotions and i still get so upset thinking about the mountains, the sky, the air, the water. I feel such a deep connection to this place and all i can think about is returning. I have never felt this way leaving a place. I can only think that i have a deeper connection to this place than i ever thought possible.
There’s just something i cant explain, this connection. I really want to learn more about this.
I chose my soul place after meditating there, at a pooling of the water in a turn of the river, where a large tree had fallen and formed a natural bridge. Birds were singing all around it, a beautiful sanctuary to alleviate my pains and fears of teenage years. I invited a girlfriend to camp there with me one summer eve. As we walked to the spot a much older boy, the son of my parents close friends, drove by and invited himself to join the party. To make a long story short, he brought a case of beer to get me so drunk I couldn’t walk and raped me in my sanctuary. I never told a soul. My “friend” spread rumors all over town about what a whore I was. I have never dared to designate another space as mine. I know now that such magical places can attract these kinds of dark souls so I place protections around myself and bring Light around them. The energy of that space of the river continues to be blocked…logging and housing have decimated its beauty, a space I will never ever return to. Bless all who make the Earth more enlightened.… Read more »
Hello I live in the the country and so happy that you might help me with what is happening to me. Just across the road from my house there is a small piece if land with large cedar trees, has I walk in and under the trees I feel a surge of energy, peaceful sense of tranquility. What does it mean. When I feel down, I just love to just go and sit under the trees and feel rejuvenate and I am so good. Please help me and clarify this for me. Thank you
I don’t know about my specific soul place, but I’ve certainly found my soul country. I was born in the south of England, but throughout my childhood and upbringing I’ve lived all over the world, and visited dozens of foreign lands. Each have been beautiful in their own way, but when I returned to England last year to visit relatives in the north, something wonderful happened. It was like something snapped into place inside of me. The green trees, rolling hills, fickle sky – it had me almost giddy. I was losing my mind over every sheep, feeling like I was buzzing with contentedness while driving down average motorways. Interestingly, the landscape is very different from the part of England where I was born and spent years of my childhood, but it nevertheless felt like home. This year my parents have moved back to England for good – Somerset, this time, in the midwest of England, and just as green as it was up north. I’ve been living with them in the summers when I’m home from university, and the overwhelming sense of passion, joy and contentedness has returned. It’s strange and a bit sad sometimes, since a lot of… Read more »
3 years ago, I drove to my new boyfriend’s house for the first time. He had given me his house number, but I didn’t see numbers on the mailboxes. So, I stopped for a moment to figure out which driveway to turn down when a voice inside me said Oh, it’s this way. So, i turned down the gravel driveway which turned toward the house, hidden from view from the road. There was a grove of pine trees and I suddenly had an overwhelming feeling that I was home. I remained happy yet a little unsettled during the visit because I couldn’t figure out how I could have such a feeling. A few weeks later, a spiritual voice told me that he was the one for me. I began to fall in love with him after that and every time I drove over the county line and then to his house, I always felt like I was coming home. Long story short, he broke up with me, then we got back together 9 months later and I was overjoyed to be able to go to this place again that felt like home. Then he broke up with me again 8… Read more »