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Caring for the Soul: Part I. Looking Inward and Nurturing the Self; A Special Crafting of Life. Meaning of “Soul”. Tied to life in all its particulars – simple pleasures. Good food, satisfying conversation, genuine friends, experiences that stay in the memory and touch the heart.
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Caring for the Soul:Part I Looking Inward and Nurturing the Self; A Special Crafting of Life
Meaning of “Soul” • Tied to life in all its particulars – simple pleasures. • Good food, satisfying conversation, genuine friends, experiences that stay in the memory and touch the heart. • Revealed in attachment, love, community, inner communing, and intimacy. • Accepts human foibles, disappointments, periods of darkness and foolishness. • Sees dignity and peace in them. • Psychological and spiritual dimensions. • Accepts paradoxical mysteries of life. • Brings imagination to areas devoid of it.
Contemporary Symptoms of Loss of Soul • Emptiness. • Meaninglessness. • Vague Depression. • Disillusionment about marriage, family, and relationships. • Loss of values. • Yearning for personal fulfillment. • Hunger for spirituality.
Distinctiveness of Care of the Soul • Psychotherapy as a part of culture for treating symptoms of problems. • Care of the soul is fundamentally different from psychotherapy. • Continuous process of attending to small details of everyday life. • Gives ordinary life a new depth and value. • Requires imagination.
Care of the Soul • Care = Responding to expressions of the soul that is not heroic or muscular. • Original meaning of care = attention, devotion, husbandry, adorning the body, healing, being anxious for. • Soul = quality or dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. • Depth, value, relatedness, heart, personal substance. • Observe how the soul manifests itself and how it operates. • What is problematic may be necessary or valuable.
Attempts to Escape to the Opposite • When one is faced with “conflicting” possibilities [e.g. independence and dependence] one is seen valuable and the other is seen negatively. • Often the negative is an important part of the soul that must be seen in perspective rather than as something to be eradicated. • Observance of the soul can be deceptively simple. • Take back what has been disowned. • “Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around a lake.”