Soul Communication Through the Eyes | Why Your Wrinkles Are Sacred

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In the livestream for episode 555 of Soul Elevation, I talk about how there is so much happening between us that never passes through language.

We tend to think of communication as something verbal - words, tone, phrasing, the structure of sentences. We understand body language as well. Psychologists and behavioral experts have studied posture and facial expressions for decades. They have concluded that crossed arms can signal defensiveness. We know that eye contact can signal confidence or discomfort. None of that is new.

But the communication happening between us runs far deeper than psychology. What if we are communicating constantly at a subconscious level and even at a soul level?

At any given moment, you are taking in extraordinary amounts of information from your environment. Most of it never reaches your conscious awareness. Hypnosis demonstrates this beautifully. There are countless stories of witnesses who could not consciously recall a detail from an event, yet under hypnosis they could retrieve precise information such as a number on a license plate or the color of a passing car. Their conscious mind did not store it in an accessible way, but their subconscious had recorded it.

Your system is always perceiving more than you realize. And I believe that includes perceiving subtleties with each other that our conscious minds can hardly grasp.

Early in my spiritual journey, I spent time in a meditation community that practiced intense breathwork and disciplined spiritual living. When I went on a retreat there, one of the first things that struck me was the eyes of the people who lived there. Their eyes were bright. I don't mean that in a metaphorical sense. They genuinely appeared luminous, as though light was radiating out of them. There was clarity and vitality shining through them. It wasn't about eye color. It was a radiance that shone through.

That experience always stayed with me.

Later, in a very different spiritual setting that I would now clearly describe as a cult (but I would have defended it against that label at the time), I had another experience with eye contact that felt equally profound, though in the opposite direction. I found myself face to face with the leaders of this group in what felt at the time like a sacred moment. I expected radiance and light. Instead, when I looked into their eyes, I saw darkness. My mind immediately tried to rationalize it. It told me not to judge, that there were logical explanations. But my intuition knew something was off, even as my mind tried to explain it away.

In hindsight, I can see that something within me was discerning something important. The eyes were communicating something that my intellect was not yet willing to accept.

There is something about the eyes that transmits truth. And there is something within us that recognizes it - whether we are ready to admit it or not.

This idea of subtle soul communication goes beyond eye contact. Across multiple traditions, there is an understanding that the body itself reflects internal states. Iridology suggests that the iris carries information about organ systems. Reflexology maps the entire body onto the feet. Traditional Chinese Medicine reads the face as an energetic landscape. Even certain homeopathic traditions observe facial lines and skin tone as indicators of mineral needs or organ imbalance.

Whether we view these systems symbolically or physiologically, the underlying premise is the same. The body is constantly signaling to us. It doesn't randomly produce lines, discoloration, tension, or texture. These are reflections of something happening within.

Over time, I have come to see wrinkles in this light as well. We have been conditioned to view them as flaws, as evidence of decline, as something to correct. But what if they are evidence of life? What if they are maps of your experience? The lines across your face reflect your laughter, your grief, your endurance, your devotion, your persistence. Brandi Carlile has a song that states this beautifully: 

All of these lines across my face
Tell you the story of who I am
So many stories of where I've been
And how I got to where I am

In a culture where Botox has become so normalized that it is discussed casually at social gatherings and assumed that everyone is doing it, it is worth pausing and asking what is being erased. If the face communicates, then altering it changes the transmission. 

When we feel pressure to hide the natural signs of aging, there is a deeper wound underneath. A fear of losing value based on our outward appearance. Perhaps a fear of becoming invisible. Maybe we ultimately fear the death that ultimately comes when our youth slips away. But you go way beyond the surface. You are a soul inhabiting a living, organic body. Your eyes, your skin, your expressions are part of how your soul moves through the world.

There is also something humbling about the fact that human vision perceives only a tiny portion of the light spectrum. Infrared, ultraviolet, countless frequencies exist beyond what we consciously see. Even within the visible spectrum, some people can distinguish more subtle gradients of color than others. Perhaps surprisingly, visible perception refines with awareness. It makes you wonder how much more we are perceiving in each other than we consciously name, because what we perceive is beyond what the visible eyes can see.

Perhaps the brightness in someone’s eyes is not poetic language. I say it's something real. Perhaps when you feel something shift in your body while looking into someone’s gaze, your soul is kicking up an observation. I invite you to trust that perception. Trust what your body registers before your mind explains it away. And equally, there is an invitation to allow yourself to be seen without distortion.

You did not come here to edit yourself into acceptability. You came here to embody your humanity fully. The lines on your face are not evidence of something gone wrong. They are evidence of something lived.

Authenticity has a radiance that cannot be manufactured.

When you let yourself be fully who you are, when you stop trying to erase the visible story of your life, there is a clarity that emerges. And that clarity communicates more powerfully than any perfectly smoothed surface ever could.

Your soul knows how to shine through exactly as you are. Don't stop it.