Our Soul Odyssey - The Live Exploration

As this soul odyssey emerged, there was a sense that it wanted to evolve on the move, to become a live exploration — initiating a syphoning discovery process with a growing network inquiring into these realms.

Initially, I felt compelled to go into an isolated, reclusive retreat. I imagined finding a quiet space of contemplative serenity from which I’d be writing. Well, my writing sabbatical lasted three weeks. It was a longer writing retreat than I had ever taken. The preamble and the first two chapters were written during those three weeks from Christmas to the beginning of January 2024.

It then became apparent that Portals Into the Soul would need to find a way to co-arise along with other active commitments. The project seemed to want to include more than a solo inquiry into the soul. It searched for the conductivity of a larger, connective and collective inquiry. The intuition offered that some of the revelatory content would emerge through events.

This intuitive nudge was actualized live Portals in the run-up to our first Portals Into the Soul event in March 2024, when we gathered to reflect on the content of Chapter One and explored, with the help of IHOW practices, a somatic sense of the three jobs of the soul.

In contemplating and preparing the workshop choreography, I searched to find a bridging entry. I wanted to facilitate an experiential sense of the soul. What transpired confirmed the intuition that certain elements of this odyssey would reveal themselves in the live collaboration and exploration with others interested in gathering around the soul inquiry. One reason for this development is rooted in my own soul’s journey and how it has evolved.

Creating and choreographing experiences that enable transformation has been central to my development path. I initially discovered the group facilitation and leadership space at age 15, guiding groups of 11-year-olds in the youth movement at the kibbutz in Israel. I would spend hours imagining and sculpting the outdoor and indoor activities I was about to lead. I imagined how we would get to the trailhead; the activities we would integrate along the trail; the clearing in the woods we would arrive at; the conversation we would then open, and the facilitative questions that would unlock the conversation.

Before even consciously understanding what I was doing, I began to discover a mysterious world of possibilities. The discovery led to exploring ways of sculpting group processes. It unlocked vibrant creativity and opened, for me, a fountain of opportunities.

A Soul Quickening: Attunement Discovery

The quickening of this domain of possibility found me by surprise in the summer of 1974. It was just nine months after the Yom Kippur War, which brought rapid maturation for us teenagers. With most of the men responsible for the kibbutz agriculture being called to the army to fight and save the country as the northern and southern borders collapsed, the teenagers in the kibbutz had to take charge and grow overnight to quickly assume responsibility.

Israel was facing a grave danger, and as a 14-year-old, I suddenly had an important role to play. Contributing to the vital effort of the kibbutz was exhilarating. Getting up at 5 a.m. to work in the avocado orchard as the country was battling for survival created a potent peak experience.

Nine months later, during my 10th grade, I started guiding a sixth-grade group in the youth movement at a kibbutz north of Tel Aviv. For one of our first outdoor night activities, I decided to create a trust-building experience. Three days before the planned activity, I visited the area to find the trail we would take and identify the exact location we would arrive at in the dunes high above the Mediterranean beach. I found a contained space surrounded by the dunes, a perfect natural small amphitheater, where I could imagine sitting in a circle with those twelve kids four years younger than me. Standing there, I imagined the way I would guide the activity and the conversation.

As the evening activity arrived, I was a little anxious. It was the first time I was leading this kind of activity; I sensed I was stepping into an unknown world. Once we headed out into the moonlit evening, I experienced an energized inner peace, joy and confidence alongside a sense of flow. Suddenly, I was in my element. I did not know it at the time, but in retrospect, the champion of higher purpose, the third impulse of the soul, guided me to a path I was meant to find.

We hiked to the dunes and followed the plan I envisioned. During part of the hike, the group was arranged in pairs, one person having their eyes covered while touching the shoulder of a friend walking in front of them, whose job was to lead the blindfolded person safely along the trail. Then, they switched roles, allowing everyone to experience the vulnerability of being dependent on a friend, so they could each discover the inner sensation of needing to trust a friend leading them when they could not see.

We then reached the natural amphitheater and gathered in a circle to debrief the activity. I asked the group about their experiences in leading a blindfolded person and in being led when they could not see. As the conversation unfolded, I suddenly sensed the circle becoming alive. A subtle energy field was activated, and the conversation facilitated a current that moved through the circle’s collective field. When the current of the conversation flowed with ease, I felt a sense of relief in my body. When it reached a point of resistance, where it felt stuck and did not flow, I experienced uneasiness and tension in my body. As the conversation found its flow again, the group’s field began to reveal its potential.

