FAQ

I define "soul" similar to how Bill Plotkin, PhD construes it: "a person or thing's unique ecological niche in the Earth community." Soul refers to the way we embody and carry out the purpose we are meant to manifest in the world, as unique individuals with a unique role to play in the larger scheme of things. Soul designates not a "thing," "substance," "entity," or "realm," but a characteristic pattern of tangibly creating and sharing our particular skills, abilities, vision, and talents with the world.

Soul work does not necessarily need to be understood as "spiritual." Technically, spiritual practice and spiritual experience is distinct from soul care.

The spiritual path is associated with God, the Divine, the Transcendent, Universal Consciousness, the transpersonal unity of all life, etc. It is the realm of universal truths, cosmic interconnection, theology, enlightenment via transcendence, all the "big picture" questions, perspectives, and experiences.

The path of soul care can definitely be related to a spiritual journey, but it is distinct from this. Soul work concerns not transcendence, but immanence. It is about more fully and completely embodying -- literally, tangibly -- the contingent complexities that make each of us irreducibly unique individuals. It is about more fully integrating with the natural and social ecologies we live in, not by conforming to the dominant norms of those ecologies but by carving out a space for ourselves in which, and through which, we can exercise our creative abilities, actualize our vision, and influence the ongoing evolution of life-mind-consciousness by contributing something that nobody else can.

Technically, therefore, you can personally identify as spiritual, religious, agnostic, atheistic, humanistic, or whatever, and still fruitfully engage soul work. You need not have a theological or doctrinal perspective or commitment of any kind, and you can also do soul work from any established  religious, spiritual, or theological tradition.

Soul Care and psychotherapy do not need to be mutually-exclusive; they can complement one another. Psychotherapy, generally speaking, is a clinical practice concerned with the inner psychic life of a person, addressing what traditional psychological science and the medical establishment would view as "neuroses," "pathologies," "mental disorders/illnesses," and trauma. Psychotherapy is more focused on resolving mental and emotional distress through any number of clinical techniques such as cognitive behavioral therapy, EMDR, psychoanalysis, acceptance and commitment therapy, etc.

Soul Care, in contrast, takes a fundamentally different approach to helping people live a full, authentic, healthy, satisfying life. The emphasis is not on problematic symptoms but on supporting a person in holistically maturing and developing by enhancing and refining their ability to more thoroughly embody themselves and the unique gifts they can offer the world. The approach views many of the "problems" people have as indications that something in their psycho-somatic-soulful ecology (their holistic Self) needs resourcing, cultivation, and/or expression, rather than viewing such problems as symptoms of an underlying disorder, disease, neurosis, pathology, or illness.

Although it's a rough distinction, traditional psychological therapies are individual-inner focused whereas Soul Care is holistic and ecological focused. Engaging in soul work may very well bring about "healing," as it is conceived in a clinical/medical practice, but that is not the explicit intention. The emphasis is on cultivating and optimizing a person's innate wholeness, competency, and capability. As there are literally hundreds of diverse yet overlapping theories, techniques, and modalities within the broad sphere of "psychotherapy" today, there will be some similarities between soul work and therapy. It is important to maintain a distinction, however, because soul work guides do not diagnose or treat any medical or clinical conditions; they operate from a fundamentally different framework of human development, maturation, and health/dis-ease.

 Ultimately, soul work and psychotherapy can be engaged in tandem, each complementing the other.

Somatics is very important in Soul Care because "soul" is all about more fully and literally embodying the functional-ecological-creative role we were born to manifest. On my approach, soul is not some esoteric, mystical, other-worldly thing that requires escaping from or transcending material reality to access or connect with. Instead, soul is quite literally embodied; it is tangible, physical, sensuous, kinesthetic, aesthetic, moving, shapely, dynamic, and ecologically-embedded.

It is only in modern age of mechanistic-physicalist-reductionistic science that "mind" and "body" have been defined dualistically -- i.e., separately and independently. This parallels another false duality between "material" and "spiritual" reality. I do not view the world through any such dualities. Somatics, then, is fundamentally a way to experience the unity of these various forms and "levels" of life/reality that really only exist in concept, and abstractly. Since soul work is all about (re)creating wholeness and integration through an ecological perspective, the "bodily" aspect of our lives must be a key element in our "psycho-emotional" development and maturation. From the orientation of Soul Care and Somatics, it is all wrapped up together; we cannot actually separate our physicality from our mentality, our emotionality from our embodiment, or our imagination from our tangible sensing.

"Somatics," thus, refers to a diverse set of practices, experiences, and techniques that help us experience this holistic integration of the multidimensional nature of human cognition as an ecological phenomenon, rather than a reductively defined "internal, mental" activity.