A Soul is Not a Thing You Have
Souls, Consiousness and Parenting as Sacred Resistance
We are all feeling this global shift, a collective unravelling of systems, stories, and selves. Something is shifting, and while we can feel it in our bones, it’s hard to name exactly where we’re heading. This is a space where I explore how parenting, spirituality, and Earth connection intersect in a collapsing world.
Here, I chronicle my necessary shift, sometimes uncomfortably, away from a materialist worldview. The one I grew up with. This is a form of sacred resistance for me. My main inquiry here is “How do we raise children who have the skills to co-create a future with a more earth-centred paradigm?”. I know I can’t do this perfectly, and I know I can’t control what my kids do. However, most of what my posts here are me trying to figure it out for myself so my children can see that I have forged a path that they can follow.
The stories we tell ourselves about our reality matter, they shape how we walk the world. I’ve previously talked about how we create their reality, how we talk to them about death, and posts on animism.
Our current paradigm says that consciousness lives only in the human brain, that it ends with death, and that matter is inert, with the world around us mostly silent. This story we tell ourselves affects how we relate to everything. It is what makes the difference between a person who extracts and destroys and a person who relates deeply to the living world. It touches how we understand spirit, vibration, consciousness and souls.
I write this with deep respect for those cultures and traditions who have not lost this way of being, and with an awareness of the lineage of disconnection I come from. The worldview I was raised in trained me to forget, to numb, to extract. I am unlearning, listening, re-programming and re-storying and it’s sometimes messy. I don’t have oral traditions going back generations, or the experience of being embedded in ancient animist culture my whole life. I have internet, books, courses and lived experience. I am slowly remembering what was never truly lost so that I can raise my children with a different framework and introduce them to different ideas than the ones our culture presents us.
A little while ago, I saw an issue of the New Scientist with headlines asking things like ‘Are animals/babies conscious?’ and then an Instagrammer ‘disproving’ souls. I have seen people trying to explain these matters with such clarity that I just cannot grasp. This absolute certainty people hold that we are all separate and individual. The word soul isn’t a clearly defined thing to be disproved, it’s a metaphor for something that really can’t be explained. It just keeps us disconnected from the web of life. This is all evidence to me that we are trapped in a worldview that no longer serves us.
I can already hear the objections to some of the ideas in this article. Isn’t this just mysticism dressed up in sciencey words? I’d have agreed once. But the longer I sit with land and children, the more our dominant framework feels like the myth. It reduces the living world to machine where only humans hold the key. Vanessa De Andreotti in Hospicing Modernity talks of the harms of “wording the world”. So I invite you to consider that if the words don’t sit with you, choose some that do. The invitation of our time is to not let words change how open you are to other ways of seeing and being in relationship.
We’ve been taught that consciousness is an accident of biology, a clever trick of human brains. Consciousness is what makes humans superior to all of our kin and the sacred others and often even to each other as it is equated with “intelligence”. We have built a false and limited ladder of hierarchy of consciousness and judged ourselves to be at the top.
Our culture treats consciousness as if aliveness is something to be doled out or denied… Are animals capable of it? Do babies qualify?
Over the generations ancient wisdom traditions around spirituality have been eroded and now we have collectively rejected them. The harms of this colonial thinking run deep. The idea we can only obtain consciousness at a certain age, or that no other beings are conscious, that some humans are not conscious “in the same way” and are therefore more like “animals”, are perpetuated by headlines like these, no matter what conclusions the articles draw.
The idea that consciousness is limited to human thought creates a dangerous ripple effect through our collective consciousness. The harms cannot be underestimated. When the Instagrammer dismissed souls as "unscientific," I recognised the same dismissive human centric colonial logic that declares forests as "resources" and children as "consumers."
I understood where she was coming from, I’ve been there. For a time, I called myself an atheist. After watching a loved one vanish into dementia, their personality dissolving before my eyes, I thought, surely a soul would have more integrity than that. As I sat at their Catholic funeral listening to how they were in heaven because they had been baptised, and everyone who hadn’t would never go there, I concluded then that souls and gods were comforting illusions. Years later, after my awakening to planetary collapse, I came to see how that worldview was too small, too brittle and ultimately too harmful.
