What Is A Soul-Print?
Just like each of us has unique fingerprints, we also have unique soul-prints. From a spiritual perspective, the reason we are born is to actualize our unique soul-prints in this world. We are here to become who we truly are and have this true self acknowledged and accepted by others.
The inability to actualize one’s authentic self leads to anger, anxiety, frustration, discouragement, depression, regret etc. These emotions, in turn, are often repressed and become emotional “cysts.” Our bottled-up emotional cysts hold us back physically as well as emotionally.
The Soul Print Equation
The “I” is the immortal component of the soul that carries the unique “DNA” of a given soul from one incarnation to the next throughout the cycle of birth, death and rebirth. It also acts as a mediator between the “lower world” of primary consciousness and the “upper world” of higher consciousness.
The Kabbalah teaches that the human soul contains animal-, plant- and human soul components. The “I,” situated at the interface of these components, serves as receptacle and integrative medium for the revelations of the spiritual world. It also elevates the animal soul from being merely the soul’s instinctive “animal principle” by linking its experience of the external world to one’s personal existence, thus giving rise to a multi-dimensional, inner private world.
Nature and Nurture
One’s soul print consists of equal parts nature and nurture. In this context, “nature” refers to the innate qualities someone is born with and “nurture” to post-birth, formative influences and experiences. We can view the “I” as pure individualized soul essence colored and differentiated by the cumulative life-experiences acquired along the chain of being. Accordingly, the “I,” as the carrier of “nature” and the processor of “nurture,” is the matrix of a person’s singular soul print.
Birth-Family Relationships
Of all the formative “nurture” influences none is more important (some such as congenital illness and socioeconomic status are equally important) than birth family relationships. The character of a child’s relationship with her (or his) mother and father and her experience within the family group dynamic will in large part determine the quality and trajectory of one’s soul journey during a given lifetime. Dysfunctional birth-family relationships are major catalysts in the development of an individual’s pain body.
The Pain-Body
Birth-family relationships are a major contributor to the construction of the pain body. In his book, The Power of Now, spiritual theorist Eckhardt Tolle elaborates upon his concept of the pain-body. According to Tolle, after the field of complete consciousness is established, it expresses itself in an organic form that becomes immersed in the organization of its physical environment. Said consciousness then begins to divide into mind, and mind, in turn, into ego.
When ego, due to its thoughts of limitations, fractures itself against obstacles, the pain-body: a layer of stored, negative emotional charge then becomes a component unconscious entity whose existence is sustained by pain. The pain-body both encourages the experience of pain and the urge to inflict pain on others.
As may be expected, the pain-body inhibits emotional and spiritual connection and exerts a negative impact upon physical health as well. It can be viewed as an energy field that merges with psychical and cellular energy fields, whose prime directive is the generation and storage of pain.
Tolle writes: “There are two levels of pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain of the past that still lives on in your mind and body…. The accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind.”
The pain-body tends to hypertrophy and recruits the mind into its service. Release from pain-body domination follows from observation of the mind’s process of identifying completely with, and thinking and acting out, particular feelings. Through this observation, one is essentially separating from the pain-body and thus able to dissolve ones bondage of identification with it. The resultant freed-up light of awareness can then be directed toward the dissolution of the accrued pain. One comes to recognize the pain-body as a shadow-entity constructed of past emotional woundings and detoured life force.
The movement toward a wholeness which is no longer subject to fragmentation (the essence of spirituality) and the dismantling of the pain-body require the development of the awareness that one is the producer, not the product, of thought patterns. This serves to remove the sense of automation that accompanies the delusion of pre-determinism.
Morbid introversion represents resistance to one’s feelings—a denial of their existence in favor of a compensated state that is more consistent with one’s desired self-image. This prevents the psyche’s efforts to digest trying experiences which, in turn, leads to their storage in the form of a pain-body. This compensated state encourages one to become accustomed, and attached, to a perception of life as an engenderer of suffering.
Clearly, everyone has a pain-body. However, its relative density and activity varies among individuals. In some, it is active only to a limited degree in certain situations such as in intimate relationships, or incidents which trigger memories of prior emotional hurt. In others, the pain-body is highly volatile and exerts a continuous, dominating influence.
The pain-body, just like every other vitalized entity, is invested in its own survival. This survival is sustained by nourishment that consists of one’s ongoing conscious and subconscious identification with the pain-body’s payload of pain.
The pain-body can only feed on pain; it finds contentment indigestible. A dominating pain-body has a food-craving for more pain. Hence, one becomes both perpetuator and victim of the pain-body. On the other hand, when one lets go and ceases to identify with the pain-body, it ceases to exist and a higher dimension of consciousness fills the resultant void.
