Though the World Teaches Forgetting, the Soul Remembers Anyway

I spent the weekend at a women’s healing retreat based in ecstatic dance and somatic practices. We spent Saturday afternoon creating art, and one particularly potent creation that came through was a painting of myself: a silenced woman with external judgments she had accepted as truth and her soul calling her to “shine brighter.”

Later that evening, I stood in front of a bonfire, tore that painting in half, crumpled those halves up, and declared in the presence of twenty-five other women, “Goodbye to playing small,” as I tossed the pieces into the flames and watched them burn brightly. When I look at the photo of this painting now, I can feel exactly what was moving through me when I laid my brushstrokes to that paper. I feel the tension between the part of me - us - that’s been taught to shrink, hide, and stay manageable, and the deeper part that never stopped asking to shine through.

One of the most powerful moments of the retreat happened while I was dancing with my eyes closed, simply allowing the music and intelligent pulse of life to move through me. I stopped trying to look a certain way - I gave up on monitoring myself from the outside - and let the rhythm carry me. The need to get it right dropped away, and the self-consciousness and fear of judgment that so often interfere with our natural rhythm went with it.

What opened in that moment was simple but powerful: I knew I could just be myself. I didn’t have to perform, fit a standard, or prove anything to access the power, grace, and beauty already within me. This moment stood out because it felt like more than personal freedom; it felt like remembrance. It’s what becomes possible when the body feels safe enough to stop bracing and the soul has freedom to shine through.

The older I get, the more I feel that so much of life is less about becoming and more about remembering. I believe each of us is a spark of divine consciousness in physical form, connected to an intelligent force within us that is inseparable from the original creator. Sadly, we’re taught to forget this very early. We’re shaped by fear, shame, family conditioning, religion, and a worldview that often mistakes soul for fantasy and inner knowing for irrationality. We are taught to look outside of ourselves for answers - that there are some among us that are more wise and better equipped to guide us.

We learn not to trust what cannot be externally approved. We’re taught that seeing ourselves as sacred, connected, or divinely guided is arrogance, delusion, or blasphemy. We become afraid of our own depth and wary of our own power. We learn to police ourselves. Over time, we stop reaching toward that knowing and begin to live as if smallness is wisdom and self-doubt is maturity.

What’s most troubling about this is that this forgetting is harmful and exploitative. People who remember their power are harder to control. People who trust their inner authority are less easily manipulated or shamed, and they are much less likely to hand themselves over to systems that depend on that disconnection.

When I look at the world through that lens, many things become clearer. I see systems of power led by people who are deeply disconnected from soul and from Source because they have pledged themselves to greed, domination, and gain at the expense of others. I see Amazon workers peeing in bottles because they are denied basic rights while their sacrifices rake in billions for a select few individuals. I see children forced into labor across the planet. I see parents working multiple jobs and barely having quality time with their children just to provide the bare minimum. I see those children drifting in a sea of confusion and the domino effect of such disconnection. I see women and men exploited, abused, and killed for the profit, ego, and entitlement of others.

I also see people swept up by political movements that prey on fear and turn identity into a weapon. I see frightened nervous systems manipulated into loyalty, cruelty, and obedience. I see people abandoning their own moral compass in order to remain attached to a collective story that gives them a sense of certainty and belonging. It often feels as if they are under a spell and, in many ways, I think they are. Fear, shock, and chronic dysregulation make people easier to control, and systems built on domination know that.

This is why I no longer think playing small is just a personal issue. On one level, it’s in service to safety; it’s what the body does when truth has felt dangerous and visibility has historically come with a cost. But playing small also serves something larger: the systems that benefit when people remain cut off from their own soul, dignity, and inner authority.

That’s why safe, truthful spaces matter so much. When we are in the company of other hearts that are sincerely seeking inner truth, something ancient and intelligent begins to move through us. The watcher within softens and the grip of perfection loosens. We stop trying so hard to perform, and life starts moving more naturally through our bodies.

This is what I felt while dancing. There was no grasping, no hiding, and no attempt to be “acceptable” according to some rigid internal standard that was shaped by external forces. All that remained was rhythm, movement, and life. The perfection was in the imperfection. The beauty was in the messiness, lack of preparation, and the pure honesty of it all.

Many of us have confused perfection with truth while, in reality, perfection is often fear wearing a fancy dress. It’s control, self-protection, and effort to avoid judgment by becoming more rigid, more managed, and less real. The soul can’t thrive under those conditions, and it doesn’t need to be perfected. It only needs the body and mind to feel safe enough to come through.

Once this knowing becomes real in the body, even for a moment, it changes the way we understand everything. We begin to see that remembering isn’t only a mystical experience; it’s also a daily practice. It’s in the small moments when you wake up, feel the sun on your skin, and know it as something sacred. It’s in thanking your body for carrying you - for never abandoning you even when you abandoned it. It’s in blessing the water you drink and recognizing that life is moving through it as it moves through you. It’s in laughing even in the difficult moments, paying attention to what lights up your heart, and listening to your intuition the first time instead of second-guessing it until the mind takes over. It’s in respecting the mind’s role in your life without letting it run your life. It’s in returning again and again to your heart.

Remembering also looks like refusing to keep abandoning yourself for outside influence. It looks like trusting that the answers aren’t always somewhere beyond you, but are often already present within you. This is not ego, and it’s not delusion. It’s the restoration of right relationship with your own inner knowing.

This matters because the world doesn’t need more people who are numb, obedient, over-controlled, and disconnected from what’s most alive in them. It needs people who remember, who trust what they know, who allow their soul to come through, and who stop mistaking self-suppression for goodness.

I want to be one of those people. I want to keep remembering, and I want to keep creating spaces where others can remember too. We were never meant to spend our lives in dormancy, cut off from the sacred intelligence within us while calling that disconnection normal.

We were never meant to stay small or live as if our light had to stay buried in order to stay safe. What I felt in that dance wasn’t performance nor was it fantasy. It was the simple, liberating truth of what happens when a soul feels safe enough to come through and shine brighter.