Sometimes the change arrives suddenly, through a death, betrayal, abandonment, illness, humiliation, divorce, loss of faith, or traumatic event that divides life into a recognizable before and after. At other times, there is no single moment we can identify. The wounds may have developed slowly through years of instability, neglect, shame, loneliness, fear, or the persistent experience of not being seen, protected, loved, or understood. Some wounds occur so early in life that we have no conscious memory of their beginning. We know them only through the ways they continue to live within us.

We recognize them in relationships that repeatedly awaken the same fears, in situations that provoke emotional responses larger than the immediate moment seems to require, and in the stories we have told ourselves for so long that we no longer remember when we began believing them. We recognize them in our bodies, our dreams, our defenses, our anger, our longing, and sometimes in the strange feeling that different parts of ourselves have become separated from one another.

Something happened, and the Soul responded.

The ancient Greek story of Chiron offers one image through which we might begin imagining this experience. Chiron, the wise centaur and healer, is pierced by a poisoned arrow and receives a wound that cannot easily be removed or healed. The wound becomes part of the life he must carry. In my practice of Mindfulness Centered Soul Tending, I have come to call this kind of originating psychic injury the Chiroan Wound.

Yet not every wound to the Soul feels like a piercing. Some experiences feel more like a tearing apart, a severing, or a fragmentation of psychic life. The Egyptian story of Osiris gives us one such image. Osiris is murdered and dismembered, his body cut into pieces and scattered across the land, and his story becomes one of searching, gathering, and re-membering what has been torn apart. The Scottish stories of the Selkies offer another, more distinctly feminine image of psychic wounding: the seal-woman whose skin is taken and hidden from her, leaving her estranged from her natural form and compelled to inhabit a life on land that is not wholly her own. Her eventual search for the hidden skin becomes an image of recovering what has been taken, forgotten, or exiled and returning to a deeper relationship with the life of Soul that has remained beneath an adapted identity.

All of these images speak to something familiar in human experience. Sometimes suffering enters like an arrow, piercing and wounding. Sometimes suffering cuts deeply, divides and scatters us. Sometimes parts of ourselves retreat, disappear, or become hidden because they cannot safely remain connected with the rest of psychic life. The person who survived the original experience may continue functioning, working, loving, caring for others, and moving through the world while something within remains vigilant, frightened, angry, ashamed, or lost.

Whether we imagine this wound as Chiron’s poisoned arrow, the dismemberment of Osiris, or the estrangement and dispossession of the Selkie, the deeper image is one of suffering entering psychic life and changing its terrain.

The wound, however, is only the beginning of the story.

What Gathers Around the Wound

When we are wounded, we do not merely preserve a memory of what happened. The psyche responds creatively and protectively to what it has endured.

A frightened child may become watchful. A shamed child may learn how to disappear. Someone repeatedly abandoned may become fiercely independent or painfully afraid of being left again. A person who has felt powerless may discover aggression as a form of protection. Someone who cannot escape an unbearable situation may find refuge in imagination, fantasy, achievement, caretaking, perfectionism, prayer, substances, work, withdrawal, or any number of ways of surviving what could not otherwise be endured.

Many of these responses begin long before we have language for them. They become woven into the ways we move through relationships and understand ourselves. Over time, a complicated psychic substance gathers around the wound, composed of memory, bodily sensation, hypervigilance, grief, fear, shame, fantasy, desire, defensiveness, anger, dreams, images, stories, and complexes.

In my work, I call this accumulated psychic material the Prote Hyle.

The term Prote Hyle is borrowed from the Greek philosophical expression prōtē hylē (πρώτη ὕλη), meaning “first matter” or “prime matter,” a concept later rendered in Latin-language alchemical writings as prima materia. In its original philosophical setting, the term referred to the underlying matter from which form emerges. I borrow the image here for the language of Psychopoiesis, using Prote Hyle to name the accumulated psychic material that gathers around the wounds and experiences of a human life. Memory, bodily sensation, fear, grief, shame, fantasy, desire, defensive adaptation, dream, image, and story become the first matter with which the work of Soul Tending begins. I do not mean to suggest that the Greek philosophers themselves used prōtē hylē in this psychological sense; rather, I am drawing upon the ancient image of first matter because it offers a rich and fitting language for the material from which transformation may emerge.

The tender work of Soul Tending begins with this Prote Hyle, the raw material our lives have actually given us and the psychic substance that has accumulated around what happened.

This distinction matters because the Prote Hyle is not merely psychological garbage waiting to be removed. Hypervigilance may create tremendous suffering later in life, but vigilance may once have protected something genuinely vulnerable. Aggression can become destructive, yet aggression may also have developed as a guardian when no other protection was available. Withdrawal can isolate us, but there may have been a time when disappearing was safer than being seen. Compulsive self-reliance can leave a person painfully alone, yet it may have been formed in a world where depending upon others was repeatedly dangerous or disappointing. Even the parts of ourselves we eventually experience as troublesome often carry a history.

Soul Tending begins by becoming curious about that history.

Rather than immediately asking, ‘How do I get rid of this?’ we might begin to wonder, ‘What has this been doing here? What has it protected? What does it fear? What story does it carry? What image does it reveal?’ The question changes because the relationship changes.

Soul Is Not a Problem to Be Solved

We live in a culture filled with the language of improvement. We are encouraged to become healthier, happier, more productive, more regulated, more successful, more integrated, and increasingly optimized versions of ourselves. Even spirituality can quietly become another improvement project in which meditation, prayer, therapy, retreats, exercise, and personal development are recruited into the ongoing effort to become the person we believe we should have been all along.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to suffer less. Healing matters. Safety matters. Emotional and psychological health matter. Sometimes symptoms need treatment, crises require intervention, and professional mental health care is essential. Soul Tending, however, asks a somewhat different question…

What if not everything within us needs to be corrected before it can be beheld, heard, and attended to?

What if some of the material we have learned to call dysfunctional, irrational, unwanted, or broken also carries images, memories, adaptations, and possibilities that deserve our attention? What if our suffering—the raw material of a human life—also contains the seeds of healing?

The word Psychopoiesis helps me name this way of approaching Soul.

Psyche (ψυχή) means Soul, while poiesis (ποίησις) refers to making, creating, or bringing something forth. Psychopoiesis can therefore be understood as Soul-making.

I do not mean that the ego manufactures Soul as though we arrive in the world without one and must construct it through enough effort, insight, or spiritual practice. I mean that Soul is continually making and remaking a human life through our encounters with suffering and beauty, body and dream, relationship and solitude, grief and desire, memory and imagination, nature and the Sacred.

Psychopoiesis is already happening.

What we cultivate through Soul Tending is the capacity to participate more consciously in what is already taking place.

For this reason, I prefer the language of tending rather than fixing, and increasingly even prefer tending to the more familiar language of spiritual direction. We do not make a garden grow by pulling on the stems and demanding that the plants mature more quickly, nor do we “direct” a garden toward some predetermined outcome. The word direction can carry an authoritative quality, evoking images of the director of a play or the director of an organization, someone who determines where things should go and how they should unfold. Soul Tending asks for a different posture. We tend the soil, provide water, notice what needs light and what needs shade, and prune carefully when something has become overgrown. We pay attention to what is emerging and learn the rhythms of the garden rather than imposing our timetable upon it. In the same way, the work of Soul Tending is less about directing another person’s Spiritual Journey and more about helping to create and maintain the conditions in which Soul can be listened to, accompanied, and allowed to unfold.

Within this practice of patient tending, we listen for what is trying to emerge. We make room for dream, image, contradiction, grief, longing, fear, memory, body, and imagination. We become less concerned with forcing transformation and more interested in creating the conditions through which transformation can be consciously tended.

This is where meditation and mindfulness become essential to the larger framework of Soul Tending. Meditation cultivates the capacity to remain present to what is happening without immediately grasping it, rejecting it, explaining it away, or becoming completely identified with it. We cannot consciously participate in transformation if we cannot remain present with the material being transformed.

Staying Close to the Images of Soul

My understanding of Psychopoiesis is deeply influenced by James Hillman and the tradition of Archetypal Psychology. Hillman repeatedly returned psychology to a perspective rooted in psyche-as-Soul and resisted the impulse to explain psychic life too quickly.

A dream, fantasy, emotion, symptom, or recurring image may certainly invite interpretation, but Archetypal Psychology asks us not to rush past the image in order to arrive at an explanation. Sometimes explanation closes the very door through which Soul is trying to speak.

A dream of walking through a dark forest may be more than evidence of anxiety. A recurring image of drowning may deserve more than an easy interpretation. An angry figure appearing in dreams may not need to be immediately corrected, defeated, or transformed into something more pleasant. A frightened animal standing at the edge of consciousness may be asking something of us that cannot be answered by too quickly deciding what the animal represents and then moving on. Images have depth, and when we remain close to them, they often begin to change the way we understand our own experience.

Someone who feels abandoned may begin to recognize exile as an ancient human experience rather than merely as evidence of personal defectiveness. A grieving person may find themselves walking imaginatively beside Demeter searching for Persephone. Someone who feels psychologically scattered may encounter the dismembered Osiris and discover that the work is not to pretend nothing was torn apart, but to begin the patient work of finding, gathering, and re-membering what has been lost. Someone who has lived for years estranged from a deeper sense of their own nature may recognize themselves in the Selkie whose sealskin has been taken and hidden, leaving her to inhabit a life that is not entirely her own. Her search for the lost skin becomes an image of recovering what has been forgotten, concealed, or exiled and returning to a more intimate relationship with the life of Soul that has remained beneath an adapted identity.

These myths do not tell us who we literally are. I am not Chiron; I am not Osiris; and I am not the Selkie. Mythological and archetypal images become valuable because they widen the frame through which we understand our own experience. They allow us to see that our personal suffering participates in patterns larger and older than the story told by the triumphant ego.

This is part of what I mean by Soul Tending. We allow psychic experience to become imaginal rather than reducing it too quickly to a problem requiring a solution.

The Wound Is Not the Whole Story

Whenever we speak about wounds, trauma, transformation, and Soul-making, there is an important danger to avoid. Suffering should never be romanticized.

The existence of growth does not make trauma good. Wisdom that eventually emerges from grief does not justify the death. Compassion developed through suffering does not mean the suffering was necessary. No one needs to become grateful for abuse, abandonment, betrayal, violence, or loss simply because something meaningful may eventually grow from the long process of surviving and tending what happened. The flower does not justify the wound.

Psychopoiesis does not ask us to bless what injured us. It asks whether we can enter into a different relationship with the psychic material that has gathered around the injury.

The historical event may be unchangeable. We cannot return to childhood and prevent what happened. We cannot undo the death, erase the betrayal, or reconstruct the world exactly as it existed before something was taken from us.

Yet the wound continues to live within psychic material that is present now. The dream is here now. The fear is here now. The shame, anger, longing, bodily memory, defensive pattern, story, and image are here now.

This is the material available for the conscious tending through which we participate in Psychopoiesis.

The Prote Hyle is therefore not evidence that something has gone wrong with the Soul. It is evidence that Soul has been responding.

Some of those responses, however, may now create suffering and require change. Some may have become so rigid that they no longer serve the life for which they were originally formed. Psychopoiesis begins by approaching them with curiosity rather than contempt. We ask what they have carried, what they have protected, and what might become possible when they no longer have to perform the same work in the same way.

The poison and the medicine may be closer together than we imagine.

A Journey Without a Finish Line

I also use the word Psychopoiesis because I want to resist the idea that the Spiritual Journey eventually produces a completed, perfected human being.

There is no graduation from being human because life continues to bring new material. Relationships reveal unfamiliar parts of us, aging changes the body, vocation shifts, people we love die, beliefs change, dreams surprise us, and old wounds reappear in new forms. Experiences we thought we understood may acquire entirely different meanings years later because Soul continues making Soul.

For me, this resonates deeply with the wisdom of the Buddhist tradition and especially the Prajñāpāramitā teachings, where even the path itself is emptied of our ordinary ideas about spiritual achievement. The Spiritual Journey is not a project through which we finally earn a perfected identity. We practice, awaken, forget, remember, become confused, encounter new depths, and begin again.

Psychopoiesis is therefore not something we accomplish. It is an ongoing process in which we consciously participate.

This makes the work more humble and, I believe, more compassionate. I do not need to become a finished version of myself before I can inhabit my life fully. I do not need to eliminate everything wounded, contradictory, frightened, angry, grieving, unfinished, or strange before I can begin living from Soul. Instead, I can cultivate a wiser and more spacious relationship with what is already here.

No Mud, No Lotus

The lotus has become a central image within what I call Middle Way Spirituality, and it may also be the clearest image I know for understanding Psychopoiesis.

Thich Nhat Hanh often taught, “No mud, no lotus.”

A lotus does not grow by escaping the pond. Its roots remain embedded in the mud beneath the water, drawing nourishment from decomposed material that appears dark, murky, and far removed from the beauty of the flower opening above the surface. The mud and the flower belong to the same living process.

In the language of Psychopoiesis, the Prote Hyle is the mud. It is the accumulated matter of our lives: wound, memory, dream, grief, defense, longing, fear, image, body, shame, desire, contradiction, and all those difficult substances we might once have believed needed to disappear before anything beautiful could emerge. The lotus does not purify itself by severing its roots from the mud. It flowers while remaining rooted in the mud.

This image expresses something essential about Middle Way Spirituality. The path does not require us to abandon body for spirit, darkness for light, grief for happiness, or suffering for some purified spiritual realm beyond suffering. Neither does the Middle Way ask us to sink into the mud and make suffering our entire identity.

The lotus belongs to mud and water, darkness and light, root and flower. Its life depends upon relationship with the whole pond.

Psychopoiesis asks something similar of us: we do not transcend the difficult material of our lives, nor do we allow that material to become the whole story of who we are. We remain rooted enough to draw nourishment from the ground in which our lives have actually unfolded while remaining open to whatever new life is still trying to emerge.

Perhaps healing looks less like escaping our wounds and more like learning how to grow from the ground in which we actually find ourselves. Perhaps transformation does not require becoming someone untouched by suffering, but becoming increasingly capable of meeting suffering with awareness, imagination, compassion, discernment, and choice. Soul-making happens whenever we stop treating the mud as evidence that something has gone irreparably wrong and begin listening for what life may still be trying to grow there.