The Conundrum of Stuckness
I have been a practitioner, teacher and author in the field of holistic healing for 30 years. After many years of practice and observation, I came to the conclusion that the common denominator in all forms of chronic physical and/or emotional disharmony is the element of “stuckness.” Indeed, the word “chronic” itself implies stuckness. From a psycho-spiritual perspective, no contributory factors are more important in the development of stuckness than dysfunctional birth-family relationships.
When mired in stuckness, a person’s life has an inertial quality. There is a sense of one’s being stuck and unable to break free. Also, of life being a masquerade wherein the true self always has to take a back seat to the self you use to deal with the perpetual challenges of daily life.
Ultimately there is no separation between mind and body. The human organism is a fully integrated entity of mind, body and soul. The ongoing survival of this organism depends upon its capacity for self-healing. Self-healing, in turn, is a centrifugal process. In other words, the direction of cure is from the inside to the outside.
As the emotional level is a deeper level than the physical, our unexpressed emotions will be transferred from the emotional level to the physical level (i.e., centrifugal movement from inside to outside). In this way, emotional disharmony morphs into physical disease. Remember, the first imperative of the organism is self-healing. Whatever is not processed and resolved on the emotional level will ultimately have to be expressed on the physical level, or those bottled-up energies will cause a “meltdown.”
The problem with stuckness is that there often seems to be no way out. One comes to feel like Gulliver bound by the stress-Lilliputians of daily existence.
Essential Oils And Birth-Family Relationships
Dysfunctional Relationship with the Mother
The theme of maternal nurturing, or lack thereof, is a central factor in both emotional and physical wellness. I have found that the theme of insufficient maternal nurturing is often a prominent factor in those stricken with breast cancer. The mind/body connection in cancer is well-established and it may be that many cases of breast cancer are impervious to all forms of medical intervention, because the maternal nurturing issue, which may represent the central disturbance that gives rise to the disease expression, remains overlooked and unresolved.
In the world of the nursing fetus, survival is dependent upon maternal protection and nourishment. However, this dependency is unproductive in the adult whose positive self-image and socioeconomic viability depend upon self-confidence and self-sufficiency. Thus, this feeling is often repressed. Nevertheless, repression only prevents above-the-ground flowering of a deep-seated feeling; it does not extricate its subterranean roots from the subconscious.
This “root” gives rise to tremendous internal anxiety whose source, due to the censorship of repression, the individual cannot identify. The manifested anxiety takes the form of feelings of abandonment, being forsaken, being vulnerable and alone. Frequently, a woman with breast issues has a history of being neglected in some way by her mother, often exacerbated in later life by a similar form of neglect by the husband or grown children.
A history of insufficient maternal nurturing is quite common among sensitive, spiritually aware individuals. Many of these have the feeling of being unwanted as children and compensate by becoming self-sufficient and non-demanding, repressing their emotions strongly. This state persists even if the situation changes later on in their lives.
Ideally, a child should experience an harmonious blend of maternal guidance and nurturing. Maternal guidance must be modified by, unconditional love and benevolence. Mother love that is an harmonious blend of guidance and nurturing is unconditional, it does not have to be earned. On the other hand, when mother love is adequately infused with guidance but is deficient in nurturing, the mother’s expressions of judgment and restriction become autonomous and the feeling the mother communicates to her child more closely resembles control than love. This can give rise to profound inner conflict in the child characterized by deep-seated pain and obsessive anxiety about security and vulnerability.
In the upcoming teleseminar course I will elaborate upon three oils which are important regarding the mother/child relationship: carrot seed, coffee and fennel.
Dysfunctional Relationship with the Father
According to the Kabbalah, the Tree of Life vessel of Chokma or Wisdom represents the father archetype. It is the source of intuition, emanates from the non-verbal right hemisphere of the brain and penetrates the left hemisphere of the brain where it impregnates Binah (Understanding), the mother archetype.
The offspring of this union is the Tree of Life vessel of Daat, or Knowledge, which consciously communicates this “understood wisdom.” Interestingly, a recent study by the University of North Carolina’s Child Development Institute and School of Education found that in families with two working parents, fathers had greater impact than mothers on their children’s language development between ages 2 and 3.
Chokma is associated with the highest intellectual center from which the most profound ideas and observations originate. Chokma corresponds to the fundamental axioms of cognition which lie behind all thought processes; it is what allows one to mentally decipher the essence of something.
