SoHum Pathways

You were born onto a piece of land, and it was already whole.

The trails across it were worn in by the people who walked there before you came. You learned them the way every child does, by putting your feet where theirs had gone. Some of those trails still serve you, and some were never yours to walk.

SoHum Pathways is a way of walking the human experience as a soul living in a human body. It follows four Pathways, each with its own practice and its own question.

Liberation. I choose. Seeing what you hold, keeping what is yours, and setting down what was never yours to keep.

Self-Actualization. I am. Remembering who you are apart from everything you learned to be, and recognizing the gifts that came with you.

Integration. I live. This is the hardest and most fruitful of the four. It means living what you know at the real table, with the people who knew the old you, and returning every time you forget.

Contribution. I give. Offering what is yours to family, friends and strangers, because there is no hierarchy of unique gifts.

Running through every chapter is one continuous story, a parable of a woman across a lifetime on her own land, from the gate she was taught to leave alone to the tree she grows from seeds taken off her mother's tree. Alongside it, the book draws on Christianity, yoga philosophy, Buddhism, the Stoics and modern psychology. Each Pathway closes with reflective prompts, and a final chapter offers practices to choose from and try, including yoga, meditation, sound and prayer.

This is a book to keep out on the table and write in, and to come back to through every season of your life. It asks you to look down at the ground you have been standing on your whole life and recognize it as home.

I am you. You are me. We are one. And so it is.