Caring for the soul takes work and commitment to self. By Pennie Quaile Pearce

Fri, 24 March 2017

In today’s psychologies and therapies there is often an unspoken, but clear salvational tone. If you could only learn to be assertive, loving, angry, expressive, contemplative, or thin, they imply, your troubles would be over. In the Middle ages and Renaissance ‘self-help books were cherished and revered, but were never a cure all and didn’t promise the sky. They gave recipes for good living and offered suggestions for the practical, down to earth philosophy of life… I must say I am interested in this humbler approach, one that is more accepting of human foibles.

Jung, one of our most recent doctors of the soul, said that every psychological problem is ultimately a matter of spirit. A spiritual life of some kind is absolutely necessary for psychological ‘health’; at the same time, excessive or ungrounded spirituality can be dangerous, leading to all kinds of compulsive and even violent behaviour. In today’s society we also have the archetypes of spiritual tourist and the spiritual snob. The spiritual tourist is much like any other tourist who likes to visit interesting places, hear the stories about it, takes pictures and leaves. They have no wish to move there or commit to visiting every day. The spiritual snob is much like any other type of snob, they feel they have ‘made it’, they have seen it, been there and got the T shirt and feel they can look down from the amazing heights they have achieved. What both have missed in their need to appear spiritual is caring for their soul, when a soul is neglected that when symptoms appear.

Caring for the soul takes work and commitment to self. The emotional complaints of our time, we therapists hear every day in our practices include

Emptiness

Meaningless

Vague depression

Severe depression

Disillusionment about marriage, family and relationship

A loss of values

Yearning for personal fulfilment

A hunger for spirituality

Repeating patterns of destructive behaviour

All of these symptoms reflect a loss of connection to the soul and let us know what the soul craves. We yearn for entertainment, power, money, intimacy, sexual fulfilment and material things, and we think we can find these things if we discover the right relationship or job, the right church or therapy. But without soul, whatever we find will be unsatisfying, for what we truly long for is the soul in each of these areas. Lacking soulfulness, we attempt to gather these alluring satisfactions to us in great masses, thinking apparently that quantity will make up for lack of quality.

Care of the soul speaks to the longing we feel and to the symptoms that drive us crazy, but it is not a path away from shadow or death. A soulful personality is complicated, multifaceted and shaped by pain and pleasure, success and failure. Life lived soulfully is not without moments of darkness and periods of foolishness. Dropping the salvational fantasy frees us up to the possibility of self-knowledge and self-acceptance, which are the very foundation of soul.

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