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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$3So 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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My soul place is Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. I feel like I can truly be myself there and I often feel inspired to truly get to know myself in a deep way when I’m there. I am so lucky to have found it!!!!❤️❤️❤️
I’m not sure how to edit my own comments, but I always thought my soul mate would be a person and it looks it turned out to be a place!
Thank you for sharing Jeremiah, that’s how you know you’ve found a very special place :)
I am British Caribbean mixed and I have always felt drawn to Italy, no idea why, but the food, the language, the people, the cities, all of it makes me feel this intense magnetic pull that I cannot shake. Who knows, maybe I lived there in a past life as I believe in that sort of thing.
That’s interesting Jasmine. I feel like thanks to globalization a lot of us are discovering places that speak to us in deep ways that we never had the ability to learn about in the past. Perhaps that’s one of the great attractions of travelling, to help us find what feels most like home.
When I was about 7, my mother remarried a man from Death Valley, California. His stories enchanted me so much, I vowed to move to the desert when I grew up. For the next several years, I researched and spent hours reading about creosote bushes, Native American tribes, how to tell the difference between a Cardura and a Saguaro, how mountains and mesas and plateaus rose from the ground, and of course all about Death Valley on Encarta Encyclopedia (this was a LONG time ago) and any book about the American Southwest I could find at the library (internet was still in it’s infant stage). My parents were severely against me moving out west (“It’s too hot!” my mother would say despite the fact we tolerated the miserable Alabama swamp weather). Yet almost every dream at night was filled with dry heat, dust, wind, prickly pears, and a bright blue open sky flanked by the tall colorful plateaus of Chaco Canyon or the asphalt pass between Cleghorn and the Sheephole Wilderness.
I was 22 when I visited New Mexico, my first state other than eastern Texas, across the Mississippi River. My first stop was El Paso, then Alamogordo, NM to visitmy then boyfriend stationed at Holloman. Neither of those places are remotely comely or worth visiting. One of the days he had off, we drove an hour and a half to Las Cruces, and after laying eyes on the Organ Mountain range, I felt like my soul had swollen like a balloon, left my body, and was going to explode above me. All the air was sucked out of my lungs. The colors became bright and warm, and I got this surge of adrenaline for reasons unknown.
He and I broke up and I never saw him again, but once I graduated nursing school, I immediately jumped at the opportunity to move to New Mexico. I’ve lived here for almost 5 years, and my friends keep asking if I’m ever coming home. The problem is, Alabama never really felt like a home, but the desert and the sand and the mountains and heat and bugs and rocks and fragrant creosote bushes and cacti and adobe houses and pueblos and protected and preserved open land that sprawls for miles under a bright sun in an open sky is where I belong.
I took a long solo road trip from Cruces through Tucson to Saguaro National Park to Phoenix, then west to Joshua Tree, winding north through Mojave Wilderness to Vegas. From there, I ventured to Death Valley, and somewhere in the Mesquite Sand Dunes, I felt like a piece of myself I had lost or never really owned to begin with, reunited inside of me. As I drove back to Phoenix, I stopped in Sedona to meditate in a Vortex, and on Airport Mesa, a man started speaking to me as if he knew my plights and anxieties and fears, and his words of comfort and spiritual intuition washed over me like a cool ocean wave. I felt a large part of my depression slip away that night.
I’ve traveled back to all of those places many times since, and I find a small piece of myself in the most unlikely places–the quiet between Kofa and Twentynine Palms; on a cliff in Valley of Fire; in the sand blowing by Roy’s in Amboy; between the boulders in Texas Canyon; in a field of Joshua Trees; nestled between the Superstition Mountains; om the cliff above the Secret Mountain Wilderness surrounded by the red rocks; on the side of the road between the Wildernesses of Cleghorn and Sheephole; growing inside a giant monolithic Saguaro; at the peak of Shiprock; between the satellites of the VLA; in the waters of Salt Creek Canyon; on the plateaus of Chaco Canyon; in the glittery gypsum in White Sands; in the pink-orange glow of the Organs at sunset; and most profoundly, at night gazing east from the highest hill in the Rio Grande Valley down into the sparkling lights of Las Cruces.
