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Helen Keller: Soul Type 3 (Inspiration)
When a person truly speaks from their soul what she or he says or does is completely selfless, resulting in clear benefits for everyone. This looks different for each soul type. Soul type 3, for example, creates the energy and enthusiasm that life deserves by inspiring people around them to live life fully in the moment. There is no past, there is no future, there is just the eternal now to be savored to the fullest.
Helen Keller became blind and deaf at the age of 19 months as the result of an illness. With the help of her teacher, Annie Sullivan, she was able to find a language that allowed her to communicate with others. She was a voracious learner, and became the first blind and deaf person to attend Radcliffe college. She considered her limitations an opportunity to live every day to the fullest. She leaves a legacy that few people with all of their senses can match.
Richard Harrity, in his book, The Three Lives Of Helen Keller details many of the amazing things that she was able to do with her life in the service of others. She was completely devoted to creating schools for the blind so they too could become useful members of society.
In the past forty years, Helen Keller has been received by seven presidents, visited almost all the governors of all the states, and traveled over the world six times in behalf of her great and humane cause. In Japan in 1937 on her initial world tour, she worked eighteen hours a day preparing and delivering speeches, which enabled her to raise forty million yen for the blind of that country. And everywhere she has gone since, from India to Australia, from Egypt to Siam and all way stations in between, hospitals and schools for the blind have been built in her wake.
Both during and after World War Il, Helen Keller made a continuous round of visits to military hospitals throughout the United States to offer help and encouragement to blinded soldiers. Thanks to her years of travel in her own country she could always establish an immediate bond with a sightless boy by talking about his home town whether it was Aberdeen, Washington, or Zenith, Ohio. She even danced with blind soldiers and sailors to show them that the ordinary pleasures of life were still within their reach.
And she preached and practiced her own favorite precepts: "Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight, in the face. Never think of your limitations. Trust in your fellow men. It's as simple as that."
"Often it was not verbal encouragement that was asked of me," she recalled after a visit to the wounded, "but a kiss or the laying of my hand on a weary hand. This always made me feel as if I were partaking of a sacrament."
Once when she bent down and kissed a blinded soldier, he said, "My, I have not had a kiss like that in years. My mother used to kiss me that way." p 21
Copyright © 2000 Alan Sheets and Barbara Tovey
