TEACHINGS

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Honoring all authentic Spiritual Traditions...

Soulwork has its genesis in a number of spiritual principles that are coming into greater focus and understanding in this 21st century.

Flip through the pages below for a brief description on some of its main themes.

Major Tenets

of Soulwork

This booklet holds the major tenets or themes that permeate soulwork. In this 21st-century, as we bring together centuries of spiritual wisdom coupled with new insights, sign-posts are emerging showing us the most direct path to our next step on the evolutionary ladder.

The following pages offer a brief summary of many of these sign-posts. Flip through them to get a taste of what awaits you on your journey into spiritual expansion as you discover your True Self and all that it means to be an embodied soul.

Some of these Tenets are expanded on in the "Topic" section under "Teachings" in the website menu at the top of this page.

Essential Soul Qualities -- 3
Embrace Everything - Avoid Nothing - 4
Head, Heart, and Belly/Body Centers - 5
Include & Transcend - 7
Compassion - Soulful Humility - 9
Present & Alert - 11
The Shadow Knows - 12
Translation and Transformation - 15
In the Flow - Organic - 16
Being vs Doing - 17
Embody & Transcend - 19
States vs Stations - 20
Hurts More, Bothers You Less - 21
Perfection Now & There's More - 22
Impulse to Evolve - 23

Essential Soul Qualities

Soulwork emphasizes the potential of what it means to be a fully incarnated soul. It knows a soul will not rest until it fully awakens into its own uniqueness along with all other souls. Thus, the journey embraces the longing to discover the myriad of essential soul qualities that every soul has the same potential to enjoy.

These Essential Soul Qualities are sometimes likened to jewels, or the many facets of diamond. They include qualities such as spaciousness, deep peace, equanimity, joy, presence, balance, unity consciousness, vulnerability, strength, commitment, patience, being in the flow, curiosity, acceptance, knowingness, passion, love, commitment, alignment with Divine Will, and many more. Find a list of Essential Qualities with descriptions under the Topic Page in this website.

Each moment presents a new opportunity to polish each jewel as it arises and to discover countess more as the mystery of life unfolds.

Embrace Everything - Avoid Nothing

What does it mean to embrace everything and avoid nothing? Often our understanding of this phrase is coming more from our head than our complete being.

A fully embodied soul asked that every part of our body and mind be put on the altar of surrender. This means our feelings, beliefs, fears, and hardest of all, who we think we are. We cannot lose or shake off our True Self, our soul. Thus, we ultimately will be invited to dive into every part of our being-ness including every cell, every thought, every old memory whether pleasant, debilitating, or terrifying. There is no escaping this if we are truly to embrace what it means to be a 21st-century spiritual pioneer.

The old ways of marginalizing ("that" doesn't apply to me) or avoiding (out of sight - out of mind) haven't worked so well in healing our planetary strife and environmental dissonance. Today we must embrace in the moment every thought, feeling, and "zoning out" that enters our consciousness.

Soulwork teaches us what it truly means to embrace everything and avoid nothing. Soulwork offers us the skillful means not to make matters worse, but instead bring more freedom into our consciousness empowering us to be a clearer channel through which Spirit can flow.

Head, Heart, Belly/Body

Truth, Beauty, Good

You may recall the classic movie The Wizard of Oz. Did you know one of the reasons it likely is so memorable is because is speaks to the awakening of the three soul centers spiritual sages have been talking about for centuries? It calls to our unconscious self to awaken. The Tin Man wanted his heart; the Scarecrow his brain; while the Lion longed for courage, the ability to act. When the Wizard was finally revealed behind the curtain (representing our Shadow-self), the message became clear: What we are looking for is already within us.

Depending on the source, the three centers our soul manifests through are referred to as Truth or Head; Beauty or Heart; and, Good or Belly-Body. While most major spiritual traditions and religions emphasize one, while either overlooking or diminishing the importance of the other two, Soulwork is one of the emerging spiritual paths to recognize the equal importance of all three soul centers.

