What is the soul?

'This is the first, oldest and wisest thing I know: that the soul exists.'

Mary Oliver from 'Low tide'

I was in my early fifties when I set out in search of soul. For many hours, I looked for it in book after book: in the sacred texts of the world’s major spiritual traditions, in mythology and philosophy books, in psychology and psychotherapy books. The more I read about the soul, however, the more uncertain and confused I became. I was in danger of losing my way in a dense forest of too many words, too many contrasting ideas and beliefs, too many conflicting perspectives with no way of knowing which path to take. It took me a long time to realise that I was searching in all the wrong places, that our rational and scientific ways of knowing will always fail us. They will never prove the soul’s existence. They will never ensnare it in the net of their theories and definitions. They will never plumb its depths nor penetrate its mystery. However hard they might try to catch hold of it, it will always slip out of their hands for the soul is too deep and encompassing a mystery for the mind to grasp. And so if we seek to know more of the nature of the soul, we must learn to look elsewhere. 

It wasn't until I steeped myself in the poetry of Mary Oliver that I finally found a path through the forest. What she taught me is that it is only when we learn to listen to the voice of our own experience, when we come to trust our own intuitive grasp of the way things truly are that we can find our way to that place of deeper knowing of which she speaks. For the soul can be felt, touched and experienced. When something stirs or moves us deeply, when we are gripped by an inexplicable conviction in our gut, when we sense those deeper longings that seem to arise from the very core of our being, we are experiencing soul. When we are gripped by the need to find ourselves, to know who we really are we are, to be all that we have within us to be, we are hearing the inner voice of the soul. And when our imagination and creativity are flowing freely and our senses come alive as never before to the wonder, beauty and sacredness of this extraordinary world that is our home, we are drawing on those qualities of soul that enable us to 'live deep and suck out all the marrow of life' to draw on the words of the philosopher, Henry David Thoreau.

We can also grasp something of the soul’s nature by looking at the ways in which we have come to name it. Soul is the oldest name for this deeper self but it has many others. Wisdom teachers have called it our larger or deeper self, our original or essential nature, our inner light or teacher. Psychologists and philosophers have named it our true personality, our Self, our true self, our core self or our authentic self. Each of these ways of naming the soul reveals a little more of what it is like. The words they draw on – words such as true, essential, core, inner and deep – also tell us something about the way in which it works in our lives and shapes our way of being in the world. For they flow both out of our experience and our intuitive understanding of the soul.

Our true self

‘The great law of life is: be yourself.’

                                      John O’Donohue

When I have been in therapy, when I have been sharing the difficult or painful aspects of my experience with those to whom I am closest or when I have been wrestling on my own with what troubles me, I am often aware that at the heart of my struggle is a deep longing to become more fully myself, to discover and live out more of the truth of who I am. It is a longing to find a way of being more authentic in the world, of being real, of being true to the person I am.

At some point in our lives, many of us will find ourselves voicing such a need to ‘find ourselves’ or to know who we ‘really are’. It is a longing that flows from the very core of our being. Though it may subside from time to time, it is always there. In midlife, it clamours for our attention as never before. We may speak of not ‘being ourselves’, of not having ‘come into our own’, of not living the life we are ‘meant to be living’. Sometimes, we also sense these things in others as we walk alongside them. We may sense a listlessness, a joylessness, a lifelessness, a pervading sense of gloom and despondency, a deep sadness that nothing seems to explain or alleviate. We may see them as having ‘lost their way’, of having ‘lost their passion for living’, of having had ‘the life sucked out of them’. All of these words flow out of our experience of being cut off from some vital part of ourselves as they did for me. They are an expression of our deep need to find our way back to the person that somewhere within us we know ourselves to be, to come home to our soul. For the soul is the true self.

Soul is the self we become when we choose to embrace our full personhood, when we begin to find our way home to the deeper self within us that has languished in the shadows for too long. It is the self we are meant – some would say are destined – to be. It is the self the world sees whenever we are willing to come out from behind the masks we wear, whenever we refuse others’ expectations or demands that we are who we are not, whenever we make the decision to live life as we choose to live it, whatever the cost.

