soul craft practices

8/22/2019 Soul Craft Practices

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SOUL CRAFT PRACTICES

1) Nourish soul with images, the soul imagines the mind thinks

2) Respond to what most pressing in your experiencing and asks to be dealt with

and listen to your heart

3) Transform experiences into images the world is to be made into images thatbecome for us tabernacles of spirituality and containers of mystery

4) Avoid simple explanations of pain that keep the soul from flourishing, learn to

live with complexity. How do I distance myself from problems and challenges

? How am I not using my talents and gifts ?

5) Be ethical - Its not possible to care for the soul and violate ones own moral

sensibility

6) Be of service to others recognise that soul exists beyond your personal

circumstances and conceptions.

7) Choose work that suits the soul as well as the budget Is it ethical ? a sense of

community and meaning ?

8) Be individual and eccentric be willing to go against the grain of theestablishment

9) Know your own mythology get a feel for the deep underlying patterns of

your being that we live out in our everyday life

10) Learn to reflect on your experiences and express them artfully

11) Notice soul speaking through simple things in furnishings, home, all around

in the world, there is no separation between world soul and individual soul.

12) Tend to memories, dreams, reflections which are rich with imagination and

soul

13) Make ritual part of your everyday life, its an action that speaks to your heart

and soul

14) Be exposed to spirituality in a soulful way emphasise stories, images not

spiritual achievements

15) Dont forget that soul depends on longer, more patient cycles extending

beyond the urgencies and madness of work

16) Touch the elemental waters in your own life and it will transform everything

into grace and presence

17) What courageous conversations bring you to your poetry ?

18) Daily disciplined conversation deepens and enlivens our life

19) Pay attention to your inner voices have courage to bring who you are, your

whole self into the workplace

20) Via negativa say no to everything that is not a real yes21) Be a gentle revolutionary bringing your language of soul and belonging into

the workplace

22) Soul pathologises it gets us into trouble

23) Soul refers to deepening events into experiences

24) Soul has a special relationship with death

25) Soul responds to the honest to those who are prepared to be close to their

deepest, darkest feelings, the suffering of their deepest truth

26) Prior to gender, race, wealth and health is a soul/heart that if we allow it the

capacity to feel and be touched deeply by what we see and experience

27) Savour the undertones

28) Seek out the ways the soul attempts to guide our relationships and individualdevelopment


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29) Focus on attending to the small details of life rather than fixing a central flaw

30) Think of yourself as a seasonal creature, summers of pleasure, springs of

renewal, winters of discontent and autumns of necessary decay. Rather than as

a constantly developing creature.

31) Soul luxuriates in deep attachments but there is also something in us that also

takes flight when we sense deep attachment, this is also as aspect of soul. Weneed to embrace both attachment and flight and dig deeper into our nature.

32) Care of the soul is that it is not primarily a method of problem solving. Its goal

is not to make life problem-free, but to give ordinary life the depth and value

that come with soulfulness. In a way it is much more of a challenge than

psychotherapy because it has to do with cultivating a richly expressive and

meaningful life at home and in society. It is also a challenge because it

requires imagination from each of us. In therapy we lay our problems at the

feet of a professional who is supposedly trained to solve them for us. In care of

the soul, we ourselves have both the task and the pleasure of organizing and

shaping our lives for the good of the soul.

33) The idea of growing and developing is more a project of trying to becomesomething with a goal of perfection in mind. Whereas, alchemy is more of a

natural process itself, wherein the inherent qualities of something are revealed.

34) If we dont allow these crises, these challenges to take place, then we

remain fixed in life and never really ripen or mature. Its human nature to

cling to whats safe and familiar. The choice is between being safe and

allowing these transformational processes to happen. The life of the soul is

dynamicalways moving toward a deeper, more subtle place. What Im really

saying through my work isto honor whats happening in your life rather than

trying to take the safe way.

35) Live more by the intuitive signs we see in life than to live by logic.The soul is

dynamic and is constantly trying to find a new direction in life.

36) Intimacy really does nourish the soulall kinds of intimacy. Just one

intimate conversation can make life worth living

37) Value your dependence and your independence - When I say that Im thinking

of giving a workshop so that people can learn how to be dependent, everyone

laughs. Our culture is more interested in people who are independent at the

moment. But I think its important to be both. As a society, intimacy threatens

our independence and individual identity.

38) Value your attachments - I want to emphasize the value of attachmentof

being attached to your home, your family, where your grew up, or a car

youve driven for years. Its OK to hesitate to discard these things in your lifebecause youre attached to them. Acknowledge those attachments and live life

according to them. I dont always see the value in being spiritually strong

and running over those attachments. One of the reasons our society is so

mobile and transient is that we arent rooted enough. Soul and spirit need to

carry on this constant dialectic with each other, so that neither of them is

wounded by the other. We live in a time when soul is constantly wounded by

all our attempts at spiritual progress.

39) What the ancients knew is that the whole world needs to be married. We need

to get the Republicans and the Democrats married. We need to get the Blacks

and the Whites married. We need to marry the intellect to the body. We are

surrounded by differences that need to appreciate each other and want to betogether. Marriage is really a state of connectedness and co-operation.We


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prepare for marriage by enriching our imagination. That way we can come to

marriage with rich textures to weave our lives into the fabric of family life.