You may gain valuable spiritual awakening by following a particular spiritual tradition's focus. However, to truly achieve the full potential of our spiritual capabilities, we are beginning to comprehend the importance of activating all three centers in this 21st-century.This is precisely what some of the great teachers have tried to transmit in previous centuries.

Some of these luminaries are Sri Aurobindo, Socrates, the Yogas, Rudolph Steiner, Einstein, and Gandhi. Modern science and brain research is also showing us how these three centers correlate with our evolutionary brains; reptilian, limbic, cortex, and neural-net.

Simply put, our Truth-Head center is responsible for concepts, symbols, language, and organization of data. This includes the prefrontal cortex (which finishes growing in our mid-twenties) which adds self-reflection, ethics, and judgment. The Beauty-Heart center's primary contribution is one of love, harmony, relationships, and compassion using our five senses for both input and output. Finally, the often misunderstood and dismissed Good-Body center is how we are able to express our Divinity through our incarnated body. This center also offers us the ability to stay grounded in reality while feeling our inter-connection and inter-dependence with all of the manifest world.

Each of these centers takes focused attention to bring them into greater fullness. This includes body awareness and acceptance, shadow work, and an expansion of our beliefs. At the same time, the most recent part of our specie's brain is still evolving. The Neural-net, which science has shown remains malleable throughout our life, holds the physiological potential to harmonize and bridge our other brains so we can act as a more complete embodied soul.

Include & Transcend

This theme is becoming more and more common in 21st-century spiritual circles. It is a more complete way of understanding how a soul awakens that can run contrary to conventional thinking or desires. For instance, it is common to believe we can skip stages and go right to the top using all kinds of ego-tactics. This simply isn't true. To be a fully embodied spiritual being we ultimately must both include every element of every stage at the same time we are transcending and moving to higher stages.

We often use the analogy of language to depict how consciousness evolves. In creating language, the first level is learning the letters of the alphabet. The next involves sentences, then paragraphs, chapters, books, and perhaps a series of books. We see this same evolutionary unfolding in the growth of a fetus, the birth of a flower, and the construction of an atom, to a cell, all the way to and complex organism.

Just like in nature, our consciousness includes all the previous levels of growth as it grows into a more complex being with greater awareness and perspective. You can't build a molecule without atoms. However, in the case of humans, we often lose pieces of a healthy ego structure and essential soul elements as we grow into the world of our parents and beyond. Along the way various elements of these stages are either left out or misconstrued.

A significant part of the spiritual journey involves going back and working on the missing pieces to bring them back into alignment allowing them to play a greater role in our soul-inspired life.

EXAMPLES:

Species
Organsim
Organ
Molecule
Cell
Atom
Nucleus

Be all you can be. Is this too much to ask?
Be all you can be.
Be
B

Compassion - Soulful Humility

Compassion and humility go hand in hand. In its deepest sense, humility is the honest embrace of our true gifts and challenges. It neither inflates nor deprecates our honest evaluation of where we are on our journey. The word "humility" has its roots in "humus" the very makeup of the earth itself. Intrinsically it means we are "grounded" in reality.

Thus, soulful compassion means we have the capacity to see clearly into the nature of suffering; the reality of a situation and what action, if any, is truly called for. We get that we are not separate from suffering. Because we have explored our own suffering and its causes deep within every cell of our own Being, we can appreciate how suffering arises. We get the meaning behind the phrase: "suffering is optional, pain is not."

We cannot be soulfully compassionate if we are attached to the outcome of our empathic outreach. We learn through our own direct experience that there are wounds deep within our psyche that have created suffering in our own lives. Many times soulful compassion simply means staying present Being to Being (without the compulsion to "do" something). Some of the enemies of compassion are pity, moral outrage, and fear (both afraid of what would happen inside our own psyche as well as in the outer world).

Thus, when compassion arises it comes from a place of clarity and objectivity tuning into what is truly the best way to respond. We might choose to act through or Head, Heart, or Belly center. We might also see the most compassionate thing to do is nothing, giving the freedom to another soul to work through it's suffering and pain alone, building its own spiritual muscles and awareness.

