I have just completed ‘Living From Your Soul – A 9-Week Journey to Create a Life that Expresses Your Truest Self’ by Neale Donald Walsch.

Neale builds on the work in the ‘Conversations with God’ books and on later work particularly the recent ‘The Only Thing That Matters’.

Neale teaches that each of us is a three-part being, body, mind, and soul, and that it is possible to have an encounter with the soul, and through it, with God. We can have our own conversation with God. There was an exercise to facilitate the beginnings of such a conversation including how to feel the physical presence of God’s energy, the energy of love – this part very much the same as feeling the ‘life force energy’ in Quantum-Touch!

The soul, an individual expression of Divinity, entered into physicality to use body and mind to create an experience of Divinity, Divinity expressing and experiencing itself.

In the realm of the absolute, there is nothing else but God, all there is is love. Love can be known, but how can it be experienced in the absence of what is not love?

We have placed ourselves in physicality, where everything exists in relative terms: light and dark, love and not love. We can experience these contrasts, then select which of these aspects bring the most joy. As we are one with the Divine, through this process God expresses and experiences Itself.

In the session on ‘Eliminating Life’s Complexity’ Neale offers 15 Tips. Here is a taste of them, and most require some thought to appreciate.

• Nobody does anything inappropriate given their model of the world. (And God sees us that way!)
• Nobody does anything they don’t want to do.
• Nobody needs your help and you don’t need help from anybody at all. (The reason to offer anything to anyone is as an expression of who you are.
• There is nothing you have to do.
• There is enough.
• Life was meant to be happy and death was meant to be joyous.

If you feel the lack of any quality you desire then give the gift you want to receive.

How to make contact with the soul? The mind holds experience while the soul holds wisdom and knowledge. Tell your mind that you want to reunite with your soul, and instruct your mind on the information you want from the soul, while releasing any need for it to show up in any specific way.

The entrance to the soul is through the doorway of beingness. We might instruct the mind to ‘be peace’, ‘be love’, ‘be wisdom’.

Meditation is one of the best ways to make contact with the soul and Neale offers various methods of meditation in his book ‘The Only Thing That Matters’, adapted from a similar section in ‘When Everything Changes, Change Everything‘.

Neale suggests: ‘Life is so simple. Why does everyone keep making it so complicated?’

And one ‘simple’ tool for overcoming life’s challenges is Gratitude. We can choose gratitude as an act of will. It is a decision which defines our experience and so our reality.

Suffering is the idea that something is happening which should not be happening: gratitude opens the mind to see the good in situations which we might initially judge ‘not good’. Neale talks about ‘reliable repetition’ of similar experiences which give us the opportunity to react in more constructive ways than we did last time.

The master, therefore, says yes and only yes to every experience. And the master says it joyfully, gratefully, for the master knows that a glorious moment has arrived that is perfect for the glorious expression and experience of glory itself called Divinity.

Another tool which Neale offers for making sense of life is Recontextualization. The importance is not in what we are doing but in who we are being. What aspect of divinity are we expressing in this situation. This point of view can turn to joy a task which previously was experienced as unpleasant or boring.

A third tool is Compassion, compassion for yourself and compassion for others. Divinity expects nothing of you. Free Will means precisely that. There is no judgment or punishment. It is impossible for you to make a mistake: you can only take steps towards your destination.

Seeing your compassion, others will come to you with their anger and hurt. Your offering to them of love, understanding, and acceptance which they have not been able to offer to themselves, will also help you to offer these gifts to yourself.

The final tool offered here is perhaps the most profound in its impact: Forgiveness? – not quite. Neale as usual goes deeper than we expect to suggest ‘Forgiveness forgone‘.

All four tools are designed to give you freedom from suffering, but this one especially.

On the day that you understand that you don’t have anyone to forgive for anything – and that you never did have anyone to forgive for anything at all, because all human expressions are ultimately an expression of love, if only in a distorted form – on that day you will be free no matter what has occurred in your life.

We may seek to experience the fullness of who we are by taking the path of the Soul yet hesitate to step onto that path. We must give ourselves the gift of Willingness. We must use ‘Free Will’ and free our will.

Your Will and God’s Will are one – God wants for you what you want for you. Free Will is the key to freedom.

Any negative thought is coming from the mind alone – the soul will never produce negative energy. Stand where the mind and soul come together and the soul’s position will prevail.

To move into a state of Willingness, all it takes is awareness, desire and determination: an awareness that you have the ability to create your own reality, the desire to do so, and the determination to settle for nothing less.

‘You create your own reality’ means that you are personally responsible for how you experience everything. Contrary to popular belief there is no connection between any event in your life and your reality. It is your experience of the event that is creating the reality.

What creates your experience? The emotion which you attach to the event.

What creates the emotion? Your thought about the event.

You can use this understanding to train your mind to produce realities you prefer rather than those to which you find yourself seemingly subjected.

The Soul has its own perspective. The Soul has data from all the past, indeed all of eternity. The mind and the soul were meant to function together. The data of the mind is expanded by the perspective of the Soul and the experience generated by the Soul meets the experience generated by the mind to create a new place in between, which the Buddhists would call ‘the middle way’.

Love is all there is. There is only one energy in the Universe, the energy we call love; love of self, love of others, love of life. Your Soul and the Soul of the universe desire, seek, and produce all the same thing: whatever love invites next, in order for even more love to be experienced.

Every event can be a blessing when encountered with Gratitude, with Compassion for yourself, and with deep understanding.

Ask, How does what I’m doing now serve the agenda of my Soul? How do I choose for Divinity to be expressed through me in the next grandest way in the next moment?

As the messages of Conversations with God make clear over and over again, there is a reason and a purpose to life, and it has nothing to do with what you are doing. It has everything to do with what you are being while you are doing whatever you are doing. And one day, when everything you are being emerges from the agenda of your Soul, rather than the thoughts of your mind, all the things you are doing will be an expression of Divinity in physical form. This is the ultimate change, this change is called transformation, and this transformation is called enlightenment.