Why Soul Work?

Rather than therapy?

First, let me say that in no substantive way am I simply "against" therapy, or "anti-therapy." In the FAQ, I discuss the differences between soul work and psychotherapy, as traditionally and commonly practiced. The experiences can work together, and when it's done well, psychotherapy actually shares a number of elements with soul work.

Nonetheless, the fair question remains: why would a person choose to do soul work instead of therapy, if they are interested in such an experience? Goodness, I could write an entire book in response to this question! In essence, though, I see two primary, fundamental, and crucial differences between soul work and standard approaches to psychotherapy.

First, psychotherapy is a professional, clinical service that emerged from the field of modern psychology more generally, and modern psychology is a fundamentally flawed perspective on human life, health, and disease. There are countless reasons for this, and no simple explanation (hence being able to write a book about it). Two key factors stand out, however.

1) Modern psychology as a field of scientific study developed within a mechanistic and pathological paradigm: the dominant worldview at the time viewed the Earth and all her inhabitants and phenomena as a vast machine that could be understood by breaking them down into their component parts and analyzing how those parts worked.

2) Psychology also adopted the approach of modern medicine, which was focused heavily (and sometimes exclusively) on disease pathology. In this approach, a doctor or clinician's job was to diagnose a patient or client to determine what problem they had (i.e., what was "defective" in their system, like a mechanic looks for a defective part in a car) and declare a label for that problem, whether a condition, illness, disease, or syndrome.

Second, modern - and much contemporary - psychology is excessively individualistic. For many researchers and clinicians, "psychology" definitionally refers to "mental events" or "cognitive processes" internal to individual subjects. On this approach, "mind" as such is a mental phenomenon occurring inside a person's head and manifesting outwardly - and secondarily - through behavior, communication, and the like.

As I detailed in my PhD dissertation, however, these approaches were based on very limited and poor quality evidence (or total lack of evidence, in some cases). Much of modern psychology relies on dubious concepts invented by a handful of peculiar white European men who lived in highly specific social conditions unrelated to the vast majority of the human population, both in their own times and especially compared to people today. The "fathers" (who were the mothers? this is rarely, if ever, discussed in college courses on psychology) of modern psychology lived in sociocultural-economic-political-ecological conditions vastly different from what we experience today. This isn't to say that they couldn't have tracked anything accurate or characteristic about humans. It's just to say that some of their core assumptions and beliefs were forged through experiences and perspectives that have virtually no substantive connection or relevance to how most people experience their humanness today.

Over the course of the 20th century and the past couple decades, researchers and clinicians from hundreds of unique scientific disciplines and methodologies have generated a massive body of evidence that undermines most of the core tenets of modern psychology. This has resulted in what the esteemed philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn has called a "paradigm shift" in the life and mind sciences (inclusive of biology, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, ecology, evolutionary theory, neurophysiology, neuropragmatism, dynamic systems theory, phenomenology, consciousness studies, etc.). This means that the basic perspectives of these sciences must be revised if they are to accord with the best available evidence. The revision required here is not just tweaking details in an existing theory; a paradigm shift entails a comprehensive re-thinking of a field or discipline of study.

It turns out that soul work, when understood in the biological-ecological sense I detail on the Detailed Discussion - Soul Care page, is much more aligned with the paradigm currently emerging in the life-mind sciences. Moreover, soul work does away with the pathologizing and mechanizing perspectives of modern psychology and medicine. In soul work, we do not look for what's "wrong" with you, and then try to fix that. We take a fundamentally different approach that views living systems (of all scales, from cells to organisms to ecosystems to planets) as inherently competent, intelligent, innately whole, and capable of self-healing and adapting to the most complex and difficult challenges imaginable. Soul care is a characteristically developmental experience, not a medical or clinical practice. A core belief and assertion of soul care is that people do not need professional experts to bestow on them special powers or knowledge to "fix" them; rather, people need guidance and support to be connected with their own expertise, their self-knowledge as manifestations of the incalculable intelligence of all life and their abilities to self-heal and evolve as all life can.

In the shortest statement possible, soul work follows the approach to teaching, learning, and growth discussed by Sherri Mitchell in her book Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change:

"The primary role of an external teacher is to empower your relationship with your inner teacher. Your inner teacher is the all-knowing part of you that is connected to the Creator and the entire creation."

The driving conviction behind my approach to Soul Care and Somatics is that in order to mature beyond the age of social and individual "patho-adolescence," as Bill Plotkin calls it, we must individually and collectively become our own experts. We must grow beyond an era of social, psychological, and medical help that relies on professional, credentialed experts to tell us how to live, and recover our ability to self-determine how to live based on the knowledge we innately possess and the knowledge we can gain through direct experience of life and self-directed learning.