Alchemy and Soul Tending both begin with the material that is present. We begin with the life we actually have: the wound, the body, the dream, the grief, the memory, the fear, the image, the longing, and the contradictions we have not yet learned how to hold. We bring these things into the vessel of attention and meet them with mindfulness, compassionate presence, imagination, curiosity, close listening, and witness. Rather than demanding that the material become something different before we are willing to approach it, we begin by tending what is here.

I name this work Psychopoiesis: the patient, tender, lifelong work of Soul Tending.

Over the past several decades, researchers have attempted to understand the lasting effects of childhood trauma through the study of Adverse Childhood Experiences, more commonly known as ACEs. The widely used ACE questionnaire asks about ten categories of experiences before the age of eighteen: physical, emotional, or sexual abuse; physical or emotional neglect; addiction or serious mental illness in the household; violence in the home; parental separation or divorce; and incarceration of a household member. Each category that applies adds one point, from zero to ten.

The questions themselves are simple. The lives hidden behind them are not.

A checkmark beside the question of physical abuse cannot tell you what it feels like to be a frightened child waiting for an adult’s anger to erupt. A checkmark beside the question of neglect cannot measure the intensity of loneliness, the deep hunger for affection, or the slow realization that the people upon whom you depend may not be able—or willing—to protect you. A question about addiction, mental illness, violence, incarceration, or family instability cannot describe the confusion of growing up in a home where love and danger may occupy the same space.

The landmark ACE research revealed something important: these experiences do not necessarily remain confined to childhood. Researchers found a graded relationship between accumulating early adversity and increased risk for a broad range of psychological, behavioral, and physical difficulties later in life.

To be clear, an ACE score is not a diagnosis, and an ACE score is certainly not a destiny. It cannot tell the whole story of a childhood or predict the life that follows. It cannot measure resilience or the extraordinary capacity of human beings to heal and change. Nor can a number capture the terror of a particular night, the loneliness of a particular year, or the ways a child learns to survive inside a world that does not feel safe.

Still, there is something startling about seeing parts of your childhood reduced to ten questions on a page.

When I answered those questions for myself, nine of them applied.

My ACE score is nine out of ten.

I did not need a questionnaire to tell me that my childhood had been traumatic. My body had known that for most of my life, and the struggles that followed me into adulthood had long testified to wounds that had never fully healed. But the number gave me another way of understanding something I had struggled for years to name: I grew up under circumstances that required my developing mind, body, nervous system, and psyche to learn very early how to survive in the presence of danger and volatility, and in the absence of stability and connection.

I am now a middle-aged man—in fact, rapidly approaching my sixties. I have spent decades engaged in personal inner work, academic study, spiritual discipline, meditation, and the slow work of trying to understand my own psyche. I have healed a great deal and become more capable of recognizing when an old wound is speaking through a present situation.

And yet the effects of early trauma do not disappear because I finally understand them.

That may be one of the hardest realities for people without significant trauma histories to understand. Trauma is not merely something that happened a long time ago. In childhood especially, sustained, inescapable trauma becomes entangled with the physiological, neurological, and psychological processes by which we learn whether the world is safe and what we ourselves are worth. A child does not possess an adult capacity to place frightening experiences into perspective. A traumatized child adapts.

Over time, those adaptations can become part of the neuro-somatic and psychological architecture through which life itself is experienced.

For me, that means things other people may rarely—if ever—need to think about can require tremendous conscious effort on my part. Safety is one of them. Trust is another. Belonging, vulnerability, intimacy, self-worth, and the ability to rest inside the assumption that I am welcome can all become complicated and difficult to experience. For friends, colleagues, loved ones, and romantic partners without significant trauma histories, these experiences may be easy or they may be difficult, but they do not necessarily carry the same underlying burden of danger or the same capacity to overwhelm the nervous system that I so often experience.

I can know intellectually that I am safe while some deeper part of me is still scanning the room for threat. I can know that someone cares for me while simultaneously watching for the change in tone, the withdrawal, the disappointment, or the subtle sign that tells me their care may soon disappear—that abandonment may be just around the corner. I can be invited into belonging and community and still feel, somewhere beneath conscious thought, that I have entered the room under false pretenses and will eventually be discovered as a fraud, a failure, or even a monster.

And then there is shame. Not merely shame about something I have done, but a deeper, more primitive and difficult feeling that something may be fundamentally wrong with me as a person.

I came to understand long ago that childhood trauma can leave behind an almost indelible scar of shame. When the person hurting you is also the person upon whom you depend for safety, love, and survival, the child’s psyche is confronted with a reality that is almost impossible to reconcile. Because the child remains utterly dependent upon that caregiver for safety, love, affirmation, and belonging, they cannot easily accept that the caregiver is unsafe, broken, or incapable of providing the love and protection they need. Consequently, the unbearable contradiction can turn inward. To contain the contradiction, the child’s psyche may come to believe: It must be my fault. There must be something wrong with me. If I were different, better, easier to love, this would not be happening. What begins as an attempt to make psychological sense of an impossible situation can become a deeply embedded way of experiencing the self.

For me, shame has often felt like the core of a nuclear reactor in meltdown—an ever-glowing, ever-radiating center buried deep within my psyche. It has been perhaps my deepest emotional state, almost a default setting beneath all other feelings. Shame does not always announce itself directly. It radiates outward into self-worth, belonging, trust, vulnerability, and intimacy. It can transform any disappointment into evidence of defectiveness, any rejection into confirmation of unworthiness, and even the smallest ordinary human mistake into proof that the old verdict of inner corruption was right all along.

For much of my life, I have lived inside that internal contradiction. I can name my gifts, recognize what I have accomplished, do meaningful work, receive affection from others, and still feel another voice somewhere deep within me whispering that none of it really counts. Other people may value me, love me, respect me, or welcome me while my deeper internal tribunal remains adamantly unconvinced. Beneath everything else, the old question persists: What if they eventually discover what I have always felt—that there is something fundamentally wrong with me?

For traumatized people, this is part of what I mean when I say the struggle is real.

And much of that struggle is invisible.

A person may be educated, accomplished, responsible, funny, compassionate, spiritually grounded, and deeply caring. None of that necessarily means the old alarm system has quieted or the inner voices of condemnation have fallen silent.

Trauma research has given us an increasingly sophisticated understanding of why. Chronic or severe adversity during childhood can affect developing stress-response systems, autonomic regulation, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal stress system, and brain systems involved in emotion and threat detection. None of this means every traumatized person develops one predictable kind of brain or nervous system, and biology does not seal anyone’s fate. But the larger point matters: repeated danger during development can become biologically embedded.

I find that phrase—biologically embedded—both sobering and compassionate. It helps me understand how a person can leave the dangerous environment while the dangerous environment does not immediately leave the person.

If a developing nervous system repeatedly learns that danger can arrive without warning, hypervigilance is not irrational; it is learning. If closeness has repeatedly carried the possibility of harm, distrust is not merely stubbornness; it is protection. If vulnerability once increased the likelihood of injury, guardedness may be the nervous system’s version of wisdom. If love and fear became intertwined early enough, intimacy in adulthood can awaken both longing and alarm at the same time.

And if the outer world becomes too frightening or overwhelming to inhabit safely, the developing psyche may learn to retreat into an inner one. I know this adaptation intimately. As a child, a vivid imagination gave me an imaginal world where I could find distance from what was happening around me and create some measure of safety, freedom, and possibility. Dissociation can be protective, sometimes even lifesaving, but it can also create distance from the reality immediately in front of us. I still recognize both sides of that adaptation in myself. I can retreat inwardly when life becomes overwhelming. The same robust imagination that once gave a frightened child somewhere else to go now allows me to see from different perspectives, enter deeply into image and symbol, and imagine possibilities others may not immediately see. What once helped me survive remains something I must tend consciously, but of all my psychological adaptations to trauma, it has also become one of the capacities I most value.

From the outside, these responses can look confusing and excessive. From the inside, they can simply feel necessary.

This is where I have begun using the language of psychotypicality and psychodivergence.

These are not established clinical terms, and I do not offer them as scientific diagnoses. They are part of my own developing language for understanding what it means to inhabit a psyche that adapted to chronic trauma while it was still being formed.

By psychotypical, I do not mean psychologically “normal.” I am increasingly suspicious of that word whenever it is applied confidently to human beings. I mean something more modest: a person whose early psychological development was not persistently organized around threat, instability, abuse, neglect, or vigilance.

By psychodivergent, I mean a person whose development required significant adaptation to trauma. The psyche learned different expectations; the nervous system learned a different relationship with safety; relationships taught different lessons about closeness and separation. Shame, vigilance, self-protection, and the anticipation of rupture may have become deeply woven into the way the person encounters the world.

My language is influenced by the way neurodivergence has helped many people conceptualize autism and other neurological differences. I want to be careful with that analogy. I am not suggesting that developmental trauma and autism are the same phenomenon, or that psychodivergence is an established form of neurodivergence. I’m just borrowing a conceptual insight: what appears dysfunctional against one presumed “norm” may sometimes be better understood as a different pattern of functioning with its own history, strengths, costs, and needs.

That distinction has become deeply important to me. For much of my life, I thought healing meant becoming more like people who had not been shaped by trauma. I wanted to become less vigilant, less sensitive to shifts in relationship, less frightened of rejection, less ashamed, less complicated around trust, less hungry for belonging while simultaneously being less frightened of it. In other words, I wanted somehow to become what I am now calling psychotypical.

I am no longer certain that this is the right goal.

Zen teacher Claude Anshin Thomas teaches that healing is not the absence of suffering, but learning to live in a different—or, as I have come to understand it, a right—relationship with suffering. That teaching has become central to my own spiritual work and recovery. I do not use the phrase lightly when I say that it helped save my life and opened the possibility of becoming the person I am today. Healing may have less to do with becoming the person I might have been if nothing painful had happened and more to do with becoming conscious and welcoming of the person who actually did develop in response to what did happen.

My hypervigilance has caused suffering, but it has also made me perceptive. My sensitivity to emotional atmosphere can be exhausting, but it also means noticing things that are easily missed. My instinct to protect myself from perceived danger has often cost me connection, but it has also helped keep me safe from harm. Traits that create difficulty in one setting can become valuable capacities in another. I would never romanticize abuse by pretending trauma is a gift. I would gladly have learned whatever wisdom I possess by some gentler road. But neither can I despise the adaptations that helped me survive.

They deserve understanding. Not only my own understanding, but the understanding of others.

Some need softening. Some need healing. Some need boundaries. Some need to be thanked and gradually allowed to rest. All of them, however, need consciousness rather than condemnation. Today I comfortably accept and state that I am psychodivergent, I have found peace with my psychodivergence.

Perhaps that is why the language of trauma-informed care has become so meaningful to me.

In hospitals, counseling offices, schools, prisons, hospices, and other settings, professionals increasingly speak about trauma-informed practice. At its best, trauma-informed practice asks us to stop looking only at behavior and begin wondering about the history behind it, recognizing that a response that appears confusing, withdrawn, mistrustful, or overly reactive may have a painful history.

But I have begun wondering why trauma-informed awareness should belong primarily to professionals.

What might happen if we all began cultivating trauma-informed being?

I don’t mean that we should start diagnosing everyone we meet. And I don’t mean assuming that every difficult person is traumatized, or that trauma excuses harmful behavior. Compassion does not eliminate accountability, and understanding a wound does not require us to surrender our boundaries to it.

Trauma-informed being would be both simpler and, perhaps, more demanding. It would mean carrying an awareness that the person in front of me may be negotiating an invisible history I cannot see.

Trauma-informed being would also change the way we understand vulnerability.

Those who did not have to fight for basic emotional safety in childhood may not realize how much courage ordinary intimacy can require. To say I need you, to reveal fear, to trust another person with tenderness, to believe that conflict does not necessarily mean abandonment—these can appear to be ordinary relational capacities. For a traumatized person, they may involve walking directly toward the place where the nervous system expects injury.

The resulting hesitation can be easily misunderstood. A traumatized person may deeply desire intimacy and still recoil when it arrives. We may long to be known and panic when someone sees too much. We may want belonging and simultaneously search for the exit.

None of this is easy for the people who love us, and trauma awareness should never become a demand that others endlessly accommodate behavior that harms them. Still, something changes in a relationship when both people can understand these contradictions as adaptations rather than evidence that someone is fundamentally defective.

One of the more unexpected realizations of my own life has involved recognizing my need for emotional and physical safety as a man.

Men are often taught to imagine safety as something we provide for others rather than something we need ourselves. Men are expected to be protectors, to absorb danger, to remain composed, and to experience vulnerability almost as a failure of masculinity. It took me a long time to recognize how profoundly my own nervous system yearns for safety, gentleness, predictability, and the assurance that becoming vulnerable will not result in punishment or abandonment.

That recognition has opened another door of empathy for me. I have learned to hear differently when women describe the ongoing calculations many of them make around physical safety, power, trust, and vulnerability. I do not mean that my experience is identical to the gendered realities many women encounter, and I would not want to collapse those differences. Rather, my own experience of hypervigilance gives me a point of contact with the exhausting reality of having to assess safety in situations another person may move through without ever considering it.

Perhaps genuine compassion begins somewhere near that point: not in assuming that I know another person’s experience, but in allowing what I know of suffering to make me more attentive to suffering I do not know.

Not every wound is trauma. Not every difficulty comes from childhood. And not every person has a significant trauma history. And I do not want to make the word trauma so broad that it loses its meaning. But almost every human being carries pain, and far more people than we realize carry wounds that shaped them while they were still learning what safety, love, belonging, and selfhood meant.

My ACE score is nine out of ten. That number is part of my story, but it is not my whole story.

My whole story includes survival, but it also includes decades of healing: spiritual practice, study, relationships, mistakes, grief, love, and the gradual discovery that consciousness can change my relationship with what happened even when it cannot make what happened unhappen. The old adaptations still arise and sometimes still complicate my life.

But I no longer want to meet those parts of myself with contempt.

I want to meet them with the same trauma-informed awareness I hope to offer others, and I hope others might learn to recognize this, too: Of course you learned to protect yourself. Of course trust is difficult. Of course belonging matters this much. Of course vulnerability can feel dangerous. Those responses were shaped somewhere. They have a history. And because they have a history, they can also enter into relationship with consciousness, compassion, and choice.

