Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Thomas Moore. Thomas has been a monk, a university professor, and a psychotherapist. His work focuses on developing a deepening spirituality, as well as the act of cultivating the soul in everyday life. Thomas is the author of the bestselling book Care of the Soul, and in 2004 released a book called Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life’s Ordeals. Beginning on October 28, Thomas will begin a three-part online event series at Sounds True called Gifts of a Dark Night: Dealing Effectively in Times of Loss and Trial, where he’ll discuss periods of loss or failure that we’ll all endure while offering advice and guidance on how to navigate these difficult times. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Thomas and I spoke about the danger of sentimentalizing the spiritual life, the fear of living versus the fear of death, and what it means to live with care. Here’s my conversation with Thomas Moore:
Tom, you’ve written widely and wildly on the life of the soul, and yet, of all the different topics you’ve touched on, I want to talk with you about this idea of our darkness and dark passages in our life and difficulties. And the reason that I want to talk to you about this topic is that it seems to me that it’s an area of great confusion—not that we couldn’t find other areas of great confusion!—an area that I see, at least, that a lot of people get very confused about, they somehow feel that they’re failing in their spiritual quest in some way when they go through hard times. I’m wondering, just to begin, if you can talk directly about your view of that.
Thomas Moore: There’s several things going on. One is that a lot of times, I think we tend to sentimentalize the spiritual life. We make it look wonderful and only wonderful, and therefore, when bad times come along, we think we’ve failed, that somehow we should be in a place where these things don’t happen, or that we should be able to handle them very easily. That’s not the way life works. So I think that’s really a great difficulty for people who are particularly interested in spiritual life. It would help if they could think about it quite realistically, so that they might see that from the very beginning, that there’s no such thing as the perfectly sweet life. Some people have sweeter lives than others, but I don’t know anyone who has the totally perfect life. If we could just accept that to begin with, I think we’d be way ahead of the game, so that, when bad things came along, we wouldn’t be shocked, and wouldn’t judge ourselves so much, and be more likely to be able to handle it.
TS: It does seem that there’s an idea that enlightenment or spiritual liberation or something like that will deliver us from our suffering, so then, when we suffer, we think, “Well I bet something’s gone wrong!” What’s your view of that?
TM: The spiritual life might bring us further into suffering, actually, because I think, when we’re doing it well, we’re willing to be open to life, to let life happen. I think there’s a lot that goes on in the ordinary person’s life where they really don’t allow the possibilities of their lives to even take place. One way that I sometimes think of it is that a lot of people say that fear of death is really at the root of a lot of problems, but my experience tells me that fear of life, fear of living, is at the root of our problems, because life is like this river of time and events that just pours through us all the time, and it’s always changing. A change involves suffering. Let’s say that someone is quite successful at a job. (I’ve heard this story many times.) People are successful at a job, but something in them feels dissatisfied, and that dissatisfaction, this may be a sign that life wants something more or something different. Eventually, that person may have to say, “Well, I’ve got to leave this job behind now and take a leap into the unknown, and see what’s going to happen next.” I’ve talked to a lot of people who’ve gone through that experience.
Now I think that, even though it’s painful and there’s a lot of suffering and fear and anxiety around it, it means that you’re willing to live, rather than to defend yourself against life. I think that’s really a key ingredient to this whole thing: that those people who are willing to live, instead of just remain static, are going to have maybe more challenges and have to go through more pain than others.
TS: So when you’re referring to “fear of life,” you mean the fear that, if I really open up to the life that’s moving through me, that things are going to change. My job might change, my relationship might change, I might start acting in new ways, and who knows what’s going to happen?
