First and foremost thank you Steve for your generosity of thought and referencing (perhaps 'generosity' is a quality of soulfulness?). I am trained in a 'psychology of soul' (psychosynthesis) and often wonder how little this word 'soul' is explored, examined, challenged. It is presented all too often as a 'thing, place or dimension' that exists 'a priori'. I agree with you that we are bound by language and in particular by our preference for nouns which reify, rather than verbs and adjectives. As Jay Griffiths suggests 'all things that represent life at its most vital and wild wiggle. Words wiggle into metaphor'. So let's wiggle! Let's be playful with our language and see where this takes us. Right now, I am playing with the words 'emergence' and 'emergency' to explore the nature of soul. My experience is that soul is essentially emergent, and that this emergence takes place in the in-between spaces, through dialogue, interplay, intercourse. Leaving aside the search for nouns to describe what soul IS, perhaps we can play with how soul appears - soul as 'dawning', 'greening', 'springing', as well as 'breaking through', 'bearing' and 'birthing'. Robert Macfarlane reminds us that we see 'in webs of words, wefts of words, woods of words'. We see most deeply through metaphors that hold together counterpoint of feelings, thoughts and sensations, without reducing them to a single form. Like music, our experiences of being human are polyphonic (from the Greek polys = many + phone = voice). Dissonance and harmony interweave to create a richly textured sound capable of communicating the dynamic complexity of human experience. Psychological terminology seems to have taken us backwards towards a kind of 'monophony' characteristic of medieval plain chant in which only one note can be sounded at a time. Your approach to 'soul' has brought me back into the rich sound of polyphony and I thank you for this. (www.susanholliday.co.uk)
What an amazing response Susan. Let's wiggle indeed! Back in the day, when I was doing my own psychotherapy training, I often wondered about the psychosynthesis route - what if I've taken the road less travelled? I went to Metanoia where soul was seldom mentioned, and Hillman unspoken of! If you'd like to expand your words into a guest piece for this Substack, do let me know - either way, I'd love I if you kept in touch!
Thanks for such a warm welcome Steve. Very happy to find you at this crossroads (we take different paths, but we all meet in the end!) I'd be chuffed to pen something for this Substack. Inspired by Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem 'As Kingfishers Catch Fire' I've just finished a new piece which revisions that very thorny word 'self' which plagues psychological discourse. Hopkins coined the word 'selving' as a verb, and so invited the 'wiggle' back into identity! At c.3000 words, the paper may be too long for this space - let me know how best to reach you.
OK, Susan, that sounds brilliant. I really like that poem, so it would be an intriguing place to play from! You can send to submissions@unpsychology.org or Steve@ the same domain. If it's too long then we could run it over two weeks. We've done that before (see Chris Robertson and Nora Bateson's pieces). This obsession with self in the so-called 'meaning and sense-making' spaces is wearing me down a bit at the moment, so it will be good to have a fresh take! Steve
This echoed so much. I've been on a ontological crisis with the word "Soul", so much of this crisis has been described on your essay. But also much of my sense making of "the thing beyond the word" is also cunjured by animism, and the inter-intra relacional and complex aspects of our evolucionary more than human biology. Thanks for this reading.
Thanks Ana. I think that complexity is where I've been tracking lately. The animism thing is the key, I think, which is why I'm questioning (human) soul...
Yes, I ressonated with both, made space for becoming aware of my own experience. Looking forward to keep reading. Thanks for your words/heart/thoughts.
I remember discovering The Souls Code at a pivotal moment in my life. It provided a sense of validation that the unpleasant experiences in my life were in service of something and not completely random or caused by me. When I look backwards I see a red thread. and yes I only see through the lens of how I think, perhaps because safety and solidity has been so necessary to ground me in an abusive and neglectful environment.
Your essay in contrast, it seems displays a great pleasure in the whirling dervishes of ideas, comparing and contrasting , the great preference for continually opening out and not coming to conclusions, citing many different rabbit holes for research.
I have come to see a great need for grounding not only for me but also for humanity, grounding in our physical forms which we think means doing some exercise and eating vegan or whatever.....No what I feel is grounding is within your soul or whatever you might call it ....to feel your gut and heart wisdom which has a coherence and a consistency of integrity to it. Which needs to make choices to exclude certain things simply so there is not an overwhelm that short circuits the system and that you can focus on what brings you joy
James Hillman's acorn provides an individual organising principle for each soul, just as the lily differs from the rose - they are organised differently. But they are not organised by thinking or by determining labels, they follow a life force that flows through everything to create their contribution. In humans that life force flows from the gut and the heart, not the intellect. And yet it is clear that for some the intellectual capacity is a wondrous gift they could share ONCE the grounding has occured. Until then the intelligence is used in service of soothing agitation which occurs because we are not living according to that guiding principle but rather because we want to preserve our social status and therefore must compromise ourselves . This reliance on the intellect and by extension science and medicine, technology to soothe our collective agitation, is actually killing us all.
