Introduction
“When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep…”
— William Butler Yeats
This book is the collective effort of some of the most accomplished minds of our age. It was born of their quest to explore and understand the world of Soul and how each of us connects with it. Together, their contributions weave a tapestry of warmth, wisdom, and insight about the most important relationship in our lives.
Since the publication of our first two anthologies, Healers on Healing and For the Love of God, we have received countless letters from readers all over the world. These letters have convinced us that a desire to pursue and understand Soul in the life of individuals is woven into the fabric of our world. The primary purpose of this anthology is to create an environment of understanding and possibility as we explore together this mysterious and powerful universe.
“Soul” has different meanings to different people. Many would accept that Soul suggests an invisible dimension of experience. It has a lot to do with love, depth, and reflection. To feel nurtured on a deep and sustained basis, we must attend, beyond our physical needs and worldly aspirations, the life-enhancing nature of the Soul. In doing so, we bring a sacredness to every moment of our day.
We all seek Soul. While Soul is always present, it doesn’t appear in our lives automatically. Soul requires our attention and reflection. Offering our respectful regard to the Soul is a way of loving it, caring for it, nurturing it.
With this in mind, each contributor to this collection has created a personal vision of nourishment for and from the Soul. The various visions and the tones they adopt cover a great range. That is because, in a real sense, each had to invent the subject.
Perhaps the most definitive framework for writing about the soul was expressed by Phil Cousineau in his book Soul: An Archaeology, when he paraphrased British author W. Somerset Maugham: “There are three rules for writing about the soul. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.”
Yet this is a book that we could not not do. In traveling our own journeys, we have found others, like us, like you, searching their own depths for understanding not only of who they are but for the fulfillment of all they can be. We hope this book helps them in tending this need.
Our gratitude goes to the contributors of this work. As we contacted them, we were greeted, almost universally, with great enthusiasm for the invitation to address this subject. Repeatedly, they told us that this book was addressing one of the most important issues of the day. In all cases, they demonstrated humility and love. Now and then one of the authors would call us, sometimes from the other side of the globe, to share an expanded insight. We hope that these considered reflections of people who have dedicated their lives to the study of the Soul may change the way you think about your life.
We approach this subject as students, not experts. We come with “our cup empty.” We created this book not in an effort to put forth any particular point of view but to cultivate a greater understanding of, and appreciation for, the possibilities open to all of us, and to offer a gift to humanity.
This project unfolded as a gift. The cultivation of this project provided us with the opportunity to share, reflect, and grow on a daily basis. We wish it to be a gift to others as well. Profits from this book will be donated to an international humanitarian organization. We hope it will affect many lives in a meaningful way.
Treasure yourself.
Benjamin Shield, Ph.D.
Richard Carlson, Ph.D.
Forward by Marianne Williamson
I can think of no other time when it has been more important to consider the needs of the human soul. The twentieth century has been dominated by a worldview that glorifies a mechanistic, rationalistic focus at the expense of the inner life. The ravages that have been wreaked on the planet as a result of this dissociation from the essential self have reached crisis proportions. Yet, just as the individual unconscious knows when a person’s survival is threatened, I believe the collective unconscious knows when group survival is in danger. Beyond the level of the rational mind is an awareness that without our souls, we are without our power, and without our power, we will die.
Carl Jung said that the psyche is inexorably driven to seek balance. I believe that modern consciousness is now seeking its soul – not because it’s a new trend, but because it’s literally our only survivable alternative. This book speaks to a yearning for balance, a mass willingness to rekindle our souls. This may represent a more important historical unfoldment than we as a culture have known for centuries.
All the great religious and philosophical systems are paths to this understanding – different, yet equally valid, paths. And spiritual ideas, like any ideas, are strengthened as they’re shared. For those to whom many of these ideas are new, our hope is that they will fill you with wonder and delight, as they surely inspired those who wrote these pages. And people who are already quite familiar, at least intellectually, with this ageless wisdom can join other pilgrims in sharing it, embracing the ideas even more deeply, making them part of our daily spiritual practice, and trying to apply them to all we say and do.
Our soul is our life. Everything else is a fiction – a mind game, inauthenticity. Without nourishing our own souls, we can’t nourish the world; we can’t give what we don’t have. As we attend to our souls, we emanate invisibly and involuntarily the light we have received. The book is dedicated, then, to increasing the spiritual potency in each of our lives, so that what begins as individual nourishment might become nourishment for our communities and four our countries and for our world. As the ancient mystical doctrine, the Cabala, says, we receive the light and then we impart it . . . and thus we repair the world.
