Soul Notes: Reflections, Prompts, and Resources for the Journey
This space is a living companion to our soul work — a collection of writings, practices, and inspirations to support your inner unfolding.
You’ll find short essays on the mythopoetic path, wellness writing prompts to spark reflection, musings from the Walk & Talk podcast, and curated tools and resources to deepen your journey toward your future self.
Power of a Dream
My belief is that the soul - another word for the psyche or the totality of the self - communicates most readily and most frequently through the nightly journey into the realm of dreams. It is no wonder that Freud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious or that Jung spent intense hours unfolding and amplifying the meaning in his own and clients’ dreams. It is because dreams are so valuable for receiving messages from the soul that I encourage all my clients to keep dream journals.
Belonging and The Great Resignation
I have a sense that the American worker in the pandemic and The Great Resignation are linked in the same way that a frog is linked to the proverbial pot of slowly boiled water: There does come a tipping point when the frog notices the heat and reacts by leaping out of the pot. The pandemic gave us the chance to lift our heads long enough from the desk to notice we were uncomfortably warm at work… and we’ve jumped… and we’re still hopping!
Finding Soul Amidst the Digital Deluge
I suggest we need look no further for a diagnosis of our current mental and emotional predicament than this environment in which we are flailing and failing to flourish in a flood of information: a digital data deluge!
Optima: A Love Poem
I believe in love at first sight:
I once bought a book for its cover. . .
Finding the “Yin” in Culture
I was trying to think of how to explain the loss of the so-called "feminine values" - all that is YIN as opposed to YANG in our current times. It feels like an important exercise - like protecting an endangered species…
Monopoly Musings
How many of us have turned away from the great American past time of “real life monopoly?” How many millions of us have snuck away from the table where the winners are taking away houses and building more hotels and sending other players to jail, never to pass go, never to collect another paycheck. We resigned from that game and we’re outside in the twilight of the American dream…
The New Divorce
Isn't it curious that there is one relationship – that with our family of origin – which it's considered a failure if we do not eventually move out and leave them. While another relationship - marriage - is considered a failure if we do move out and leave them.
The Peace of Great Cities
The peace of great prairies be for you.Listen among windplayers in cornfields,The wind learning over its oldest music... (from Harvest Poems - Carl Sandburg)
The Peace of Great Cities – A Response to Sandburg
Love & the Long Body
The poet was correct in saying "the child is father of the man." Our childhood drama sets the stage for the dramas that will be enacted by our future self. The scripts we create and the characters we conjure up later in life are all in service to the psychological puzzles left over from childhood.
Reflections on the Mythopoetic
The Joseph Campbell Foundation proclaimed its mission boldly at its inception back in 1990 with the intriguing phrase: “a not-for-profit organization seeking to formulate a mythopoetic response to contemporary literalism and cultural retrenchment.” This deliciously difficult phrase holds what is, in many ways, the clue to what Campbell’s work is all about.
Seeing the Shadow
Before we get up on our high horses, it is a good idea to recognize efforts to demonize “others” as another opportunity for spotting "the shadow" of our own, all too recent, excesses of puritan zeal and religious violence…
The Way of the Celestial Lights
The images of the sun, the moon, the planets moving in their spheres-the very idea that we are part of a celestial dance that progresses in this serene, dignified fashion eon after eon with great predictability-every planet moving through its great elliptical phases ~ All of these energies impacting our little planet and we, as little, human receptors of these vast energies…
Every Generation
Dream Image: I am climbing down a ladder that is just metal rings bolted into the side of a steep stone wall. It seems to be some kind of chamber, or maybe the cavern left over after mineral excavation. It's enormous, silent and eerie…
How to Say “I Love You”
I've been thinking about the many different ways that we show our love, concern, affection, interest, passion and care for the other beings in our experience. The diversity of relationships that we engage in every day mandates that there be a diversity of forms with which to express our relatedness - and finding the right form to fit, perfectly, the kind of relationship we have with each person, plant or pet is one of the arts demanding of human beings.
Ships Passing in the Night
In conversation together we have articulated the existential truth that even among couples with long and happy marriages, we can really only be to each other as “ships passing in the night.”
The Good that I Would Do
Since I know better, why can't I live better?
We are justified in returning to this troubling question again and again – it is certainly at the heart of ethics - and the core of my teaching thus far has been to acquaint students with the discrepancies between what we say we value, by our language, and what we demonstrably value by our actions, both as individuals and as a nation…
Emily in the Sky
As those of you who have flown Southwest will recall, seats are not assigned. You draw a boarding number and then look for any open seat when you get on. I was about in the middle of the pack so there were plenty of middle seats left when I boarded, and therefore I must assume that some guardian spirit or daimon was guiding my choice when I took the middle seat in row seven next to Emily who was at the window…
The Congregation of Rock-n-Roll
Rock ‘n’ roll was a celebration of congregation. But we don’t have the brains to answer the question of what it was that rock ‘n’ roll tried to start and has failed to finish: Who are we? What is our function? What is our worth?…
Fault Lines
Vishnu swirled the liquid soma in his chalice, idly watching the bubbles come together in a clump in the center as they always did. He blew on the bubbles until they reluctantly released their surface tension and floated across the golden liquid, seeking the edges of the cup…
Jane Jacobs & The Mothers
Rather than seeing a building which had fallen into disrepair as a rotting log that simply needed to be hauled away and the lot bulldozed for some high-rise, Jane saw every fallen log as the potential for a new ecosystem of important lifeforms that would regenerate the forest floor and thus feed the ongoing life stream of the larger ecosystem in which it was embedded.
Writing Prompts
The practice of journaling has been shown to be a great tool for improving our wellbeing:
gaining insight
calming anger
soothing grief
clarifying questions
solving dilemmas
articulating emotions
finding joy
This selection of Writing Wellness Prompts are similar to the kinds of activities that you will find in the “Beyond the Great Resignation” courses on this site, but there are no exact duplications, so feel free to enjoy these according to you need!
This is a frequently asked question?
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
This is a frequently asked question?
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
This is a frequently asked question?
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
This is a frequently asked question?
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
This is a frequently asked question?
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
This is a frequently asked question?
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Music to Soothe the Soul
-
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
-
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
-
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
-
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Why Self-Care is the first step
All great endeavors are better when started after a good rest and a hearty meal . . . just ask Bilbo Baggins!
But more seriously, we have fallen prey to the pernicious idea that he who dies with the most emails in the Inbox is the winner. That’s crazy! We really don’t do a good job of taking care of ourselves. We seem to think that leisure is a dirty word or something done only by the super rich or wastrels.
The truth is that we can’t really change direction unless we’re first willing to stop. Let me show you how.
