Dear reader, it has been many months since my last missive. There are any number of worldly matters that have conspired to claim to my spare hours, which are tedious to tell.
What may be more interesting to recount is an internal sea change, still very much in process, which is taking me away from familiar conceptual landmarks and attenuating my confidence that I have something interesting to say. I am mostly in learning mode. But now with the start of a new year, and a number of new subscribers, I summon the resolve to attempt an initial sketch of where I find myself and how I got here. Perhaps it will create some useful resonance in the labyrinth of your own wandering.
For the past 5 months, I participated in an online training with Francis Weller called Entering the Healing Ground: Grief Ritual Leadership Training. Weller is a psychotherapist and soul activist who is working to regrow vital rituals, such as communal grieving, that have been abandoned by modern Western culture in our manic pursuit of Progress. In the midst of my own grief over my mother's death in 2020, I found his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, which articulates in bracing detail the many unacknowledged sorrows that attend modern life. Highly recommended
The training offered a sumptuous banquet of ideas and practices, but was also frustratingly intangible. The leaders tried admirably to help us stay grounded in our own sensual experience, but the group connection was tenuous and unsatisfying. How intimate can we really be with a grid of faces in a Zoom gallery? There was a tinge of sad irony in the fact that we were gathering virtually to work - in part - with the grief of living in an age of isolation and disconnection from our physical, earthly existence.
I imagine I will eventually offer some sort of grief rituals myself, at my yoga studio, but I need more time to integrate the material. In the meantime, a more immediate effect of the training has been a new line of personal and professional inquiry into the realm of psyche, the world of images and meanings that sits at the crossroads between the material and spiritual realms.
I found Weller to be tremendously inspiring - wise, articulate, humble - and I had the natural reaction of “I want to know what he knows.” He used the word soul a number of times, and I realized I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by it. Is it the same as Spirit? Self? Atman? Francis studied with James Hillman, himself a student of Carl Jung, so I sought answers in the thought of both of these remarkable men, which has led to a broader program of study. So far it has been both fruitful and mystifying.
I am hesitant to write much more, as my understanding is still so partial. What I can say is that I am realizing, a bit belatedly and sheepishly, that the Western1 traditions of psychology and philosophy (which merge once you go back far enough) offer many riches that are worth exploring for someone with yogic inclinations. In fact, there is a long tradition of “Western Yoga” that can be traced back through alchemists and Christian mystics to the pre-Socratic philosophers2. As a descendent of the West, my psyche resonates with the images and dilemmas of this cultural sphere more than those that emerge from India or China. Of course I can still enjoy the Ramayana, but it will take more work to invest its symbols with the power and nuance carried by, say, Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
To put it another way, as Hillman observes in this epic 7 hour seminar, if I don’t consciously account for the history I carry in my Western psyche, I am bound to project its shadow onto any “foreign” tradition that I attempt to practice. I will mostly see my own “cultural face” even as I seek to escape it. Particularly, Christianity, capitalism and science cast archetypal shadows over anything put forward today as modern yoga3. If I really want to understand my samskaras - the habits of mind that bind my actions and perceptions - I might do well to study the Bible or Darwin at least as much as the Bhagavad Gita.
Keep in mind, for Jung and others, shadow isn’t inherently negative in a moral sense, but rather what lies outside the acceptable bounds of normal ego consciousness. Both demons and angels dwell there. And the idea from James Hillman isn’t to exhaustively empty the shadow, or figure it out, but to open up lines of fruitful communication via imagination, fantasy and dreams. His writing is poetic and circular, seeking to keep ideas in play rather than resolve them into certainties. My inner metaphysician - yearning for some crystalline spiritual Truth - find this frustrating, but my inner artist loves it.
Anyways, here’s a bit of what I came across regarding the notion of soul, from Hillman’s book Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, page 16-17:
The soul is a deliberately ambiguous concept resisting all definition in the same manner as do all ultimate symbols which provide the root metaphors for the systems of human thought… We are not able to use the word in an unambiguous way, even though we take it to refer to that unknown human factor which makes meaning possible, which turns events into experiences, and which is communicated in love.
How refreshingly honest to admit deliberate ambiguity! I have often longed for this from my yoga teachers.
'[S]oul' refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance soul makes possible, whether in love or religious concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by ‘soul’ I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy- that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.
This! The recognition that any moment of experience is woven from a tapestry of meanings and symbols, that there is no such thing as an objective, bare perception of reality. The notion of objectivity itself is in fact another fantasy - a fruitful one, to be sure, but still a story among others.
Psychology as an objective science is forever impossible once one has recognized that objectivity is itself a poetic genre… a mode that constructs the world so that things appear as sheer things (not faces, not animated, not with interiority), subject to will, separate from each other, mute, without sense or passion.
So what is psychology? A story of the psyche (logos = account, story). The story is much weirder than science can handle. The psyche does not even belong to us individually! Francis Weller often reminded us that we are “part of the Dreaming Earth”, or the anima mundi as Jung put it. We are momentary vortices of image and meaning, rhizomatically linked to the sorrows and joys of the rest of the living world - and perhaps the dead as well.
I look forward to further travel along these thought-trails. It feel long overdue. To be clear, I am not turing my back on yoga or what I’ve received from the Indian lineages in which I studied. Rather, I am hopeful that a more nuanced account of the Western psyche can point the way to a more mature yoga that consciously integrates the psychic inheritance of the West (rather than pretending it doesn’t exist and have it show up dysfunctionally).
Over the next months, I hope to continue posting excerpts from my explorations into my Western lineages alongside tentative commentary and poetic speculation. Thanks for tagging along!
I take Western to mean “the vast cultural sphere characterised by the Hellenic-Abrahamic synthesis”, described further here: https://shwep.net/info/glossary/.
See the amazing Secret History of Western Esotericism podcast, and the work of Peter Kingsley.
Lots of good work being done to explore how the Western shadow is playing out in modern yoga. See Selling Yoga by Andrea Jain and Inhaling Spirit by Anja Foxen.