Marriage is not all about interpersonal dynamics, a notion which tends to get

us swamped. I think we could handle our emotions better if we saw marriage

as something which holds the whole of life together. In that way, marriage is

truly a service to humanity40) Embrace endings - To me, the point is to be able to embrace the experience of

ending. Its a death experience and exists beyond whats personal.It touches

on the mystery that life is full of endingsa mystery that nobody can explain.

Life is not perfect. Its full of death and sickness, failed careers and failed

relationships. And its OK to be thrown by these things. The challenge with

endings is to live through them and not run away from the pain of the

experience. The powerlessness, the despair does something profound to us, it

changes us. Its the alchemy of the soul at work

41) See past experiences as food for the soul, and not something to be

transcended. We can dip into the past, not to solve the problems of what may

have happened but to tell the stories of our personal history. Its a form ofimagination. If the memories are not used as explanations for our life, they can

be used as a very rich source for reflection on the nature of lifeeven if they

are painful. Its the mystery of what human life is.

42) Lose your soul - Theres an ancient riddle in eastern philosophy which says:

Its only by losing your soul that you gain it. If we could learn to let go of

what we think is so important in life, and stop trying to fulfill all our plans, we

might actually find what we are looking for.

43) I try to show in this book how to recognize your calling. You read the signs,

positive and negative, and you always take a chance on life, no matter how

thoughtless and irresponsible it might appear to be. You live into life, willing

to risk and change, rather than hide out in a job that is familiar and safe.

44) Dreams can be part of your spiritual practice. You can write them down and

ceate your own personal scripture of revelations. They are all meaningful.

45) When you meditate, dont soar too high. Dont worry about distractions; they

are the stuff of your soul and tell you who you are. Dont try to be good or

perfect. Just be. Add some art and humor to every spiritual practice you have.

46) Dont make your spirituality abstract: use music, art objects, color, food.

Spirituality should always begin and end with a full sensual sense of place,body, and connection.

47) Imagination is everything. People seem to think of it as a superficial thing,

lighter than thought and research. I dont. I see imagination as the most

important power we have. As we imagine the world, so we live and

understand. But a great deal of the imagination that shapes us lies under the

surface. We need to tap that underlying storehouse of images in order to grasp

who we are and where we are headed.


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48) Make space for your problems - Ive encountered people who, in dealing with

their problems, just dont have enough space in them. Maybe they havent

allowed life to affect them much. Life experiences stretch you, when you let

them have their impact. Maybe they havent allowed emotions that frighten

them, like anger, sadness, or desire. Let some of those in, and your soul will

get bigger, fast. Maybe they havent reflected much on their experience. Anunconscious soul is a small one.

49) He said that the soul has its own source of unfolding. What is this source? It is

very deep, very mysterious. To understand this unfolding, you must learn to

pay attention to how your own soul is movingthis may be felt as desire or

longing or fear, perhaps as fantasies, or images that recur. This is one of the

central parts of soul life. As a culture and a society, we would therefore pay

attention to what is happeningon the level of meaning. People in the past

took this approach. Today, we just try to identify the causes and solutions. The

soulful way would try to find meaning in the experiences that we have,

especially the ones that are difficult or unpleasant. Other aspects of soul life

involve cultivating an appreciation for community and relationship, intimacyand attachment. Art and poetics are essential to the soulful lifethese are

where the images come from that allow us to appreciate the depths of daily

experience. The decisions we make based on soul nourishment are not

necessarily the simple way of doing things. Soul, like art, is often very

complex.

50) Be in the moment, people say today, as though it were a given. Well,

maybe its better sometimes to drift out of the moment and reconnect with thepast and imagine the future.

51) When I think of a mega-soul, the first thing that comes to mind is humor. Aperson has to have lived and made mistakes and see the humor in the human

condition if hes going to have enough inner space to hold it all. Humor often

comes out of the clash of high principles and low failures.

52) souls get big from opening out beyond the limitations of human knowledge

and control. Everyone is called to be a mystic of some sort, and being open to

mystery and myth, the intuitive and the non-rational, to art and ritual, to nature

and animals, to absurd ideas and outrageous fantasies gives the soul room to

fashion a lovable and thoughtful human being

53) However simple your life, however ordinary and retiring, you can have a

mega-soul, a vast source of vitality, and the capacity for pain and failure as

well. You can be noble in your simplicity and deep and wide in your ability to

contain life. You can be all of humanity in one person and the cosmos in

miniature. You can be a whole world.

54) Mistakes people make in spiritual development - I can only mention:

moralizing instead of advocating and ethical life, taking all spiritual ideas too

literally and missing the mystery, treating spirituality and psychotherapy


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narcissistically, not seeing the spirituality in the sensual world in which we

live, anthropomorphizing the notion of God, and on and on.

55) Soulful activities - My readers would benefit most from being more engaged

with the arts, reading only the best of literature and not pop psychology or pop

spirituality, finding ethical and rewarding work, being engaged in some kindof service activity, staying close to nature, cultivating the ordinary joys and

pleasures of life, keeping friends and family close, and loving their children no

matter what.

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