The soul, suffering, healing, learning, and spirituality [Night Shift split]

I realise I'm stepping into the middle of a dialogue with  yourself and @nbtruthman here, I apologise for the interruption.

If something inspires, speak away.

I've heard you speak of your own healing from past traumas and it is pleasing to hear that. There is a sense of indebtedness I feel on hearing of the sharing of such experiences.

It's not always easy to share such experiences... but even that can be healing, in its own way. To know you're not alone.

However I wanted to add, briefly, a couple of instances of my own, one of them in my younger years, the other somewhat more recently.

As as a young adult I struggled with a trauma which was bubbling beneath the surface and became overwhelming. I was feeling the unfairness and unjustness of things as well as the pain itself. Somehow I found my own path through, in several stages. Firstly, rather than trying to suppress whatever I was feeling, and just 'soldier on', I allowed and encouraged my feelings to emerge, to be felt, to be expressed. There was also a need to simply accept what was happening, not judge it good or bad but simply let it. That was a greatly beneficial process, however it brought a further breakthrough: a realisation that the feelings of unjustness and unfairness of it all, as well as the distress itself, originated not in this present life but in a previous one. Bang! It felt like a great shock to find that simply trying to find a way to deal with pain had led to a discovery of immortality. Among it all though was a simplicity, a sense of humility and of gratitude. Humility in recognising how in this life we are peering through occasional cracks in the fabric of existence and seeing the vastness of - something. Gratitude in understanding that somehow I was helped and guided, the help was felt and it also led to a realisation that I need never be alone in my struggles. A recognition of something more, use the word God if you wish. Though not as an abstraction necessarily, more direct than that.

A more recent example of my healing was when I unexpectedly found myself spending an afternoon communing with and chatting as well as laughing with deceased loved ones. That hasn't been repeated, I'm not a natural medium, but the effect has been long-lasting.

Beautiful.

Perhaps I should attempt to comment on the nature of the soul in all this. Though it feels like i should leave that for now. Maybe another day.

Whenever you're ready.