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.
When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its...
The basic intention in any caring, physical or psychological, is to alleviate suffering. But in relation to the symptom itself, observance means first of all listening and looking carefully at what is...
Oh, ever thus, from childhood's hour,I 've seen my fondest hopes decay;I never loved a tree or flowerBut 't was the first to fade away.I never nurs'd a dear gazelle,To glad me with its soft black eye,
Maybe one function of love is to cure us of an anemic imagination, a life emptied of romantic attachment and abandoned to reason.
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.
It is precisely because we resist the darkness in ourselves that we miss the depths of the loveliness, beauty, brilliance, creativity, and joy that lie at our core.
I believe that one day we’ll understand that we’ve lost out on religion because we made it too lofty and distant. I see it as a simple quality of everyday life, and in that simplicity lie its beauty a...
How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension...
DOST thou not hear the silver bell,Through yonder lime-trees ringing?'Tis my lady's light gazelle.To me her love thoughts bringing, —
Come o'er the sea,Maiden with me,Mine through the sunshine, storms and snows;Seasons may roll,
Your challenge, then, is to create a religion of your own by being secular in a religious way, or religious in a secular way. You can learn how to see the secular from a religious angle, and vice vers...
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...
Only when you are fully engaged can you see the activity that will make your life feel worth living.
Often care of the soul means not taking sides when there is a conflict at a deep level. It may be necessary to stretch the heart wide enough to embrace contradiction and paradox.
I'm painfully aware that the experts in fields like religion and spirituality sometimes feel that bringing mysticism down so far into ordinary life is an insult to the great mystics and makes it all t...
A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.
There is nothing neutral about the soul. It is the seat and the source of life. Either we respond to what the soul presents in its fantasies and desires, or we suffer from this neglect of ourselves. T...
Soul-making is a journey that takes time, effort, skill, knowledge, intuition, and courage. It is helpful to know that all work with soul is process—alchemy, pilgrimage, and adventure—so that we don’t...
One effective trick in caring for the soul is to look with special attention and openness at what the individual rejects, and then to speak favorably for that rejected element.