Care of the soul

"Care of the Soul" by Thomas Moore

Moore's studies in Renaissance psychology, philosophy, and medicine contributed to the work.

Renaissance authors: Marsilio Ficino and Paracelsus

Jung said that every psychological problem is ultimately a matter of religion. He also said that the work begins and ends with Mercury. Mercury is the god of fictions and fabrications, of trickery, thievery, and sleight-of-hand.

A spiritual life of some kind is absolutely necessary for psychological health.

Fulfilling work, rewarding relationships, personal power, and relief from symptoms are all gifts of the soul.

Marsilio Ficino: The mind tends to go off on its own so that it seems to have no relevance to the physical world. At the same time, the materialistic life can be so absorbing that we get caught in it and forget about spirituality. What we need is soul, in the middle, holding together mind and body, ideas and life, spirituality and the world.

James Hillman (the founder of archetypal psychology)
Robert Sardello
Rafael Lopez-Pedraza
Patricia Berry
Alfred Ziegler

Cure of the soul: cura animarum.
 the craft of life: techne tou biou (Plato)

We can be the curates or curators of our own souls, an idea that implies an inner priesthood and a personal religion. To undertake this restoration of soul means we ave to make spirituality a more serious part of everyday life.

The emotional complaints:
Emptiness
Meaninglessness
Vague depression
Disillusionment about marriage, family, and relationship
A loss of values
Yearning for personal fulfillment
A hunger for spirituality

All of these symptoms reflect a loss of soul and let us know that the soul craves.We yearn excessively for entertainment, power, intimacy, sexual fulfillment, and material things, and we think we can find these things if we discover the right relationship or job, the right church or therapy. But without soul, whatever we find will be unsatisfying, for what we truly long for is the soul in each of these areas. Lacking that soulfulness, we attempt to gather these alluring satisfactions to us in great masses, thinking apparently that quantity will make up for lack of quality.

"therapy" refers to service to the gods.(Socrates)

Apuleius (Roman writer): Everyone should know that you can't live in any other way than by cultivating the soul.

Epicurus: cultivating the simple pleasure.

Soul is nothing like ego(self). Soul is closely connected to fate, and the turns of fate almost always go counter to the expectations and often to the desires of the ego. Soul is the font of who we are, and yet it is far beyond our capacity to devise and to control. We can cultivate, tend, enjoy, and participate in the things of the soul, but we can't outwit it or manage it or shape it to the designs of a willful ego.

Care of the soul is not solving the puzzle of life; quite the opposite, it is an appreciation of the paradoxical mysteries that blend light and darkness into the grandeur of what human life and culture can be.

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.
---John Keats

Care of the soul is not 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. The word care implies a way of responding to expressions of the soul that is not heroic and muscular. Cura means several things: attention, devotion, husbandry, adorning the body, healing, managing, being anxious for, and worshiping the gods.

"Soul" is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance.

Care of the soul begins with observance of how the soul manifests itself and how it operates. We can't care for the soul unless we are familiar with its ways. Observation is a word from ritual and religion. It means to watch out for but also to keep and honor, as in the observation of a holiday. The -serv- in observation originally referred to tending sheep.

This definition of caring for the soul is minimalist. It has to do with modest care and not miraculous cure. Therapy sometimes emphasizes change so strongly that people often neglect their own natures and tantalized by images of some ideal normality and health that may always be out of reach. By trying to avoid human mistakes and failures, we move beyond the reach of soul.

James Hillman: The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

It is the soul that makes us human.

To feel and imagine may not sound like much. But in care of the soul there is trust that nature heals, that much can accomplished by not-doing.

Paracelsus (16th century physician): The physician is only the servant of nature, not her master. Therefore, it behooves medicine to follow the will of nature.

In caring for the soul, a symptom has its own will and that "curing" in some way means following that will.

Observance has considerable power.

Modern interventional therapy sometimes tries to solve specific problems and can therefore be carried out on a short-term basis. But care of the soul never ends.

Every ending is a beginning. The life of the soul is a continual going over and over of the material of life.

Storytelling is an excellent way of caring for the soul. It helps us see the themes that circle in our lives, the deep themes that tell the myths we live.

Taking an interest in one's own soul requires a certain amount of space for reflection and appreciation. A little distance allows us to see our own complexity. Love of the soul asks for some appreciation for its complexity.

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.