TM: Who knows what’s going to happen next? That’s right. We can’t—I don’t think any of us can—take everything. You can’t just be constantly changing and letting life pour through you too much. We have to sort and pick and choose. Maybe that’s what we mean by living our own lives and making decisions and shaping our own lives. But I think it’s certainly possible—and I think the majority of people do this—to just say “no” to life and say, “Well, everything’s in place. I’m not going to move. Now I’m making a good living, I’ve got health insurance . . .” all of these things that keep us stuck. Then the problem is, I think, that the result of not living and not facing the potential pain involved in changing is that we begin to feel lifeless, and maybe even that there’s a certain kind of depression. I think there’s a depression that is related to this. It’s not a deep, black, dark depression, but it’s a feeling that you’re just floating along in life, and that nothing is important, nothing gives you much pleasure, that kind of feeling, that can lead easily to addiction or lead to hopelessness. I think it’s essential to be able to accept life as it presents itself, and the opportunities that presents, because if you don’t, you’re going to suffer the consequences there, as well.
TS: Now I mentioned to you, Tom, why I was curious and committed to this topic of exploring our passages through difficult times. What was your inspiration for writing the book Dark Nights of the Soul? What was happening in your life, or why did this constellate in you as a book you wanted to write?
TM: Well, I think it started when I was practicing therapy with a great deal of attention, and I spent a lot of time at it. In recent years, I’ve been writing mainly, but there was a period when I was really doing therapy every day, and people were coming to me with depression, different forms of depression, and obviously a lot of challenges in life and a lot of suffering. I thought that one of the difficulties was that they were thinking of themselves in typical psychological terms, so “There must be something wrong. If only I can understand it, this will go away. I must find some way to live better.”
I didn’t think that was a very good approach, so I wanted to change the language. I wanted to move away from depression and move away from other language we have that is psychological. That’s when I thought of, I was reminded that years ago I had read John of the Cross, who was a mystic, who wrote a poem called “Dark Night of the Soul.” Then he wrote a commentary on his poem “The Dark Night of the Soul.” He had difficulties in his life, himself. Now he was writing primarily to mystics, people who would take their spiritual life very, very seriously. He was writing to them and trying to help them navigate a mystical life, but I thought that what he said about that kind of life could also apply to us ordinary folks trying to get through life. What I did was apply some of his insights to what I was seeing as a psychotherapist.
TS: So when you said that you were working with people and they came in with this idea, like, “I hope this therapy solves my problem,” isn’t that what most people want?
TM: Well, yes, and I think that’s legitimate. We want to deal with the problem. It’s not that. The issue is: How do I solve the problem? Do I solve the problem of life once and for all? If you think, “Well, if I get rid of this problem, then I’m going to be happy,” it just isn’t true, because suffering is part of life. It’s more important to come to a place where you can deal with life more realistically and learn how to navigate the various challenges that are presented, and to have, I think, a much richer, more realistic, more intelligent view of what life is, so that you don’t keep bouncing back and forth between happiness and sadness, because that’s kind of a bipolar way of living, you know? You can’t be in one place and feel that life is going to settle.
I guess a lot of this has to do with my own experience. My feeling is that I have come to accept life as being complicated and difficult, and having some suffering and some joy, and some very plain, ordinary days when things don’t seem to be either high or low. Living that way, I find, anyway, to be ultimately more satisfying, because it allows me to be creative, which gives it its own rewards. I wanted to bring some of that attitude to the people that I was working with. And I wanted to write about it, because most of the books I see either ignore the dark side of life or they look for quick and easy solutions to it.
TS: Now it’s interesting that you said that not polarizing into either happiness or sadness, but accepting and being with all of the terrain of life has allowed you to be creative. I wonder if you could talk more about that. I could see someone else saying, “Well, I can accept all of my life, but I’m not particularly creative.” What is in it for you that has led to this creative outpouring (which I definitely feel, Tom, in looking at your life and seeing the prolific nature of your writing)?
TM: When I look at my own life, I see a lot of challenges from the very beginning. I grew up in a traditional Catholic family, and I was pretty much educated, at the beginning, told to be someone who didn’t, that was not visible, that remained quiet in the background and never complained and never did anything remarkable, just sort of remained quiet. That was really the main principle, and you had to be this good person, you know, and not do anything that would upset anyone in the least. That’s a challenge. That’s a handicap to begin with, emotionally, anyway. It’s taken me many years to deal with that material at the very beginning, and so, for me (maybe it’s not true of everybody, but for me, it makes sense) if I can deal with some of these challenges that are there that make life unpleasant and unhappy at times, and really drive me crazy at others, if I can deal with those, it frees me up then to be able to use my talents to do what will give me a deep satisfaction.