With this awareness switching on, I sensed who was going to speak next and intuited the feeling and tone they were going to express. It was a startling, almost shocking discovery. In the youth movement training sessions, no one ever spoke about a subtle, invisible field that could become vibrantly alive in certain situations that produced attuned flow and presence.

Initially, I did not understand what I was experiencing. The language I am now using to describe what occurred was not available to me. It was as though I was awakened to another dimension of experience, only to realize I had similar inklings and sensations before. Somehow, leading a facilitated conversation with a group presented an opportunity that activated dormant sensing capacities and attunement.

Years later, as I traced the soul-centering and searing moments that shaped my journey, the imprint of that miraculous night presented itself. I was in my early 30s when I was able to compassionately review, from a place of stillness, that 15-year-old self, stumbling and discovering almost by accident an inner somatic and energetic access, activated in a leadership moment.

That soul-searing experience was then joined by additional dimensions. There was the subtle field that the group created which came alive that night in the sand dune near the Mediterranean beach. Then I discovered I could sense, and even seed, a tone or compose a part of the subtle energetic ecology of what I hoped the group would discover

What was this inner dialogue like?

It took the nature of meditatively traveling through and dialoguing with the experience before it happened. I discovered there was a way to fashion and sculpt the experience meditatively. It was not an attempt to rigidly determine what must happen. Instead, it was a process of opening possibilities by choreographing a path that offered participants access to their inner experiences.

Once again, since there was no instruction manual, no training guide, and no one talked about these subtle experiences, I stumbled into this meditative sculpting before I knew what I was doing. I thus proceeded through trial and error, often encountering confusing experiences. Although I did not have the language for it, I gradually realized that the access I had found opened an interior dimension experienced even earlier in my running practices, where at certain moments I would enter an inner zone of attunement.

The Subtle Inner Worlds

There were now three dimensions to this invisible subtle world. There was an inner attunement that would switch on in certain moments in nature, or when running, breaking through to the pain threshold. There was a second subtle dimension that activated when leading a group through a conversation circle, as we explored the nature of trust. And there was a third dimension I began to discover, which was not bound by physical location or chronological time. It presented itself as a subtle energetic access to the group process days before the actual experience commenced. It suggested that facilitation did not start when the activity began, but rather, whenever I brought the focus of my attention to it, hours, days or weeks ahead of the event.

Later, inside a new context that emerged in my 20s, there was one more dimension added to it. The event was not completely over when it was over. On certain occasions, I could retrace and reconfigure, or even redo, a moment in the experience and change its quality within myself. I’d never know if it changed anything for anyone else, but for me, when I experienced a harsh or unartful move I made, I could retrace the experience to learn from it how to manage and navigate it more effectively. Then, I was able to superimpose and forgivingly reconfigure the quality of it internally.

Accessing the point of forgivingly metabolizing and resculpting an experience was not easy, especially amidst the clouding stresses and anxieties of addressing the material questions of living and building a family. Still, there was a very thin thread of light that kept this search going. It offered a path of inquiry, curiosity and possibility; a path that did not involve suppressing or make-believe pretending. It guided me to see that, instead of carrying forward the scar tissue of embarrassment and pain, I could free that moment by constructively metabolizing these experiences and use disappointment, embarrassment and pain to fuel capacity building and development. It would again take several years before realizing that, in fact, I began to ferment what I will describe later in the workings of the Inner Conclave.

Instead of getting frozen by pain, confusion or a sense of being overwhelmed — causing contraction in the soul and possibly accumulating compensatory ghost responses — there was an interior space in which pain and its scars could be melted, metabolized and transformed. It was not a flip-the-switch-and-pretend-all-is-well kind of a move. Instead, it required a genuine rewiring of response pathways. This was not an impact I could create by suppressing or by merely wishing; I needed to find an inner alchemical source. Given that the neural pathways of pain can be potent, I’ve had to promise and direct my brain, mind, and soul toward a new possibility pathway with energy that would transform these impressions. I will describe more about this work in later chapters when we cover the Inner Conclave process to help liberate the imprint of the ghost.

Inside the turmoil of life, one surprising discovery led to another. Stumbling onto the field of choreographing and leading development workshops with groups opened the discovery path to the process of melting, transforming and releasing painful and even traumatic experiences.

The 10,000-hour rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell suggests that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert or master in a given field. In 2022, I tried calculating the hours of meditatively choreographing and designing transformational workshops and experiences, adding in the hours spent leading these events and experiences, and then the hours spent debriefing by meditatively reviewing, harvesting learning and recalibrating those experiences. I estimated it came to probably more than 60,000 hours. Although I never planned it, this focusing practice had become central to my journey.

