The Soul Keeps Score

I’ve been thinking about the soul lately, mostly because we rarely talk about it in a practical way.

We talk about the body constantly. We track it, optimize it, feed it, medicate it. We’ve also learned how to talk about the mind. Our mental health, trauma, anxiety, thought patterns. There’s language for all of that now.

But the soul tends to fall through the cracks.

For some people, it sounds too abstract. So we either avoid it altogether or reduce it to something that doesn’t really touch daily life. And yet, when people say they feel disconnected, flat, or like they’re watching their own life from the outside, I don’t think they’re talking about their body or their mind. They’re talking about their soul.

At its most basic level, the soul refers to vitality. The part of you that feels present and engaged in your own life. When that vitality is repeatedly set aside, unmet and ignored, the soul doesn’t disappear but it does go quiet, often without you noticing.

The dormant Soul

It shows up when you’re nodding along in conversations instead of speaking your truth. When you stop doing things you once loved because someone decided they weren’t practical or worthwhile. When you accept behaviors in relationships that slowly erode your peace because addressing them would make things complicated. When you find yourself living more vividly in fantasy than in real life, because imagining feels safer than choosing.

How often do you stop yourself from saying things like: I don’t want this anymore, or I want something different, or why am I still doing that thing I despise?

Many of us were taught that safety requires sacrifice. That wanting more is dangerous. That peace is earned by staying agreeable or palatable and not disrupting the system. So we learn to just remain grateful, to stay in our lane, to keep up the routine even when something inside us feels dimmer than it used to.

A dormant soul doesn’t announce itself as pain. It announces itself as stagnation. As a life that works, technically, but doesn’t quite feel alive.

And this is where another layer becomes impossible to ignore.

Energy (!)

This is one of my favorite topics, and I don’t talk about it enough, so hear me out.

We live in a culture that prioritizes what can be seen, measured, or explained physically. We focus on words, actions, outcomes, the things we can point to and dissect. We wait for something obvious to happen before we trust what we feel.

But long before that, there’s something else communicating.

That signal, again, is energy (!!)

The soul, in many traditions, has always been understood as a form of energy. An animating force, a frequency, something that moves through us and around us, shaping how we experience people, places, and situations before our rational mind catches up.

You already know this, even if you don’t call it that.

You feel it when you walk into a room and immediately feel uneasy, without knowing why. You feel it around certain people. A subtle tension, the contraction in your body, the sense that something is off even when everything looks fine from the outside. You feel it in situations that don’t feel just or aligned, even if they technically should make sense.

And sometimes, it’s the inverse …

That energy that shows up around people who inspire you. Spaces that feel expansive. Conversations that leave you feeling MORE like yourself instead of less. Work that energizes rather than drains.

We often call this intuition, but intuition is just the mind’s word for energetic information.

Energy is constant and it’s always communicating. We’re just not taught how to listen to it or we’re taught not to trust it, especially when what it’s telling us feels inconvenient or morally complicated.

Why do I have this desire? Why does this situation drain me? Why does this hobby feel so liberating? Why does being around this person feel heavy, even though I “should” be happy? Why does this light me up in this way?

Instead of reading those sensations as information, we override them. We tell ourselves to be logical. To not overthink. To not want too much.

So the signal keeps coming, and we keep turning the volume down.

At the beginning of this year, I read a book called The Prism, where the fascinating Laura Day talks about learning to read your soul’s cues. The subtle energetic signals that move through the body before the rational mind interferes. The idea isn’t that intuition is rare but that we all have it. Some of us learned to listen. Others learned to suppress it.

Your body reacts immediately. Sometimes it feels like a wave, other times like a tightening. Sometimes like an opening, other times like a quiet pull toward something that feels alive and expansive. Other times it’s repelling, heavy, contracting.

To someone else, that might look like a reaction. To me, it’s energy. My body reads it before my mind forms a story. Over time, (and admittedly, with the help of Laura Day), I’ve learned to trust that information not as a command, but as a compass.

We are deeply energetic beings living in a world that pretends we’re only physical and cognitive. Frequency is real. We can’t see it, but we can measure it. SOUND has frequency. LIGHT has frequency. Our nervous systems operate through electrical signals. Energy doesn’t need to be visible to be real.

In quantum theory, there’s a concept called quantum entanglement. The idea that two or more particles can become linked in such a way that what happens to one affects the other, regardless of distance. They exchange information without physical contact. Albert Einstein used to called it spooky action at a distance, I believe it shows up in very strange ways, sometimes as synchronicities.

We are constantly entangled with our environments, our relationships, our routines, our choices. Information is being exchanged all the time not just through words and actions, but through energy. Through presence. Through what feels aligned or misaligned long before we can articulate why.

When a soul is dormant, that signal doesn’t disappear.

It just gets ignored.

And when a soul is alive, that signal becomes something you’re willing to listen to even when it asks you to speak, to move, to change, or to let go.

So, let’s ask ourselves:

• Where do I feel small in my life?
• Where do I feel myself going numb instead of responsive?
• Where does my body signal that something is off, even if my mind keeps justifying it?
• And where do I feel expanded, energized, more myself even if it scares me?

That information MATTERS.

It’s not indulgent, nor random. It’s not a flaw and it’s not a sin. It’s your soul communicating in the language it has always used.

And learning to listen to it isn’t about becoming reckless or dramatic. It’s about becoming conscientiously responsive again.

Redemption isn’t reserved for heroes or gods as we often believe. It belongs to ordinary people like you and me who realize, one day, that staying the same has started to cost them more than changing.

The soul doesn’t need grand gestures to wake up, it really only asks for honesty and attention.