Creativity, creative work gives me, at least, a deep satisfaction. I think it does for most people. I’d rather have that kind of satisfaction than some kind of happiness that means that I don’t feel pain or I don’t feel any conflict in life.
TS: But Tom, I can imagine someone who says they’re suffering in some way—maybe they’re depressed or they’re down in some way, and the last thing that feels like it’s rising in them is a creative force. That’s not what’s happening, you know? They’re down.
TM: What I’m saying, though, is that I think that if you can look at life as being more complicated, and that your vision of life and . . . Here’s a point that I make in my book, that I think is key: You develop a philosophy of life. That is, you think things through, and you have a sense of values, and you have something of a plan to deal with life. If you include difficulties, and include that you expect that life is going to have challenges in it and changes, and that there will be frequent moments of confusion and pain, then I don’t think you go down into these deep places so much. So it’s possible to be creative when life is that mixture of things. I think it’s quite difficult when you have to more or less surrender, when the depression and the sadness overwhelm you. Then it’s very difficult to be creative. In fact, most people have told me that when they are feeling depressed, one of the characteristics of that place is that you just don’t have any energy to be creative, and you don’t have the will to do it. You also have this feeling that it will never go away, so it’s rather a double depression there: You’re depressed, and then you’re depressed about being depressed. It’s a difficult thing to deal with.
I think that part of it has to do with the fact that we don’t look at life in its complexity. We expect happiness all the time, really. We think that’s the normal state to be in. I’m trying to suggest that happiness is not the normal state.
TS: But do you think that simply expecting and accepting that there will be these dips, there will be these periods of loss and grief, that that’s enough to keep one out of these deep pitfalls of depression? Just that?
TM: It’s not enough, but it goes a long way. It goes a long way because there are a couple things about that: First of all, this is an idea that I got from my friend, James Hillman, many years ago, a long, long time ago. He said in conversation once that he felt that a lot of our depression comes from the fact that we have such a spirited society—we’re talking about American society now—we expect to be happy. We’re dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. We have all kinds of messages around us telling us that we should be happy, and if we’re not, we’d better do something about it and get back on track quickly. That, he says, creates depression, itself, it makes it worse, because that’s our expectation, and that’s the environment we live in. I think there’s a lot of truth in that.
What I’m suggesting, first of all here, is that we could have a vision of life that is more true to its nature, that it is a complex mix of happiness and sadness and challenge, all of these things. Our philosophy of life, then, goes along with that. Then I think we become more even-tempered as a result, don’t have these depths, and don’t go high and low quite as much. That’s a start. I’m not saying that’s going to solve the problem entirely, but that, certainly, I think is a major part of the whole picture.
There are other parts, then. Some people will find some benefits from finding the roots of their depression. A lot of them go back a long way. They go back to earlier experiences, to the influence of other people, to childhood, and so it’s really worth looking at all of those things. What I do in my own practice: In order to find out what kind of darkness is in a person’s life, I look closely at their dream life. I find signs there of patterns that I think help shed light on the depression or the sadness, whatever it is, the conflict. So that’s very useful, and then you have something, then, that you can reconsider.
Just being able to reframe your story, then, is also part of the healing, and a part of being able to live in a life that maybe has its challenges and difficulties, but you’re not undone by them. You can go ahead and live your life, even though these things are going to be there for you to deal with.
TS: What I’m curious about is, in your own life, linking up this philosophy of life that you’re talking about and your rich creative life, how that syncs up for you.