Through walking an animist path, I’ve begun to experience consciousness entirely differently. I have opened up to a different way to be in the world. I am seeking a different truth and experience, one where consciousness is not human-specific, or an accident of biology, but the very foundation of reality. I have come to realise consciousness isn’t something we are; it’s something we participate in. It’s not a possession; it’s presence.
From the moment I was pregnant, and I could feel the presence of my child’s consciousness, and I knew there was something more to what we are taught about consciousness being solely in the brain. I felt I could telepathically communicate with the baby. I would talk to them in my mind and tell them what was going on, introduce them to people.
I was pregnant after a miscarriage during the pandemic. Alone, in lockdown, I was freaking out. I had thought I had grieved. I had thought I was ready, but as soon as I saw the pink line, I crumbled, what if I lost this one too? Then I realised, if I centred myself and I asked the baby, he gave me clear signs. He sent me visions of a willow blowing in the wind, deeply rooted. I felt his determination to be born. When he was born I already knew him. I knew his humour and his calm, stable, healing presence, his curiosity and determination, none of it was a surprise to me, we had been building a relationship for 9 months.
Through carrying a dead baby and then carrying an alive one. I could feel the contrast within my own body. The difference between “alive” and a soul being present, and “dead” and a soul being absent started to become clearer to me.
When I was travelling in Australia, I saw wild dolphins. Some swam alongside us as we walked beside a river. I was struck by the intelligence, the presence, the consciousness in their eyes. But on Fraser Island, we came across a dead dolphin. We approached to pay our respects. I stared into its lifeless eyes for a long time, trying to beam my love, respect and grief there somehow, but the consciousness was gone, there was nothing to connect to. I could feel the difference. It was like a light had been switched off, a spark distinguished, the coherence of the dolphin itself dispersed and what was left was an empty vessel.
At the Subtle land energies course I did earlier this year with Patrick McManaway and Animate Earth, I was introduced to the idea that “Everything that vibrates is conscious”. I have thought about that a lot since and how to integrate it into my own story of life. I am also regularly reminded of the quote by Oscar Miro Quesada 'consciousness creates matter, language creates reality, and ritual creates relationship' in Manda Scott’s podcast, Accidental Gods.
The universe is an interconnected spiralling fractal web, where everything vibrates in harmony with the whole. Atoms, rivers, trees, stars, the cells in your body, the song of a bird, the frequency of your thoughts, the pulse of the Earth herself. Each thing, each being, each moment, sings its own frequency.
Hermetic traditions teach the Principle of Vibration; nothing rests, everything moves, everything vibrates. The Principle of Correspondence; “as above, so below; as within, so without”, reminds us that these patterns of resonance echo across scales, from micro to macro, from the smallest atom to the dance of galaxies. The toroidal fields of hearts, of trees, of planets spiral in rhythm with this ancient law. What happens in one part of the system ripples through the whole. The Hermetic Principle of Mentalism states that if the universe is a living mind, then each vibration is a thought-form, a signal of consciousness expressing through the medium of energy. We do not stand outside this; we participate. We are the vibrating field remembering itself.
Many Indigenous and animist cultures have always known this. Songlines, drumming, ritual chants, these are not symbolic gestures. They are acts of communication with a living world. Vibrational languages, invitations to remember who we are in relation to everything else. Even science agrees, beneath all matter is movement. Oscillating systems; neurons, heart cells, fungi, bacteria, seek resonance. They sync, align, and harmonise. And when systems vibrate in harmony, consciousness emerges.
If it vibrates, it resonates.
If it resonates, it communicates.
If it communicates, it is conscious.
So what if the brain doesn’t produce consciousness at all? What if it’s more like a receiver, a tuning fork, a prism? A way of expressing something much more foundational to our reality. Consciousness isn’t rare or special to humans. It’s everywhere.
We often imagine a soul as a fixed essence, something tucked safely inside us, quietly defining who we are. A personality, perhaps. Something we cling to because we must hold on to our identity at all costs. But what if the soul is not a container, but a pattern of movement? Not something we own, but something we are part of? What if our soul experiences our personality, rather than our soul being our personality? What if our soul is our field and our field is what creates us? What if a soul is not a noun, what if it’s a verb. A pattern of coherence. A toroidal field of vibrating awareness, looping out from the heart and back again, like a spiralling breath of light?