It refreshing to know that soulful compassion is one of those precious soul activators that hooks up all parts of the brain and enhances our immune system while building the connection between our Head, Heart, and Belly-body Centers. Science has come to support this on a physiological level.

Present & Alert

Over the past decade or so we have heard more and more the emphasis put on being more present. Eckhart Tolle's book "The Power of Now" is just one indication of its renewed importance.

If we are not living in the moment than where are we. As you likely know, staying present is much easier said than done. We let our past or stories about our future take us away from the present. There are many ways to work on this, depending on your own unique life-style, training, and experience.

Soulwork emphasizes the importance of body awareness in staying grounded in the reality of the moment. Our body becomes a constant ally in helping us stay aware of when we are not in the moment. It behaves like a grounding rod the more we learn to stay in tune with its messages.

Just as important to being present is the quest to stay alert. We can be present but barely awake. A key to accelerated soul awakening is to become keenly alert to what is going on in every moment whether we are sleepy or highly energized. This takes practice under endlessly different circumstances and deep familiarity with our own body and all its functions.

The Shadow Knows

We have witnessed acknowledgment of the Shadow move through three waves of awareness over the last eighty years from the time of Freud and Jung until the present.

Initially the focus of Shadow (or Ego) therapy and philosophy was focused primarily on those dysfunctional parts of individual self or our world that would benefit from psychoanalysis. In itself this was of profound contribution to self-growth and actualization. This approach was only indirectly connected to the spiritual journey. Most religions relied on dogma, commandments, and a strict adherence to a hierarchy of wisdom holders within their own system. We all know the kinds of penalties that would accrue if you strayed.

Only now, in this early part of the 21st-century are we starting to emerge from the second wave of Shadow-awareness. This second stage is often put in these terms: "The Shadow of the New Age, is that there is no Shadow." Perhaps because of the revolt against the unbending and dictatorial nature of traditional religious dogma and rules, along with the "I'm Okay, You're Okay" salve that way used to make it okay not to confront one's shadow, we learned to marginalize or avoid any direct confrontation with darkness or negative.

The Shadow continued...

We were taught that simply by thinking and believing good thoughts, that good things would happen to us and the world. This gave the Shadow plenty of time and means to subtly grow stronger, especially in the spiritual arenas.

The time for our denial of the Shadow is coming to an end. Many spiritual leaders are once again recognizing Shadow-work to be of central importance to real spiritual growth. Shadow-work, along with working on moving through the Stages and States of Conscious evolution are being embraced with renewed vigor - in service of a soul's awakening. Soulwork represents one of these approaches.

The Shadow continued...

The time for our denial of the Shadow is coming to an end. Many spiritual leaders are once again recognizing Shadow-work to be of central importance to real spiritual growth. Shadow-work, along with working on moving through the Stages and States of Conscious evolution are being embraced with renewed vigor - in service of a soul's awakening. Soulwork represents one of these approaches.

Soulwork uses the term "Pseudo-soul" instead of Shadow. Bob found, in his own work with people of all different religious persuasions, that using terms like Shadow, Devil, Evil, Darkness, and even Ego brought along subconscious baggage that hindered the ability to look at our Shadow with a fresh set of eyes without the underlying emotional baggage.

We are learning what it means to live from both a Relative and Absolute awareness simultaneously. In the Relative world duality exists. Where there is light there is always the potential of darkness. It is non-sensical, and spiritual naive to believe or act otherwise.

To learn more about Soulwork's approach to Shadow work go to the FAQ page under the "Teaching" Menu at the top of this web page.

Translation and Transformation

These are two key aspects of spiritual growth that have come together with the emergence of an integral view of the evolution of consciousness. Until we began to understand the interrelation of States of Consciousness and Stages of Consciousness, the way we approached our spiritual development was more limited in scope. This new, more inclusive approach, is a richer dance between Eastern and Western approaches to consciousness.