TM: Well, it links together in a couple of ways. One is that I have a great deal of empathy for people who are going through suffering. I’ve had to deal with things myself. They’re maybe not the same, maybe in many instances not as powerful as other people have, but at least I’ve had my own. I’ve had my own fate and things that I have had to deal with, and having confronted them and come to a certain level of peace—and as I was saying before, being able to be creative. My creativity, to some extent, the particular nature of it is to deal with those difficulties, so I write about them. I write a book called Dark Nights of the Soul, partly because I know what it’s like. I’ve been there, and I would like to write about it. Part of my creative effort is part of my own therapy. Writing Dark Nights of the Soul was very helpful for me, personally, to write it, just to go through it, that experience. I hope that that’s one reason why it’s useful to somebody else: because it’s genuine. I’m not sitting back saying “I have some answer to these things, and you poor people don’t know the answers.” It’s not that at all. I struggle with this, I’ve gone through these things, and I write about them. I think I have found a way to deal with them that is useful, and so that gives me the creative material and gives me the energy to do it, and the motive to do it. That’s a very big part of it, part of being creative at the very time that you feel, that I feel some of the struggles that I’ve had to deal with.
TS: In your book Care of the Soul, the book that really put you, I guess, on the public map in many ways, there’s a chapter on “The Gifts of Depression.” I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, what you see as depression’s gifts.
TM: I got this idea of “The Gifts of depression” from my studies. I’m the person who learns a lot from books. My family makes fun of me because I learn everything from books. I tell them I learned how to swim from books, you know, everything. I studied depression and dealing with difficulties and darkness in life. I studied, looked it up, and I found, in writing almost 1,000 years ago, people were talking about this same issue. They’re the ones, these writers 1,000 years ago, who talked about being in a sad place, in a dark place. They had called it “being in Saturn,” because they’d tend to use poetic imagery at that time. They said it was like being in Saturn, who was this mythological figure of sadness and struggle. They said that if you can endure Saturn, if you can stay with Saturn, that you will get benefits from this. They listed the benefits. One of them, they said, is that you age better, that this is one of the gifts of Saturn. You mature more.
And I think this is true. I think that one of the big problems of American society is that its citizenry is not as mature as it could be. We tend to be rather adolescent for a very long time, and our whole culture has this adolescent spirit to it. Visitors come here, and they’re kind of shocked, I think, when they come here for the first time to see this kind of a spirit that is very innocent, almost like it hasn’t grown up. Saturn can give us, or having to deal with conflict in life, can mature us. We go through these rites of passage. We become gradually more and more mature about life. That doesn’t mean we become sadder. It means that we have a bigger picture, a deeper picture, of what’s going on, a more complicated view of ourselves and the life that we’re living. That is a good thing, and that’s one of the gifts of Saturn: to age well, and to mature.
Another thing, they said, was that Saturn is particularly good for artists. In fact, there’s a book called Born Under Saturn that hearkens back to those medieval writings that say that artists are born under Saturn, that they have this dark view of life from the beginning. You find so many artists, so many writers and musicians who have a very dark approach to life, and somehow, that is connected to their art. Their art gets its depth and its substance from the fact that they do not have this innocent, adolescent view of life. It’s given to him.
So those are two very big things that I learned just by going into the past. I don’t just say they’re true because someone said it. I think about my own life and the lives of the people that I’ve counseled over the years, and I see this. I do see that going through a challenge and going through a depressive time can make them more mature people, people who live from a deeper place and have a deeper sort of happiness when they come out of it. Actually, of course, they never fully come out of it, because part of dealing with the darkness is to come to grips with it and see it as part of life. You see, you never just completely pull out of it, but you learn how to live with it.
I’ve also worked with a lot of artists, because I’m a musician and I’m a writer. I’m married to a painter. I have a strong affinity for the artist. I think it’s in my nature, anyway, to love the artist. I’ve seen so many artists over the years who I think have proven this principle that the difficulties they have and the dark periods they have gone through have actually helped their art and have allowed them to be successful artists. And you look at the art of people who have this kind of sunny view of life, and again, it’s too childish. It doesn’t have the edge that art requires.
TS: So Tom, I’m definitely following you in that I can think of people that I know who have really wrestled with themselves, with life, and I can see both their maturity and I can see in other people how it informs their art, but I also see people who have been crushed by Saturn, and who are still being crushed, and maybe, as they age, become bitter or cranky or stay depressed. What’s the difference? How come some people receive Saturn’s gifts and others remain under and crushed?
TM: Well, the answer to that is one word for me, and that is therapy, but let me explain what I mean. I don’t mean everyone should go into therapy as we know it today. >em>Therapy means . . . when I use the word, I don’t mean just the institution of psychotherapy. What I mean is some sort of caring, of attention, psychological attention—I use the word soul, so I would say care of soul or soul care—involved, so we do something with our depression and our darkness, and not just let it go on and let it rule us forever. There has to be some response to it.
People who don’t go to therapy (I think therapy is one root, but people who don’t do that) may find solution elsewhere. I know a lot of people who feel very, very dark in their lives, and they decide to change their jobs and their careers, and that is enough to turn them around. They become different people because they have moved in a different direction. I’ve known people whose darkness and depression and despondency in life is due to their marriage, and it isn’t until they get our of a marriage that they rediscover their lives. I’ve seen that happen many times. That’s kind of a therapeutic move, in some way, both of these things. Other people take on some sort of a practice, so they enter a spiritual group or community, or they follow a particular spiritual path, and that becomes their way of dealing with the hardship and the difficulties and the depressive view. If you don’t do something, then it’s going to swamp you. That’s just the way it works. So we have to find ways.
That’s why I call my book Care of the Soul. A lot of people focus on the word soul. I focus a lot on the word care, and I take care as something very active, something that it’s very important to do, and so all my work is devoted to responding to these dark moments. How do you deal with them? Don’t let them just happen. Don’t let them just be there. Do something with them. There’s quite a wide range of what you can do. That’s really what I have spent most of my life doing: trying to explore all of the different ways that we can respond to our dark nights.
TS: I love your use of the word care. You write in the book Dark Nights of the Soul, “Give yourself care rather than cure,” focusing on cure. But the question I have, I mean, to care, to give myself care, I have to have some kind of positive regard. I mean there’s already a kind of positivity in my willingness to give myself care, and then you can make a hundred suggestions, some of which you just mentioned, whether it’s switching your job or developing a spiritual practice, or whatever, but what about when you’re in that place where you don’t feel caring towards yourself?
TM: Well that’s part of the problem, then, part of the issue, itself. It’s part of the suffering. I think what happens (I mean this is a funny way to put it. I don’t think I’ve ever said this before.) is it’s as though life offers us, it constantly offers us opportunities to wake up out of where we are, to see the possibility of doing something else. You know, there’s so many stories of people who have been in a very despondent and difficult depressed place, and maybe they see like the Buddha. A friend gets cancer, and so they visit them in the hospital and they wake up to the fact that their own life is just going by, and they say, “Well, I can’t do this. I’ve got to do something about it now.” They wake up. There’s an awakening process.
In fact, I’ve wanted for years to write a book on waking up, because this is really an important part of the process. What is it that makes you wake up and not just remain forever in that sleep where you don’t have even the impetus to care for yourself? There has to be something to wake you up. Usually it comes from outside. As I say, you look at somebody who’s worse off than you are, or you look at someone who’s let their life just go by, and you wake up and say, “I’m not going to do that.” Or you might see a symbol or an image of it. You might see a child. A lot of people wake up because of children. Either they have children and they want to give their best to their children, or they see a child’s life, and they realize that “That’s me,” and they think of their own childhood, and they say, “Well, I don’t want to squander this gift of life that I’ve been given. I’m going to do something about this now. I’m not going to keep going the way that I have been for all this time.” Or they may have a friend that tells them, a good friend that says, “Look, you’re letting life go by. Do something about it,” and they may have a friend that gives them some chances to say, “I know someone you can talk to,” or, “Why don’t you come with me? I’m going on a trip to Africa,” or something. Travel, actually, is quite an interesting source of waking up: those people who maybe don’t travel because they suddenly realize they want to get on with life, but just opportunity comes along, and they go somewhere and they see how people are living, and they encounter some extraordinary people, and they say, “Well, I have to change.”
So life gives us all kinds of signals where we can wake up, and a lot of times we let them go by. We don’t pay attention to them. Sometimes they’re so strong that we can’t do anything but pay attention to them. I think being alert to what life has to offer is part of the awakening process.
TS: I love that. It’s almost like we’re in partnership with this bigger force that’s surprising us all the time.
TM: Exactly.