Perhaps that is the invitation I most want to make.

When someone’s behavior confuses us, we do not have to diagnose them, excuse harmful behavior, or abandon our boundaries. We can simply remember that human beings are deeper than what is visible in a single moment.

We can become a little slower to shame and a little quicker to wonder. Safety, trust, belonging, self-worth, vulnerability, and intimacy are not equally uncomplicated gifts given to every child. Some people inherit them almost without noticing; others spend a lifetime slowly learning that they, too, are allowed to experience them.

That, for me, is trauma-informed being. It is not a professional technique. It is a way of moving through the world with the awareness that every person we encounter possesses an interior life, much of it unseen, and that a little gentleness may reach places in another human being we will never know were wounded.

For traumatized people like me, the struggle is real, but our compassion can become real enough to meet it.

Most of what we have come to call spiritual direction, especially in its Western and institutional forms, has emerged from a monotheistic imagination.

This is not a criticism so much as a simple observation. The language, formation, assumptions, and institutional homes of spiritual direction and spiritual direction training have been shaped largely by Christianity and by traditions that imagine the spiritual life as a matter of relationship with God or Christ. In such models, the directee may typically be invited to notice God’s presence, discern God’s will, deepen relationship with God, surrender to God, listen for God, and align one’s life more faithfully with God.

For example, many contemporary twelve-step recovery programs retain historically monotheistic language throughout the Twelve Steps. Traditionally stated, Step Eleven reads: “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.” Similarly, the well-known practice of Ignatian Spiritual Direction is traditionally rooted in Christian theology and a Christocentric framework, using biblical language, prayer, imagination, and Christ-centered imagery to deepen relationship with God. But this is not the only way to understand the spiritual life.

For those whose spiritual imagination has moved beyond classical Christianity or monotheism, or whose experience of Soul does not fit neatly into the language of relationship with a single divine center, much of traditional spiritual direction can begin to feel too narrow or confining. The assumption that spiritual maturity means alignment with “God” or Christ, or the deepening of that relationship, may not speak to those whose spiritual experience is non-theistic, Buddhist, animist, pagan, archetypal, post-Christian, earth-centered, or deeply plural. It may not speak to those who experience the sacred not as a single transcendent being, but as a multiplicity of presences, images, powers, moods, ancestors, dreams, goddesses and gods, wounds, landscapes, and voices. For those carrying wounds of indoctrination, coercive religion, spiritual abuse, or religious trauma, monotheistic language may not only feel inadequate; it may also feel profoundly unsafe. This is where Mindfulness-Centered Soul Tending (MCST) offers another way.

When I describe MCST as a polytheistic form of spiritual direction, I do not mean that every practitioner or directee must literally believe in many goddesses and gods. I am describing a polytheistic imagination: a way of approaching Soul as plural, imaginal, relational, and alive with many centers of meaning. The language of the goddesses and gods becomes a symbolic language for the living multiplicity of the psyche.

Mindfulness-Centered Soul Tending is a form of spiritual accompaniment rooted not in the assumption of a single divine will, but in the careful, compassionate, and disciplined tending of Soul. It does not begin by asking, “What is God saying to you?”

Mindfulness-Centered Soul Tending begins by asking different questions: “What is moving in the Soul?” “What images are appearing?” “What grief is asking to be honored?” “What dream, symptom, longing, fear, memory, or archetypal figure is seeking relationship?” “What exiled part of Psyche is trying to become conscious?” This shift matters.

In a monotheistic framework, the spiritual life is often imagined as a movement toward unity, obedience, surrender, or alignment with one sacred center. In a polytheistic framework, the spiritual life may be better understood as the cultivation of right relationship with many centers of meaning. The psyche is not a single, unified system waiting to be mastered by the ego or aligned with one transcendent authority. Rather, Psyche is a living landscape. It is an ecology. It is a community. It is a field of presences.

James Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology is especially helpful here. Hillman challenged the dominance of monotheistic assumptions in psychology and spirituality by recovering a polytheistic vision of the psyche. For Hillman, the Soul is not reducible to one story, one god, one diagnosis, one goal, or one path of development. Psyche is plural by nature. It is inhabited by many figures, many moods, many goddesses and gods.

Figures such as Chiron, Saturn, Icarus, Aphrodite, Ares, Hermes, Hestia, Dionysus, Athena, Persephone, Hecate, and Pan—alongside Brigid, Odin, Freyja, Coyote, Raven, Anansi, Osiris, Isis, Kali, Kuan Yin, and countless others from the world’s mythic traditions—are not simply quaint mythological relics. They name real patterns of psychic life. They give image and form to the forces that move through us.

Thus, to mindfully tend the Soul is not to conquer these figures, suppress them, or force them into conformity with a single ideal of spiritual health. Soul Tending is patient, attentive listening. It is the practice of learning their names, their wounds, their gifts, their shapes, and gradually becoming intimate with their size, weight, patterns, and ways of appearing. Soul Tending is the recognition that what appears as anxiety, depression, rage, longing, confusion, obsession, grief, or creative hunger may also be the appearance of a goddess or god at the threshold of consciousness.

This does not mean romanticizing every impulse or indulging every inner voice. A polytheistic approach is not spiritual chaos. Soul Tending calls for discernment, containment, ethical responsibility, and practice. But it does mean that spiritual direction becomes less about obedience to a singular divine will and more about cultivating relationship with the many presences that inhabit the landscape of the Soul. This is where mindfulness becomes essential.

Mindfulness provides the ground of attention. It teaches us how to be present without immediately identifying with, reacting to, fixing, judging, or collapsing into whatever arises. In Mindfulness-Centered Soul Tending, mindfulness is not used as a technique for self-improvement or emotional regulation alone. It is a contemplative discipline that helps us create enough spaciousness to listen, discern, and bear witness.

When anger arises, mindfulness helps us pause long enough to ask what kind of anger this is. Is this Ares, demanding courage and boundary? Is this Kali, burning through illusion? Is this the rage of an exiled child who has never been protected? Is this the strong voice of justice, or the quiet voice of compassion? Without mindful attention and discernment, we are simply possessed by the affect. With mindful attention, we create spaciousness that allows us to enter conscious relationship with the affect and the force behind it.

When grief arises, mindfulness allows grief to become more than a problem to solve. Grief may be a messenger from the ancestors. It may be Persephone descending to the underworld, inviting us to follow. It may be the dark soil from which a new form of life will eventually emerge. It may be the Soul’s refusal to allow us to continue living superficially. In a culture that wants grief medicated, managed, or hurried along, Soul Tending asks us to honor grief as one of the great initiatory powers.

When desire arises, mindfulness helps us avoid both repression and compulsion. Desire may be Aphrodite, calling us back to beauty, embodiment, intimacy, art, and pleasure. Desire or yearning may also be a hungry ghost, shaped by loneliness or trauma. The work is not to condemn desire, but to listen deeply enough to discern what kind of desire is present and what it is really asking of us.

This is the heart of a polytheistic spiritual direction: not the search for one authoritative answer, but the cultivation of conscious relationship with the many powers of the psyche.

In this sense, Mindfulness-Centered Soul Tending is a spiritual direction practice for those who no longer experience the sacred as a single voice above them, but as a living multiplicity within and around them. It is for those who find the divine in dreams, images, rituals, stories, ancestors, seasons, bodies, animals, trees, rivers, grief, eros, shadow, and imagination. It is for those who sense that the Soul does not want to be saved from its complexity, but accompanied into deeper relationship with it.

This approach is also decolonizing. MCST can be understood as an anti-colonialist framework for spiritual care because it resists the habits of domination that have shaped so much of Western religion, psychology, medicine, economics, and culture. It resists the impulse to conquer the inner life, reduce it to one authorized meaning, submit it to one ruling authority, diagnose it into a fixed category, explain it through one approved system, or make it useful according to the logic of productivity.

So much Western spiritual formation has been shaped by the need to establish one right belief, one right doctrine, one right God, one right path, one right form of salvation. These assumptions have not remained confined to theology. They have shaped psychology, education, medicine, government, and systems of care. They have taught us to mistrust multiplicity, ambiguity, embodiment, Indigenous wisdom, dream knowledge, ritual imagination, and feminine and earth-based ways of knowing.

This is what I mean by a colonialist attitude toward Soul: the belief that the living multiplicity of the psyche must be governed by a single ruling center, whether theological, psychological, egoic, clinical, ideological, or economic. It is an attitude that assumes difference is disorder, multiplicity is confusion, embodiment is inferior, image is fantasy, myth is primitive, ritual is superstition, and the wildness of Soul must be civilized into conformity. It is the attitude that wants the inner world to become manageable, measurable, profitable, obedient, explainable, and useful.

Monotheism, in its deepest mystical forms, can be spacious, beautiful, and profound. But monotheistic consciousness can also become colonizing when it becomes rigid, literalized, imperial, and suspicious of plurality. When one God becomes one truth, one truth becomes one doctrine, one doctrine becomes one authority, and one authority becomes the power to name, judge, convert, correct, diagnose, or exclude, then the religious imagination can become a tool of domination rather than liberation.

This same pattern appears in the mental health industry when diagnosis becomes more than a helpful tool and begins to function as a totalizing identity. Diagnosis can be clarifying, validating, and sometimes necessary. Clinical care can be life-saving. But when the human person is reduced to a diagnosis, when suffering is understood only as pathology, when symptoms are treated only as malfunctions, and when care is organized primarily around management, billing codes, compliance, and return to productivity, Soul disappears from view.

Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology offers an important critique of this reduction. Hillman did not deny suffering, nor did he romanticize illness. But he challenged the fantasy that psychological care should be primarily about adapting the person to the rationalist, post-Enlightenment expectations of the dominant culture: its attachment to literalism, quantification, explanation, measurement, and normalization. This is not a rejection of science or scientific inquiry, but a refusal to let scientific literalism become the only authorized way of knowing the Soul. Hillman resisted the reduction of symptom to defect, image to explanation, myth to illusion, and Soul to ego-functioning. Instead, he asked us to listen more deeply. He asked us to imagine symptoms as carrying images, complexes as carrying goddesses and gods, and disturbances as carrying meaning.

In this sense, Hillman’s critique of psychology, the mental health industry, religion, and capitalism is deeply aligned with the decolonized and anti-colonialist framework of MCST. He resisted literalism wherever it appeared. In psychology, literalism appears when a person is reduced to behavior, cognition, or a developmental category. In the mental health industry, literalism appears when suffering is translated too quickly into pathology, symptoms are treated only as malfunctions, and care becomes organized primarily around diagnosis, billing codes, compliance, risk management, and return to productivity. In religion, literalism appears when image becomes dogma, myth becomes historical fact, symbol becomes doctrine, and mystery becomes certainty. In capitalism, literalism appears when human life is reduced to productivity, usefulness, marketability, and measurable outcomes.

Literalism flattens Soul. It turns living images into fixed meanings. It turns the goddesses and gods into concepts, symptoms into labels, dreams into neurological debris, rituals into empty performance, and persons into cases. A decolonized Soul-care resists this flattening. It protects the imaginal dimension of experience. It listens for the image within the symptom, the story within the wound, the goddess or god within the affect, the ritual called for within the grief, and the wisdom hidden in what the dominant culture has learned to dismiss.

A polytheistic approach to spiritual direction therefore resists this narrowing and flattening. It makes room for many ways of knowing. It honors the imaginal. It listens to the body. It respects the land. It allows ritual, dreamwork, creativity, movement, silence, myth, and ceremony to become legitimate forms of spiritual knowledge. It does not require the Soul to translate itself into the approved language of institutional religion, clinical diagnosis, academic theory, or capitalist productivity before it can be taken seriously.

This does not mean abandoning discipline. In fact, the opposite is true. A truly polytheistic approach calls for a disciplined capacity to stay in relationship with complexity. It requires the humility to know that no single image, tradition, teacher, diagnosis, or theology can exhaust the mystery of a human life. It invites us to become less interested in certainty and more capable of reverence and awe.

This also does not mean dismissing appropriate clinical mental health care, clinical counseling, psychotherapy, medication, crisis intervention, or stabilization when these are needed. There are times when suffering requires skilled clinical attention, careful assessment, professional treatment, and immediate support. Mindfulness-Centered Soul Tending is not intended to replace these forms of care, nor does it claim to do the work of psychotherapy or clinical practice. Rather, MCST offers a complementary framework for spiritual accompaniment: one that honors the imaginal, symbolic, ritual, relational, and Soul-centered dimensions of human experience without denying the importance of clinical care when such care is necessary.

Mindfulness-Centered Soul Tending brings together mindfulness practice, Archetypal Psychology, dreamwork, active imagination, ritual awareness, and contemplative presence as a way of accompanying the Soul in its multiplicity. Soul Tending encourages us not to seek only transcendence or escape, but to cultivate presence and depth; not only clarity, but image; not only peace, but the meaning hidden in disturbance; not only healing, but relationship.

The goal is not to become a perfected spiritual self. The goal is not to rise above our humanity, or to spiritually bypass suffering. The goal is not to silence the many voices within us in favor of one approved voice.

The goal is to become more deeply present to the living reality of our naturally polycentric, polytheistic Soul.

From this perspective, spiritual direction becomes less like receiving instruction from above and more like tending a sacred fire. We listen for what has gone cold, what is burning too hot, what needs air, what needs containment, what needs fuel, and what may need to be allowed to turn to ash. We learn to recognize the goddesses, gods, and other mythic beings who gather around the fire. We learn which ones have been neglected, which ones have become inflated, which ones are wounded, and which ones are calling us toward a more whole and truthful life.

Another image I find useful for understanding Soul Tending is that of a practiced wilderness guide or park ranger. Such a guide does not own the forest, control the weather, command the animals, or force the landscape to become something other than what it is. The wise and skillful guide serves through intimacy with the terrain, knowing something of the trails and thresholds, the rivers and crossings, the sudden storms, the hidden clearings, the open vistas, the dangerous cliffs, the medicinal plants, the sheltering trees, and the creatures who inhabit the land. An attentive and seasoned guide knows how to offer orientation when someone has lost the path, how to provide aid when someone has been wounded, and how to help the traveler remain attentive to what the landscape itself is revealing. In this sense, the Soul Tender is not an authority standing above the Soul, but a companion and guide within the living terrain of Psyche. The work is to help create enough safety, orientation, and spaciousness for the journey to continue, so that what is encountered along the way may become part of the traveler’s deepening wholeness, meaning, and belonging.

