6 CHARACTERISTICS OF A SOUL-LED LIFE

Dear Reader:

As I continue to develop the Encodings Model, I am deeply engaged by the difference between what someone might call a 'self-led' life and what another might call a 'soul-led' life. In the Internal Family Systems Model, Creator Richard Schwartz posits that a self-led life includes the 8 C's- Compassion, Creativity, Curiosity, Confidence, Courage, Calm, Connectedness, Clarity- and the 5 P's- Presence, Persistence, Perspective, Playfulness, Patience. In other words, when you have done enough work to work through your various parts, you become a more integrated self that is characterized by those qualities.

When I first read this, my initial response was that it all seemed a little too neat and tidy for my liking. It made sense that someone could become better integrated as they proceeded through the IFS process, but why would they all exude the same qualities? Where lies the colorful uniqueness of each self? And, if you are someone who believes that the soul travels through time, wouldn't the self reflect the idiosyncratic stage that each soul is at on its incarnation journey? In other words, if you are focused on surrender in this lifetime, you may not exude the quality of persistence. Or if you are focused on developing your capacity for solitude in this incarnation, you may not manifest a tendency to be connective. Not every being, in every lifetime, is focused on relational matters.

I won't shed too much light on the nature of Encodings (the first book, 'Where is God in all of this?: A Conversation' will be out soon. The second, 'Encodings: Walking the Path of You', in 2026) other than to say that it is premised on the idea that each soul, in each lifetime, carries a whole host of potentialities that live at the heart of its unique journey through time. In other words, someone may well be here to explore everything not neat and tidy in this lifetime. It's certainly been my experience that the most brilliant souls are the most difficult to neatly define. And, even if you don't believe in a traveling soul, the Encodings model asserts that every person's path to self-actualization is as much similar as it is uniquely polyphrenic (multi-aspected). There are likely some shared qualities on the road to an integrated selfhood, but I wouldn't want to limit them to 8 C's or 5 P's or 7 Z's. In fact, its been my personal experience that the more congruent I became with respect to traditional notions of self, the more eager my soul became to break free of those confines and find its own framework of meaning. That's not to say that we shouldn't engage in the IFS healing journey, but it is to say that we need to be careful with respect to our ideas of where it might take us. We need to avoid any singular definition of a healthy selfhood. Not because it is necessarily wrong, but because we are already living in a world that conditions us to conform to a generic notion of self, thereby limiting our individual and collective possibilities. And, simply because I have yet to meet a human who can definitely know what it truly means to be a self-actualized human. That question is still up for grabs.

Here is a conversation I had with Richard Schwartz that touched on the question of the soul: Jeff's 2nd talk with Dick

At the heart of the Encodings Model is the belief that each soul comes into this incarnation with a series of potentialities and inclinations that it alone knows. This is not a model that tells you who you are, or what your healthy looks like, or what your core self looks like. But it is a model that believes that there is a meaningful and relevant distinction between an unencoded and an encoded life, and that the latter has a series of tendencies that serves one's personal quest for wholeness. Both an unencoded and encoded life can be messy, but an encoded life has a kind of directionality to it. In other words, messy as a breaking through the confines of a conditioned consciousness, messy as a conscious depth charge into experience, messy with a clarifying purpose. Here are 6 of those tendencies: