Soul-Making: The Inner World and Spiritual Life

​“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” – C.G. Jung

Many people are starving for meaning and purpose. Does this resonate?  

Yet, we look for it in the wrong places.   We habitually look for meaning and purpose in the next role, the next relationship, the next credential, the next accomplishment, the next “fix.” We take on the obsession like a scavenger looking for significance.

Soul-making flips the direction. Instead of looking outward, we shift our search inward to inner life. 

The inner life becomes a North Star: not because it tells you what to do simplistically, but because it reconnects you to the deeper pattern underneath your choices, your suffering, your longings, and your calling. 

We need a new spiritual orientation—a “North Star”—that can hold our deepest longings and connect us to a larger source of meaning.

Meaning isn’t an idea. It’s an experience.

Jungian Psychology is an experiential psychology. Soul-making is not a conceptual exercise; it’s the way that we metabolize experience—how we process life so that events don’t remain merely “What happened?,” but become psychologically and spiritually meaningful.

This is why the inner world matters: when life delivers rupture—grief, illness, betrayal, loss—the old frameworks can collapse. If we only live literally, the misfortunes of life can feel random and meaningless; there’s “no image to provide meaning.” 

Soul-work introduces image, symbol, and story as a way to engage experience differently.

What is “Soul”?

Soul isn’t a vague poetic add-on. It’s the inner dimension of life that mediates meaning—the “middle ground” that differentiates us from events and helps us reflect rather than merely react. 

Soul-making is a reflective movement: it “mediates events,” and soul-making means differentiating that middle space between the doer and the deed.

In my book “Soul-Making: A Journey of Resilience and Spiritual Rediscovery”,  I talk about soul in the psyche itself: the etymology of “soul” is connected to the Greek psyche—“breath”—the invisible animating principle that can’t be perceived by the senses, yet makes us uniquely human. 

We experience the soul in dreams, fantasy, synchronicities, the arts—any imaginative or symbolic activity arising from the psyche’s desire to know itself.

Soul speaks in images. If the soul speaks to us in images, then soul-making is learning to imagine—to see through outer-world events to the image being conveyed, translating life-events into soul.

And the soul isn’t just “inside.” There is a paradox: the soul reflects the symbolic inner meaning of outer events, yet there can be no inner knowing without the soul expressing itself outward—in a dream, a synchronicity, or creative expression. 

Why the Soul needs a spiritual life

A spiritual life is about devotion to the inner journey: cultivating consciousness, interiority, and a relationship with the energy that is greater than ourselves – however you name it: God, Source, The Universe, the Quantum Field, or the SELF.  

To be spiritual ultimately means taking responsibility for our inner journey,” and why devotion becomes a way of life—an active cultivation of self and meaning-making.

Spiritual practice matters because it creates the container where meaning can form. 

The spiritual path is a path of radical interiority—the interior life.

So yes, many people are looking for purpose, but looking outside themselves. Soul-making insists that meaning and purpose arise when we develop interiority: when we live less from conditioned, external values, and more from authenticity and genuine subjective experience.

Have you ever paused and asked, “What is this life asking of me?”

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