And its not our fault, we have been trained into. this way of seeing ourselves as thinking beings that feel whereas in truth we are feeling beings that think. We all at heart know this but we desperately want to belong, we don't want to have to put our stake in the sand and commit to our true essence because it will shake up our comfort zones. And then one must really feel the intensity of this world - the horrors of corporatisation of the globe, how little children are repeatedly being raped and go to sleep at night wondering when this hell will end, elderly people sleeping in their cars, plastic in our beautiful aquatic friends, many places on the earth where wanton destruction of life and property in sanctioned wars, people denied food, water and land in many places in the globe. ... so many horrors, you don't have to look far.
But like everything we make choices but what are they based on. Even the constant refusal to make conclusions is a choice...but in service of what ?
Such a lovely response, thank you. I totally agree about grounding and that is also what drew me/still draws me to Hillman. I am not really fascinated by the swirl of ideas, there seems so many these days, but I am suspicious of conclusions - or meaning making, and there really only a few thinkers/writers that mean a lot to me (Hillman, LeGuin, Bateson). I also have a sense of a red thread (as you aptly put it) and the continuity of 'me'. My own journey has a lot of experiences of being on the edge, so the acorn has meant a lot to me over many years. I am not an intellectual, so somewhere for me there has to be some kind of practice that allows me to feel integrated as a human, in an often awful world, and that I belong somehow. It's hard sometimes. Massive gratitude for your soulful engagement...
It is hard - there are so many complexities and different perspectives but I think we make meaning all the time even if we don't think we are. Personally I think that's how we are wired and it's only a problem if that is a closed meaning. That is the wonderful thing about dialogue - you evoke something in me from how you have expressed yourself which might poke a wee hole in something I have held dear or it might be that the contrast of what I don't agree with, firms up something. I'm not sure there needs to be a goal of agreement in dialogue - I would have thought it was more about communication and the more you present an idea, the clearer at least for me, that communication might be received and then able to be pushed about a bit. And hopefully we are both a bit expanded and this may not always be warm and fuzzy.
Yes, I feel suitably expanded by your responses. I love the idea of poking a wee hole, and it leading to a firming up - or even something new to be encountered maybe. This dialogue, and some others around this piece, have really helped me to open (reopen?) some of the meaning of 'soul' again - and I need this right now! Many thanks.
First and foremost thank you Steve for your generosity of thought and referencing (perhaps 'generosity' is a quality of soulfulness?). I am trained in a 'psychology of soul' (psychosynthesis) and often wonder how little this word 'soul' is explored, examined, challenged. It is presented all too often as a 'thing, place or dimension' that exists 'a priori'. I agree with you that we are bound by language and in particular by our preference for nouns which reify, rather than verbs and adjectives. As Jay Griffiths suggests 'all things that represent life at its most vital and wild wiggle. Words wiggle into metaphor'. So let's wiggle! Let's be playful with our language and see where this takes us. Right now, I am playing with the words 'emergence' and 'emergency' to explore the nature of soul. My experience is that soul is essentially emergent, and that this emergence takes place in the in-between spaces, through dialogue, interplay, intercourse. Leaving aside the search for nouns to describe what soul IS, perhaps we can play with how soul appears - soul as 'dawning', 'greening', 'springing', as well as 'breaking through', 'bearing' and 'birthing'. Robert Macfarlane reminds us that we see 'in webs of words, wefts of words, woods of words'. We see most deeply through metaphors that hold together counterpoint of feelings, thoughts and sensations, without reducing them to a single form. Like music, our experiences of being human are polyphonic (from the Greek polys = many + phone = voice). Dissonance and harmony interweave to create a richly textured sound capable of communicating the dynamic complexity of human experience. Psychological terminology seems to have taken us backwards towards a kind of 'monophony' characteristic of medieval plain chant in which only one note can be sounded at a time. Your approach to 'soul' has brought me back into the rich sound of polyphony and I thank you for this. (www.susanholliday.co.uk)
What an amazing response Susan. Let's wiggle indeed! Back in the day, when I was doing my own psychotherapy training, I often wondered about the psychosynthesis route - what if I've taken the road less travelled? I went to Metanoia where soul was seldom mentioned, and Hillman unspoken of! If you'd like to expand your words into a guest piece for this Substack, do let me know - either way, I'd love I if you kept in touch!
Thanks for such a warm welcome Steve. Very happy to find you at this crossroads (we take different paths, but we all meet in the end!) I'd be chuffed to pen something for this Substack. Inspired by Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem 'As Kingfishers Catch Fire' I've just finished a new piece which revisions that very thorny word 'self' which plagues psychological discourse. Hopkins coined the word 'selving' as a verb, and so invited the 'wiggle' back into identity! At c.3000 words, the paper may be too long for this space - let me know how best to reach you.
