511. Soul Growth and Authentic Change: Letting Go of Others’ Perceptions

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Kara Goodwin: Welcome to Soul Elevation, guiding your Ascension to New heights. I'm Kara Goodwin and I'm excited to be here with you today on Halloween. Happy Halloween. It's. October Friday, October 31st. So today I wanna talk about, um, soul growth. Our, our personal evolution and the changes that we can find ourselves in, because when we're on a journey, especially a spiritual journey, a lot of times our lives take different turns and we find ourselves making changes. And that can be difficult. And I know that this has happened with me many times over the years and.[00:01:00] 

One of the key things that can be one of the drivers that holds us back. That's one of those invisible things that's kind of camouflaged through our process that might be pulling the strings of how we go about things or, or how we prevent ourselves or delay changes is the way that we think others perceive us.

I think this is really a critical way that we stay stuck or that we, we don't allow ourselves to take the plunge because we can feel within ourselves that a change is being called for. We can feel within ourselves that we're being pulled in a different direction, but sometimes we override that. Because we look at what we are [00:02:00] thinking about doing through somebody else's eyes, and that limits us.

It stops us. And so I'm going through this. Big change within my own little personal world myself as I transition from dyeing my hair for years and years. I was covering my gray and I'm growing my gray out and I don't feel like it's as easy to see when I'm, uh, in this lighting as it is in other lighting.

You can kind of see here like it's growing out. It's um. It, it, it's becoming more and more noticeable. It's definitely noticeable. Again, maybe not so much in this light, but it's been a, it's a process for me because I, I am excited about the change. I like. I like the [00:03:00] unraveling of what I look like naturally.

You know, I like how this is, it's changing how I look, and it's like I'm getting to see this other part of my physical aspect that I haven't been wanting to see in the past, but I change how I feel about it when based on who it is that I am. Seeing myself through whose eyes am I seeing myself through.

So for example, I have an event coming up in a few weeks, a social event, and I'm gonna be seeing people that I haven't seen for a little while. And these are people who follow the mainstream. They're lovely, lovely people, but they're not overtly working on. Their spiritual growth. They're not necessarily, um, pushing [00:04:00] themselves to be authentic.

They're just sort of following the trends and the herd. And when I look ahead to that situation, I honestly, I feel a little bit nervous because I don't think anybody. Who I come across is going to understand why I would stop coloring my hair, that they would see it as anything but, um, I don't know, lazy or stupid or, you know, that I'm.

Giving up. Somebody said that to me the other day as a joke, but which I don't advise as, um, if you see somebody going through a great transition, I don't think it's, the funniest joke you could come up with is like, oh, you're giving up, huh. Um, but, and not everything is a joke. Some people have to learn that.

Not everything is a joke. But anyway. Um. [00:05:00] So I, I catch myself when I start to feel doubts or when I start to feel badly about this transition that I'm going through, I notice that I have shifted my perspective from me, from how I feel about it, and that authenticity within me, that, that genuine alignment and the, the call.

That I'm answering this, the soul call that I'm answering, I have shifted out of that and I have put on the perspective of somebody else, like a, a person at this event that I'm going to, you know, and, and or many of them. And I start to see it from their perspective and then it makes me feel doubtful. And so.

Again, this can be a hidden way that we keep ourselves in some [00:06:00] sort of loop or we prevent ourselves from taking the, the leap into a new version of ourselves, and we don't notice that. We don't always notice that we're doing it. So this is where I encourage you to think about changes that you desire, transitions that you wanna make.

See them. Notice if you're starting to shift your perspective. Another way that this has shown up for me in my life is years and years ago, decades ago, I decided to become a vegetarian. And as I was making that decision, I didn't make it overnight. But I waited it, you know, I considered this is something that I wanna do, how inconvenient is this gonna be?

And the inconvenience I knew that I could manage. But what held me back was inconveniencing other people. So I imagined myself being invited to somebody's house for dinner and them being [00:07:00] annoyed that they had to consider a vegetarian option. Because I didn't eat meat anymore, and that was, it weighed on me.

It weighed in, played into my, into my decision of whether I wanted to be a vegetarian or not. And. That is, I mean, we, we wanna take, we don't need to go into big transitions in our lives lightly, but spiritual evolution and spiritual development is really about coming into alignment with who you are. It's an understanding and a learning of who you truly are at the soul level.

And it's important that we listen. To that, that is where our happiness lies. It is in living, in alignment. Our soul is communicating with us. So if you're getting inspiration to make changes in your life, [00:08:00] listen to those. If you're being encouraged, if there's something within you that's like my job, I just don't feel fulfilled.