I have a feeling there’s more of me to find.
The world needs a book of your storytelling <3 thank you for sharing x
Thanks for sharing
Peace and love
There is something about the American Southwest. I grew up here, but each city/town has its own flavor and I love where I currently live.
I believe with all my heart, I found my soul place. Two weeks ago, at midnight I had the thought (second time, I ignored it before) to search houses for sale in a small mountain community less than an hour away. Why, I have no idea. But I did, and it was, the perfect house. Again, we were not looking for another house. It has a creek running through the front yard. My husband drove us to see it. It’s perfect, absolutely perfect. We reached out to see the house, no one called us. We went again and this time found out it’s pending to a buyer. But in the week from actually being there to today, I have dreamed of this house. I can SEE us there, I HEAR the creek. It FEELS like home. The first day, I was going to open the gate, my husband asked what was doing? But it felt so natural. But someone else is buying it. I’m so confused. Why was I drawn there?
My soul place is on Vancouver Island. I feel so connected to the land. When I’m there I feel inner peace and a sense of belonging. The mountains, the ocean and the forests make me feel at ease. I’m stress free and so refreshed the moment I’m there. Since my first trip to Van Island, I know that’s where I’m meant to be. It’s so special to me in many ways and I call it my happy place. I love beautiful British Columbia. One day I will call that place home.
My sister says the same thing about Vancouver Island. She lived there for a time and often mentions going back to live there.
I’m starting to think we should compile a list of these places, like Vancouver Island, so some of us can visit them and see if they speak to us in the same ways. :)
I have it in my heart to always be in America, although I live in Europe. It’s like my soul calls out for it
I believe my soul place was Iceland. When I visited two years ago, something about the nature of it all, the waterfalls, the glaciers, the northern lights, connected with me. I felt like I had to touch the soft black sand on the beach or a piece of ice chipped off from a glacier to feel connected. Seeing the northern lights (faintly although) in person, something just resonated with me. Despite the fact that I was dumped (we dated 7 years!) while on the trip, it never soured my memory of Iceland. It was almost like losing that long relationship paled into comparison with the connection I made there. Anytime I see something about Iceland or scenery that looks similar, my heart just rings with joy and familiarity. I’ve traveled to other wonderful places but NOTHING can replace the connection I made in Iceland. I’m curious to understand this connection more (as I also felt connected to other Nordic countries too).
I also feel deeply connected to Nordic countries, as if I lived there, but I never had and don’t even have relatives there. I feel deeply connected to Norway specifically ♥
I was always drawn to Africa and finally got there in 2017. I had a couple of extremely special moments on my trip. One was watching the Sunset beside the ocean at our campground in Tsitsikamma National Park, and the second was on a beach watching the stars near Mozambique. I felt this profound and overwhelming love, and both times I was overcome with tears of joy. I don’t remember feeling such happiness, contentment and connection. I never felt like I could describe the feeling properly, and now I know why. It was incredible ♥️
Zion, Utah. Words can not describe what I experienced or how I felt but my soul knew it was finally home.
I am being overwhelming drawn to the Steppes and to Turkey, the Khazars civilization and to the the Kiev Rus. I am Ashkenazi. I lived in Western European for a few years in my 20s. I felt so at home. I have no previous introduction to the Steppes, the Khazars or Turkey only that ai need to be there. My grandmother’s people were from Russia and were Russian Jews. Things are so familiar to me like the Russian language. I took German in Manheim and it was second nature. I am a strong empath. I just can’t stop the pulling on my soul. I love the food. I have never been exposed to the Turkish culture or Khazars or the Steppes or the Kiev Rus but it feels like it is a part of me
This brought tears to my eyes. One day i will sit and write to you and Luna.. I want to tell you about my spiritual awakening and journey and how Lonerwolf has been huge for my twin flame and I. But for now I was guided to comment about how this “soul place ” article resonated with me. I have a soul place.. i use to call it “home” it is a spot by a “creek ” in Van Buren County, Arkansas,