OK, Susan, that sounds brilliant. I really like that poem, so it would be an intriguing place to play from! You can send to submissions@unpsychology.org or Steve@ the same domain. If it's too long then we could run it over two weeks. We've done that before (see Chris Robertson and Nora Bateson's pieces). This obsession with self in the so-called 'meaning and sense-making' spaces is wearing me down a bit at the moment, so it will be good to have a fresh take! Steve
...and just discovered your website and book, delicious!!!
This echoed so much. I've been on a ontological crisis with the word "Soul", so much of this crisis has been described on your essay. But also much of my sense making of "the thing beyond the word" is also cunjured by animism, and the inter-intra relacional and complex aspects of our evolucionary more than human biology. Thanks for this reading.
Thanks Ana. I think that complexity is where I've been tracking lately. The animism thing is the key, I think, which is why I'm questioning (human) soul...
Yes, I ressonated with both, made space for becoming aware of my own experience. Looking forward to keep reading. Thanks for your words/heart/thoughts.
Beautiful sharing Steve.
Many thanks Mirjam!
I remember discovering The Souls Code at a pivotal moment in my life. It provided a sense of validation that the unpleasant experiences in my life were in service of something and not completely random or caused by me. When I look backwards I see a red thread. and yes I only see through the lens of how I think, perhaps because safety and solidity has been so necessary to ground me in an abusive and neglectful environment.
Your essay in contrast, it seems displays a great pleasure in the whirling dervishes of ideas, comparing and contrasting , the great preference for continually opening out and not coming to conclusions, citing many different rabbit holes for research.
I have come to see a great need for grounding not only for me but also for humanity, grounding in our physical forms which we think means doing some exercise and eating vegan or whatever.....No what I feel is grounding is within your soul or whatever you might call it ....to feel your gut and heart wisdom which has a coherence and a consistency of integrity to it. Which needs to make choices to exclude certain things simply so there is not an overwhelm that short circuits the system and that you can focus on what brings you joy
James Hillman's acorn provides an individual organising principle for each soul, just as the lily differs from the rose - they are organised differently. But they are not organised by thinking or by determining labels, they follow a life force that flows through everything to create their contribution. In humans that life force flows from the gut and the heart, not the intellect. And yet it is clear that for some the intellectual capacity is a wondrous gift they could share ONCE the grounding has occured. Until then the intelligence is used in service of soothing agitation which occurs because we are not living according to that guiding principle but rather because we want to preserve our social status and therefore must compromise ourselves . This reliance on the intellect and by extension science and medicine, technology to soothe our collective agitation, is actually killing us all.
And its not our fault, we have been trained into. this way of seeing ourselves as thinking beings that feel whereas in truth we are feeling beings that think. We all at heart know this but we desperately want to belong, we don't want to have to put our stake in the sand and commit to our true essence because it will shake up our comfort zones. And then one must really feel the intensity of this world - the horrors of corporatisation of the globe, how little children are repeatedly being raped and go to sleep at night wondering when this hell will end, elderly people sleeping in their cars, plastic in our beautiful aquatic friends, many places on the earth where wanton destruction of life and property in sanctioned wars, people denied food, water and land in many places in the globe. ... so many horrors, you don't have to look far.
But like everything we make choices but what are they based on. Even the constant refusal to make conclusions is a choice...but in service of what ?
Such a lovely response, thank you. I totally agree about grounding and that is also what drew me/still draws me to Hillman. I am not really fascinated by the swirl of ideas, there seems so many these days, but I am suspicious of conclusions - or meaning making, and there really only a few thinkers/writers that mean a lot to me (Hillman, LeGuin, Bateson). I also have a sense of a red thread (as you aptly put it) and the continuity of 'me'. My own journey has a lot of experiences of being on the edge, so the acorn has meant a lot to me over many years. I am not an intellectual, so somewhere for me there has to be some kind of practice that allows me to feel integrated as a human, in an often awful world, and that I belong somehow. It's hard sometimes. Massive gratitude for your soulful engagement...
It is hard - there are so many complexities and different perspectives but I think we make meaning all the time even if we don't think we are. Personally I think that's how we are wired and it's only a problem if that is a closed meaning. That is the wonderful thing about dialogue - you evoke something in me from how you have expressed yourself which might poke a wee hole in something I have held dear or it might be that the contrast of what I don't agree with, firms up something. I'm not sure there needs to be a goal of agreement in dialogue - I would have thought it was more about communication and the more you present an idea, the clearer at least for me, that communication might be received and then able to be pushed about a bit. And hopefully we are both a bit expanded and this may not always be warm and fuzzy.
Yes, I feel suitably expanded by your responses. I love the idea of poking a wee hole, and it leading to a firming up - or even something new to be encountered maybe. This dialogue, and some others around this piece, have really helped me to open (reopen?) some of the meaning of 'soul' again - and I need this right now! Many thanks.