The older I get, the harder it becomes for me to speak clearly or convincingly of things if they aren’t connected  in some way with what I have experienced first hand. Thus, what I have to say about living a symbolic life is unabashedly grounded in the personal, but I think it has general applicability and some general conclusions can be drawn from it.

Let me begin with a quote from James Hollis: ” If one is not to surrender to the easy assurance of the herd…then as Jung said,  ‘ he has to go on a Quest, he has to find out what his soul says.’ ”  Living symbolic lives means listening to what our souls say. The soul speaks in many ways. It speaks to us,  for example, through dreams, events, people, visions, stories, symptoms, nature, music, and art. The soul’s language is often nonverbal and almost always nonlinear. The soul speaks in symbol, myth and metaphor.

I recall first discovering that my soul had a voice of its own when I was twelve. Several years after my mother’s death, my father married a woman who was horrified to learn that his three children had grown up unchurched.A rigorous plan of indoctrination, hymn singing and regular church attendance was promptly initiated. I wanted desperately to belong, to find a home, to gain approval and acceptance. As time went on, I became increasingly aware that all this would come when I was “saved”, when I would walk to the front of the church as the congregation sang “Just As I Am”. I also knew that coming forward would bring me a lot of attention. I wanted all of those things, wanted them badly, but something would not let me  go forward. Week after week passed and I couldn’t do it, and indeed, I didn’t do it. I remember being puzzled at myself. Before then, I had not noticed any particular inability to do what was needed to gain acceptance, approval, and attention, and there have certainly been times since then when I have taken the easy way, when there was not congruence between what I knew to be true internally and what my outer words and behavior conveyed. But not that time. That time, I listened to what my soul had to say. In that case, the soul did not speak through dreams, stories, other people, art, nature, music, or symptoms. It spoke silently but compellingly and the result was that I was strangely unable to do something that seemed to be to my advantage.

My soul and I have been in intermittent dialogue since then. To be honest, much of the time I am not aware of  being offered counsel, guidance, or correction, although dream work, journaling  in the form of letters addressed to Abiding Presence,  and soulcollage have helped me develop a sensitivity to soul and every now and then something breaks through my habitual patterns of thought, emotional reactivity, and behavior and redefines my sense of who I am, who I think others are, and what I believe the world to be.  In tomorrow’s post, I will share a few things disciplined reflection on this experience at age twelve and other experiences since then have shown me about what is required to live a symbolic life.