In The Service of Soul
The highest form of wisdom is kindness.
~The Talmud
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I learned through my body and soul that it was necessary to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it.
— Hermann Hesse
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Soul work is not a high road. It is a deep fall into an unforgiving darkness that won’t let you go until you find the song that sings you home.
— Wayne Snellgrove
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Jung believed that the destiny of our planet is intricately linked to the personal growth and inner journey of each individual, and he advocated for a greater understanding and appreciation of the most mysterious aspects of our being: our emotions, our instincts, and the imaginative power that they evoke.
According to Jung, emotions and instincts serve as the driving force behind our creative impulses and, ultimately, then, shape not only our own personal lives, but also the collective: the future of humanity and the Earth itself.
If you personally feel called to make a difference in the world, seek to be in service of soul. It is the element that brings meaning, compassion, integrity, truth, love (including self-love) and transformation.
— Bonnie Bright
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Soul work may sound noble but facing what kind of beings we are involves facing rather than hiding from ourselves. Our inherited solutions to our complexity is to hide from it, to repress it and tell ourselves a comforting story about who we are. Large numbers of human beings doing that makes for a dangerous world because the undiscovered self breaks out into the open unexpectedly and causes pain and suffering.
We become less than kind because we have an image to protect.
If we want to make a difference in the world we can’t do it as people who don’t have an inkling of who they really are. Working in service to soul values means coming to terms with our darker impulses, with kindness and without condemnation. If it’s true that the fate of our planet depends on individual personal growth we have a responsibility to face the full picture of who we are.
All those things we don’t want to admit into our awareness have a habit of lying in the dark and springing forth into the world just at the wrong time. We ourselves are why the world is so unkind. That unkindness starts at home, in how we try to force ourselves to be something we’re not. We live in a society that trains us to play a role that probably doesn’t correspond to who we really are. It’s just a role, a performance.
If we watch, wonder and question our emotions and instincts, our reactions, judgments and decisions begin to mutate. We begin to make connections between our unconscious energies and their outcomes. We begin to see the damage we cause. We realize it’s not just other people who create chaos.
When we see how we too create suffering, we have a chance to change, but if we never see it we won’t stop.
Finding your song won’t happen if you hide from yourself. Staying in touch with our unconscious mind is healing. It is real and it wants to reveal what it thinks and feels. Psychotherapy used to be a good way to get to know ourselves, but now we think we can manage our unruly instincts with pharmaceuticals. We do have various ways to bring our repressed energies into our consciousness, like meditation and the arts. We can do it, if we will.
It’s a decision anyone can make, if we can find the courage to face ourselves.
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Volume four of my series Meditations on Living is now published on Amazon. If you read it, please leave a review.
Here’s one:
Insightful and eloquent musings on the human condition
A regular contributor on Medium, David Price’s articles caught my attention a couple of years ago. Combined with stunning artwork — some of which is his own — and often wonderful quotes from celebrated sources, his daily submissions became a fixture with my morning coffee. He combines an almost poetic prose with razor-sharp insights into the state of humanity and the world we’ve created. Time and again I’ve been thoroughly impressed by his views of the state of things, both the good and the bad, views that will often follow me around all day. This book is a collection of a number of his articles, and I highly recommend it.
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It will look like this:
