We’ve all heard the phrase “mind over matter.” It’s one of those mantras we cling to when life tests us — push harder, think stronger, keep going. And for a while, it works. The mind is powerful; it bends reality, rationalizes pain, and convinces us we can make it through anything.
For years, I wore this kind of resilience like armour.
Every challenge was a battlefield, and I fought with mental strength alone. Mind over matter was my survival tool until the mind itself became the battlefield.
That’s when I realised:
The mind is not the final frontier of strength. It is just the first.
There is something deeper beneath it — the soul. It doesn’t argue or demand. It doesn’t need logic or proof. It simply knows.
The mind pushes. The soul guides.
The mind analyzes. The soul accepts.
The mind tries to control reality. The soul understands there isn’t one — that everyone’s reality is uniquely shaped by their experiences. At the level of the soul, matter doesn’t even exist, only energy, intuition, and truth.
So maybe it’s not mind over matter anymore. It’s soul over mind.
Because when the mind falters, the soul doesn’t swoop in to fix it — it simply reminds us that we were never broken in the first place.
The mind survives the world. The soul transcends it.
And one day, when you find your way out of the heaviness, you’ll notice a different kind of peace waiting for you. Not the temporary kind that depends on circumstances or certainty, but a grounded calm that comes from releasing control over what was never meant to be yours. A peace that doesn’t need answers. A peace that trusts that what left was never meant to stay, and what remains is exactly what’s aligned.
Someone once told me, at a moment when I had completely given up, that maybe the way through wasn’t to fight the darkness, but to give in to it. To stop resisting the fall long enough to actually land because only when you’ve met the ground can you find the strength to rise again.
He said, “There’s a long way ahead, full of bright green pastures of possibility. It feels dark now, overwhelming even, but if you get back up… you’ll get to live the life that’s already unfolding for you.”
Maybe soul over mind isn’t esoteric at all.
Maybe it’s the part of us that survives the fall.
Not the polished resilience the world praises, but the raw, scraped-knee, tear-stained kind you only earn at the bottom.
The kind that whispers:
Not like this. Get up. One more time.
The mind helps us function.
The soul — that inner fire — helps us rise.
Photo artist unknown.
fortuitouspurpose 