“Letting Go of the Mountain” by Benjamin Shield, Ph.D. in Handbook for the Soul
“Soul is where the fires of our passions burn. It is where our love is most alive. The soul longs for this deeper love, for a connection between form and formlessness, for a continuum between the earth and the divine.”
One afternoon, a man named Harry went mountain climbing. All in all, things were going very well. Then suddenly, the path he was walking on gave way, taking Harry with it. With flailing arms, Harry managed to grab a small branch on the side of the mountain. Holding on for dear life, he screamed, “Help! Help! Is anybody up there?”
Miraculously, the clouds parted, and a beam of light illuminated Harry as he hung tenuously from the branch. A voice – clearly the voice of God – spoke directly to Harry and said: “Harry, I will save you. I am all that is good, all that is true, and all that has meaning. Let go, Harry; I will save you. Let go.”
Harry thought hard about this. Then, with a sudden burst of conviction, he looked up the mountain and shouted, “Is anybody else up there?”
How often we find ourselves in Harry’s position. Do we find ways to hold on tighter and tighter to what we know won’t support us, or do we learn to let go, into the realm of soul?
Letting go is one of the most difficult challenges human beings ever face. I’ve always pictured letting go as transformation – moving from a closed fist to an open hand. As we take an open-handed attitude toward life, we can be free of the self-made obstructions that litter our path. This process requires a willingness to shed our persona – those inauthentic trappings we hold onto for identity but that no longer serve us. Like Harry, each of us is faced with these choices every day. The choice to let go frees us to follow the pathway to our soul.
And when we embark on our journey to soul, what then? Is the soul a fragile piece of art, like some holy chalice that we now safely and adoringly preserve in a glass box? Or is the soul the way we view our world – seeing the best and most authentic elements in everyone in our lives and everything around us?
The soul can be experienced by releasing the familiar and safe, by the constant renewal and expression of our presence in the world, and by the moment-to-moment attention we give to daily life. Then the relationship we have with our soul becomes the model for the relationship we have with our world.
Our soul’s journey is not about acquiring more and more knowledge. It is a journey of re-minding ourselves of those precious truths we have long known. It is not a process of gathering enough data to eventually achieve the “Big ‘Ah-ha!’” Instead, our soul’s journey is a process of freeing ourselves to the newness of each moment, constantly clearing away those thoughts and fears that have obstructed access to our soul and, equally, our soul’s access to us. As Robert Frost said, “Something we were withholding made us weak / Until we found it was ourselves.”
We might think of soul making as the same process by which Michelangelo created his sculptures. He believed that a statue’s completed form already existed in the marble. All he needed to do was chisel away everything that was not the completed sculpture, and it would appear. This is the nature of the soul – perfect, yet hidden. Our “marble” can be chiseled away by the passionate desire to know our soul as well as its obstructions.
Experiencing the soul is like the magic you feel when falling in love. This is a time when our ego boundaries – those defensive walls we build around ourselves to keep us separate from one another – crumble. This is a time of soul nourishment. Remember the feelings that infuse our souls when we sing and dance with abandonment? Witness a birth? Hear Schubert’s “Ave Maria”? Become lost in another’s eyes? Ironically, we often describe these special moments as “losing ourselves.” In the “losing,” we are actually finding ourselves. Letting go, then, becomes the gateway to creation, to generating soul.
In our search for soul, it is important to bring along two things: humility and “unknowing.” This means being completely present with an open heart and open mind. This openness is not an absence of thought but, rather, a clear attentiveness to the moment. It is achieved not by effort but by letting go – giving up the need to be in control and dissolving our preconceptions of the way things “should be.” All experiences that bring our minds into attentiveness, into the present, guide us on the path to our soul. When I am in doubt as to how to begin, I try to allow myself the time to clear my mind and open my heart. Sometimes I might focus on my breathing – feeling the breath travel up my hands, arms, and shoulders toward my head on the inhalation, then slowly down toward my feet on the exhalation. Or I might be transported by feelings of being in love, or by watching my dog, Annie, play with her friends.
Negative thoughts and the powerfully dramatic feelings associated with them often get in the way of experiencing wholeness. As though they rested on opposite sides of a balance, when negativity goes up, soul goes down – as do intelligence, perspective, and almost any possibility for a genuine moment in life. When I am coming from a place of negativity, especially directed at myself, my tendency is to “react” toward life, and the present moment becomes diverted by past remorse or future insecurity. It feels as if I have one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake! This dichotomy wears on my soul, my mind, and my body. When I come from a place of letting go, from the closed fist to the open hand, I am infinitely more present, loving, intelligent, and peaceful.