The Pathfinding of Aliveness and Care

At the end of Chapter One we described an inquiry practice to help you trace moments of soul attunement, when the latent natures and qualities of your soul configuration were activated. My trace here of this soul-centering and searing night, when I was initiated into the awareness of a group field and its potential, is an example of this practice. I had no concept of these realms; there was no guidance or professional role or name, or anything I had heard about this immensely vast subtle world of possibility. My starter entry was anxious and unsure. Still, the inner qualities I experienced with leaping into the unknown in leading the group that evening were vibrant joy, flow and expanded awareness. Unbeknownst to me, it would catalyze my soul journey and, years later, would shape my professional and spiritual path.

What is the sentiment imbuing the practice of sculpting transformational experiences?

The focusing intention emerged out of the sentiment of care. Before leading a group to hike anywhere, I would go early to scout the trail to ensure it was safe. I wanted to discover and address in advance any danger, including placing rujum marks (made of a few stones on top of each other) where we possibly could miss the trail. Since I had learned to apply this practice while leading a group in navigating the exterior landscape we aimed to traverse, it was natural to apply the same discipline of care in the interior landscape. I would explore and visualize the interior terrain we intended to traverse, seeking to offer coverage and create a supportive ecology for the inner discovery trail.

Meditatively, I would inquire and search to discover the possible conversation pathways a few days in advance to release resistance and find a path of easing flow, understanding and connection. I did not hear a melody; still, it felt as though there was a musical quality to this meditative envisioning. The work, the struggle, was in that it would often be clouded and blurry. As the search developed, I’d imagine the steps and moves we could explore. The effort was to track possibility pathways that offered flow. By dwelling and abiding with the search, the choreography of the journey came alive and allowed me to experience and sculpt its path.

Four Elements Soul Meditation

Preparing for the first Portals Into the Soul workshop event to reflect on the content of Chapter One, I found myself in this meditative sculpting process. The search was to find an entry that was not conceptual but rather would invite a whole-person experience. For several weeks, as I did my morning ocean running and swimming, I explored a four elements meditative soul attunement experience. Standing at the point where the ocean meets the land, I listened quietly to my soul’s experience — its experience of the sand at the beach, the water of the ocean, and its experience of the fresh, open air and the sunlight.

How do we listen to the experience of the soul?

It is right there, an ever-present subtle presence behind all the easily accessible, often noisy, dimensions of experience. It is an accompanying presence, imbuing, comforting, and guiding every aspect of our moment-by-moment awareness.

Abiding in this place where the four elements vividly come together, I sensed the qualities of the four elements and their foundational presence in the making of the human body and system. I focused on sensing how these four together constitute a vessel that enables a fifth subtle dimension, life itself.

I listened inside to this pre-verbal dimension in a spacious abiding with the soul attuning to itself and its own nature. It became evident that to enter the space I was hoping to facilitate and invite, we needed to seek a threshold where the cognitive experience of thinking and feeling is transformed from a disjointed two-dimensional occurrence to a potent ecology of possibility.

In other words, I was tracking inside a subtle pre-verbal pathway to find and gather the energetic fuel and potency to enable me to access the heightened cognizance of the difference between lifeless and enlivened thought; to bring to life the possibility of a soul imbuing life-giving awareness.

I sensed coming through this threshold would enable an experiential rather than concept-based access to the soul. What transpired confirmed the intuition that certain elements of this odyssey would reveal themselves in the preparation for, and in the live collaboration and inquiry with, others.

Soul Transcending Polarity

To transcend and integrate a polarity so it becomes a fuel for entering a subtle field of power, we must first name the polarity. Here is how this pathway presented itself: on one side is “Thinking without feeling.” It is made of aimless, repetitive chatter of recycled, undirected, uncontrolled and unwanted thoughts. A big part of it is described as the monkey mind, which swings between scattered, unconnected thoughts and ruminations about what happened in the past or what is desired for the future. This kind of disjointed thinking deflates the capacity to connect with powers available here and now.

This way of being was represented on the left side of the slide. Another way to describe it is lifeless thinking. It is a cognitive function that can also be called braining, where the flow of life stops and gets arrested. These are the times when the flotsam of scattered ruminations associated with general habitual thinking goes on uncontrollably, only to temporarily be stopped with the process of categorizing and labeling as the brain tries to assert control.

The polarity on the right side of the visual was named “Feeling without thinking.” Another way to describe it is aimless feeling. It includes sensations of bodily programs stimulated and triggered without thinking, such as hunger, cravings, upset, excitement, and more. This polar conditioning of lifeless thinking and aimless feeling tends to produce confusion, suffering and inner havoc. It is just this interior chaotic confusion that the mindfulness project brought from the East aspires to address and solve.