Ultimately, Mindfulness-Centered Soul Tending is not spiritual direction as submission to a single divine authority. It is spiritual direction as sacred relationship with the many in a world alive with presence. It is mindfulness in service of imagination, depth, and transformation.

Mindfulness-Centered Soul Tending is a way of honoring Psyche as plural, the earth as sacred, the body as wise, and the spiritual life as something far richer, stranger, deeper, and more beautiful than any single theology can contain.

A Synthesis of the Four Cornerstones of Middle Way Spirituality

Defining Middle Way Spirituality…

The central image of Middle Way Spirituality is the lotus. The flower opens above the surface of the water toward the vast sky and radiant sun, while its roots remain firmly planted in the dark mud at the bottom of the pond. Beneath the water, fallen leaves, decaying matter, silt, and the remains of what once lived gather in darkness. Yet this apparently undesirable material is not separate from the beauty of the flower. The lotus draws nourishment through its roots from precisely this rich, organic mud. What has fallen, died, decomposed, and returned to the earth becomes part of the living material through which the flower rises and opens.

Thich Nhat Hanh expressed this ancient image with elegant simplicity in the phrase, “No mud, no lotus.” For me, the lotus offers the clearest image of Middle Way Spirituality because it refuses the spiritual fantasy that awakening requires escape from the conditions of ordinary human life. The flower does not reject the mud, nor does it remain concealed and dormant within it. It is rooted in darkness while opening toward light, belonging simultaneously to mud, water, air, and sun. The lotus flower’s beauty emerges not through elimination of what lies below, but through participation in the whole ecology of the pond.

Seeing deeply into this image of the lotus, Middle Way Spirituality may therefore be understood as a contemplative and imaginal path of Soul formation that cultivates intimate relationship with the whole field of lived experience without collapsing into suffering or attempting to escape or spiritually bypass it. It is neither an eclectic blending of Zen and depth psychology nor simply a generalized spirituality of moderation. Rather, it is a particular spiritual practice and transformative framework grounded in the understanding that wholeness emerges through intimate, conscious, and discerning relationship with the multiplicity of life rather than through purification, exclusion, transcendental escape, or identification with suffering. Through mindfulness, shadow work, right relationship, and alchemical imagination, the raw material of life is received into awareness and gradually transformed into greater consciousness, compassion, wisdom, and embodied participation in the world. The lotus embodies this understanding because its rootedness in the mud and its flowering toward the sun are not two separate movements, but expressions of one living organism undergoing one continuous process of transformation.

The “middle way” within this spiritual framework does not mean compromise, moderation, or standing rigidly halfway between two competing positions. It refers instead to the capacity to hold together realities that initially appear contradictory or incompatible: suffering and awakening, darkness and illumination, emptiness and form, conscious and unconscious, wound and wisdom, stillness and imagination, individuality and interdependence. Middle Way Spirituality does not require one pole to defeat the other. It asks what kind of relationship can emerge when both are allowed to remain within a larger field of awareness.

Over time, I have come to understand this spiritual path through four cornerstones, which I have explored in the previous four essays: Eihei Dōgen’s invitation to study the self until the imagined separateness of the self begins to soften; Carl Jung’s insistence that transformation requires making the darkness conscious; Claude Anshin Thomas’s understanding of healing as right relationship with suffering; and James Hillman’s image of the Soul as a cooking vessel that “takes in everything.” These four teachings form a single movement. Dōgen teaches us how to become present. Jung teaches us what must be included within that presence. Anshin teaches us how to relate to what we discover. Hillman gives us an imaginal and alchemical understanding of what becomes possible when the many dimensions of our experience are received into the vessel of Soul.

The larger project can therefore be described as Meditation and Alchemy. Meditation because the path begins with learning how to be present; alchemy because presence creates the conditions in which transformation becomes possible. Meditation separated from transformative engagement can be reduced to passive observation, while alchemy ungrounded in contemplative presence can become fantasy, inflation, or an egoic attempt to force transformation. Together they provide the contemplative ground and imaginal vessel through which Soul may deepen.

The first cornerstone begins with Dōgen’s teaching: “To study Zen is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.” Zen begins not by asking us to escape the self, but by inviting us deeply into the actual field of experience. When examined closely, however, the self proves far less solid than we usually imagine. What we call “I” is a living gathering of memory, conditioning, body, relationship, history, desire, fear, culture, dream, wound, image, nervous system, and story. The self is more like weather or landscape than an isolated object, an ever-changing convergence of causes and conditions.

Zazen cultivates intimacy with this landscape. Thoughts, memories, shame, desire, grief, bodily sensation, sound, silence, restlessness, tenderness, and fear arise within awareness. Practice neither clings to these experiences nor pushes them away. Through sustained presence, the supposedly rigid boundary between self and world begins to soften. Dōgen’s “ten thousand things” are no longer merely objects standing outside an isolated observer, but the vast multiplicity of reality within which the self participates. Mountains, rivers, bodies, dreams, griefs, animals, seasons, strangers, wounds, and moments become part of the field of awakening.

Forgetting the self does not mean erasing personality, biography, embodiment, or individuality. It means loosening the ego’s claim to be the sovereign center of experience. Zen points toward an intimacy in which the distinctions between self and world remain functional without remaining absolute. In Zen literature, the Sandōkai, the “Identity of Relative and Absolute,” expresses this through images of realities that are distinguishable without being separable, “like the foot before and the foot behind in walking.” Relative and absolute interpenetrate; form does not need to disappear for emptiness to be realized, and difference does not need to be erased for intimacy to become possible.

Middle Way Spirituality receives this Zen understanding as its contemplative foundation. Meditation becomes more than a technique for calming the mind or regulating emotion. Meditation becomes hesychiapraxis, a term I use to describe the disciplined practice of embodied stillness and receptive presence through which we become capable of remaining with the ten thousand things as they arise. The path begins by learning to stay present with what is.

The second cornerstone brings this contemplative intimacy into relationship with Carl Jung’s depth psychology. Jung reminds us that the ten thousand things include realities the conscious ego may prefer not to encounter. Honest self-study eventually leads into the shadowed places of the psyche, where wounds, complexes, projections, forgotten capacities, contradictions, unlived possibilities, and disowned feelings remain outside the circle of conscious awareness.

Jung is frequently paraphrased as teaching that “enlightenment does not come from imagining beings of light, but from making the darkness conscious.” The deeper point is not a romanticization of darkness but a warning against using spirituality to avoid our own Soul. A spirituality that identifies exclusively with light, peace, purity, or transcendence easily becomes hostile toward grief, anger, shame, fear, embodiment, uncertainty, and contradiction. What cannot be welcomed consciously is often driven underground, where it continues to shape relationships, behavior, ideology, symptoms, and projections.

The psyche is inherently complex. We may be both loving and resentful, courageous and frightened, generous and possessive, peaceful and aggressive. Jung understood psychological development as requiring relationship with these tensions rather than victory of one side over another. Individuation does not create a purified or psychologically uniform person. It develops a more conscious, differentiated, and responsible relationship among the many forces of the psyche within the larger organizing mystery Jung called the Self.

Shadow work therefore does not mean indulging everything that arises within us. Not every impulse should be enacted, every image literalized, or every emotion treated as authoritative. What remains unconscious can possess us precisely because we have no conscious relationship with it. When anger, shame, grief, desire, fear, or longing enters awareness, a different relationship becomes possible. We gain the possibility of discernment rather than compulsion and of responsibility rather than projection.

Zen and Jung meet within this capacity to hold experience without either repression or possession. Zazen cultivates the spacious awareness through which difficult psychic material can arise without immediately becoming action. Jungian and Archetypal Psychology invite us to listen more carefully to what has appeared. Meditation establishes the stillness of the vessel, while depth psychology helps us recognize what the vessel contains.

The third cornerstone asks how we relate to what we discover. Claude Anshin Thomas teaches that “healing is not the absence of suffering. Healing is the ability to be in right relationship with suffering.” His teaching challenges the widespread assumption that healing means eventually becoming untouched by pain. We may imagine that enough meditation, therapy, spiritual practice, insight, shadow work, or self-awareness should eventually produce a life in which grief, anxiety, anger, loneliness, fear, and loss no longer disturb us. Middle Way Spirituality begins from a different premise: suffering belongs to the conditions of embodied life, and spiritual maturity is better measured by relationship than by immunity.

Right relationship occupies the living space between avoidance and possession. We neither exile suffering nor enthrone it. Grief can be present without becoming the whole identity. Shame can be acknowledged without becoming destiny. Anger can be honored without becoming violence. A wound can remain part of our story without becoming the only story available to us. Right relationship creates what I have described as spacious intimacy: we remain close enough to feel what is true while maintaining enough spaciousness to respond rather than simply react.

Such relationship is not passive acceptance. At times, right relationship may mean sitting quietly with pain and allowing grief to move through the body. At other times it may require setting a boundary, telling the truth, leaving what is harmful, seeking therapy or medical care, performing ritual, repairing what has been broken, or resisting social conditions that cause suffering. The Middle Way is therefore contemplative and ethical at once. Presence deepens our capacity not merely to endure suffering, but to respond to it with greater wisdom and compassion.

The fourth cornerstone, James Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology, gathers these earlier movements into the image of the alchemical vessel. In Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman writes that “the cooking vessel of the Soul takes in everything.” A vessel receives and contains. It allows different substances to remain together long enough for heat, mixture, pressure, patience, and time to produce transformation. The vessel does not accomplish its work by throwing away everything unpleasant or contradictory. Its transformative capacity depends upon its ability to receive the material that has been given to it.

Hillman deepens the Middle Way by approaching psyche as polycentric, imaginal, and irreducibly plural. Soul speaks through dreams, myths, symptoms, fantasies, moods, memories, gods, animals, ancestors, children, exiles, tricksters, wounds, and images. Archetypal Psychology resists reducing this multiplicity too quickly to diagnosis, explanation, behavior, or biography. Instead, it asks us to remain close to image and to cultivate relationship with the many presences moving across the landscape of psyche.

Where Jung often describes psychic development through the tension of opposites, Hillman encourages us to remain with these energies as distinct yet relational presences within a larger ecology of Soul. Puer and Senex, ascent and descent, light and darkness, eros and restraint do not always need to be resolved by determining which is correct. Each may reveal something about the other. The Middle Way becomes an imaginal field in which psychic realities can coexist without being prematurely collapsed into unity or forced into opposition.

This polycentric understanding also makes Middle Way Spirituality hospitable to religious multiplicity. One person may understand the Sacred through relationship with God, another through Buddhist emptiness, ancestral presence, earth-centered spirituality, deities, bodhisattvas, saints, archetypal figures, dreams, or the numinous life of the natural world. Soul Tending does not require these images to be subordinated to a single theological center. The more important question concerns relationship: What has appeared in the landscape of psyche, and what would right relationship with this presence require?

The alchemical dimension of this work can be described as Psychopoiesis, the ongoing formation and transformation of Soul. The raw material of the work, the prote hyle (the prima materia of Latin alchemical language), consists of what life has actually given us: grief, love, trauma, beauty, shame, failure, pleasure, longing, culture, memory, body, inheritance, relationship, dream, and suffering. Middle Way Spirituality does not claim that suffering is inherently good or that trauma exists for our spiritual development. Harm remains harm, and injustice requires response. Yet what has happened becomes part of the material with which Soul must work.

The lotus returns here as the encompassing image. Its roots descend into the prote hyle of the pond, drawing nourishment from what has decomposed in darkness. The flower does not transform the mud by condemning it, nor does it mistake the mud for the blossom. Through an organic process of relationship, time, metabolism, and life, what lies below becomes nourishment for something capable of opening toward the sun.

The four cornerstones describe this single movement of Meditation and Alchemy. Dōgen teaches us to become present to the ten thousand things. Jung teaches us to include the shadowed and unconscious dimensions among them. Anshin teaches us to cultivate right relationship with the suffering we encounter. Hillman teaches us to receive the multiplicity of psyche into the vessel of Soul, where mindfulness, imagination, attention, relationship, and time create the conditions for transformation.

Middle Way Spirituality therefore resists both the transcendental escape from our humanity and the psychological collapse into our wounds and suffering. It does not ask us to escape our humanity in pursuit of enlightenment, nor does it ask us to remain identified with our wounds and suffering. It invites us instead into the deeper work of becoming intimate with the whole field of life. Meditation teaches us to remain present. Depth psychology teaches us to become conscious. Right relationship teaches us not to be possessed by what we encounter. Archetypal and alchemical imagination create the conditions through which what has been received may undergo transformation.

The lotus symbolizes and embodies this entire movement. Its roots remain firmly planted in darkness and mud while its flower opens to light and sky, yet both belong to one living organism. Mud and lotus are not competing realities. The flower grows because the roots remain in contact with what lies below. In the same way, awakening does not require abandoning suffering, shadow, embodiment, history, or wound. The work of Soul is to receive the whole of life deeply enough that what once seemed only poisonous may, through conscious relationship and transformation, begin to yield medicine.

Middle Way Spirituality is ultimately a path of learning to embody the lotus ourselves: to become increasingly whole by remaining rooted in the fertile ground of our humanity while opening fully toward awareness, compassion, wisdom, and awakening. Wholeness does not emerge through escaping the mud of suffering, shadow, wound, history, and contradiction, nor through becoming imprisoned within it, but through intimate, conscious, and discerning relationship with the multiplicity of life. As we learn to hold what is difficult without rejecting it, to become conscious of what has remained hidden, and to cultivate right relationship with the many realities that arise within and around us, the prote hyle of our lives becomes material for Psychopoiesis—the patient work of Soul-making. The lotus reminds us that rootedness and flowering are not separate spiritual movements, but one continuous transformation. To embody the lotus is to participate consciously in that transformation, through which suffering may deepen compassion, darkness may yield consciousness, wound may open toward wisdom, and the ten thousand things may gather into a more spacious, integrated, and fully embodied life.

In the first three posts in this series, I have been reflecting on the four cornerstones of Middle-Way Spirituality.

