After our conversation today, it feels as though this group is "embarking on a journey of epic proportions"! As an opening to the project of languaging and possibly re-visioning Depth Psychology as we currently see it, here is a relevant quote from Bonnie's paper On Depth Psychology: It’s Meaning and Magic, Bonnie Bright 2010
http://www.depthpsychologylist.com/Depth-Psychology-Its-Meaning-and-Magic
"Depth Psychology seeks to regard what is silenced, marginalized or hidden at the edges of what we believe to be normal in our culture and our world. It challenges norms and asks more questions rather than settling on fixed answers. It looks beyond symptoms to find the underlying root rather than simply trying to fix or mask the symptom. It seeks to put issues into a larger context using image, story, and myth. Once a symptom or problem can be located in a larger framework, it is easier to get a big picture or a metaphor for what is really going on.
The Study of Soul
The word “psychology” is made up of the word “psyche,” meaning soul, and “logos,” to study. Therefore, Depth Psychology, at its core, is the study of the soul. According to best-selling author of Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore (1992), “soul” is not a thing but rather a dimension of experience. It is related to depth, to substance, and to relationship to the world (Moore, 1992). James Hillman (1975), contemporary author and pioneer of Archetypal Psychology, outlines five functions of soul: (1) it makes all meaning possible, (2) it turns events into experiences, (3) it involves a deepening of experience, (4) is communicated in love, and (5) has a special relation with death (Hillman, 1975) (p. xvi). For Hillman, as a result of these five characteristics, the soul represents the imaginative possibility of our nature, a possibility that is realized in reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy. Indigenous and earth-based cultures held the belief that malaise and illness came from a “loss of soul,” occurring when the soul fled or was abducted to the underworld and had to be called back by the shaman, the spiritual caretaker of the community. Thus, early Depth Psychologists were also considered doctors of the soul (Ellenberger, 1970).
Soul involves depth. When we say something has soul, it implies a deeper level than the normal, everyday thing. Each of us, at any given moment, is both a source of soul and a container for soul. Without it, we are lost; without acknowledging and embracing it, it is lost. Each of us longs to be reunited. Soul, as I have come to think of it, is a Source Of Unconscious Longing (SOUL): we are seeking to find what is missing, the connection we have lost and are yearning for at some deep level; the implicit desire to make deep meaning of both inner and outer nature, to find balance in a world where we have radically tipped that innate balance that indigenous peoples know comes with nature and earth. By searching for soul, we embark on a journey of epic proportions, a so-called “hero’s journey” of myth."
Replies
Yes, thank you to Bonnie for this great anacronym of SOUL! I also wanted to share a link to an interview that may be of interest in the use of language and in meetings and dialogue venues with 'indigenous' groups:
An Intersubjective Dialogue Process to Engage with Current Global Issues and Causal Leadership
Regarding the interface of indigenous and western paradigm in who is teaching whom?
Transmission of the wisdom of these villages
Communication practices that are not oppresssive
If anyone would like to listen to this very interesting interview and have a discussion or share thoughts, please let me know. You may try this link and see if the blue Recording button is on the page under this title. http://www.meridianuniversity.edu/index.php/integral-voices-program...
If you cannot access it, you need to sign in on this page: http://www.meridianuniversity.edu/public-programs/integral-voices
Integral We-Spaces: A New Context for Global Dialogue?
This was held on Monday, June 15, 2015 10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m. PT
Thomas Steininger and Elizabeth Debold
Thomas Steininger and Elizabeth Debold have each explored and developed “We practices” for over thirty years. They have undertaken radical experiments with social change involving consciousness raising practices for collective spiritual awakening to a “Higher We,” and new forms of conscious dialogue.
The question that they are asking is: How can our emerging capacity to shape collective spaces be used to heal the fragmentation between cultures? Over the past nine years, Steininger has developed a communication practice, called Evolutionary Dialogue, based in the awareness of our prior unity and motivated by the creativity that can emerge from diversity. Debold’s work has been to start from fundamental nonseparation to make transparent the patterns of domination and submission that form our gender and cultural identities, thus liberating the self to respond and be responsive in fresh, unexpected ways.
In this Integral Voices call, Steininger and Debold will have recently returned from a global dialogue event in India. They will share their experience of this meeting point between cultures to reveal the potentials and dangers inherent in such an encounter. Taking a self-reflective look at the successes and failures of this East-West dialogue, they will consider: What makes deep dialogue possible? What capacities do individuals need in order to participate together?
I also liked the beginning of this talk: Causal Leadership Panel
HAVE YOU HEARD OF CAUSAL LEADERSHIP? Causal Leadership Panel
Wednesday, September 17, 2014 THERE IS A RECORDING OF THIS TOPIC ON http://www.meridianuniversity.edu/index.php/integral-voices-program...
Living sense of non-separation and difference
Integral We-Spaces: A New Context for Global Dialogue?
Elizabeth Debold and Thomas Steininger
How can our emerging capacity to shape collective spaces be used to heal the fragmentation between cultures? Over the past nine years, Steininger has developed a communication practice, called Evolutionary Dialogue, based in the awareness of our prior unity and motivated by the creativity that can emerge from diversity. Debold’s work has been to start from fundamental nonseparation to make transparent the patterns of domination and submission that form our gender and cultural identities, thus liberating the self to respond and be responsive in fresh, unexpected ways.
In this Integral Voices call, Steininger and Debold will have recently returned from a global dialogue event in India. They will share their experience of this meeting point between cultures to reveal the potentials and dangers inherent in such an encounter. Taking a self-reflective look at the successes and failures of this East- FOR MORE CONVERSATION ON THIS TOPIC, THERE IS A FREE SEMINAR:
One World in Dialogue: The Emergence of a Global, Integral Perspective
An Intersubjective Dialogue Process to Engage with Current Global Issues
FREE TWO-DAY WEEKEND SEMINAR:
September 12-13, 2015
And a 6-Month Program with Dr. Thomas Steininger and Dr. Elizabeth Debold. Beginning October 2015
SCROLL DOWN to bottom right of this site to sign up for email enlisting for the free seminar
http://www.enlightennext.de/
I like reading SOUL as source of unconscious longing. It is all in the longing...
here is Goethe on The Holy Longing
Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
Because the mass man will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
What longs to be burned to death.
In the calm water of love nights,
Where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
A strange feeling comes over you
When you see the silent candle burning.
Now you are no longer caught
In the obsession with darkness,
And a desire for higher lovemaking
Sweeps you forward.
Distance does not make you falter
Now, arriving in magic, flying
And finally insane for the light,
You are the butterfly, and you are gone.
And so long as you haven't experienced this:
To die, and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest
On the dark earth
Thank you, Julie.
Thank you Julie for this! I had read this gem a while back so it is nice for it to resurface again. As one who continually struggles with some of the language of depth, language that I think is problematic and that I disagree with, it is nice to come back to something so clear and simple as this piece.