Practicing mindfulness often begins with focusing on what you are sensing and feeling in the moment, without interpreting or judging, and releasing in the process identification and attachment to these thoughts and feelings.

The invitation I offered was to attempt an alternative move. Instead of the compelling Eastern move to release attachment to thoughts and feelings as a way to begin sensing the spaciousness of a nonattached, empty mind, I offered the move of opening to a different kind of thinking. In this sense, the word “thinking” suggests a cognitive process that is activated into a new octave of possibility, one that is not lifeless but life-giving.

Imagine holding in your left palm a dry brown leaf and in your right palm touching a vibrant green leaf still tethered to the tree. Now imagine that disjointed thoughts running through you are more like the dry, brown, lifeless leaf. There are, however, thoughts that are connected to a living vibrant source — thoughts that offer glimpses of a process connected to and sourced in the tree of life. They carry capillary action, power and potency, and can evoke feelings that bring about a causative change.

Imagine the green leaf connected to the twig, which is connected to the branch that grows out of the trunk representing a contemplative, life-giving thinking with feeling. Feelings that are not recycled stimulations or simulations but rather unlock potent intentional perceiving and thinking. I demonstrated this quality of contemplative thoughts in Chapter Four by describing and developing the loom work process. Each of the thoughts placed in the loom carried intentional, open-ended inquiry accompanied by feelings, such as wonder, yearning-search, awe, reverence, joy of discovery and intimacy of being, accompanied by a luminescent power.

Another element that becomes activated in this new process octave is that we begin to feel our thoughts in a whole new way. When thoughts resemble drifting, lifeless leaves on the floor of the forest, they do not evoke life-giving cognizance and potency. The wind just picks up the dead leaves and drops them anywhere. The green leaves on the branch of the tree, on the other hand, move as the branch bends with the wind and then gently follow it as the branch bounces back. They are tethered to the bigger, life-giving process of the tree and express its supple resilience.

Instead of running the lower circuitry that conflates bodily programs, cravings and urges with their accompanying thoughts, in the higher circuitry I access heightened awareness that enables me to feel my thoughts. For example, by bringing my focus to care and patience, I can begin to experience the vibrant, living actuality of the essences of care and patience. These multi-dimensional presences emerge with distinct tone, momentum and shape, far beyond a two-dimensional word that holds a concept.

On the other hand, if an unwell critical thought or harsh judgment towards another appears, I feel its harshness in my own body and can release or transmogrify it. In this octave, thoughts become alive and are active with intentional power; therefore, anytime we allow meanness or malice towards another, we are the first to be impacted by their unkind energy and its harsh and cruel byproducts.

Scattered, aimless, disjointed thinking without feeling is one way of losing agency. Feeling emotions reactively, without intentional meaning-making, is another way of losing agency, energy and power.

On the other hand, intentional inquiry and contemplation can open a path into the mysteries of the soul, evoke feelings of inspiration, awe, uplifting gratitude, fortifying endurance and intimacy with life and its throbbing possibilities.

Eastern practices follow the Buddha’s great discovery in turning the cognitive function of the mind on itself, so as to release it from the transitory content it gets attached to and unlock its own spacious nature. The alternative move of generative thinking with feeling unlocks a deliberate, contemplative, intentional way of being, activating and birthing in the process creative and connective properties.

Imagine a communion that transforms a two-dimensional, lifeless picture into a multidimensional, vibrant and augmented reality, where feelings are not short-term bursts but sustained, presence-filled sentiments, arising with new connections and possibilities.

The Biblical corollary is in the story of Jesus feeding five thousand people with the five loaves and the two fish. Braining the story occurs in two ways. One is to dismiss it as an allegory. A second is to dismiss it as a miracle. Well, it has become an allegory and is described as a miracle, but what these two interpretations dismiss is a third possibility and dimension.

Imagine that by entering his own soul communion, Jesus facilitated and summoned a conductive ecology, imbued with healing and nourishing power for the souls of those in attendance. The suggestion is not that we are seeking miracles, but rather that the miraculous is forever nearby. The invitation is to realize the human system can create potent states of enhanced well-being in which the semi-automatic programs and urges of the body can be balanced and pacified. Further, practicing such elevated states of attuned connection and communion can create an ecology of enhanced transference, where thoughts and feelings can become psycho-activating for others with healing and inspirational properties.

Imagine that the five loaves of bread symbolize the body, which in this case was served by catalyzing energetic soul qualities that nourished the five energy centers that govern the human body. Imagine the two fish symbolize the flow of the higher connective faculties.