Our unique self

‘You… are utterly unique.

There are gifts you were born to give.

Songs you were born to sing.

Stories you were born to tell.’                               Carrie Newcomer from ‘Showing Up’ 

The soul is also the source of our individuality. Too many of us live in a culture that is in some way or other trying to suppress our individuality, to encourage or even force us to conform to some imposed norm, to make us other than we are. Our individuality is drowning in a sea of conformity and the world is undoubtedly the poorer for it.  For each soul has its own unique light, its own shape, its own strengths and gifts, its own path to tread and one of our most important callings is to learn to inhabit this individuality. In similar vein, the writer, Parker Palmer speaks of the soul as our original ‘birthright nature’. Each of us, he says,  contains within us ‘a seed of selfhood’, ‘the spiritual DNA’ of our individuality. We are born knowing somewhere deep within us our true nature and the particular gifts that we are meant to offer the world. 

But to take the risk of expressing this individuality in a world that prizes it so little is hard and so we often make the choice to fit in rather than stand out. We sacrifice our individuality on the altar of conformity and thereby lose sight of the uniqueness of our being. The loss is hard to bear. In his book, ‘Tales of the Hasidim’, Martin Buber tells this story about the celebrated Jewish Rabbi Meshulum Zusya. On his deathbed,  he began to cry uncontrollably and his disciples asked him why he was weeping. ‘In the coming world’, he said, ‘they will not ask me: Why were you not Moses? They will ask me: Why were you not Zusya?’

Our deep self

‘It is not too late

To open your depths

 by plunging into them

And drink in the life

That reveals itself quietly there.’

                                                Rainer Maria Rilke  

It seems that for many if not most of us, the word ‘soul’ is strongly associated with such words as ‘core’, ‘essence’, ‘heart’, ‘innermost’ and ‘centre’ as it is for me. My experience of soul has led me to think of it as the essence of my being, the innermost core of me. It is what comes to light when I am able to let down my defences, take off the masks I wear and risk being more fully who I am. If you were to ask me where I might locate the soul bodily, I would point to my gut. There is an association here with depth, a sense that the inner landscape of the soul is to be found at the deepest level of our being and that connecting with soul requires us to dive down inside ourselves.

At some time in our lives, all of us will be invited to plunge into our depths to discover what awaits us there. All of us will feel ‘the downward pull to soul’ as psychologist Bill Plotkin describes it. All of us will hear the call to an inner path that mythologists call an ‘underworld journey’ and wisdom teachers call a ‘journey of descent’. Furthermore, the self that we are searching for as we dig is often spoken of as a deeper self. For psychologist John Rowan, it is 'my Deep Self'. For writer Parker Palmer, it is his 'deep identity'. For a client of mine, it is 'the deep downness of me.'

The use of such spatial metaphors reflects our sense that the landscape of the soul is to be found at the deepest level of our being. It also reflects our sense that the soul is the very essence of who we are. The word ‘essence’ comes from an ancient Greek word which speaks of the fundamental nature of something. To speak of the soul as our essence is then to say that it is what makes us who we are, that it is the cornerstone or foundation of our nature, that it is the very core of our being. And just as we have to dig down many miles below the earth’s surface to reach its core, so too we have to dig down through the outer layers of our personality to find the core of our selfhood. 

Soul is not something we have. It is something we are. Soul is the essence of us. It is what is deepest and truest in us. It is the self we long to be, the self we are meant to be, the self we are called to be. It is the unique and beautiful self we - and only we - can be. To live from the soul is to live this deeper self as fully as we can in every moment of our lives. It is to claim the freedom we have always had to be who we have always been. It is to live with courage, hope and a deep and certain knowing that this is the true meaning and purpose of each of our lives.

©Copyright Kaitlyn Steele 2025

Kaitlyn Steele

www.insearchofsoul.co.uk

kaitlynsteele16@gmail.com