Healing Wholing & Souling
“Soul likes intimacy; spirit is uplifting. Soul gets hairy; spirit is bald. Spirit sees, even in the dark; soul feels its way, step by step, or needs a dog. Spirit shoots arrows; soul takes them in the chest…Spirit likes wholes; soul likes eaches.”
- James Hillman
How does spiritual practice, self healing and soul work interact? We will explore a broad map that covers the terrains of: Self and healing; Spirit and wholing; Soul and souling. Of course, the small self or ego, the spiritual self and the soul-self all permeate each other and ultimately are not seperate. Yet there is a different emphasis, aim and perspective that each realm brings. We could summarise the aims of the upper world of spirit as to wake up, the aim of the middleworld of the small self or eg as to grow up and the aim of the underworld as to show up as our unique, most authentic self with our unique gifts for the world. We will briefly explore ways to navigate the three realms of Self, Spirit and Soul, on the personal, spiritual and soulful journey of transformation.
The realm of Self is the personal realm, the middle world, the everyday world of the small self or ego. There are many facets to growing up - to becoming an integrated and mature adult. In summary, personal maturity involves the development of an authentic self, self worth and self love. This involves disentangling cultural, conditioned beliefs from our own authentic values and beliefs. A focus on self-healing is important if there is unresolved trauma, other disturbances within the psyche or a difficulty in holding space for one’s self with love and kindness. We need a ground of self-love and authenticity alongside the ego-dissolving practices of the spirit and soul realms. We can only surrender the self when we have a self to surrender.
The spiritual realm, also known as the upper world, includes a wide range of spiritual paths and practices, with the overall intention to wake up and know ourselves beyond the ego-self, as unbounded consciousness, presence or beingness, united with all life. This is the realm where we inhabit deep spiritual values as natural emanations of our innate spiritual nature, including oneness, love, wisdom, truth, wholeness, trust, faith, devotion and mystery. Spiritual practice is a practice of wholing, the experience of spiritual wholeness, presence and beingness.
In the soul realm, the lower world or underworld, we meet a self much deeper than personality or ego-self. We meet a vital, essential core self, the soul. Whereas spirit connects us with a transpersonal, universal essence of self, the soul is the individualised spark of spirit that is the essence of the wild, exquisitely unique individual self, which is, nevertheless, embedded in the web of life, filling a unique ecological niche. Spirit and soul are at each end of a continuum, with spirit at the universal and transcendental end of the spectrum and soul at the exquisitely individualised and inscendant end of the spectrum. The soul, carried by spirit, carries the ego-self or small self throughout our lives, like a star wrapping us in the luminous cloak of who we truly are. The soul carries our unique soul powers, essence, values, ways of knowing and being, and soul gifts. The soul carries the deepest significance and purpose of each individual life, so that each individual can show up and bring the gifts that only she can give to the world.
Souling is a way of perceiving through the intuitive flow of the soul river within. Soul speaks through metaphor, through exquisitely unique images, myths and symbols that reveal our own soul essence. Like spiritual realisation, soulful insight requires going underneath the strategic thinking of the ego-self. Like spirit, the soul itself is beyond definition, yet we receive whispers and messages that reveal our deepest self through a symbolic or mythopoetic identity.
I will give a brief overview of my inner journey over the last 35 years, as one example of how these three realms interact. My inner journey really began when I was 19 years old, when I turned toward my unresolved wounding around growing up with a violent father. At the time it felt like I had no choice as grief intensely erupted in my life, but I can see now that I bravely dived deep into my own healing. I saw a psychotherapist for a few years and learned to feel emotions, acknowledge and meet my own needs and develop my sense of self and worth. At the same time, I began practising yoga and meditation, then later trained in somatic psychotherapy, and this opened up a deeper connection with my felt sense and embodied knowing. Also at 19 years old, alongside university study, I joined the Melbourne Rainforest Action Group and became an environmental activist. This was an enriching time of living my values, taking empowered action and developing skills. This stage of my life was really about developing a stronger sense of self and finding my way in the world as a young adult.
My yoga, chanting and meditation practice deepened over the next 30 years. The spiritual path became central to my life, which included pilgrimages to India and teaching yoga and meditation for 20+ years. Probably one of the greatest gifts that spiritual practice has given me is the capacity to be aware, to be present, to be able to sit with and compassionately embrace all that is here in this moment, including the suffering of myself, others and the world. As Thich That Hanh writes: “Each thought, each action, in the light of awareness, becomes sacred.” My practice evoked a deep recognition of my own wholeness. It has awakened my spiritual heart, the heart that has a huge compassionate embrace of all of life. My practice has given me a foundation of deep embodiment and a perspective larger than the ego’s smaller scope - alongside many other gifts too numerous to fit here.