The inner essence of Chokma is self-nullification the capacity for negating one’s superficial self while awakening to one’s connection with the divine source. Self-nullification enables a person to experience existence, not as an independent operative, but as an individuated manifestation of the source of all being. In so doing, she becomes a conduit for divine wisdom.
Deficient or negative paternal influence associated with parental-absenteeism, early death or other form of estrangement, ineffectual character, excessive sternness or even frank abuse is no less damaging to a child than a deficiency of maternal nurturing. In addition to some of the more obvious negative effects of the failure of paternal parenting, the kabbalistic model infers that the child’s thought processes, intuition, ability to communicate what she knows and capacity for connecting with the spiritual world can be significantly impacted.
In Spiritual PhytoEssencing, clary sage is one of the essential oils associated with Chokma, the father archetype. This helps explain some of the more prominent emotional symptoms in the clary sage picture including: nervousness; nervous exhaustion; racing mind; anxiety; panic; indecision; confusion; fear; phobias; delusions; paranoia; obsession; rage; lack of self-confidence and positive self-image; depression.
In the upcoming teleseminar course I will elaborate upon two oils which are important regarding the father/child relationship: cypress and Ravensare aromatica.
Dysfunctional Relationship with the Family Group
Often when interviewing clients, the person reports having been shunned or insulted by her birth family and thus denied recognition and support while growing up. In my experience, this shunning or insulting most commonly involves being overlooked or not deemed to be as important as a sibling.
Thus, her life becomes a juggernaut of trying, through concentrated and consistent effort, to win esteem, to be noticed and valued by the other members of her family. This generates an inner conflict between, on the one hand, her natural independence and confidence in her convictions and, on the other hand, the uncertainty, lack of self-confidence and anger towards the family which for a variety of reasons simply will not give her the due she deserves. The longer this situation persists, the more likely it is that she will develop a state characterized by discouragement, insecurity, anxiety, sensitivity and ultimately darkness and indifference.
There are of course other forms of dysfunctional intra-group dynamics including the issue of dual parental suppression associated with the Cancer miasm and the pressures of triangular relationships (e.g., a divorced mother and father competing for the child’s affection). In the upcoming teleseminar course I will elaborate upon three oils which are important regarding a dysfunctional relationship with the family group: galbanum, geranium and parsley seed.
The Nature of True Healing
In Spiritual PhytoEssencing, the key to moving the soul forward toward healing is the formulation of an oil blend which accurately reflects an individual’s “soul print.” As stated above, just like no two fingerprints are alike, each soul is completely unique.
Living within the context of one’s true soul nature requires a continuous connection with one’s higher self. Happiness is the key to wellness. No one can truly be well so long as he or she is unhappy. In turn, the key to happiness lies in accepting, and living in accordance with one’s soul print and having this soul print received by others.
Harmonizing the currents of the psycho-spiritual plane facilitates an altered state characterized by heightened awareness, receptivity, flexibility, objectivity and the illumination of life-choices. True healing can proceed only in this altered state.
Here is Your Opportunity to Discover the Life-Changing Inner Power of Essential Oils
I began developing Spiritual PhytoEssencing, an art which focuses upon deep psycho-spiritual work using the inner nature of essential oils, more than a decade ago. I continue to become more awakened to the unique potential that essential oils hold to catalyze profound life-change. The soul is the foundation of all levels of being. It is also the epicenter of core disturbances which ripple outward on to the emotional and physical planes.
The human soul has the ability to engage with an essential oil, the most concentrated carrier of the soul of its plant, on a soul-to-soul level. In my many years of practice, I have worked with a wide variety of natural healing modalities and know of no other healing substances that can substitute for essential oils in this regard.
An understanding of the inner or soul nature of an essential oil is the prerequisite for activating its soul-healing potential. Spiritual PhytoEssencing is an art which elaborates complete soul-portraits of over 100 essential oils. It also provides the skills required to prepare highly individualized blends that will initiate a soul-to-soul encounter between the essential oil blend and the particular human soul whose image it mirrors.
Related Reading
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Ravensare Materia Medica$5.00
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Parsley Materia Medica$5.00
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Geranium Materia Medica$5.00
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Galbanum Materia Medica$5.00
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Fennel Materia Medica$5.00
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Cypress Materia Medica$5.00
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Coffee Materia Medica$5.00
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Cedarwood Materia Medica$5.00
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Carrot Seed Materia Medica$5.00
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Berkowsky’s Synthesis Materia Medica/Spiritualis of Essential Oils$385.00
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2022 Spiritual PhytoEssencing Repertory of Essential Oils$35.00