A 21st-century spiritual approach is not only cognitively aware of these two components of growth which run concurrently, but it embraces them as an integrated approach to all aspects of awakening, including Shadow work.

Ken Wilber describes these two aspects this way:
"Translation (horizontal expansion)
...creating a meaning for the self.
...a new way to think or feel about reality.
Examples:
...forgiveness instead of blame
...relational instead of analytic
...holistic instead of atomistic
Transformation...transcending the self. (vertical)
the very process of translation itself is challenged, witnessed, undermined, and eventually dismantled.
...the self itself is inquired into, looked into, grabbed by its throat and literally throttled to death.”

In the Flow – Organic

This idea of being "in the flow" can trace its roots all the way back to Taoism. Today it has become more relevant than ever as more attention is being paid to what it means to be "in the moment." It is a challenge to be in the moment and not be in the flow, so the two go hand in hand.

The big tease comes when we begin to examine what is behind our impulses that show up in the moment. This is very important to consider as it is very easy to deceive ourselves into thinking that, because "it" came up naturally (i.e. without me thinking about it first), it must be from my soul. It's not that easy.

From a spiritual awakened standpoint, being in the flow means that our action or inaction arises from the Void, from The Source, without the interference of our Shadow. The more we awaken to our True Self, our embodied soul, the more likely we come to know what it feels and looks like to be in the flow as Being gives rise to Doing which then moves organically and naturally back into Being over and over. The full participation of our Head, Heart, and Belly/Body centers play a critical role in this knowing.

Being vs Doing

Yin/Yang = Balance

This is one of the larger challenges facing us in the West. Our Calvinistic roots show up in the first question we often ask a stranger: "What do you do?" Other cultures ask different questions, such as; "Where were you born or, What is your family name?" We also see this in our focus on what we own, our status, and the barrage of marketing efforts aimed at the moniker "What you own says who you are and determines your state of happiness."

While we say we are Human Beings, we live much more like Human Doers. Our culture is lopsidedly in favor of the manifest realm which pulls us away from our soulful roots, our Being-nature that transcends lifetimes of incarnations. The interplay between Yin and Yang, Being and Doing has been obscured by our group Shadow and our own individual acquiescence to our Shadow-culture's call to fit in.

Understanding the Divine interplay between the Masculine (Yang/Doing) and Feminine (Yin/Being) goes way beyond gender and physical roles in the spiritual domain. As we come to understand how both are equal partners in every breath we take, we begin to know what it means to embrace our complete and True Self whether we are in a male or female body. The embrace of these two perceived parts of our nature is a key component of all Soulwork.

The soul's journey to awakening is inextricably linked to this dance. For it is the dance of surrender into the arms of Being, our soul, the unknown (to our human intellect) that gives rise to our manifested self and actions. A joyful and peaceful incarnation comes from the knowingness that arises from our Being, our Yin/Feminine nature. This is where we draw our true power, our true alignment with Divine Will.

We joyfully let go and let our soul direct our lives through our incarnated soul as it constantly dips into the realm of Unity Consciousness, The Void, The Source, the Ground of Being, or whatever other term you prefer to use. Our Unique Self organically rises from this soil and loves the role it is invited to play.

Ultimately this leads to greater balance and equanimity in our lives. We come to grok what it means to embody and transcend (see next Tenet).

Embody & Transcend

We are being called to embrace and accept our bodily incarnation in ways that counter what many spiritual traditions have fought against. Somehow, if we dismiss or berate our incarnated soul, we will discover heaven and peace will reign. Make no mistake, this is the work of our Shadow-culture that would have us turn against listening to how our soul is trying to speak to us through every part of our body. We have shut down its voice out of fear, prejudice, and self-righteous beliefs.

We severely limit our ability to fully transcend into higher realms of consciousness when we minimize our body's role. Our full experience of higher States of Consciousness is crippled by our fear of what a fully alive and embraced body would do if set free. So we hear things like "if we diminish our body's importance and limit its role, we can know god." Incredibly, we even hear that this god is in everything and everywhere - except when it comes to our bodily functions.

