What Are You Feeding Your Soul?

When's the last time you had some soul food? I don't mean fried chicken and baked macaroni and cheese and sweet potato pie. I'm asking about the last time you read something specifically to feed your soul and inspire your journey. When's the last time you wrote in your journal or sketched or painted or did something creative? Just as we are diligent about nourishing our physical bodies, it’s important to incorporate art and culture into our lives to keep our spiritual and emotional bodies healthy. I have to admit that I have an ulterior motive for asking these questions. You see, I made some soul food for you. I wrote a book called The Beautiful Disruption. It’s a soul story about a woman facing an interruption in her life. I was inspired to write it to put a creative frame around some of my inner conflicts with the hope that other women would find pieces of themselves in the story. The more we tell our stories and express ourselves creatively, the less isolated we feel. Too many of us walk around thinking that no one out there feels the way we do and that we are alone with our inner struggles. The main character is a woman in transition. She is tired of doing the same hurtful things, thinking the same painful thoughts—“I’m crazy! I’m not good enough! I have bad luck!”—over and over and over again, unconsciously making her nightmares come true. Finding herself heartbroken and fed up, she decides to change her self-fulfilling prophecy of defeat. The book explores her stream of consciousness and the landscape of her emotions as she seeks to find meaning in her contradictions and extremes. From the back of the book:

For as long as she could remember, she’d been quietly dancing on the edge of her life, waiting for the sky to fall. Thrilled by doom and passion, her story of crisis was tattooed on her insides, an inescapable prophecy that she never questioned. Until one day comes a disruption and the small voice that she had always suppressed escalates from a whisper to a roar, demanding acknowledgement, calling her out. In this collision of inspiration and fallibility, she faces her inner conflicts and examines them closely without flinching or running away. Her observations are woven together like a stream of consciousness, full of contradictions and discoveries that give her a new way of perceiving herself and the world around her. In The Beautiful Disruption, Hill explores the dynamics of family mental illness, self-prophecy and transformation as she reminds us that our lives are framed by the stories we tell ourselves.

Perhaps you are in a place where you are feeding everyone and everything but your own spirit. You might be putting yourself on the backburner, knowing that you are not fulfilled but not sure what to do about it. If this sounds like you, my book will resonate and put words to your feelings. The biggest takeaway that I hope to provide with this book is that when we learn to embrace the beauty of who we are and what we have been through—pain and pleasure, enlightenment and foolishness—that is when we truly begin to thrive. GG Renee Hill is a writer, blogger and soulful living coach based in the Washington DC area. She writes to help women embrace their complexity and live authentic, creative lives. You can find her sprinkling love dust daily on her blog, All the Many Layers; and in her book, The Beautiful Disruption, which can be purchased here.