The Body as the House of the Soul

Caring for the Soul in Counselling:
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The Body as the House of the Soul

“Opening to the felt sense … is vitalizing, expansive, and illuminating, transforming the most painful aspects of life into a process of soul-making.”
 - Holifield​

Our soul is here on earth, feeling the warmth of the sun on our skin, the hug of a loved one, the serenity of a quiet moment, the quickened heart rate of anxiety, the ache of loss. The body houses the soul—but is also intertwined with the soul, as much as our experience of being alive is entwined with the experience of having a body (Swinton, 2020).
 
This means the body can help us experience the soul.
 
The Felt-Sense
 
One of the ways we might experience the soul is through attuning to our “felt sense” (Leijssen, 2008; Holified; 2020). The felt sense is a non-verbal dimension of our experience. It uses the body, because the body feels, the body senses. At the same time, the felt sense is also the domain of the ineffable, the numinous, the sacred, the supernatural, because it is an innate capacity for discernment that that does not involve processes of logic or rational thinking (Holifield, 2020). The felt-sense connects body and soul—this sensing part of us relies on sensation and beyond-logical wisdom to discern choices, paths, meanings.

Carl Rogers, the father of person-centered therapy, described the essence of therapy as a “getting back” to our basic sensory and visceral experiences (Leijssen, 2008)—away from the stories we tell. This deepening into the actual sensations of our experiences helps sensitize us towards our felt sense. In therapy we are learning to feel—to be with our feelings, not avoid them in the myriad ways we do—which also helps us to feel our felt sense.
 
Polyvagal Theory
 
Somatic therapy and polyvagal theory are evidenced-based therapeutic methods of doing exactly what is described above. According to polyvagal theory, there needs to be safety in the body in order to feel safe feeling (Porges, 2017). Those of us with trauma might especially struggle to feel safe enough inside our own skin to attune to our felt-sense. Polyvagal theory has taught us that first, before we can fully feel and sense, we need to find the safety inside ourselves—specifically in our nervous system, by working with a therapist to establish ventral vagal regulation (Dana, 2021).
 
Polyvagal theory, from the perspective of the therapist, is also very useful in terms of using the therapist’s own body as a therapeutic tool. This is because as humans, with bodies, we are also mammals—we share the autonomic nervous system and all its functions with mammals (Porges, 2017). Mammals perceive safety relationally, based on nervous system information—and so the therapist needs to send safety information this way as well (Quillman, 2020).
 
The Soul, The Body, and Love
 
This mirrors the soul’s need for love (hyperlink). The soul is the part of us that needs love and is also accessed by love—soul care in counselling relies on the therapist’s ability to give love, not to say it, but to feel it (Quillman, 2020). Love is essential to working with the soul in therapy, and this love can be created via polyvagal theory and the expression of nervous system safety and love in the therapist.
 
Embodied Imagination
 
More generally, methods of somatic therapy—which encompass a variety of body-led therapeutic techniques—help us learn to sit with our sensations, to make space to tune into our felt-sense (Dana, 2020, Quillman, 2008). This is also territory where we might discover how our felt sense connects us to our embodied imagination, which is a realm of images, ideas, visions, colours, symbols—information about how we make sense of our experiences—that we can tap into by exploring the sensations associated with particular feelings (Quillman, 2008). Because imagination is the language of the soul, some believe that the embodied imagination is a bodily experience of the soul (Quillman, 2020).
 
Intuition
 
By learning to tune into the sensations of our body, we are learning to tune into our felt-sense, which we might also call our intuition. If we are always experiencing ourselves from the realm of logic, we are not tuning into this subtler felt-sense, and may not be operating from the perspective of soul.
 
If you are a religious or spiritual person, have a relationship with God, Creator, or a higher power, this may also be a part of your process of prayer or listening. Ultimately, creating a relationship with your body, the sensations it uses to communicate with you, and attuning to your felt-sense, creates an opportunity to experience the soul, to develop an ability to listen to the still-small voice.

References

Dana, D. (2021). Anchored: Befriending your nervous system. Sounds True.
 
Dana, D. (2020). Polyvagal flip chart: Understanding the science of safety. W.W. Norton & Company.
 
Holifield, B. (2020). Trauma, Soul, and the Body in Jungian Analysis. Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, 14(4), 72–85. 
 
Leijssen, M. (2008). Encountering the Sacred: Person-centered therapy as a spiritual practice. Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies, 7(3), 218–225. 
 
Porges, S. W. (2017). The pocket guide to the polyvagal theory: The transformative power of feeling safe. Norton.
 
Quillman, T. (2020). Neuroscience and the therapist’s love for the patient: Intersubjective space, the embodied imagination, and transformation. Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health, 22(1), 1–29. 
 
Swinton, J. (2018). Medicating the soul: Why medication needs stories. Christian Bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality, 24(3), 302–318. ​