Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life
One must first define what a soul is before learning to care for it. Fortunately, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life, provides a guide for what the soul is – and how it is best cared for. While the definition of “soul” may lack the precision of a geometric proof or the rigor of a carefully controlled study, Moore’s descriptions provide a sense for what it is that the soul is in each of us.
Characteristics and Comparisons
Words like “depth” in the context of humans isn’t like a yardstick with precise delineation. However, most people can describe a person they know who has depth even if they can’t quite explain why they believe they are “deep.” They will sometimes share a particular topic that they’re an expert in, but more frequently, it’s a general sense that they just think about things more deeply. They look past the surface of things to see the underlying patterns and invisible forces.
The soulful people we meet seem to respect and value others. They prioritize developing and maintaining relationships with others. They see these relationships for their inherent value of connection, not as a tit-for-tat exchange of value. (See The Evolution of Cooperation for more on tit-for-tat.) Being in a relationship is how we were designed – and yet, somehow, being real in relationships doesn’t always come easy. (See How to Be an Adult in Relationships for the keys.)
People who Moore describes as “soulful” might be the same people that the Dalai Lama describes as “compassionate.” (See Emotional Awareness, A Force for Good, and the Dalai Lama’s Big Book of Happiness for more on his views on compassion.) Thupten Jinpa’s book, A Fearless Heart, exposes how being compassionate takes courage. When we see great compassion, we recognize that inner strength.
Knowing the self is part of being soulful. Bowen calls it “differentiation.” (See Family Evaluation for more.) Masterson in Search for the Real Self calls it “real self.” Another expression of knowing one’s self well is to have an integrated self-image. (See Beyond Boundaries, Compelled to Control, and Schools without Failure for more on an integrated self-image.)
The World as It Is
While the pointers towards soulfulness aren’t always clear, one marker that signals the right path is an insistence on dealing with the world as it is. Rather than dreaming and hoping for something different or simply ignoring the reality of the situation, soulful people accept reality and navigate their way through it.
Commonly attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr and the serenity prayer, twelve-step groups often include “taking the world as it is, not as I would have it.” While this wasn’t included in the original prayer, it reflects the deep-felt belief that we achieve peace, and soulfulness, by accepting the world as it is.
The truth of our world is that many of the serious mental illnesses defined in the DSM (DSM-V-TR currently) are ways in which people are disconnected from reality. Whether it is voices and images or simply a perception of the world that’s not correct, our disconnection from reality can become pathological. It’s the other end of the spectrum from the kind of connected, deep, soulful experience that some have.
Care and Cure
Moore’s selection of the word “care” is telling. Contrasted with the word “cure,” which implies finality, care describes a continuing relationship. When we care for our souls, we’ve committed to a continued relationship and process. Cure’s implications are that there is something wrong to be fixed, and whatever the cure is has fully resolved it.
Our growth as humans, like the growth of every kind of organism, must continue. We can’t simply say that we’ve reached some pinnacle, and it’s now time to start the dying process. The truth is that dying is a part of living. Shrinking is a part of growing. Caring for our soul is investing in the growing process so that it continues to exceed the shrinking process as much and for as long as possible.
Moore also points out that there are times of pause, when we need to take a step back and perhaps shrink a bit so that we can prepare to grow again. Nassim Taleb in Antifragile makes the point that periods of rest are just as important to growth as periods of striving.
Growing Up
Moore attributes a sense of inferiority to the statement, “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.” I make no such attribution having said the same statement myself. It’s one part whimsical rebellion against the idea that there is something called being “grown up” that’s a desirable state. The other part of the statement, for me, is the realization that I’m on a journey of discovery and that my discovery doesn’t have a single end. Walt Whitman wrote, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself / (I am large, I contain multitudes).”
I believe that everyone contains aspects of themselves – some may desire to grow up while others desire to remain playful. (See No Bad Parts for more on everyone’s multitudes.)
Machinery of Society
While Gareth Morgan explains that organizations can be seen from different lenses, each with their own benefits and weaknesses, most people don’t apply the same perspectives to societies. (See Images of Organization.) Mostly, we see society as a machine. Most of the people on the planet play the roles of small cogs, which silently continue turning to the pace of the larger machine. Our institutional education system has been designed to condition people into their roles as cogs into the machinery of society.
We’ve traded the Greek proposal of being the best adult possible, which meant virtuous and wise, for one that simply focuses on our ability to plug into the machinery of society. In Deaths of Despair, Anne Case and Angus Deaton speak of how the machinery of society grinds some people up, leading to their suffering. Moore proposes instead that we should be supporting people in their discovery of the depths of their soul and their inherent value.
Soul in Nature
Moore proposes that the soul is in nature – and nature is in the soul. The research on depression, burnout, and anxiety seems to imply that people are happier – or at least less depressed – when they have the change to be immersed in nature. It doesn’t appear to matter much how someone is immersed in nature, simply that they are.
Love
Love is a complicated topic, one that I’ll leave to Anatomy of Love. However, there’s an important relationship between love and the soul that is worthy of exposition. Soulful people find ways to walk the path of trust, vulnerability, and intimacy. (See Trust => Vulnerability => Intimacy, Revisited.) Love sounds easy, like a Hallmark movie that predictably ends with the people who are meant to be together ending up together. However, in the real world, love takes work. It takes learning how to trust when every fiber in your being wants to run. It means building safety for others and in yourself. It means choosing to be vulnerable to create the space for intimacy – knowing that your trust may be misplaced.
They’re hard things that are both investments in and expressions of the soul. Soulful people find ways to summon the courage it takes to trust and be vulnerable by knowing that it’s only by following the path that they can reach deeper peace in their soul.
Despair
Despair visits too many people. (See Deaths of Despair.) Loneliness is an epidemic in our modern culture. (See Loneliness.) We’ve stripped our social structures. (See Bowling Alone and The Upswing.) We’ve lost the rituals that connect us with one another and divide segments of time. (See Rites of Passage and Raising a Modern Day Knight.) All of this to say that we’re seeing despair today despite centuries of increasing economic safety. (See The Anxious Generation and The Righteous Mind.)
While tragedy is one outcome – and one that should rightly be avoided – there are sometimes positive outcomes. Moore acknowledges that some of the most soulful people have gone through the most horrendous things. One outcome is a depth of soul. Calhoun and Tedeschi call it posttraumatic growth (PTG), and it’s the way that people become better because of the trauma they’ve suffered. (See Posttraumatic Growth and Transformed by Trauma.)
The net of all of this is not to assume that, when you meet someone soulful, their life has been rosy. The odds are, it’s been anything but.
Insight and Truth
One might easily assume that soulful people are those who know the truth and live by it. By and large, this is true, but it hides a deeper truth that soulful people are looking for insight. They’re looking beneath the surface to find the insights that others miss. The title of Gary Klein’s book, Seeing What Others Don’t, is a wonderful expression for finding those things that drive everything.
Soulful people do seek truth – but they’re more interested in the insights they can gain. They see the systems that Donella Meadows explains in Thinking in Systems as the relationships between people and between people and the world. In Seeing Systems, Barry Oshrey explains how the structures and motivators of our organizations are driving us apart. It’s only through conscious consideration of this fact that we avoid the traps. Chris Argyris spoke of these traps in his book, Organizational Traps. They’re the ways that we get caught into a small portion of the truth and fail to see the bigger picture or what will emerge. (See On Dialogue for more on emergence.)
It doesn’t take great insight. It doesn’t require unwavering faith. All it takes is learning to prioritize the Care of the Soul.