Hi, everybody. I’m Mike Staver. This is Mondays with Mike, a weekly video series where I answer questions from people just like you. Here’s this week’s question.
“I know for sure that my life is not in balance. For instance, in my soul, I am a musician. I do nothing with my music. In fact, I don’t even hardly listen to music. I have great job satisfaction. I have a satisfactory personal life, but the thing that makes my soul soar is left on the sidelines. How do I take my longing and turn it into action? A return to what my soul craves– Oh, I want to return to what my soul craves of my circumstances resisted.”
I wish we could cue a song right now of some kind of music. Wouldn’t that be good? That’d be good. Listen to your question. How do I return to what my soul craves of my circumstances resisted?
You cannot give up what your soul craves to your circumstances. You just admitted in your question that you have surrendered what your soul craves to your circumstances. You can’t do that. If you do that, guess what happens to your soul? Listen to this. I have to return to what my soul craves and how do I take my longing and turn it into action? Turn on a radio, brother or sister, or I don’t know if you’re a singer or what kind of musician you are. I do nothing with music and my soul soars when I’m involved in music. I want you to ask yourself a question.
At what point did you get off the music highway? At what point did you say to your soul, “It’s just not that important, something else is more important. My work is more important. My relationship is more important. My time’s more important.”? There is nothing more important in your life than feeding your soul. Your soul is the essence of who you are, not to feed the essence of who you are is– I don’t know, is it neglect, is it abuse? What is it? Here’s how you do it. I want you to get back to whatever it is. If you’re an instrumentalist, if you’re a vocalist, maybe you write music. I don’t know what you do. I just want you to sit down with something really simple and spend some time with it. Maybe it’s your favorite song, maybe it’s a piece of music that you wrote, maybe you just go to your instrument, whether it’s a piano, or a violin or an oboe or I don’t know, and you just hold it or you just sit there. You just put your hands on it, get physically connected to the music because you’re already spiritually connected to it. For the rest of you who this doesn’t apply to that music is not the thing that frees your soul, I want you to ask yourself this question. What is it that you need to do to return to soulfulness? For some people, it’s music, for other people, it’s art, for some people, it’s hiking, are the outdoors, for other people, it’s– I don’t know what it is, but I know for all of us, there is a thing that feeds our soul and if we avoid it, we will pay a consequence later on.
The way that you get back into it is that you discipline yourself to say, “All right, for five minutes, every morning, I’m going to sit at the piano. I’m going to hold the guitar. I’m going to read a piece of sheet music. I’m going to watch videos about music.” For me, music doesn’t– I don’t crave it because I’m not a musician, but I know that if there’s no music in my life, I start to fade a little bit. Like today coming to the studio, I turned on a specific radio station. I just listened to it. It got my mind right. Do the little incremental things that reconnect you to your soul, reconnect you to your music so that your soul comes alive again. That was a great question. All of us have something, all of us have something that our soul craves. To deny our soul of its cravings, not a good idea. Hope that was helpful.
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