At the start of my 50s, as I began looking for deeper answers about how to turn up in life, it became clear that my longing to know my unique way of participating in the world was not being met by my spiritual practice. For me, the spiritual path I was on did not offer practices to uncover the uniqueness of me - and even dismissed the uniqueness of the soul. A metaphor, commonly used in contemplative practice, of the small self being the like the wave not seperate from the ocean, points toward the merging of the individual self into the ocean of beingness. This is expressed beautifully by non-dual Indian teacher Sri Nisaragadatta Maharaj: “Wisdom tells me I am nothing, love tells me I am everything. Between the two, my life flows.” The ego-self erroneously sees itself as seperate from life. The ego-self of separation is surrendered to a spiritual essence that has no seperate identity, is “nothing”, and is part of all that is, is “everything”.
Yet the soul, whilst being individual, is not the same as the ego-self. In surrendering the ego-self it can be all too easy to surrender all that is unique about ourselves and obscure the existence of our soul-self. It was with some grief at first, that I realised that through the spiritual practice of surrendering my ego-self, I had dismissed glimpses of my soul-self too. My spiritual practice was reinforcing conditioning based on entrenched patterns of hiding and invisibility. For most of my spiritual path, I did not even realise that I was missing a connection with my soul. The practices of yoga, meditation and chanting did not point me in the direction of soul or address the underlying longing and angst in me to know who I am, why I am here and what my gifts are for the world. In midlife, I turned towards imaginal, creative, nature-communing practices to evoke a connection with the mythical, poetic soul-self within. This souling process involves a dying to old versions of my self and life, to reemerge with a truer sense of my soul-self and soul-purpose.
To revisit the teaching from Sri Nisaragadatta Maharaj: “Wisdom tells me I am nothing, love tells me I am everything. Between the two, my life flows.” The soul might say: As spiritual essence, wisdom shows me I am nothing, love tells me I am everything, yet Soul shows me I am a unique expression of that shared essence or spirit, with a unique place of belonging in the web of life, a unique role to play, just as every tree, river and creature has their place in the Earth community. The soul holds a potent truth of profound uniqueness expressed through profound belonging in the web of all life.
To synthesise the realms of spirit, self or ego and soul, the following three maps may be helpful. Map 1, with soul at the bottom, highlights that the journey to soul is in stark contrast to the transcendent path of spirit and instead is a descent, a burrowing down into our depths, to retrieve our deep self from the imaginal underneath, a process Thomas Berry calls inscendence.
Map 2, with soul in the middle, highlights soul as a bridge between the vast spiritual realms and the everyday ego-realm. An encounter with soul can draw on both transcendent experience with its spiritual qualities and the everyday experiences of the ego-self.
Map 3 again has soul in the middle, but this time spirit is on the bottom as a ground of beingness from which the soul arises, then the ego arises from soul.
When we cultivate a conscious relationship between the Self, Soul and Spirit, these three entwine to form the golden thread of our deepest and integrated life. We bring together the three aims of growing up, waking up and showing up or healing, wholing and souling.
Many spiritual traditions talk about the love affair between the Self and Soul. As Bill Plotkin writes: “Ego possesses the heart, hands, senses, imagination and intelligence to manifest, but doesn’t know what’s worth manifesting; it yearns to know the deeply authentic purpose of the Soul. Soul posses the song that’s worth singing..but it has no way to manifest this in the world; the Soul yearns to be made real by the Ego.” (1)
The soul and self threads entwine when we understand that both our own deepest woundedness and our deepest joys can be gateways into our soul’s essence and purpose as described by Clarissa Pinkola Estes:
“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” (2) Our personal and intimate wounds, longings and loves can lead us to soul.
When we do soul work, this will often deepen our connection to spirit and accelerate personal healing work. Similarly, transcendent spiritual experiences can open us up to the soul realm. Spirit can bring us to soul, personal healing work can bring us to soul - as long as the maps we follow integrate the three paths of self, spirit and soul. Unfortunately, experiential and authentic soul-based practice is often missing in the maps and practices of many Western spiritual paths.
Healing, wholing and souling are all based on present-centred awareness of what is arising in our lives. We follow what is emergent as messengers from spirit and from soul, and we follow those messages, like following a breadcrumb trail, all the way home. That home is not only coming home to our spiritual essence but coming home to our soul’s essence and our place in the world. When we follow the individual soul, when we find our gifts for the world, we discover that our own soul has taken us to the soul of the world and to the spirit of the world. What we thought was ours alone, becomes a gift for all of life.
Footnotes:
(1) Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind, New World Library, 2013, p.25
(2) Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves.
Anahata Giri