The emerging Truth is we are both beautifully Unique Souls temporarily manifested in a body and part of Unity , Non-dual Consciousness at the same time. Focusing on either end of this equation only serves our Shadow; …and it hasn't worked very well in dealing with humanities' problems. The more you engage your three Soul Centers (Head, Heart, and Belly/body), the more likely you are to experience the meaning behind these words.

States vs Stations

Understanding the difference between the States and Stations of conscious awakening helps clarify what often happens along the spiritual journey and helps keep us from getting trapped by our Shadow's interpretation of these experiences.

States of consciousness are often (but not always) profoundly beautiful, but temporary windows into the true nature of our soul and the wide variety of ways it shows up. Sometimes we get a peak at a bliss state where we are connected with Non-dual awareness. We feel what's it's like to be one with all including no-self, just pure awareness. At other times we might get a glimpse of Divine Love, pure radiance, okay-ness, deep peace, spaciousness, along with many more. On the other side we might also tap into the pain and suffering in the world, including our own, which can be very painful and difficult to bear. Over time these profoundly insightful experiences fade from direct realization into the background noise of our life.

Stations of consciousness is a way of describing how these brief States become readily available any time they are called for. This typically takes focused attention on the Shadow elements in our consciousness (intellect, cellular memories, and karma) that get in the way. Once enough of a critical mass of awareness in a particular facet of True Self awareness takes hold, these elements become as available as tuning into a radio station that is always broadcasting, but we're not necessarily listening to.

Hurts more - Bothers you less

Understanding this simple, yet profound adage offers us critical understanding of a deeper spiritual because our Shadow has many erroneous beliefs around what is supposed to happen when one is enlightened.

As we grow in True-self awareness, particularly in our Heart and BellyBody centers, we will feel more and deeper than once imaginable. There will be times these feelings, whether they are our own or witnessing someone else's, will break us open in our gut and/or heart. A seasoned soulworker will understand the nature of these experiences as very beneficial to moving to a new level of being an embodied human.

Our Shadow will always be looking for pleasure and happiness as it wants to define them. It has a difficult time seeing how pain can be part of the joyful celebration of all life has to offer, and as a means to greater awareness of our True Nature.

Instead, what happens is that we are able to experience life more deeply in all its permutations. At the same time we are not thrown off our center where deep peace, surrender, integrity, and acceptance reside. From this centered place you are able to hear your soul's voice more clearly to see how you might respond.

Perfection now and there's more

This is another one of those spiritual riddle. You often hear "everything's already perfect" used as a reason to relinquish power to the Shadow.

The question is: "Do you really want to give your power away to your Shadow?"

A more accurate and useful spiritual approach to life is to truly believe and feel you (and the world) are exactly where they need to be right now. We do this without shame, guilt, or anxiety. This is not a reason to become complacent and abrogate our own role in the evolution of consciousness.

Quite the contrary. An awakening soul engages every part of life as fully as possible knowing that there is even greater perfection to be discovered. It is as though we are polishing one facet of our soul's awareness while participating in the joy of discovering more facets each and every day.

Impulse to Evolve

The very longing to grow and awaken has its roots deep into our primal consciousness. Our reptilian brain is all about survival and propagation of the species. When we add the more recent limbic and cortex brains to the mix this primal need to survive takes on greater meaning and a stronger multi-faceted impulse.

No longer is it ever enough just to survive once our basic needs are met. We are able to tap into a deeper impulse, the impulse to evolve consciousness itself, not just the animal body. Whether we are aware of it or not, this fundamental need to evolve is ever-present in all of our brains including the neural-net's impulse to tie together all three brains in a more cohesive and balanced way.

The more we awaken spiritually, the more we feel this very subtle and very strong impulse to participate in the evolution of consciousness. This impulse moves us to take whatever steps are necessary to wake ourselves up followed by the natural impulse to assist others wherever soulfully appropriate.

Denying this impulse leads to unnecessary suffering. Aligning with it brings great challenges but also great joy and peace knowing we are in alignment with Divine Will.