Soul and Sesame

  “The Sesame Approach invites the presence of Soul
and it is the presence of Soul that gives Sesame its unique quality.
Soul longs for the depths of things”.
Carol Graham Psyche and Soma student 2008/2010

 

 You can feel me, You can touch me
You can hold me, You can need me
But you can’t prove me - I am Soul

 You can paint me, You can dance me
You can sing me, You can play me
But you can’t prove me -I am Soul

 Do not take me to a place I cannot go
Do not try to make me something that will show
A research lab consigns me to the tomb
I am Mother of the Darkness – I am Womb.

 You may weigh me, Or assess me
Try to measure. Verify me
But you won’t prove me - I am Soul

 Why not trust me? Journey with me?
Learn to free me. Come to love me
Let me prove to you - I am Soul.
I am Soul, I am Soul

Mary Smail

  

Drama and movement are the “password keys” that the Sesame approach offers to people to open up new relationship and perspectives on themselves.  Like Ali Baba’s Open Sesame magic words the art forms are keys which open the door between the inner and outer worlds.  Much attention to applying these keys is given to trainee therapists learning the Sesame Approach.  

There is however another metaphor at the heart of the Ali Baba story. It is the treasure.  What is that resource that enables healing and revisions life for people?  One of the names that can be given to this invisible core is Soul.  Sometimes this word becomes merged into religious connotation.  A student on the part time Sesame training Psyche and Soma talks about this.   

“I struggle with the word Soul which clearly has religious connotations … And at the same time I understand the  difficulty in choosing the word as other options such as  psyche (too technical) energy (too vague),  essence (too limiting) are not adequate either, especially considering the tools Sesame adopts for its work.”

Sesame’s former Patron James Hillman, who died in 2011, defined Soul in this way:

“By Soul I mean, first of all a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint towards things rather than a thing itself …  Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment, and soul- making means differentiating this middle ground”  (Revisioning Psychology 1975 page x)

In Sesame work as taught on the two year Psyche and Soma training, Soul is explored as being the mender or resolver who speaks through ailments, through the broken relationship or in the difficult to understand message of pathology. It has a sensing towards the Archetypal Divine and tends towards the recognition of Love which flourishes when the outside self, or ego is at the end of its tether.   Working soulfully is the entering into new territory. It takes new eyes and a tolerance for surrender to the end of old ways of being.

This Soul knowing is a form of logos which Sesame honours which evolves when the body moves freely, or when the drama of an imagined story is allowed to make an alliance with the questions or needs of everyday life. A Soulful perspective trusts the unadapted message of an unplanned movement or body gesture, or the outside-the-box imaginative possibilities of metaphoric story symbol as coming from the unconscious. 

These are the primary languages of the psyche-soul. They bubble freely from the inside world when an individual is safe enough to be creative, rather than be automatically locked into the editing of their originality and health, in fear of the judgement of others.   The poet Rumi speaks of this inner intellect and of Soul pedagogy when he writes in his poem “Two Kinds of Intelligence”

 “There is another kind of tablet,

One already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox.

A freshness in the centre of the chest.

This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate.

It's fluid, and it doesn't move from outside to inside
through the conduits of plumbing-learning.
This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.”

Relationship with the freshness Rumi names happens when an individual is supported to trust that they have their own treasure or Soul resource available, though unconscious inside.   Sesame reinstates what has been forgotten or dismissed:  that when an adult or child has space to play, or attend to dream images, they enter into relationship with the possibility of finding personal images, or “soul-utions”, often overlooked in everyday life because they speak in subtle terms of their own, often without words, and so go unacknowledged.  

Sesame refuses to make intuitive or soft-thinking invaluable.   It works qualitatively by paying attention to these world-shy forms, dismissing an over quick dependence on quantitative evaluation or fast result cures.   Sesame looks to the wisdom in the depth of a person, seen in the symbols they manifest when playing or dreaming, trusting in that something beyond the empiricism and logical knowing of the literal world. Sesame honours the body and the imagination’s ability to be known soulfully first, through fragments of language, intuitive hunches and surprising images.  It names these as an emergent means of therapeutic intervention working from the inside out with no need of complicated intellectual theory.  

The Psyche and Soma two year training is a Soul-led course.  It works through a reversed curriculum meaning that what needs to be learned will emerge as the key components of Sesame approach are explored and embodied.  Students from this course say:

“My immediate response is to attempt to define, to pin down, to make links explain and to summarise. . . All these things I know well.  Soul cannot be reduced to theories or concepts, data or detail.”

“The Sesame approach has, for me, something about it that creates a container within which or against the effect of some aspect of Soul may be manifested.  This is something further than a feeling that there is something there to be heard; it is creating a container that can hold it so that it is heard”. 

For more details of this innovative training click Psyche and Soma.
See Psyche: Hillman for more on James Hillman and his connection to Sesame.
See Articles on Psyche and Soma for more information on this course.