The first cornerstone was Eihei Dōgen’s teaching that “to study Zen is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.” This begins the work of Meditation and Alchemy because it invites us to study the self deeply enough that the ego-centric self begins to soften and the world becomes more intimate.

The second cornerstone was Jungian Psychology and Carl Jung’s teaching that enlightenment emerges not from transcendence or through spiritual bypassing, but on doing the deep, and sometimes difficult work of “making the darkness conscious.” Jung reminds us that real transformation does not come from imagining ourselves as beings of light while abandoning the wounded and shadowed places within us. It comes through conscious relationship with what has been hidden, denied, repressed, exiled, or left outside the circle of awareness.

The third cornerstone was Claude Anshin Thomas’s teaching that “healing is not the absence of suffering, but the ability to be in right relationship with suffering.” This teaching releases us from the fantasy that healing means becoming untouched by pain. It invites us instead into a more honest, compassionate, ethical, and spacious relationship with suffering.

The fourth cornerstone brings these earlier movements into an image I have come to love very deeply. In Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman writes, “The cooking vessel of the Soul takes in everything.”

For me, this is one of the most important images for understanding Middle-Way Spirituality and the practice of Soul Tending.

The Soul is not a ladder we climb in order to rise above the mess of life. It is not a mountaintop from which we look down upon ordinary human suffering. It is not a beam of pure light that dissolves our confusion, grief, shame, longing, fear, or desire. Hillman gives us a very different image. He gives us a vessel. More specifically, he gives us a cooking vessel, an alchemical vessel.

A vessel holds. A vessel contains. A vessel receives what is placed inside it and allows transformation to happen through time, heat, mixture, pressure, patience, and care. It does not purify by escape. It does not become useful because it keeps the ingredients separate from one another. The vessel of Soul becomes a place of transformation because it takes things in and holds them long enough for something to happen.

This is how I understand the alchemical work of Soul.

The Soul does not grow by fleeing life. It deepens by receiving life. It takes in grief, symptom, shadow, dream, desire, beauty, suffering, memory, body, fantasy, wound, failure, longing, and world. These are not distractions from the path. They are the material of the path. They are the prima materia, the raw substance through which Soul slowly becomes more conscious, more relational, more compassionate, and more alive.

The phrase “takes in everything” is essential. It prevents spirituality from becoming too selective, too purified, too idealized, or too defended against the actual conditions of human life. Soul does not admit only peace, compassion, serenity, wisdom, clarity, and light. Soul also receives shame, confusion, rage, envy, fear, ambivalence, contradiction, grief, erotic longing, resistance, failure, and despair. Nothing human is outside the vessel.

This does not mean everything is good. It does not mean every impulse should be acted upon, every wound romanticized, or every symptom treated as sacred in some simplistic way. Hillman’s image does not ask us to glorify suffering. It asks us to stop reducing suffering to malfunction. The cooking vessel of the Soul asks us to notice that even what disturbs us may have a psyche, an image, a history, a face, a texture, and a story.

This is where Archetypal Psychology becomes so important for Middle-Way Spirituality.

Archetypal Psychology invites us to approach the psyche imaginally. It reminds us that the psyche speaks in images, dreams, symptoms, fantasies, moods, myths, patterns, and figures. It resists the flattening of Soul into diagnosis alone, behavior alone, cognition alone, or personal biography alone. It asks us to listen for the mythic and symbolic dimensions of experience without losing touch with the real suffering involved.

From the standpoint of Archetypal Psychology, the psyche is not a machine to be repaired. It is not merely a collection of symptoms to be managed. The psyche is not just an algorithm of programmed behaviors and conditioned responses. Psyche rather, is a polycentric and imaginal field, alive with many presences, many voices, and many images. We are not one thing. We are many things. The Soul is not simple. It is not tidy. It is not always reasonable. It is not always interested in the ego’s preferred story of who we are.

This is why the cooking vessel matters. Without a vessel, the multiplicity of the psyche can feel chaotic, overwhelming, or dangerous. Without containment, we may try to split off what we do not like, cling to what feels noble, or rush too quickly toward explanation. The vessel allows the many things of Soul to be held together without needing to force them into premature order.

This is also where mindfulness becomes essential.

When I speak of mindfulness in the world of Meditation and Alchemy, I do not mean mindfulness as a productivity tool. I do not mean a technique that helps us become calmer so we can tolerate dehumanizing systems more efficiently. I mean mindfulness as a disciplined, embodied, compassionate presence with what is. By mindfulness, I mean the practice of remaining close to experience without clinging to it and without pushing it away.

In zazen, we learn to sit still while the ten thousand things arise. Breath is here. Body is here. Memory is here. Irritation is here. Grief is here. Shame is here. Desire is here. Boredom is here. Tenderness is here. The strange image from last night’s dream is here. The repeating pattern we would rather not see is here. We sit, breathe, return, and allow these things to arise, display themselves, and pass through.

This is not separate from the alchemical vessel. Mindfulness helps create the vessel. Presence is part of the vessel. Stillness is part of the vessel. The breath becomes part of the vessel. The body becomes part of the vessel. The willingness to remain in relationship with what appears becomes the vessel.

In this way, mindfulness is not escape from Soul. It is intimacy with Soul.

This is one of the places where Zen and Archetypal Psychology meet so beautifully. Zen practice cultivates the discipline of presence. Archetypal Psychology cultivates reverence for image. Zen teaches us not to grasp or reject what arises. Archetypal Psychology teaches us that what arises may be carrying Soul. Together, they form a practice of listening that is neither indulgence nor repression, neither spiritual bypass nor psychological reductionism.

The vessel is not passive. It is not a container where things merely sit unchanged. The vessel holds the material in such a way that transformation becomes possible. In alchemy, this requires heat. Psychologically and spiritually, that heat may come in the form of attention, honesty, compassion, grief, conflict, patience, love, imagination, and the pressure of staying present when the ego would rather escape.

Sometimes the heat is zazen. Sometimes it is dreamwork. Sometimes it is a difficult conversation. Sometimes it is therapy, ritual, ceremony, creative work, grieving, truth-telling, or the slow recognition that a symptom has been carrying an image we have not yet learned how to hear.

Alchemy is not magic in the cheap sense. It is not instant transformation. It is not a promise that all suffering becomes wisdom if we simply think about it correctly. Alchemy is slower and more demanding than that. It is the work of staying with the material long enough for it to reveal what it carries. It is the art of allowing what has been rejected, denied, or misunderstood to enter the vessel of attention and relationship.

This is why Hillman’s image deepens the first three cornerstones.

Dōgen teaches that to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things. Hillman’s vessel gives those ten thousand things a place to be received, observed, and held, and related with. The multiplicity of world and psyche is not rejected, transcended, or subordinated to a single spiritual ideal. It is allowed into the vessel.

Jung teaches that the darkness must be made conscious. Hillman’s vessel gives the darkness a place to be held and patiently explored. The darkness is not dragged into consciousness so that the ego can conquer it. It is received into Soul, where symptom may become image, wound may become depth, and suffering may become relationship.

Claude Anshin Thomas teaches that healing is right relationship with suffering. Hillman’s vessel shows us what that right relationship may look like. Suffering is neither expelled nor enthroned. It is neither denied nor allowed to rule the whole house. It is brought into the vessel, where it can be witnessed, contained, listened to, and slowly transformed.

This is also why Hillman is essential for decolonized Soul-care. So much of modern life trains us to ask, “How do I get rid of this?” How do I remove the symptom? How do I make the grief more efficient? How do I regulate quickly enough to keep functioning? How do I become useful again? How do I return to “normal?”

These questions are not always wrong. Sometimes symptom relief is necessary. Sometimes clinical care, medication, therapy, stabilization, and practical support are essential and life-saving. Decolonized Soul-care does not oppose clinical care where clinical care is needed.

But it resists the reduction of the human person to pathology alone. It resists the colonization of inner life by systems of speed, productivity, compliance, diagnosis, optimization, and cure. It asks a different set of questions: What is the Soul carrying? What image is presenting itself? What has been excluded from awareness? What grief is asking to be witnessed? What dream keeps returning? What transformation may be slowly simmering beneath the surface?

To tend Soul is to become less a mechanic of the ego and more a witness, companion, and fire-tender of the vessel.

This brings me to another image that has become important in my own understanding of Middle-Way Spirituality: the Sambhogakāya.

In Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism, the trikāya teaching speaks of three bodies of Buddha: the Dharmakāya, the vast truth body beyond form; the Nirmāṇakāya, the manifest body appearing in history and ordinary form; and the Sambhogakāya, often described as the subtle, luminous, visionary, symbolic, and imaginal body of awakened reality.

I understand that these Buddhist teachings have their own integrity and should not be collapsed too quickly into Western psychology. Still, as an image, Sambhogakāya helps me think about the intersection of mindfulness, imagination, Soul, and transformation.

If Dharmakāya points toward emptiness, vastness, and the boundless nature of reality, and Nirmāṇakāya points toward embodiment, history, and concrete manifestation, Sambhogakāya points toward the luminous imaginal field in which wisdom appears as image, color, deity, mandala, sound, symbol, and visionary form. It is not merely fantasy. It is not merely decoration. It is the imaginal display of awakened qualities.

In Vajrayana practice, the imaginal is not dismissed as unreal. Visualization, mantra, deity practice, mandala, ritual gesture, and symbolic form become vehicles of transformation. The practitioner does not escape embodiment by entering the imaginal. Rather, the imaginal becomes a field in which ordinary perception is re-patterned, purified, intensified, and awakened.

This has a deep resonance with Archetypal Psychology.

Hillman also refuses to dismiss image as “mere imagination.” For Hillman, image is one of the primary ways Soul presents itself. The psyche does not speak first in concepts. It speaks in images. Dreams, fantasies, symptoms, myths, and moods are not meaningless debris floating through the mind. They are presentations of Soul.

In this sense, the alchemical vessel of Soul and the Sambhogakāya both honor the transformative power of the imaginal. They both suggest that transformation does not occur only through abstract insight or moral effort. It also occurs through image, symbol, ritual, imagination, and participation in a reality more subtle than literalism can understand.

The Sambhogakāya is not the same thing as Hillman’s Soul, and Vajrayana is not Archetypal Psychology. But in the world of Middle-Way Spirituality, they can illuminate one another. Both invite us to take the imaginal seriously. Both resist the flattening of sacred image into fantasy or unreality. Both understand that transformation often requires a symbolic field spacious enough to hold what ordinary ego-consciousness cannot hold alone.

This matters because literalism is one of the great enemies of Soul. Literalism insists that a thing is only what it appears to be on the surface. A symptom is only a symptom. A dream is only random brain activity. A myth is only an old story. A deity is only superstition. A ritual is only performance. A feeling is only chemistry. But Soul lives in the depth-dimension of things. It hears the image beneath the event, the archetype moving through the mood, the symbolic body within the literal body, and the invitation hidden within the disturbance. Soul distills the medicine contained within what we once thought of as poison.

The Sambhogakāya, as I understand it, also protects this depth-dimension. It reminds us that awakened reality is not only empty and not only embodied. It is also radiant, symbolic, imaginal, and communicative. It appears in forms that transform perception. This is very close to what happens when Soul receives experience into the vessel. The material is not merely explained. It is re-imagined. It begins to shine differently.

This is why dreams matter. This is why ritual matters. This is why images, myths, ceremonies, stories, mandalas, icons, ancestors, deities, and inner figures matter. They are not escapes from reality. They may be ways reality speaks in a deeper register.

When mindfulness and imagination come together, the vessel becomes more alive. Mindfulness keeps us grounded in presence, body, breath, and ethical awareness. Imagination opens us to the symbolic life of the psyche and the luminous display of the Sacred. Without mindfulness, imagination can become inflation, fantasy, or escape. Without imagination, mindfulness can become dry, literal, overly clinical, or stripped of Soul.

Meditation and Alchemy needs both.

It needs the stillness of the cushion and the image-life of the dream. It needs breath and mandala, body and myth, silence and symbol, discipline and beauty. It needs the capacity to sit with what is and the imagination to perceive what is emerging through what is.

This is the fourth cornerstone of Middle-Way Spirituality: Hillman’s image of the Soul as a cooking vessel that takes in everything.

The path does not ask us to rise above the ten thousand things. It invites us to receive them with depth and to perceive them within ourselves. It does not ask us to eliminate darkness, suffering, symptom, dream, desire, or contradiction. It invites us to bring them into the vessel with patience, reverence, mindfulness, and imagination.

The Soul takes in everything because life takes in everything. The vessel receives the world, the wound, the dream, the body, the shadow, the beauty, the grief, the image, and the Sacred. It holds them together long enough for something to cook, something to soften, something to deepen, and something to be transformed.

This, too, is Meditation and Alchemy.

This, too, is Middle-Way Spirituality.

Scott Rensho Elliott, M.A.

August 15, 2026

In the first two posts in this series, I reflected on the first two cornerstones of Middle-Way Spirituality.

The first was Eihei Dōgen’s teaching that “to study Zen is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.” For me, this begins the work of Meditation and Alchemy because it invites us to study the self deeply enough that the ego-centric self begins to soften and the world becomes more intimate.

The second cornerstone was Jungian Psychology and the work of making the darkness conscious. Jung reminds us that real transformation does not come from imagining ourselves as beings of light while abandoning the wounded and shadowed places within us. It comes through relationship with what has been hidden, denied, repressed, exiled, or left outside the circle of awareness.

The third cornerstone grows naturally from these first two. If Dōgen invites us to study the self, and Jung invites us to include the shadow in that study, Zen teacher and author Claude Anshin Thomas invites us to ask what it means to be in right relationship with the suffering we discover there.

His teaching is simple, direct, and open-hearted:

“Healing is not the absence of suffering. Healing is the ability to be in right relationship with suffering.” (At Hell’s Gate; A Soldier’s Journey from War to Peace, Shambhala Publications, 2004.)

I return to this teaching often because it releases us from one of the most exhausting fantasies of modern life: the fantasy that healing means becoming someone who no longer suffers.