We are describing subtle power realms where the soul becomes tethered to a nourishing source that transforms the person’s experience and even their sense of time.

The Subtle Field and the Tree Meditation

We began our Soul Odyssey by describing the three characters and natures of the soul. In this chapter, I traced how I was led by my soul and its champion of higher purpose impulse into discovering a leadership path that brought me into contact with the subtle energetic field, a realm the soul reads, navigates and responds to.

You, too, have had moments of contact, where you sensed consciously, or more often semiconscious or unconsciously, awesomely vast realms beyond the material physical dimension of life. Still, modern education and a reductionist material orientation tend to shut down a natural sensitivity and awareness of this vast universe.

Let us open a discovery path you can play with. Here is a meditative exploration that can offer entry into re-acclimatization with the subtle worlds. I say re-acclimatization because your soul is naturalized to these realms, even if our modern conditioning and trained mental frame negates this possibility.

Okay, come along with me into this experimental discovery. Give it a try. Perhaps be daring enough to even give it three tries before making up your mind. I am about to lead you into a way of sensing and seeing the subtle field of a tree. There is nothing like the natural world and the outdoors for reawakening subtle sense organs.

Find a tree, possibly a high tall tree with some space around it so you can look at it against the sky. In the Pacific Northwest, where I am as I write this, you can find gorgeous Douglas firs, Western Hemlocks, Alders, Spruces, Western Red Cedars and Bigleaf Maples.

First, come near the tree to look at the hard crust of its trunk. Touch its firmness. Consider what enables this tree to stand upright, strong and steady. It is the combination of the root system, the cellular composition of the trunk, and importantly, the water the tree pumps from the roots up through the trunk to the branches and leaves.

Abide with this thought so you can feel it. This immense trunk is standing upright and tall. It is hard, and yet inside it, there are fluids moving up and down, enabling its resilient flexibility. Stay with this contemplation for a moment. Sense and try to experience that the tree you are observing has visible elements and also invisible elements. The roots are largely invisible, the sap moving through its trunk is invisible, and the information the trees share through the mycelial pathways below the ground of the forest is largely invisible. The subtle energetics of the tree are largely invisible.

Take a few steps back and find a spot that enables you to see the whole tree and that at the same time is not too far away. Observe the whole shape of the tree and let your eyes lead to the top of the tree. Look carefully and abidingly at the crown of the tree. Try to sense and appreciate the vibrancy of the new growth at the top of the tree. Consider this beautifully awesome tree pumps and delivers water all the way up to these top branches, some 125 or even 180 feet up in the case of the tree I am now gazing at.

As you look at the crown of the tree, possibly against the blue of the sky, let your eyes shift their focus from the branches to the contour just around the top of the tree. Abide with this space, gazing around the crown of the tree. You may begin to see flames of light emanating and throbbing from the tree and enveloping it. It may take a while and some dedicated practice, with patience, and then you will begin to see the dancing, shape-shifting flames of see-through light around the whole tree.

What you are seeing is not an optical illusion. It is the subtle energetic field of the tree that expands beyond its physical form. You may at first see these translucent flames of light closely following the shape of the tree, around it as though the tree is breathing. After you practice regularly, you can begin to see shapes and transparent hues of colors expanding out from the tree.

Again, shift your focus from the crown of the tree to looking around it. Observe the translucent glowing light emanating from the tree, creating a subtle energy field. Let yourself wonder and imagine that all living beings have a subtle energetic field that envelops them.

You can also practice seeing and sensing the subtle energy field of a plant in your house as you place it against a light background. And yes, you can begin to practice seeing and sensing the subtle energy field around people. It’s best to practice this way of seeing in a peaceful and safe ecology, where you can relax into this discovery playfully and with awe as you make contact with vast, invisible and subtle realms. These are dimensions that for the soul are like the oxygen-rich air is for the lungs.

The Next Portal Into the Soul

In this chapter, I reflected on a soul-quickening moment that has found me leading a conversation circle with a group of youngsters, and how it guided my journey and shaped, decades later, the approach we’ve taken with this Portals Into the Soul discovery odyssey. We’ve retraced the Four Elements meditation and the soul’s capacity to transcend polarities and guide us into a generative process of contemplative thinking with feeling. We can now begin to feel our thoughts and develop intentional, vibrant thinking that unlocks latent capacities and the curative potential of presence-guided communion and its creative expression.

In the next Portals Into the Soul, we will explore new realms of understanding to deepen our connection with the interior trinity—the Soul, the Spirit, and the Self. Through this exploration, we will uncover the intimate nature of their mutual interplay.