A Tortuous Path of Soul Loss

A Tortuous Path of Soul Loss

If I sincerely choose a spiritual path, I will be able to learn to spin straw into gold, to use my inner pain and anguish to burn through to soul. When I feel lost to myself, I will see it as a symptom that I need my care and attention. I will become kinder and take better care of myself so that I can again feel found and seen. It is part of the human condition that I can become alienated from soul.

Alienation is a symptom of soul loss.
 

What shamans traditionally called soul loss we now think of as emptiness, alienation, or pain... There is a hole where once was soul. The crisis seizes us when we're in the steely grip of grief, betrayal, physical terror, numbing routine, or an unauthentic life... How is it that for the soul to be truly moved... a "tortured psychology" may be necessary? That there is an "unfathomable longing in the soul to vex itself," as Edgar Allan Poe darkly described it? That the first step may be to lose the way? To lose our soul so that we may regain it?... Though the ferocious reality of soul crisis may often be sanitized today with clinical nomenclature, the ancients said it best: People can and do lose their souls.
Phil Cousineau