So much contemporary spirituality, wellness culture, and even some forms of therapy quietly depend on this fantasy. We are often encouraged to imagine healing as a state of resolution, as if the goal is to become calm enough, regulated enough, mindful enough, spiritual enough, or self-aware enough that suffering finally disappears. Healing becomes a project of removal. Remove the symptom. Remove the grief. Remove the anxiety. Remove the anger. Remove the wound. Remove the disturbance so that life can become smooth, functional, useful, profitable, successful, and serene.

I do not believe this is how life works. I do not believe this is how Soul works.

Right relationship with suffering is not passive acceptance of harm. It is not resignation, indifference, or the spiritual performance of being unbothered. It is not a way of saying everything happens for a reason, that the things that don’t destroy me only make me stronger, or that injustice or oppressions should be accepted because suffering is simply part of life.

Right relationship is more honest than that.

To be in right relationship with suffering is to meet suffering without turning it into our entire identity, without making it an enemy, without pretending it is not there, and without surrendering our lives to its domination. It is to become intimate with suffering without becoming possessed by it. It is to behold suffering, listen to it, respond to it, and allow it to be held within a larger field of awareness, compassion, and ethical action.

The Buddha’s first noble truth is not that life is only suffering, as it is sometimes poorly translated or misunderstood. The teaching is more subtle. In original Pali or Sanskrit, Buddha’s word is dukkha, which linguistically refers to the hub at the center of a wheel being “stuck” or not turning freely, causing problems of balance and mobility for the wheel and cart. There is dukkha in all of our lives. There is suffering, dissatisfaction, instability, unease, anguish, and the friction of wanting reality to be other than it is. There is birth, aging, illness, infirmity, death, loss, separation, grief, and the ache of impermanence. There is the suffering of getting what we do not want, losing what we love, and discovering that nothing we cling to can finally be made permanent.

Zen practice does not ask us to escape this truth. It invites us to sit in the middle of it.

In zazen, we sit down and become still. We follow the breath. We feel the body. We notice what arises. Sometimes what arises is peaceful. Sometimes what arises is restless, bored, painful, agitated, grieving, ashamed, angry, frightened, or lonely. Zen practice does not ask us to turn these experiences into enemies. It also does not ask us to indulge them, dramatize them, or build a new identity around them. It invites us to remain present while suffering arises, displays itself, changes, and passes through.

Over time, zazen teaches us that suffering is real, but it is not fixed. It has texture. It has causes and conditions. It has movement, body, images, memories, terrain and weather. It contracts and expands. It speaks loudly, then quietly. It may return, but it does not always return in the same way when we have learned to meet it differently.

This is what I hear in Claude Anshin Thomas’s teaching. Healing cannot be the absence of suffering because suffering is an inescapable part of the human condition. Healing is the capacity to be in relationship with suffering in a way that is less reactive, less avoidant, less identified, and less governed by fear or anger.

This teaching also resonates deeply with the Mahayana Buddhist teachings of emptiness. To say that suffering is empty does not mean suffering is imaginary or unimportant. It means suffering is not solid, separate, permanent, or self-existing. Like all things and all phenomena, suffering arises through causes and conditions. It is shaped by body, history, relationship, culture, memory, trauma, social location, attachment, fear, loss, and longing. Because suffering is dependently arisen, it can be met. Because it is not fixed, it can change. Because it is not separate from the rest of life, it can be held within compassion.

When suffering is treated as fixed, when we ourselves become fixed, suffering easily becomes identity. Our ego creates a self-referring narrative to tell us who we are: I am broken. I am damaged. I am anxious. I am depressed. I am abandoned. I am a failure. I am my wound. I am my shame. I am my grief. Something painful happens, and the ego begins to organize a whole world around it. Just like a worn-out wagon wheel, our ego keeps us “stuck in a rut.”

But when suffering is seen as phenomena arising within a wider field, a little more space becomes possible. Instead of “I am suffering” in some totalized sense, we may begin to notice that suffering is simply present in our landscape of awareness. Grief is present. Shame is present. Fear is present. Anger is present. Loneliness is present. This may seem like a small shift, but it can open a doorway. We are no longer identical with the suffering. We are in relationship with it.

Right relationship is not distancing in the cold, detached sense. It is not dissociation. It is certainly not transcendence. It is spacious intimacy. We are close enough to feel what is true, but not so collapsed into it that we lose the capacity to respond.

In right relationship, the first three cornerstones of Middle-Way Spirituality begin to form a single movement. Dōgen invites us to study the self. Jung invites us to include what has been unconscious or shadowed in that study. Claude Anshin Thomas invites us to relate differently to the suffering we encounter there.

Together, they offer a path that is neither transcendence nor collapse – a Middle Way.

Transcendence, in its unhealthy form, tries to rise above suffering too quickly. It wants light without shadow, spirit without body, awakening without grief, compassion without anger, and peace without truth. We may recognize this as “spiritual bypassing.” Collapse, on the other hand, becomes swallowed by suffering. It turns the wound into the whole story and forgets that something larger is also present.

Middle-Way Spirituality seeks another way. It invites us to remain present with suffering without fleeing into spiritual bypass and without becoming consumed by pain. It invites us to turn the lamp inward, not in order to condemn what we find, but to become more intimate, more honest, and more available for transformation.

This is why I think of Anshin’s teaching of right relationship with suffering as an alchemical teaching.

In alchemy, transformation does not happen by throwing away the difficult material. The prima materia, the raw material of the work, is often dark, confused, heavy, unwanted, and difficult to recognize as valuable. It does not look like gold. It does not look like wisdom. It may look like grief, symptom, anger, fear, shame, longing, resentment, exhaustion, or despair.

The alchemical imagination does not ask, “How quickly can I get rid of this?” It asks, “What is this material? What is hidden within it? What does it become when held in the vessel with patience, heat, attention, and care?”

Right relationship with suffering is a way of tending the vessel. The suffering is not discarded, enthroned, worshiped, or allowed to rule the whole house. It is brought into the vessel of awareness, where it can be witnessed, contained, listened to, and slowly transformed.

This is also why Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching, “No mud, no lotus,” is so important to me. The lotus does not bloom apart from the mud. It draws nourishment from the very material that appears dark, heavy, and impure. This does not mean the mud is pleasant. It does not mean suffering is beautiful in itself. It means the path of awakening does not unfold somewhere else, in a purified realm untouched by the actual conditions of our lives.

Our grief is part of the path. Our wounds are part of the path. Our shame, fear, confusion, longing, and histories are not outside the path. They are not the whole truth of who we are, but they are part of the material through which the Soul moves toward healing and wholeness.

This is where right relationship with suffering becomes decolonized Soul-care.

So much of modern Western life teaches us to treat suffering as an interruption of productivity. We are asked to recover quickly, regulate quickly, grieve efficiently, return to work, restore functioning, and become useful again. Even care systems can become shaped by this logic. The question becomes, “How quickly can this person be stabilized?” or “How soon can this symptom be reduced?” or “How can this suffering be managed so the person can return to ‘normal?’”

Sometimes stabilization is necessary. Sometimes symptom relief is required. Sometimes immediate intervention saves a life. Decolonized Soul-care does not oppose clinical care where clinical care is needed. But it does resist the reduction of suffering to malfunction alone. It resists the assumption that healing means returning a person to usefulness within systems that may themselves be wounding. It asks a different set of questions: What is the Soul carrying? What is this suffering asking to have witnessed? What conditions gave rise to it? What relationship, ritual, truth-telling, protection, grief, or transformation is being invited?

This kind of Soul-care does not rush too quickly toward cure. It creates space for meaning without forcing meaning. It honors pain without glorifying it. It recognizes the need for protection and change when suffering is caused by violence, injustice, exploitation, or abuse. It understands that right relationship with suffering may include leaving, resisting, confronting, grieving, repairing, resting, asking for help, or telling the truth.

Right relationship is not one posture. It is a living discernment.

Sometimes right relationship means sitting still and breathing with what hurts. Sometimes it means speaking aloud what has been hidden. Sometimes it means setting a boundary, allowing grief to move through the body, seeking therapy, medication, community, ceremony, or practical support, or no longer cooperating with what is harming us or others.

In this way, right relationship is both contemplative and ethical. It is inward and outward. It is personal and collective. It asks how we relate to suffering in our own bodies and psyches, and it asks how we respond to suffering in the world.

This matters because suffering is not only individual. We suffer personally, but we also suffer within systems. Poverty creates suffering. Racism creates suffering. War creates suffering. Patriarchy creates suffering. Homophobia and transphobia create suffering. Religious trauma creates suffering. Capitalism, when it reduces human beings to labor, consumption, and productivity, creates suffering. A purely individual model of healing cannot hold this.

Right relationship with suffering therefore includes the work of compassion and justice. It invites us to ask not only how I can be more peaceful with my own pain, but also how I can participate less in systems that produce suffering for others. It asks how my own unresolved suffering may be shaping the way I move through the world, and where my numbness, fear, shame, or defensiveness may protect me from seeing the suffering of other beings.

In this sense, right relationship with suffering continues the work of making the darkness conscious. Some of the darkness we meet is personal. Some is ancestral. Some is cultural. Some is collective. Some belongs to systems we inherited and continue to inhabit. Middle-Way Spirituality invites us to meet this complexity without denial and without despair.

The practice is not to become overwhelmed by all suffering everywhere. The practice is to become more available, more responsive, and less defended.

This is where compassion becomes real. Compassion is not pity. It is not sentimentality. It is not the performance of kindness. Compassion is the capacity to remain in relationship with suffering, our own and others’, without fleeing, hardening, collapsing, or turning away. Compassion is what becomes possible when suffering is met with presence.

And this is perhaps the deepest meaning of Claude Anshin Thomas’s teaching. Healing is not the absence of suffering because a life without suffering is not the measure of spiritual maturity. The measure is relationship. Can suffering be met without denial? Can grief be held without becoming the whole identity? Can pain be heard without being romanticized? Can anger be honored without becoming violence? Can shame be named without becoming destiny? Can the wound become part of the story without becoming the whole story?

These questions invite practice. They invite us back to the cushion, back to the breath, back to the body, back to the dream, back to the wound, and back to the world. They invite us to notice when we are clinging to suffering, resisting it, fearing it, making it into identity, or trying to escape it through spiritual language or self-improvement projects.

They also invite gentleness. The Soul does not move toward wholeness through force. It moves through attention, mercy, truth, protection, imagination, and relationship. Sometimes it moves slowly. Sometimes it circles the same wound for years before a new relationship becomes possible. Sometimes the first act of right relationship is simply acknowledging, “This hurts,” without explanation, justification, or shame.

That acknowledgment can be sacred. It can also be enough for today.

Middle-Way Spirituality does not promise a life without suffering. It does not promise spiritual invulnerability, perfect calm, or permanent resolution. It offers a way of being with suffering that does not abandon Soul. It invites us to meet suffering as part of the ten thousand things, as part of the darkness that seeks consciousness, and as part of the raw material through which compassion, wisdom, and transformation may slowly emerge.

This is the third cornerstone: Claude Anshin Thomas’s invitation to understand healing not as the absence of suffering, but as the capacity to be in right relationship with suffering.

The path does not ask us to become untouched by pain. It invites us to become more intimate with reality, more honest about the conditions of our lives, more compassionate toward what hurts, and more responsive to suffering wherever it appears.

This, too, is Middle-Way Spirituality.

Scott Rensho Elliott, M.A.

July 14, 2026

In my previous post, I reflected on the first cornerstone of Middle-Way Spirituality: Eihei Dōgen’s teaching that “to study Zen is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.”

For me, this begins the work of Meditation and Alchemy because it invites us to study the self until the ego-self begins to soften and the world becomes more intimate. The self is not a single, solid, isolated thing. It is more like weather, more like a landscape, more like a living field of causes and conditions. In Buddhist practice, we might speak of this as our conditioning. In Jungian language, we might speak of complexes, shadow, archetypal patterns, and the deep life of the unconscious.

This brings us to the second cornerstone: Jungian Psychology and making the darkness conscious.

Jung is often paraphrased as saying “enlightenment does not come from imagining figures of light, but from making the darkness conscious.” The actual Jung passage behind this paraphrase is more complex: in Psychology and Alchemy (CW Vol 12, ¶ 126), Jung observes the use of spiritual practices and mystical texts to avoid exploring and becoming intimate with one’s own Soul. In contemporary language, we might recognize this as what John Welwood later called spiritual bypassing.

Whether we hear Jung psychologically or spiritually, he names something essential: a spirituality that cannot face darkness cannot become whole.

This does not mean darkness is romantic, noble, or beautiful in some easy way. It does not mean suffering should be glorified. It does not mean trauma is a gift, or that every wound exists to teach us a lesson. I do not believe those things. Too often, spiritual language has been used to bypass real suffering, minimize harm, silence grief, and make people feel responsible for the very wounds they are trying to survive. There is much that cannot and should not be tolerated: abuse, exploitation, subjugation, and dehumanization.

Making our darkness conscious is not a way of decorating suffering with spiritual language. It is a way of refusing to abandon the parts of life that frighten us.

By darkness, I mean those aspects of ourselves and our experience that remain hidden, denied, repressed, disowned, unconscious, or unintegrated. I mean the feelings we would rather not feel, the stories we would rather not tell, the wounds we would rather not touch, the anger we would rather spiritualize, the grief we would rather outrun, the shame we would rather bury, and the contradictions we would rather explain away.

But, I also mean the gifts that have gone underground because they were not welcomed by our families, religious communities, cultures, or systems of power. Sometimes the shadow holds what we fear is worst in us. Sometimes it holds what is most alive and creative in us. Our shadow may hold rage, envy, resentment, fear, or cruelty, but it may also hold talent, skill, tenderness, imagination, sensuality, courage, playfulness, grief, dissent, and truth.

The shadow is not simply the “bad” part of us. It is the unseen part of us.

This is why Jungian Psychology matters for Middle-Way Spirituality. It gives us a language for understanding the psyche as deeper, wider, and more mysterious than the conscious ego. The ego is important. It is the part of us that says “I,” makes choices, tells a story, maintains continuity of identity, and tries to move through the world with some degree of coherence. But the ego is not the whole person. Beneath and around it is a much larger psychic life.

Dreams, symptoms, projections, fantasies, compulsions, moods, images, bodily responses, and recurring patterns arise from this deeper field. We may think we are acting freely, when in fact we are often being moved by unseen forces within us.

