First! Quick reminder that I'm running the Your Soul Personality workshop again this Sunday March 22nd at 2:30pm at New Renaissance Bookshop, and I would love to see you there if you're one of my Portland peeps.
Now, onto the meaty stuff. I've been deep in research for an upcoming video — The Truth About Sexual Abuse: Reincarnation Explained — which is as heavy as it sounds. While I was trying to understand the spiritual truth underneath these acts, I discovered something that caused everything to click into place.
The concept of soul hardening.
This concept shifted how I see souls, including my own, and our soul evolution.
With all the abuses that are coming to light, I have been struggling to understand the why under this. How could a soul, which I believe is bright and beautiful and a spark of god, do these truly horrific things to others? How does that happen?
Then I learned about soul hardening or calcification, which also gave me greater insight to the structure of what we often call evil.
Here's the short version: when a soul consistently rejects their soul lessons and moves away from growth — across lifetime after lifetime — their soul begins to move away from the light. It contracts. It avoids the karmic accountability, and pulls away from the energy that asks it to grow and understand.
And as it contracts, it gets tighter, denser, heavier. Not as punishment. As consequence. And as it gets denser, it is harder for light - which is the same thing as love - to reach it. Meaning, it becomes less permeable to the very light that would otherwise course-correct it.
As it pulls into itself and away from the light, it also pulls away from others, away from connecting to all-that-is. It feels more and more separate. Others become two dimensional, because they are no longer connected to us.
The hardening becomes self-reinforcing. You shut out what would have saved you, and the shutting out makes it harder to let it back in. (Yeah. Sit with that one for a second.)
Here's the part I didn't expect: once I understood soul hardening as a process of contraction — a soul getting tighter, denser, less permeable — I realized that we all do that in small ways, before it becomes big and hard and calcified. We contract when we feel fear, judgement, hatred - towards others, or towards ourselves. Especially towards ourselves. When we pull away from the light, we are contracting
This made me really not want to contract my energy, and to avoid even the slightest possibility of soul hardening. Pass on that path. I tuned into my energy, and could feel the difference between my energy contracting and expanding. Contraction feels pulling inward in a way that I might call "protecting myself" but honestly feels more like shutting down or withdrawing, or tightening. Expansion feels like warmth, openness, spaciousness, brightness, and love that doesn't have conditions on it. It feels like me. The actual me.
Once I began focusing on expansion (it helps me to first think "don't contract" to push myself into the opening process), everything felt possible. This, I thought, is who we truly are. And this is the path we are on - one where we are open and full of light. It is as simple as that.
The full video goes deeper — on why souls become abusers, what this has to teach us on a societal level, what the soul-level dynamics look like, and what reincarnation frameworks offer for healing. It comes out on Sunday, March 29th. It's not an easy watch. But I think it's an important one.
Until then, perhaps it is worth trying out what expansion feel like to you. Just notice. You might be surprised how often you've been contracting without knowing it — and how quickly you can shift it. Let me know what you find. (Spoiler: it feels like the true you).
— Jillian