TS: Now you said something really interesting: that your family teases you, that you learned to swim through reading. I’m interested in this because I’ve been very committed to speaking from my own experience, and I notice that, when I read things in books, I think, “You know, whatever.” I need to always test everything in my own experience, so it’s very curious to me to hear that you learn and gather so much wisdom from reading about other people’s experience. I’m curious how you sort out what you read.
TM: Well, usually I can tell very quickly, if I look at a book, within a few sentences, whether this is something that is part of this adolescent approach to life that’s around—the spiritual writing, especially, has a lot of that sentimental writing—you catch it right away. You see it in the language. There’s no edge. There’s no darkness to it. It’s all bright and sunny. I just don’t read any of those books that come from the sunshine only. Maybe there’s a good book in there somewhere, but it’s not worth it for me to sort it out, because I just . . . so that gets rid of a good half of the books that make their appearance to me.
Then the other stuff, the other material that I read, I go from one to another. I read one book . . . for example, I’ve been heavily influenced by Jung, and by James Hillman, a Jungian writer, and reading them these are two people who have been like me: They’ve been readers who read sources, and they read a lot of things, very widely read. Between the two of them, I have a huge amount of reading to do. Just from those two writers, alone, I have found a whole bibliography that would take me half my life to read. So I pursue those things.
There are certain philosophies that I know that, if I stick with and read over and over again, are going to give me what I need. For example, I read the Tao te Ching probably three or four times a year, maybe more than that, the basic texts from Taoism in China. To me, it has more wisdom packed into just maybe fifty or seventy pages than many, many books, so I find that, and I read it and read it and read it, because it takes me a long time to really get it. I still don’t get it. You know, I have to read it over and over again to be reminded of all the wisdom that’s there. I read a lot of books on Zen Buddhism for the same reason. I rarely find a book on Zen Buddhism that doesn’t give me something important. I read certain poets that I know are going to be strong, and I reread them and reread them. D.H. Lawrence, for example, and Emily Dickinson, and Anne Sexton, and Wallace Stevens, and Rilke. Rilke! I couldn’t imagine my life without reading Rainer Maria Rilke! I’m reading the same poems, all the time, of his and I’m always getting something from them. So I have kind of my own resources that I go to.
I get a new book that’s just been written, that comes across my desk, and this happens almost every single day. I get a new book sent in the mail to me for one reason or another, and I look at those and most of it, I see right away, doesn’t have the substance that my own library, that these books I was talking about, have. Once in a while, I suspect, I say, “Well, maybe there’s something there,” and I’ll look into it.
As a result, most of my reading is of old stuff and classic things, and classic spiritual books especially, and poets, things that I know I can trust.
TS: It sounds like reading, for you, is part of your care of the soul, for you.
TM: There’s no question about it. Now, you know I lived thirteen years of my early life in a monastery, so I was taught, when I was thirteen years old, I was taught that reading is a spiritual practice. They called it lexio divina, “divine reading.” I learned that when I was thirteen, and I was encouraged to read in that way from that time on, for thirteen years, daily. We had it built into our schedule in this monastic life, reading that was intended to be spiritual reading, and we were encouraged to find really good writers. So this is something I learned. It’s not natural; it’s something I learned, and I learned it very early on in my life. Ever since I left the monastery, it’s been an ideal for me to create a secular life and a family life that has monastic values in it, and one of those values is reading.
TS: Now Care of the Soul was written almost twenty years ago, and I know you’re working on a new book, writing a new book that’s also about the life of the soul. I’m curious if any of your views have changed over the last two decades, and what those might be.
TM: That’s a very good question. Basically, my thinking hasn’t changed much. There was a period in my life, up to, I would say, 1980, when I felt I was discovering. I was discovering so much, and especially, well, there were certain people that appeared in my life, and certain writers that appeared to me over the years, and it was exciting to discover them and to read them, and just to take so much from them. So I had a long period of time where I was absorbing so much with a great deal of excitement, new things all the time. Then that sort of changed. At a certain point, that stopped happening, not entirely, but I’d say it’s changed dramatically, so now I don’t feel that same feeling that I’m discovering these new things constantly.