Not long after university, I remember hearing that Jim Henson loved a book called Seth Speaks, so I read it. It’s a channeled book, different from fiction but not quite non-fiction. In it, the soul is described as multidimensional, a vast, conscious field expressing itself in many forms across many lives. Your current personality is not your whole soul, but a focus point, a single thread of attention within a much larger tapestry of being. Through channeling, Seth states; "The soul is not something you have. It is what you are.”
Our bodies and identities are not fixed points in time. Time shifts and changes, and so do we. We are not this one personality and identity our whole lives. We are not our names, our hair or skin colour, we are not our mannerisms, we are not the choices make or the feelings we have. It all flows and weaves through us. Rupert Sheldrake talks of his theory of morphic resonance. He suggests that these fields hold memory across time and space, that life draws on life. That form and pattern evolve together, not in isolation, but in shared awareness. Maybe your soul spirals, not stands still. Maybe your thoughts and dreams ripple out into the field and draw upon it in return. Maybe your soul is not who you are, but how you are. Not yours, but you are a part of it. Maybe instead of your soul being your identity and personality, it experiences your identity and personality. Perhaps a soul is a shared field of awareness, dancing through form, carrying a blueprint for your becoming and experiencing that becoming.
This Earth Walk teaches us, life is not made of separate parts, but of flowing fields of relationship. Consciousness moves through us, not just within us. If as many spiritual teachings say, our souls are here to learn, then our souls are not the same thing as our identity.
There are spirals of time, light, and energy that shape human and planetary consciousness. These fields are not outside of us. We are them. We’re giving and receiving information all the time, we absorb light, we vibrate with sound. This exchange of vibration, energy, and information happens right down to the smallest atom and right up to the spiralling of planets and galaxies. The universe is not made up of separate parts; the flow of energy and vibration connects everything, communicating information at both macro and micro levels. The vibrational patterns at any level of reality reflect and influence one another, uniting all things in a shared field of consciousness and energy.
Patrick MacManaway said that love is a relational wave, not a substance within us, but a frequency between us. Thinkng about this has expanded how I understand soul: as the quality of resonance held in that relational field. Not just “who I am,” but “how I am with.” A soul field, continuously shaped by presence and relationship. The universe isn’t made of separate material things, but of relationships and energy. Consciousness is the field that connects them. This is how trees communicate underground. How birds sense the direction of the flock and murmurate. How hearts and nervous systems align in close presence. The Earth has her own toroidal field too, pulsing, breathing, informing life. This field is not just electromagnetic. It is informational. It carries memory, feeling, and intention.
What if we all believed nothing is “other” and we are all fields of resonance that influence each other with our presence, vibration and relationship? Then relationship becomes the foundation of existence. Not just with humans but with rocks, plants, ancestors, tech, dreams, skies….
Our ethics would shift from rules & hierarchy to attunement & responsibility. It would mean that the questions of self awareness would be “how am I vibrating, what am I amplifying, what am I blocking or dulling or distorting?”. Presence would become an act of co-creating, of being in right relationship; listening, loving, tending. Co-shaping, co-creating. What if ‘spirit’ is actually a coherence between fields, attunement to a greater consciousness, a harmony that emerges when you are in deep presence, intimacy and reciprocity with all of life?
I imagine being taught this as a young child. How differently I would walk the world now and relate to it, how I am learning this now in my 40s and I could have been doing it forever. Recently I sat on a beach admiring the stones, touching and feeling them, every stone it’s own personality, it’s own vibration. The athiest, machinistic world left me with nothing but dissociation and numbness. Now I feel deeply, love everything powerfully and experience fully. I am still learning how to do this. Still listening. Still unlearning. But each time I sit with my children beneath a tree, each time we speak to the river, honour the directions or light a candle to mark the seasons, I feel us tuning ourselves not to the noise of the world we’re told is real, but to the deeper hum beneath it all.
When I think creating a new world paradigm this is the fertile soil I want it to grow from. May our children grow up fluent in this language. May they walk the world knowing they belong to it and it to them. This is the story I want my children to grow up with: not that they are masters of a dead world, but participants in a living one. Not that their worth is measured by what they produce, but by how they relate. That they are not separate from nature they are nature, conscious and connected, in constant dialogue with the rest of life.
If everything is conscious, then everything matters. And if everything is as conscious as we are, then we are no more important than anything else. This simple truth could be the foundation for an entirely new way of being on the Earth, one rooted in humility, connection, and respect for all life. It changes everything and nothing at the same time.