Every time I try to leave my house to go to my job, I just feel like this. Resistance. Like it's just, and you're getting these feelings within you that aren't necessarily, uh, you know, they're, they're subtle. They might be kind of subtle. It might be hard to describe to somebody where that malaise is coming from.

But you are getting those signals, those could be valid signals from your soul. Similarly, you may be in a relationship that maybe it checks a lot of boxes in terms of your security, and you know the person, they're fine. You get along, it's, it's fine, but. There's something within you that's feeling unsatisfied or feeling like it's, it's run its course, or that, you know, maybe there's not this big, huge.[00:09:00] 

Red flag. That's like, I've really been in this relationship too long. I know plenty of people who, uh, one of my friends went through a divorce and she described it as death by a thousand cuts. You know, she's like, he's not cheating on me. He's not, you know, he hasn't done something illegal. He hasn't done it.

You know, all these, these things. That would be easy to say. Yeah, this is def we're definitely done here, but she called it death by a thousand cuts. And it was just over and over day after day, these little ways that it was not working and they were making each other miserable, and so she could feel that.

I'm sure he could feel it, but that's another type of situation where when you look at that situation from an outside perspective and you look at it from the lens of somebody else. [00:10:00] And there's not a big red flag. It's just a lot of little things. And then there's this inner part of you that's like, this is done.

Something else is waiting for me and I'm ready to move on to the next part of my life. But you start to look at it from the lens of your parents or your neighbors or your in-laws or your whatever it is, and you try to think about it from like. They're not gonna understand this. So does this make sense?

And so this is that opportunity that we all have and that we're all here to experience the soul, call that soul alignment and what is our soul telling us? And then it takes the courage to move forward from that place of alignment and take the steps. That are required to get to that. A lot of people, when they choose their career, when they choose what they study in college, [00:11:00] they're looking at that from a security perspective.

I know I did. I studied computers, I studied, you know, inform informatics information technology. In college. I made that choice based on security. I, it was, I, this was in the nineties and it was a booming. Career, uh, option. I couldn't care less about information technology. I, there was really very little part of me that wanted to program computers.

I did not get joy from that. I didn't feel some sort of call, and some people do. There are plenty of people who really. Get joy from programming. And so that would be really aligned for them. It's not to say that that is a, a, the bad, a bad career choice for everybody, but for me to have made that choice just based on security, was not something that I would wanna do.

Now, that's not how I would [00:12:00] go about it Now. But when I came out of my career, this is what I see a lot of people doing. You know, it's like there, there was a time in our society where you, you had a career that you started after college or after high school or whatever, and you just stayed with that forever.

That was kind of how we did things. You got really, really good at something and you just kept doing it, and you didn't explore other career options and what I see. The, the major trend is now is that you might do what you studied in college for a while, but a lot of people go and explore something else and make a living doing something completely different.

And that's a big leap to take in, in, in a lot of cases. That is people starting to listen more clearly to themselves to say, okay, this is something like your career is something that you do. Several hours a day, every day, multiple, well, multiple days out out of the week. So it can [00:13:00] be really challenging to continue to do something that you're really not innately aligned with over, you know, a long period of time.

So, but again, if you've got security, if you're working for, you know, in my case, working for a large corporation. Well compensated benefits. Like there's, it can be, I, I, you've probably heard me call it before, I felt like the golden handcuffs, you know, it was such a good gig, even though I didn't feel, even though I felt pulled in another direction, it was like, gosh, is it stupid to walk away from something like this?

Like, it's a, it's a lot of work. It's hard and I don't love it, but. You know, I don't have, there's a lot I don't have to worry about. And so, and again, like you look at that from how you feel. I remember going through this at the end of my career where I was like, the way that I felt was that I didn't wanna do [00:14:00] it anymore.

Like pretty much every part of me didn't wanna do it anymore. But when I looked outside of myself and I saw the situation from other people's perspective, it seemed so stupid. To walk away from something like that. And that kept me in that situation for a long time because I was overriding the soul inspiration and the soul communication that I was getting.

I didn't even recognize or think that I had the ability to recognize that communication, but we were, you know, especially if we feel that deep malaise, we're getting that communication so. My, my prayer for everybody is that we all continue to get deeper and deeper into our soul alignment. So that we can recognize the communication that we're getting, the nudges, the encouragement that we're getting to make new choices that are really aligned and that they're [00:15:00] inspirational to our soul, so that we can be living with purpose, on purpose, on mission, um, to the best of our ability.

And I think that that's a, an evolving. Thing too, that's, that might change over time. And so we just keep listening and we keep honoring ourselves and our path and that of others as well. So thank you so much for being with me today. I bless you. I am so grateful for you and I will see you next time. 

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