A few weeks ago, during my NEATO Creative Soul training with Siska Tovey, she led us in a meditation for Soultype 4. Siska’s words supported me to go deeply inside myself in a way that I, as a Soultype 4, know innately how to do, but being supported by Siska with others on the call was a particularly powerful experience for me. Afterwards she asked me if I had any words about my experience. I’d like to share some of them with you:

I felt so much ease, and nothing needed to move except at the pace that it wanted to move. It felt like a stripping away, so there was just my soul, and I felt the whole. I arrived at a place of alignment where my body and soul were supporting each another, and there was so much peace. Perhaps it is important to state that words are never enough to describe this place because it is very dynamic, expansive, and inclusive. It is gentle, powerful, eternal, and reliable. It has no structure—it can’t be seen or touched, but it can be felt.

When Siska guided us to go deeper into orange, the color for Soultype 4, I imagined myself as a dolphin. As I went deeper, I felt a sense of simultaneously diving and soaring. The deeper I went into this place inside of me, the more I could soar. In this place, there is room for everything, for all human experience, life, death, Source, joy, sadness—I felt like I was diving into eternity, the present, the future, and the past.

Again, it is hard to find words to describe this place. There is so much creativity . . . it is a place where anything can happen. It is the place we all come from and where we all are connected. It is the Cosmos.

I remembered the story I read about Florence Nightingale (Soultype 4), the founder of modern nursing, that Siska and Alan included in their 1998 booklet, Embodying the Soul–New Equations for Humanity. She would stay with injured soldiers the doctors had said would not survive, and then they would often recover.

Nightingale worked sometimes 20 hours each day. Soon even the most hardened officers noticed the effects of her commanding authority and healing presence. She had an utter disregard of contagion and spent hours over men who were dying of cholera or other fevers. On one occasion, surgeons laid five soldiers aside to die, deeming their condition hopeless. Nightingale and a few nurses got permission to care for these men through the night, and by morning they were fit for surgery.

— Florence Nightingale, Mystic, Visionary and Healer, by Barbara Montgomery Dossey p. 129

There is something about life force—I’ll call it embers—and everyone has these embers. I can feel when somebody still has the strength of these embers within them, and when they want to stay here, be here, and grow. I can feel when people are just going through the motions, versus when there is something within them that I can only describe with my hand movements.

An image that keeps coming to me is the purity of trees and plants. They are rooted in the ground and keep growing toward the light. If they need to, they bend toward the light. They always adapt toward the light. They don’t think about what they do. Everything is always available for expansion. With the New Equations’ practices, I sense that I am plugged into that energy and adapting toward the light.

Catherine Dickey

Catherine Dickey, Soultype 4, is a student in the NEATO Level 3 – New Equations Creative Soul program. You can find her in Dedham, Massachusetts, USA, enjoying connecting deeply with people, animals, and the natural world.