That which remains unconscious tends to govern life compulsively. This is not because the unconscious is evil. It is because what is unseen cannot be related to consciously. Fear may become control. Shame may become contempt. Grief may become numbness or bitterness. Anger may become domination, self-harm, or spiritual superiority. Longing may become addiction, fantasy, or endless dissatisfaction.

The darkness does not disappear because we refuse to look at it. It simply finds another way to speak, sometimes psychologically, sometimes behaviorally, sometimes somatically. What is not brought into consciousness is often acted out in relationships, politics, religion, institutions, bodies, dreams, and repeated patterns of suffering. What we do not know about ourselves does not leave us alone. It becomes fate, symptom, projection, compulsion, or destiny.

To make our darkness conscious is to begin changing our relationship with it.

This is where Jung and Zen begin to speak to one another. Zen practice does not promise freedom from disturbing thoughts and emotions. Anyone who has spent much time in zazen knows this. In Zen practice we sit down, become still, follow the breath, and discover that stillness does not remove the psyche. It reveals it. Irritation, shame, desire, grief, boredom, judgment, fear, and the wish to escape may all enter the field of awareness.

Zazen does not ask us to destroy these things. It invites us to notice them without clinging to them and without pushing them away. This is very close to Jung’s invitation. The point is not to become pure. The point is not to transcend. The point is to be present and become conscious, or one might say awake. The point is not to eliminate every difficult thought, feeling, wound, or complex. The point is to come into relationship with what has been unconscious, so that we are less possessed by it.

In Zen language, thoughts and emotions arise, display themselves, and pass away. In Jungian language, unconscious contents arise and seek recognition, relationship, and integration. These are not identical frameworks, but they illuminate one another beautifully. Both refuse the fantasy that healing means being untouched by suffering (the subject of my next post). Both refuse the fantasy that awakening means becoming perfect. Both invite us to turn toward what is actually here, and what is always here is complexity.

This is why I am cautious about spiritualities the over-identify with light. Light is a beautiful and necessary image. We need illumination, clarity, compassion, wisdom, and hope. But when spirituality becomes over-identified with light, it can become strangely violent toward the parts of life that do not fit its ideal. A spirituality that only welcomes peace may reject anger before anger has been truly heard. A spirituality that only welcomes gratitude may shame grief before grief has been allowed to speak. A spirituality that only welcomes forgiveness may rush past the truth of injury. A spirituality that only welcomes transcendence may abandon the Soul’s need for descent.

This is spiritual bypassing. It happens when spiritual ideas, practices, or identities are used to avoid the actual work of becoming conscious. It can look gentle on the surface and speak beautifully of love, peace, surrender, compassion, and non-attachment. But underneath, it may be a refusal to feel, a refusal to grieve, a refusal to confront harm, a refusal to tell the truth, or a refusal to encounter the shadow.

Jungian Psychology helps correct this by insisting that the darkness matters. Not because darkness is the goal, but because wholeness includes relationship with what has been excluded. The shadow does not become conscious through condemnation. Condemnation often drives it deeper underground. The shadow becomes conscious through attention, honesty, humility, and encounter. As the Soul moves naturally toward healing and wholeness, it invites us to notice our reactions with curiosity rather than judgment. An awakening Soul invites us to become interested in our projections, to wonder why certain people, images, ideas, or situations disturb us so intensely, and to listen more carefully to dreams, symptoms, and repeating patterns. Over time, the Soul gently draws our attention toward what we avoid, judge, envy, attack, idealize, or fear, not as punishment, but as a compelling invitation into deeper awareness, relationship, and transformation.

This does not mean we indulge everything that arises within us. Not every impulse should be acted upon. Not every fantasy should be literalized. Not every feeling tells the whole truth. Making our darkness conscious calls for discipline as well as discernment. It asks for ethical responsibility and the capacity to hold something without becoming possessed by it.

This is why Zen practice is so important. Zazen helps create the inner space in which shadow material can arise without immediately becoming action. We can notice anger, shame, fear, desire, envy, grief, judgment, and confusion without immediately turning them into identity, behavior, or ideology.

This is not repression, dissociation, or passivity. It is presence. To make our darkness conscious is not to enthrone it, but to bring it into the alchemical vessel of awareness, where it may be held, listened to, heated, softened, and slowly transformed.

Alchemy gives us an image of transformation that is slower, more organic, and more honest than many modern models of healing or “therapy.” Much of contemporary life wants speed. We are conditioned to want techniques, solutions, clever life-hacks, outcomes, evidence of progress, and signs that we are getting “better.” Even inner work can become colonized by the demand for results.

But the Soul does not always move quickly. The Soul does not always speak in straight lines. The Soul does not submit easily to the mechanistic logic of productivity. Sometimes the work is not to solve the darkness, but to stay with it long enough for it to reveal its image. Sometimes the work is to allow the wound to tell its story. Sometimes the work is to sit with the complex until we can recognize the frightened, defended, or exiled life within it. Sometimes the work is to stop asking, “How do I get rid of this?” and begin asking, “What is asking to be seen?”

This is not the same as refusing help. Clinical care, therapy, medication, community support, and practical intervention may all be necessary and life-giving. Decolonized Soul-care does not oppose clinical care where clinical care is needed. But it does resist the reduction of the person to pathology or diagnosis alone. It resists the assumption that the only meaning of suffering is malfunction. It resists the demand that every wound be quickly managed so the person can return to productivity.

The psyche is not an object to be fixed. Soul is not a machine. Suffering is not merely an interruption of usefulness. The darkness may also be a doorway.

This is one of the places where Jungian Psychology becomes a decolonizing force. It challenges systems that want to reduce inner life to diagnosis, behavior, cognition, performance, compliance, or productivity. It reminds us that symptoms may have meaning, dreams may have wisdom, images may carry truth, and what disturbs us may also be asking for relationship.

To make our darkness conscious is therefore a practice of reclaiming the inner life from systems of domination. It is a refusal to let the most difficult parts of our experience be shamed into silence or reduced to problems of management. It is a way of saying that Soul speaks through more than just clarity, peace, and light. Soul also speaks through symptom, wound, dream, ache, repeating pattern, unlived life, and the shadow at the edge of awareness.

This is deeply connected to the first cornerstone. Dōgen invites us to study the self and awaken through the ten thousand things. Jung helps us understand that honest self-study includes the unconscious, the shadow, and what the ego does not already know, approve of, or control. The shadow is another of the “ten thousand things.” Otherwise, self-study becomes merely self-confirmation, welcoming only what fits our preferred identity.

Real self-study unsettles us. It invites us to notice where we are defended, inflated, ashamed, or afraid; where our compassion has limits; where spirituality protects us from grief, anger, intimacy, embodiment, or responsibility; and where our wounds have become worldviews. This is not easy work, but it is merciful work because what remains unconscious often keeps repeating itself, and because shame cannot heal what it refuses to name. When we stop abandoning the darkness, we may discover that some of what we feared was carrying a lost fragment of life.

I think of this often in terms of dreams. Dreams rarely speak in the polished language of the ego, and they do not usually flatter our preferred self-image. Dreams bring strange houses, animals, ancestors, monsters, children, dark forests, broken vehicles, hidden stairways, impossible tasks, and forgotten places. Dreams show us the psyche as landscape. They reveal the ten thousand things moving within us.

A dream may disturb us because it does not obey our conscious values. It may show anger when we want kindness, desire when we want detachment, or grief when we thought we were finished grieving. To work with dreams in this way is not to decode them mechanically. It is to enter into relationship and ask what image has arrived, what feeling it carries, what part of the Soul is speaking, and what attitude of consciousness may be needed.

This is also true of active imagination. When we enter into dialogue with an inner figure, image, affect, or dream presence, we are not trying to control the unconscious. We are making space for relationship and allowing something other than the ego to speak. This asks for humility because the ego often prefers to interpret too quickly, resolve too quickly, or turn the encounter into a neat, tidy lesson.

But the unconscious is not always neat, the Soul is not always tidy, and the darkness does not become conscious on command. It often becomes conscious slowly, through repeated attention, dreams, relationships, symptoms, meditation, creative work, grief, and the willingness to remain present when our usual defenses begin to fail.

This is why Middle-Way Spirituality is not a path of purity, spiritual self-optimization, or escape from the body, the psyche, history, suffering, or the world. It is a path of relationship: with breath, body, dreams, shadow, suffering, the world, the many inner figures moving through the landscape of the self, and the numinous as it appears not only in light, but also in the dark, rich, fertile soil where something new may be germinating.

To make our darkness conscious is to trust that what has been hidden may be approached with reverence. It is to believe that what has been exiled from awareness may still belong to the larger work of wholeness. It is to allow the alchemical vessel of Soul to receive what the ego has rejected, so that darkness may become image, image may become relationship, and relationship may become transformation.

This is the second cornerstone of Middle-Way Spirituality: Jung’s invitation to turn toward the shadow, not in order to glorify suffering or become fascinated with darkness, but in order to become more whole, more honest, more compassionate, and more deeply alive.

The path does not ask us to imagine ourselves as beings of light while abandoning the wounded and shadowed places within us. It invites us to turn the lamp inward, listen for what the darkness is carrying, and trust that what is brought into compassionate awareness may slowly become available for relationship.

This, too, is Middle-Way Spirituality.

Scott Rensho Elliott, M.A.

July 7, 2026

In my first post, I introduced Meditation and Alchemy as a way of framing the world of Middle-Way Spirituality.

Meditation, because the path begins with learning how to be present.

Alchemy, because being present empowers us to transform.

My approach to spiritual practice is shaped by several streams of wisdom that have become central to my own life and work: Zen Buddhism, Archetypal Psychology, dreamwork, active imagination, contemplative practice, and the decolonizing of Soul-care. Over time, I have come to think of Middle-Way Spirituality as resting on four cornerstones: the Zen teaching of Eihei Dōgen, the depth psychology of Carl Jung, healing as right relationship with suffering as articulated by Zen teacher Claude Anshin Thomas, and James Hillman’s image of the Soul as a cooking vessel that “takes in everything.”

Each of these cornerstones helps describe a way of being with life that is neither escape nor domination. This is not self-improvement in the usual sense. It is not spiritual perfection, mastery, cure, or transcendence understood as a flight away from the human condition. Rather, Middle-Way Spirituality invites us into a deeper intimacy with things as they are: with the world as it is, the body as it is, suffering as it is, and the psyche as it is — alive, fragmented, luminous, painful, imaginal, contradictory, and polycentric.

The first cornerstone of Middle-Way Spirituality begins with Dōgen’s famous teaching:

To study Zen is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.

I return to this teaching again and again because it says so much with such elegant simplicity. At first, it may sound strange. Many people imagine Zen as a path of getting away from the self. Others may think Zen is about becoming calm, empty, detached, peaceful, or somehow untouched by the messiness of human life. Some may imagine that spiritual practice means rising above or “transcending” our ordinary thoughts, wounds, desires, fears, griefs, and longings.

But Dōgen begins somewhere much closer to home. He says that to study Zen is to study the self.

He does not say this because the self is the center of the universe. Dōgen does not invite us to study the self so we can perfect it, polish it, brand it, or optimize it. He is not describing the self as a spiritual project to be conquered or controlled. Rather, he begins with the self because this is where practice begins. The self is the field we are given to explore.

And what is this self?

It is not one solid, fixed, separate thing. It is not a little king sitting on the throne of experience, managing the kingdom of body and mind. It is not as singular or as stable as we often imagine. The self is more like weather, with both gentle and catastrophic patterns arising and dissipating. It is a living field of causes and conditions: memories, habits, wounds, fears, desires, family stories, cultural inheritances, ancestral patterns, relationships, dreams, longings, defenses, roles, images, complexes, hopes, griefs, bodies, nervous systems, and histories.

We might also imagine the self as a landscape: varied, living, and continually changing, with critters coming and going, and flora and fauna emerging, flourishing, and passing away. Within this inner terrain there are wooded places and open fields, rivers and dry beds, jagged boulders or stones worn smooth by time, hidden roots, sudden clearings, weathered paths, breathtaking vistas, and places still overgrown and unexplored. There is sky, spaciousness, and shifting light. There are forms of life moving through this landscape as well: instincts, memories, dreams, wounds, longings, fears, guardians, ancestors, and forgotten songs. Some parts of the landscape are cultivated; others remain wild. Some places feel hospitable and familiar; others feel difficult, shadowed, or strange. To study the self is not to flatten this terrain into a single identity, diagnosis, or story. It is to walk the landscape with patience, curiosity, and reverence, learning not to conquer it, but to know it more intimately.

The self is not a thing so much as a flowing, ever-changing gathering.

When we study this gathering deeply, honestly, and compassionately, something begins to soften. We begin to see that what we call “I” is much more fluid, relational, and mysterious than we once thought. We begin to see that we are not simply our opinions, wounds, reactions, moods, identities, or stories. Anger arises and passes. Shame arises and passes. Fear arises and passes. Tenderness arises and passes. Memories, thoughts, fantasies, judgments, and desires also arise and pass.

This does not make these experiences unreal. It makes them workable, malleable. It makes them available for relationship.

Traditionally, Dōgen’s “ten thousand things” refers to the vast multiplicity of the world: mountains, rivers, trees, grasses, sounds, forms, sensations, animals, seasons, stars, faces, bodies, and beings. But I also hear this psychologically. The ten thousand things include our thoughts, emotions, dreams, images, memories, symptoms, griefs, fears, complexes, fantasies, and archetypal patterns. They include the frightened child, the angry protector, the grieving one, the monk, the trickster, the exile, the judge, the dream image that will not leave us alone, the wound that keeps asking to be heard, the pattern we repeat even when we know better, and the longing we cannot quite explain.

This is one of the reasons Dōgen’s teaching is so important for Middle-Way Spirituality. He does not say that to study the self is to shame the self. He does not say that to study the self is to inflate the self. He does not say that to study the self is to improve the self into a more successful spiritual personality. He says that to study the self is to forget the self.

For me, forgetting the self does not mean rejecting the human person. It does not mean erasing our histories, needs, wounds, personalities, or particularities. It does not mean becoming blank, indifferent, or inhuman. Forgetting the self means loosening the ego’s grip. It means releasing the fantasy that the ego is the center of everything. It means discovering that life is not happening only inside the small room of “me” and “mine.”

