The ancient art of alchemy shows a way: Pay attention to your deep and complex interior life, become more sensitive about your relationships, consider your past thoughtfully, and use your imagination at its full power. Work from the ground up toward finding the work that will make your life worthwhile. The.
The word passion means basically “to be affected,” and passion is the essential energy of the soul. The poet Rilke describes this passive power in the imagery of the flower’s structure, when he calls it a “muscle of infinite reception.” We don’t often think of the capacity to be affected as strength and as the work of a powerful muscle, and yet for the soul, as for the flower, this is its toughest work and its main role in our lives. Things.
All human symptoms and problems, when they are taken to their depth and realized in a soulful way, find their ultimate solution in a religious sensibility.
Care of the soul begins with observance of how the soul manifests itself and how it operates. We can’t care for the soul unless we are familiar with its ways. Observance is a word from ritual and religion. It means to watch out for but also to keep and honor, as in the observance of a holiday.
A gun is dangerous not only because it threatens our lives, but also because it concretizes and fetishizes our desire for power, keeping power both in sight and also removed from its soulful presence in our daily lives. The presence of the gun in our society is a threat, and we are its victims – a sign that our fetish is working against us.
Each that we lose takes part of us; A crescent still abides, Which like the moon, some turbid night, Is summoned by the tides.7.
We care for the soul by acknowledging the place of eternal childhood, seeing its disadvantages to be virtuous and its inadequacies to be the conduits of soulful sensitivity.
Care of the soul may take the form of living in a fully embodied imagination, being an artist at home and at work. You don’t have to be a professional in order to bring art into the care of your soul; anyone can have an art studio at home, for instance.
Again, we can see the importance of imaginal practices such as journals, dream work, poetry, painting, and therapy aimed at exploring images in dream and life. These methods keep us actively engaged in the mythologies that are the stuff of our own lives. The.
Care of the soul requires ongoing attention to every aspect of life. Essentially it is a cultivation of ordinary things in such a way that soul is nurtured and fostered. Therapy tends to focus on crises or chronic problems.
Growing old is one of the ways the soul nudges itself into attention to the spiritual aspect of life. The body’s changes teach us about fate, time, nature, mortality, and character. Aging forces us to decide what is important in life.
We could all be a Freud to our own experiences.
She was lost in the breeziness of her secular existence and couldn’t land anywhere. Nothing was sacred. Nothing could stop her long enough to reflect sufficiently on her life.
It isn’t comfortable to discover her place and her necessity. And yet what she has to offer is nothing less than the entire deep spiritual realm of the soul, the invisible, unchanging core.
If you are often angry, trace the roots in story and then apply your anger as a force and a sharp edge to whatever you do. Don’t indulge in venting. Always convert and transform your anger into something worthwhile. Let people see and feel your anger, but don’t explode every time you feel it.
A philosophy of life is a bundle of wisdom you have gathered from your reading and experience. It is not a rigid ideology that allows no development and complexity. It’s a living thing, a developing idea about life that belongs to you alone.
Faith is a gift of spirit that allows the soul to remain attached to its own unfolding. When faith is soulful, it is always planted in the soil of wonder and questioning. It isn’t a defensive and anxious holding on to certain objects of belief, because doubt, as its shadow, can be brought into a faith that is fully mature. Imagine.
J. B. Jackson, a historian of landscapes, makes a crucial point about such things in his essay “The Necessity for Ruins.” Things in decay, he says, express a theology of birth, death, and redemption.
A small amount of good literature can often teach more about the inner life than volumes of psychology.
Anger is often like an inverted lotus: On the surface lie muddy, not-so-beautiful roots. Under water lie beautiful blossoms. You need to develop an amphibious eye to appreciate the full meaning of such an unusual flower.