When I published Care of the Soul, I put in a lot of things I had learned through those exciting years. Since then, I’d say that those ideas have been confirmed, and I don’t think that there’s been a lot of change. I don’t think there’s anything, (I’m trying to think of it now) I don’t think there’s anything in Care of the Soul that I would want to rewrite. I can’t think of anything. There are earlier books I wrote that I would want to change, because my positions have changed, but not Care of the Soul.
I have learned a lot, though. I’ve learned a lot over the years because I’ve had to give lectures on this material so often, and I’ve spoken at so many different venues and bookstores and churches and schools, hospitals, so many different venues. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned a lot concretely about what it means to care for your soul in different situations, so that has been a new learning for me. I’ve learned a lot from people. They’ve given me a lot of ideas, but the essentials have not changed at all.
TS: Can you give me a couple examples of concrete situations that have crystallized for you in the more recent years, how you would approach them?
TM: Sure. One of the things I didn’t know when I first wrote Care of the Soul is that what I was writing had a great deal of relevance to people who are sick and being treated for illness. As soon as the book was published, I began getting letters and phone calls from medical schools and hospitals and cancer centers asking me to come and talk to them—talk to the staff, the patients, and their families. I learned a lot there that I didn’t even have a clue about. I wondered what I was going to do when I first went to these places, but I’ve continued. Now I’ve spent almost twenty years, and I’d say a third of my work has been in the medical field.
TS: Hmm. I didn’t know that. That’s interesting, Tom.
TM: Yes, and I recently published a book called Care of the Soul in Medicine, and I’m planning on doing even more work now with the medical world. That was something I didn’t have a clue that I was going to be connected with.
Again, I’m aware within myself—and my family teaches me about this, too—that I sort of am a frustrated surgeon or something. There’s something in me that loves the medical profession, and I really like being in hospitals and doing work there, and I love being with that.
TS: You are twisted now, Tom. I’m now convinced.
TM: I am!
TS: Yeah. I mean what, pray tell, do you like about being in hospitals?
TM: I like so much about it. I like the . . . there’s something that’s deeply satisfying to me about being able to deal with people in distress. Being a psychotherapist for thirty years is not too different from that, except the physical realm, mainly, rather than the emotional, but even as a therapist, I’ve really enjoyed working with people who are really psychotic, I mean really out of it. I’ve been able to work with people like that and enjoy it and get somewhere with them. So there’s something in me that loves the pathological and finds it challenging and interesting. I don’t want to change it—I mean I do want to help people with their suffering and all of that—what I mean is I can appreciate it somehow. So when I go to a hospital, I see people having to deal with all of these illnesses, and I find it very interesting. I’m drawn into it. I can see the work of a doctor or a nurse being very fascinating, being able to have empathy for people who are suffering, and then trying to figure out, “What can I do about this? How can I help it? How can I help them be relieved of their suffering?” It’s a challenge.
I just did this this morning. I did an hour of psychotherapy with someone, and I felt, as I was sitting there with this man, I thought, “I’m like a detective,” and I love detective mysteries. I can understand why: because we’re trying to sort out what’s going on in this life, and there’s something that’s going on that has caused some suffering. Well, what is that thing? And I hear these hints when he talks. I hear little hints that he doesn’t notice. He says things and doesn’t even pay attention to them, and I pick up on them, and I ask him to elaborate on these points, and suddenly, you can see the revelation! You can see the look of discovery in his eyes as we look at these things and go deeper.
So there is that whole aspect of medicine and psychotherapy that satisfies me at a very deep level.
TS: Let’s say, for a moment, that someone’s listening who is suffering from illness, and they’ve heard our conversation, and have a philosophy of life that accepts the fact that illness is happening, but still that person feels a tremendous sense of loss and maybe even fear for their life. Maybe they don’t relate so much to what you said earlier in the conversation, that it’s the fear of life that’s disturbing them as much as a fear of death is actually disturbing them. What would you say to that person, based on the work you’ve been doing with the care of the soul in medicine?