When the ego begins to soften, the world becomes more intimate. The boundary between inner and outer becomes less rigid. The mountains, rivers, trees, birds, seasons, bodies, dreams, wounds, and strangers we encounter in our inner and outer landscapes begin to speak. Dōgen’s ten thousand things begin to reveal themselves.

From the standpoint of Middle-Way Spirituality, these are not simply distractions from practice. They are part of the field of practice. The psyche itself becomes a place of practice.

This is where Zen and Archetypal Psychology begin to speak beautifully to one another. Zen teaches us to sit still and become intimate with what is. Archetypal Psychology reminds us that “what is” includes the deep, plural, and polycentric life of the psyche. We are not one thing. We are many things. Psyche speaks in dreams, images, symptoms, moods, stories, fantasies, wounds, and inner figures.

The work is not to dominate these inner realities. The work is to be present and listen.

This matters because so much of modern Western life trains us to approach both the world and the self as objects to be managed. We are taught to optimize ourselves, improve ourselves, brand ourselves, diagnose ourselves, make ourselves useful, make ourselves efficient, and make ourselves calm enough to keep functioning inside systems that may themselves be dehumanizing.

Even spirituality can become part of this. Meditation can become a productivity tool. Mindfulness can become a technique for tolerating oppression or exploitation. Healing can become another performance. Inner Work can become one more way the ego tries to control the psyche.

But this is not the way of Dōgen, and it is not the way of Soul.

A decolonized approach to Soul-care asks us to stop treating the inner life as a territory to be conquered, extracted, analyzed, exploited, or made profitable. It asks us to approach the psyche with humility and curiosity. It asks us to listen before interpreting, to notice before fixing, and to create an alchemical container spacious enough for the ten thousand things to appear.

This is where zazen becomes essential.

Zazen, the sustained practice of seated meditation, is sometimes misunderstood as a technique for calming the mind. Calm may come. Stillness may come. A quieter mind may come. But these are not the whole of the practice. Zazen is not merely a relaxation exercise. It is not a method for becoming spiritually impressive. It is not a way to escape the psyche.

Zazen is the practice of being present with what is.

And what is here, when we finally become still enough to notice? Boredom may be here. Restlessness may be here. Fear, grief, desire, confusion, shame, irritation, tenderness, insight, and joy may all be here. Sometimes peace is here, and sometimes no peace at all is here.

In zazen, we practice remaining present without grasping at what feels pleasant and without pushing away what feels unpleasant. Thoughts and emotions are not enemies, but nor are they our masters. They arise, display themselves, and pass away. We sit, breathe, return, and allow the ten thousand things to come and go.

This is a profoundly merciful discipline. It is not easy, and it is not always comforting, but it is merciful because over time zazen teaches us that we do not have to be dominated by every passing thought, mood, or inner figure. Nor do we have to wage war against them. We can learn to be present without being possessed.

This is very close to the Jungian practice of active imagination as described by Robert Johnson and Marie-Louise von Franz. Active imagination is not fantasy for its own sake. It is not an egoic attempt to manipulate inner figures or force the unconscious to give us answers. At its best, active imagination is a disciplined practice of relationship. We listen to images, affects, dreams, and inner persons without controlling them, interpreting them too quickly, or trying to resolve them before they have spoken.

Zazen and active imagination are not the same practice, but they share something important. Both require stillness, humility, restraint, and the willingness to be present before we rush to meaning. Zazen grounds us in embodied awareness. Active imagination opens a dialogue with the imaginal life of the psyche. Together, they help form a practice of Soul-care rooted in relationship rather than mastery.

This is one of the deep foundations of Middle-Way Spirituality. We study the self, sit with the self, listen to the self, and watch the self change. We discover that the self is not as fixed as we imagined. We begin to forget the self, not by destroying it, but by seeing through its claim to be the center of everything.

Then, slowly, the ten thousand things begin to teach us. A dream teaches us. A grief teaches us. A difficult relationship teaches us. A bodily sensation teaches us. A tree, a wound, a silence, a stranger, a mood, or a line of poetry may become part of the field of awakening.

The Sacred is not somewhere else. The Numinous is not hidden only in temples, scriptures, ceremonies, or peak experiences. It is also here, in the ordinary field of our actual life. It is here in the breath, the body, the dream, the shadow, the wound, and the world.

To study the self is not narcissism when it is done as practice. To study the self is to enter the doorway of reality. And to forget the self is not to disappear. It is to belong more deeply with all things.

This is the first cornerstone of Middle-Way Spirituality: Dōgen’s invitation to study the self so deeply that the ego-self begins to soften, and the ten thousand things can reveal themselves as the very field of awakening.

The path does not begin somewhere else. It begins in this life, with this body, this breath, this dream, this wound, this moment, and this self, studied with sincerity until its imagined separateness slowly begins to fall away.

Scott Rensho Elliott, M.A.
June 30, 2026

There are many ways to speak about spiritual practice. We can speak of awakening, healing, transformation, Inner Work, Soul-care, mindfulness, shadow, the Sacred, the Numinous, the Self, no-self, and the long, slow work of becoming more fully human. Each of these words carries something important. Each one points toward a different doorway into the mystery of human life. But the language I keep returning to, the language that seems most able to hold the work I am trying to name, is Meditation and Alchemy.

Meditation, because the path begins with learning how to become present. Alchemy, because presence is what allows transformation to begin.

By transformation, I do not mean quick change, magical escape, spiritual achievement, or the kind of self-improvement that makes us more optimized, more productive, more marketable, or more serene. I am not especially interested in spirituality as another form of personal branding or self-improvement. I am not interested in mindfulness as a technique for helping us tolerate systems that are making us sick. I am interested in practices that help us become more intimate with reality: the reality of our bodies, the reality of suffering, the reality of dreams, images, grief, shame, longing, beauty, fear, and love, and the reality of a world that is broken, luminous, terrifying, sacred, and alive.

That is the world of Meditation and Alchemy. It is a world shaped by Zen practice, Archetypal Psychology, dreamwork, active imagination, contemplative spirituality, and the decolonizing of Soul-care. I call this way of practice and being Middle-Way Spirituality.

When I speak of Soul-care, I do not mean therapy, though therapy can be sacred and necessary. I do not mean religion, though religion at its best can offer ritual, symbol, wisdom, and belonging. I do not mean wellness, though caring for the body and nervous system matters deeply. By Soul-care, I mean the practice of listening deeply to the life of Soul.

By Soul, I mean that dimension of human life that speaks in image, dream, symptom, story, grief, imagination, memory, and longing. Soul is not something to be fixed. It is not a problem to be solved or an object to be managed. Soul is a depth to be encountered, a field of experience to be approached with reverence, patience, and care. It asks to be listened to before it is interpreted. It asks to be accompanied before it is corrected. It asks for relationship rather than control.

Zen has been essential for me because Zen begins with presence. It does not ask us to believe the right things in order to become whole. It does not ask us to explain everything. It does not ask us to improve ourselves into spiritual success stories. Zen invites us to sit down, become still, breathe, and notice what is actually here.

When we sit in this way, we discover that everything is here. Restlessness is here. Grief is here. Old wounds are here. The judging mind is here. The frightened child is here. The angry protector is here. The longing for silence is here. The longing to be seen is here. The desire to escape and the desire to awaken may both be here at the same time. In zazen, the sustained practice of sitting meditation, we do not need to turn any of this into an enemy. We also do not need to inflate it into a grand spiritual drama. We practice remaining present with what arises, without clinging to it and without pushing it away.

That practice is sometimes harder than it sounds. It is also profoundly merciful.

Zen teaches us to study the self so deeply that the ego-self begins to soften. Eihei Dōgen famously wrote that to study Zen is to study the self, and to study the self is to forget the self. I do not hear this as a rejection of the human person. I hear it as an invitation to release the fantasy that the ego is the center of everything. The self is not a solid little king sitting on the throne of experience, commanding the body, mind, heart, and Soul from above. The self is more like weather moving across an open field. It is a gathering of conditions, memories, habits, wounds, hopes, fears, dreams, ancestors, relationships, and stories.

We might also imagine the self as a landscape. There are wooded places and open fields, rivers and dry beds, jagged boulders and stones worn smooth by time, hidden roots, sudden clearings, weathered paths, and places still overgrown and unexplored. There is sky, spaciousness, and shifting light. There are forms of life moving through this terrain as well: instincts, memories, dreams, wounds, longings, fears, guardians, ancestors, and forgotten songs. Some parts of the landscape are cultivated; others remain wild. Some places feel hospitable and familiar; others feel difficult, shadowed, or strange. To study the self is not to flatten this terrain into a single identity, diagnosis, or story. It is to walk the landscape with patience, curiosity, and reverence, learning not to conquer it, but to know it more intimately.

When we study the self with compassion and discipline, we begin to see that we are not as separate, fixed, or singular as we once imagined. The ego remains important, but it is not the whole of who we are. It is one part of a much larger ecology of Soul.

Archetypal Psychology enters the conversation here because Jung and Hillman remind us that Psyche is plural. We are not one thing. We are many things. We contain complexes, inner figures, dreams, gods, ghosts, wounds, protectors, exiles, children, elders, tricksters, monks, warriors, lovers, and strangers. Some of these figures speak through dreams. Some speak through symptoms. Some speak through our relationships. Some speak through the patterns we keep repeating, even when we know better. Some arrive as moods, images, fantasies, longings, or bodily sensations that trouble us until we learn how to listen.

The work is not to dominate these figures. The work is to enter relationship with them. To listen. To discern. To bear witness. To learn their names, their wounds, their gifts, their patterns, and their ways of appearing. What we call anxiety, rage, grief, shame, desire, envy, confusion, or creative hunger may also be the appearance of a figure at the threshold of consciousness, asking for attention. Not every impulse should be indulged, and not every inner voice should be obeyed. Soul-care requires discernment, containment, ethical responsibility, and practice. But it also asks us to slow down before we reduce the living complexity of Psyche to pathology, dysfunction, or defect.

This is what I mean by Alchemy.

Alchemy is not about instantly turning pain into wisdom. It is not a spiritual shortcut or a way of pretending that suffering is beautiful when suffering is often devastating. Alchemy is the slow work of staying with the material long enough for it to reveal what it carries. It is the art of containment, heat, patience, attention, and transformation. It trusts that something may happen when the raw material of life is held carefully enough, honestly enough, and compassionately enough.

James Hillman once wrote, “The cooking vessel of the Soul takes in everything.” I love that image because it refuses the fantasy that spiritual life is a ladder we climb in order to rise above the mess of being human. Soul is not a ladder. Soul is a vessel. It is a container, a place where things are held, heated, mixed, broken down, softened, darkened, clarified, and transformed. The vessel becomes transformative not because it rejects what is difficult, but because it receives what life brings and holds it long enough for something to happen.

The vessel takes in everything. It takes in peace and light, but not only peace and light. It takes in compassion and clarity, but not only compassion and clarity. It takes in the parts of ourselves we like and the parts we would rather hide. It takes in shame, anger, grief, envy, fear, confusion, desire, failure, fantasy, loneliness, and contradiction. Nothing human is outside the path because nothing human is outside the Soul.

This is also why I speak of decolonized Soul-care. So much of modern life teaches us to treat the inner world as something to control, improve, brand, monetize, diagnose, optimize, or make useful. Even spirituality can become colonized by productivity. We begin to ask whether meditation is making us calmer, whether healing is making us more functional, whether grief is moving quickly enough, whether spiritual practice is producing measurable results, and whether the Soul is becoming sufficiently efficient.

But Soul does not move according to the logic of capitalism. Soul does not always hurry. Soul does not always explain itself. Soul does not always become efficient. Soul does not always want to be cured before it has been heard.

Decolonized Soul-care resists the reduction of human life to usefulness, productivity, pathology, or compliance. It asks different questions. It asks what the Soul is carrying, what image is emerging, what dream is asking for attention, what suffering needs relationship rather than rejection, what old story is losing its power, and what new life is trying to take root beneath the surface. These questions do not replace appropriate clinical care, therapy, medication, or crisis support when those are needed. They do, however, protect the imaginal, symbolic, ritual, relational, and Soul-centered dimensions of human experience from being flattened by systems that recognize only what can be measured, managed, or made profitable.

Thich Nhat Hanh offered the beautiful teaching: no mud, no lotus. The lotus does not bloom by escaping the mud. It blooms because its roots are in the mud, drawing nourishment from what is dark, wet, tangled, and hidden beneath the surface. This does not mean we romanticize suffering. It does not mean harm is secretly good or that trauma is somehow necessary. It means we stop pretending that awakening happens somewhere else, in some purified realm far away from the actual conditions of our lives.

The mud is part of the path. Our wounds are not the whole truth of who we are, but they are part of the material. Our grief is not an obstacle to spiritual life; it may be one of the doorways. Our dreams are not nonsense; they may be the Soul speaking in its native language. Our symptoms may not be only malfunctions; they may also be images calling for attention. The path does not ask us to abandon the mud. It asks us to learn how to be with it in ways that allow life to continue growing.

Meditation and Alchemy is my name for this kind of work. It is the meeting place of silence and image, stillness and Soul, Zen and depth psychology, dreamwork and spiritual practice, shadow and compassion, the wound and the sacred, the mud and the lotus. Meditation gives us the capacity to remain present with what is. Alchemy gives us a language and image for participating consciously in what is becoming.

This Substack is for people who are drawn to a spirituality that does not require them to abandon their complexity. It is for those who are tired of easy answers, but still hunger for depth, practice, beauty, ritual, and meaning. It is for those who have outgrown inherited religious certainties without losing their longing for the Sacred. It is for those who know that healing is not merely the absence of suffering, but a different relationship with suffering. It is for those who suspect that their dreams, symptoms, griefs, images, and longings may be trying to tell them something. It is for those who are willing to turn the lamp inward.

My hope is that Meditation and Alchemy becomes a small vessel for this work. I hope it becomes a place where we can sit together, listen carefully, tend the Soul without rushing to fix it, and practice becoming more intimate with the life that is actually here. I hope it becomes a place where meditation gives us the stillness to remain present, and alchemy gives us the imagination to trust that what is held with care may slowly become available for transformation.

Scott Rensho Elliott, M.A.

June, 2026

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