The national sexual harassment reckoning, your soul, and an avocado seed have more in common than you’d suspect.

Have you ever been fascinated by watching an avocado seed grow? Before you think I’ve lost it and that maybe I need to get a life, hear me out. Observing an avocado seed take root, I had a revelation that my soul -my essence, my core -is much like a seed. Seeds do not merely possess the ability to grow; growth is their imperative, their very essence. Seeds exist to grow.

The same is true of souls.

This realization came to me while observing my lonely little avocado seed sitting in water on my windowsill. It hung in toothpick-supported suspension while I waited for the first sign of a sprout. I have nurtured my little seedling. I have provided the environment -sun, water, glass, toothpicks -and the opportunity for it to grow, and even to flourish.

As I observed my seed, I envisioned all the little avocado seeds at the county trash dump just sitting there waiting for the right conditions so that they, too, could sprout. They don’t have any purpose other than to become rooted wherever they are placed. They haven’t any judgment about where they are placed. You could take an avocado seed and put it in a windowsill in a home in Siberia. It would still grow, given the right conditions. Its job is to grow. Period.

So now, let’s look at the soul, the essence of a human life. According to many ancient belief systems, the soul’s purpose -like that of the seed -is growth. The soul isn’t concerned with such things as worry, stress, or bills. It wants to grow and evolve. How does a soul grow? It evolves by learning. Its nourishment comes from gaining wisdom. It depends on human life experiences to provide what it requires to become ever more of what it is meant to be. A soul grows by taking in information and learning from it so that it can move on and further its evolution.

Many ancient traditions teach that the soul wants only the best possible learning experiences for growth. In the realm of the soul, all experiences, both positive and negative, are opportunities for gaining knowledge. The soul, or the seed of a human life, is the energy force that keeps the human life existing. Without a life force, our bodies die. This life force, or soul, exists for the purpose of evolving, and it uses the human’s experiences to do so.

Similarly, an avocado seed uses its outer shell (nutrients), water and sun to synthesize its life force energy. An avocado seed doesn’t care if it is rooted on top of a huge pile of trash or my cute little backyard. It has an innate intelligence that allows for it to grow in either set of circumstances. Our souls also have innate intelligence. Your soul, your life force energy, keeps you here on earth interacting with your environment.
Here is where we humans differ from avocados. Avocados do not have the ability to rationalize emotions and store memory. I won’t say that an avocado does not have a consciousness because plants do have a level of consciousness that allows them to harness their environment, have cellular activity, and sprout roots. They do not, however, have human consciousness. Only we humans have the ability to rationalize and internalize our environment, which allows for an order of thinking not shared by other species.

Now think about that little avocado seed again. Imagine that seed is never rescued from the trash. Imagine that the little seed sits untouched on top of a pile of trash for years. Maybe it simply sits there until eventually the environment around it becomes conducive for growth. Maybe the organic material around it begins to break down, offering a small bit of nourishment. Maybe water begins to touch the seed. The conditions begin to change enough to cause this little seed to awaken from its slumber. Cellular activity begins to happen. The seed sends out a little sprout, then another, and another. Roots begin to grow, and before you know it, a stem shoots up into the sky.

Now let’s get back to the soul’s purpose. Imagine a little soul waiting for the life experiences it needs in order to gain wisdom and grow. It knows what it needs to evolve. It cannot be judged, harmed, criticized, ridiculed, bullied, or abused in any way. It simply exists. It is the flesh-and-blood human, with all of its senses and emotions, that endures negative experiences. It’s the human that processes negative emotions and memories, one after the other, over a lifetime. As the memories pile up on one another, the soul is sitting back patiently waiting for the experiences -equally embracing both the positive and negative ones.

The soul is simply observing and allowing.

What sets us apart from avocados is that we humans must acknowledge our negative experiences and turn them into understanding. We must recognize the roles these experiences have played in our accumulation of knowledge, even if the experiences were horrific. It is a difficult thing to do. Our tendency is to hold onto abuse, trauma, neglect, suffering, and other painful experiences because we have an erroneous subconscious belief that keeping them close will protect us from further harm.

Sadly, a soul cannot grow if it is under a constant state of duress from holding onto these memories. But what if the negative emotional memories could be dissipated so that they no longer carry the energetic charge? Through certain systems of personal development work, this transformation is possible. When this occurs, the individual can move out of the paradigm of victimization, and into a peaceful, new awareness. The result of this realization is tremendous soul growth. When the individual’s new reality firmly takes hold, it’s possible to shift the perspective on all of existence, allowing a new path of brighter possibility to unfurl.

Once this phenomenon takes place, the wisdom imparted from ongoing life experiences can be applied to each life lesson as it emerges. The self has begun to understand and learn, and the soul has begun to sync with the energetic stream of consciousness. In other words, the stream of consciousness and the soul have begun to speak to one another. That is a beautiful thing, and it’s not reserved for just the “masters. ” Each of us has the potential to communicate with our soul -our higher self.

Once you’ve learned to nurture your relationship with your soul, you begin to listen to the life force within you and wake up to its purpose, which is to grow and evolve. When your soul is in alignment with the conscious entity of the self, you understand that they are one and the same. You realize that the goal is not necessarily to keep terrible things from happening. Unfortunately, we all must endure hardships. But by shifting how we perceive them, and honoring the lessons they offer, we can provide our soul the nourishment it needs in order to fulfill its purpose.

Like the little forgotten seed on the trash pile that many years later begins to grow, so too, the soul waits patiently -sometimes for many years -for the human conscious self to recognize these opportunities to grow and evolve as it is meant to do.

What does any of this have to do with the #Me Too movement? Let’s imagine our nation as one entity with a soul -a collective soul with an innate intention of growth, much like the seed. The nation’s collective soul isn’t concerned with government, politics, finances, climate change, fires, floods, hurricanes, or even terrorism. It exists only to grow and learn. How does the collective soul of our nation grow? Just like an individual soul, it depends on life experiences to provide material it can learn from so that it can move on and keep progressing. In the case of our nation’s collective soul, it would be the life experiences of the population at large. The collective soul of our nation has sat back and observed, watched and allowed negative experiences, and boy have they been going on.

In the work place, in a latent dormant state, abuse of power among the sexes has rampantly existed. Finally, there is a reckoning, and it all started with a few brave women. Much like the avocado seed that, after sitting on a trash pile for years, suddenly finds itself in the right conditions to sprout roots, these few brave women, under the right conditions, allowed for a movement to take root. A knowingness began to blossom from these negative experiences -an understanding about the larger role they have played in the soul of the collective consciousness.

This shift in awareness is surfacing for all of us. It is possible that even the perpetrators are coming into an understanding of the role they’ve played. Suddenly the nation is learning, which allows the collective soul to come out of its slumber and align itself with the intent to finally gain wisdom from these negative experiences. Growth becomes inevitable. A seed becomes an avocado tree, a human aligns with its soul, and a nation rises up -healing through its moment of reckoning.