When we choose to let go of self-judgment, we create greater access to the wisdom of the body. We experience a new comfort and a greater love for ourselves and others. A new vision dawns, and we become more capable of experiencing our soul’s birthright. It is in the domain of soul that we have the most perspective, intelligence, and love. In this non-judgmental place, we can bring forward new paradigms and visions. The soul is where self-judgment is transformed into self-compassion, where the self-inflicted wounds can heal. Viewing the world through the experience of negativity is like looking at the world through a pinhole. When we view the world through the eyes of soul, every day is as if we were seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time.
Our body is our most sacred resource available to experience soul. For centuries, many of the world’s theologies have exhorted us to transcend the body in order to achieve higher soul consciousness. The body was viewed as an outright obstacle to our soul’s growth. To me, being in one’s body is an essential component of soulfulness. In a passage from Ulysses, James Joyce tells of a man “who lived just a short distance away from his body.” Ignoring the innate wisdom of our bodies prevents us from accessing all our resources and diminishes our perception of soul to a cerebral experience. At times like these, I look at a beautiful painting and think to myself, “This is beautiful,” rather than feeling its beauty in every cell of my body. We have entered a time that is beginning to accept what William Blake said long ago: “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul.”
My work as a therapist has confirmed for me that the body is a crucible where our thoughts, actions, and emotions are transformed into soul. The body continues to guide us as we wend along our soul path. For example, when I wander from my soul path, my body signals me with strong physical messages, such as headaches, illness, or fatigue. They are like voices warning me I have strayed. If I ignore these voices, they become louder and more adamant. These divergences from our path show up as physical and emotional “dis-eases.”
Soul is where the fires of our passions burn. It is where our love is most alive. The soul longs for this deeper love, for a connection between form and formlessness, for a continuum between the earth and the divine.
Don’t be fooled into thinking you are alone on your journey. You’re not. Your struggle is everyone’s struggle. Your pain is everyone’s pain. Your power is everyone’s power. It is simply that we take different paths along our collective journey toward the same destination.
I do not believe that any technique, secret knowledge, or mystical practice to “find” soul is more effective than the simple practice of letting go. When we focus the power of our attention on the present, the full measure of our soul is available to each of us at every moment.
Remember that soul is not a destination but a journey. The journey of the soul sends us through burning stars, out beyond the dark, icy planets. This journey takes us through the knowing and the unknowing, the discovery and the recovery, the letting go. And best of all, the journey always returns us to our true selves.
– Benjamin Shield, Ph.D.
Afterword
“So is our task ended, and an anthology compiled plentiful as the floods fed by the unfailing waters of the hills, rich in examples as the seashore in grains of sand; may its reception meet with none that bar the stream of Asuka, and the joys it shall afford accumulate, as dust and pebbles gather together to form a high mountain, into a boulder of delight.” — Ki No Tsurayuki (tenth-century editor of poetry anthology)
We hope in our hearts that you have treasured the experience of reading this book as much as we have its creation. The completion represents not an ending but a continuation of a journey.
This book is a handbook. It is meant to be used, to be read and reread, to be the subject of debate. It is our wish that some of the thoughts, voices, and wisdom in these pages may remain with you. Let these thoughts resonate in your mind and spirit. Play with them. Shape-shift them into your own experience.
Again, we want to extend our deepest gratitude to the contributors of this book. What we have gleaned from their words has been life-changing. Yet, as important as their words is the privilege of having seen firsthand what lives look like when they are expressions of soul. For this, we will always remain grateful.
The contributors of this book share the conviction that a relationship with the soul can be cultivated through understanding, insight, care, attentiveness, and love. They share the belief that nourishing our relationship with our soul isn’t something merely to read about and forget, or to think about when it’s convenient. Nourishing the soul is a lifelong journey, traveled day by day, that is worth making the most important focus of our lives.
Soul is like any other aspect of ourselves: the more we contact it and use it, even challenge it, the stronger and more accessible it becomes. Do things that touch your soul, from the silly to the profound. We can judge the quality of our experience by the degree to which it touches our soul.
We did not begin this book in an effort to come up with definitions and answers. It was our intention to facilitate the intimate and collective exploration of soul. We hope that this book has helped you remember those things deeply held but forgotten. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves.”
The fact that this book caught your attention says a great deal about you. It says you are well along your journey of enriching your relationship with soul. It says you are willing to cultivate and cherish those elemental aspects of that which is important in your life.
The sacred quality of our soul’s being touched, or soul connection, brings meaning and fulfillment to our lives. Honor the process. Together, we can make the world a better place.
With respect and friendship,
Benjamin Shield, Ph.D.
Richard Carlson, Ph.D.