Jean Shinoda Bolen: Soul work
“You have the need and the right to spend part of your life caring for your soul. It is not easy. You have to resist the demands of the work-oriented, often defensive, element in your psyche that measures life only in terms of output - how much you produce - not in terms of the quality of your life experiences. To be a soulful person means to go against all the pervasive, prove-yourself values of our culture and instead treasure what is unique and internal and valuable in yourself and your own personal evolution.” Jean Shinoda Bolen
We can learn so much about ourselves and our souls from Jean Shinoda Bolen. Her book, Goddess in Every Woman teaches us about the Artemis, the Athena, the Hestia, the Hera, the Demeter, the Persephone, the Aphrodite in our own psyches and how each positively relates to and cares for our soul and at times negatively can be harmful to our soul.
Bolen’s writings bring to us with so much wisdom for this journey. She empowers us during difficult situations to stay the heroine, knowing and believing that answers will come and that things will change instead of our regressing into the victim where all our energy sees the situation as caused by others. When we become the victim, our soul cannot breathe.
I love the story of Psyche’s journey to reunite with her husband, Eros, the masculine part of her personality. One of her difficult tasks is to sort a large number of different seeds. The sorting is done by an out of the box, unusual group of insects or ants that appear. These ants may represent our intuitive function, something beyond cognitive ability that is out of the box inside of us. In confusing situations, this natural intuition will come if we can stay grounded as the heroine.
Other tasks for women to connect to their masculine involve allowing the feminine to gain power but remaining compassionate, learning to see the big picture, developing the ability to say no. These stories of difficult situations where we have the opportunity to learn about ourselves are some of the many ways we take care of our soul and let it take deep breaths and wake up from a deep sleep. This is soul work.
Joanna joannaseibert.com