TM: Well, I would say, first of all, that you’re talking there about the soul and an illness. You’re talking about anxiety and fear and death and feelings of mortality, and there are so many other issues that come up: emotional issues, issues of relationship, of meaning, of work, just hosts of issues, human issues that come up when we get sick. We bring them with us when we go to a doctor or a hospital. They’re part of us, and we’re full of those thoughts and feelings, and yet our medical profession is trained only to deal with the body, as though the body were separate from all of these other things. Well, I’ve learned very dramatically in my work as a therapist that you can’t separate these things. I mean I know that intellectually, but I’ve seen it: that when people deal with their emotional life, physically, they can get better. I’ve seen things vanish overnight, physical problems vanish overnight because of conversation. So I know that there is a close relationship between care of the soul and care of the body.
I would say to a person like this that yes, I fully appreciate that. There’s no one that gets more afraid of their own mortality than I do, and has more anxiety. I really feel it, but I think that, if you’re sick and that’s what’s going on, then we can deal with that by talking. Talking is the care of the soul, really, and conversation and relationship and encounter and engagement. On one side, I go to hospitals and I try to convince doctors and nurses of the importance of conversation with their patients, and of seeing their patients as human beings, and of seeing themselves as human beings, and of being present as a human being. That’s a big part of what I do in hospitals and medical schools, and I get a lot of resistance to it, but I keep talking about it. And then with patients and families, I would say something similar: Be present. Express your fears. Let people know about them. Let people know you’re a human being. They may treat you as an object because that’s how they were educated to deal with your body. Don’t let them do it. Be present as a human being always. Treat your doctor and your nurse and other people as real people, too, and maybe they will learn from you to treat you that way.
TS: You mentioned working with people one on one, yourself, talking with people, and how important it is that we talk with others, we express ourselves, and even the one word that you gave, therapy, in terms of the difference in how people might deal with difficulties—of course, you defined it extremely broadly. You know there’s a view now, that I’m sure you’ve heard, that talk therapy doesn’t really change people, which we don’t really transform by talking with a therapist about our problems. What do you think about that?
TM: Aside from the fact that it’s just completely wrong?
TS: Yeah.
TM: It’s wrong because I think what it does is it represents the philosophy of our time, which is to be factual. We trust medications and we trust anything we can measure. We’re materialistic in that regard. Society is materialistic. Talk is not materialism. Talk has to do with the spirit and soul, so it’s something else. I just don’t believe it, and I’ve made it my life work, wherever I go, to speak in favor of the spirit and of the soul, and never to fall into that materialism. It’s everywhere, but I speak against it constantly. I don’t care. I go into these medical places, and people sometimes don’t want me there, you know? A lot of people resent it, and they think that I’m somehow complaining and I’m criticizing them. They get very, very sensitive to it. And I don’t care, because I think that this is going to kill us, this materialism. So I make it my life work, and I like being identified with this role. People know, if they invite me somewhere, I am not going to sit back and let that materialistic viewpoint go unchallenged. I just don’t believe it.
On the other hand, my own experience is that this is changing. There was a period, even just ten years ago, where I think people were disparaging talk therapy, but I’m picking up a turn now back toward realizing the importance of it. I teach psychiatrists. About three times a year, I teach a group of maybe 100 psychiatrists. Ten years ago, I used to get the psychiatrist who didn’t have any time for what I was talking about—even people in my audiences would stand up and yell and scream and complain—but I don’t see that anymore. People are very interested in going back to a kind of talk therapy. In fact, they want to go further. The psychiatrists are very interested in what the spiritual traditions have to contribute.
TS: Well it seems that this critique of talk therapy comes from a couple of different angles. One is, as you’re saying, the materialistic view, but the other is people who say, “I went and saw a therapist for X number of years, and I didn’t really change. Just talking about my problems didn’t really create change. Maybe I need a more body-centered approach, or something that’s not just going to be me flapping my lips about it.”
TM: Ha! Yes. Well, I still hold my ground. One problem might be, in what you just said, that people are looking for a kind of change. I don’t see the point in therapy as change. I really don’t. I guess I do have a very anachronistic view of therapy. I think everyone should be in therapy. That would be great, if there were good therapists for them. That’s one thing. Secondly, I don’t think that therapy ever ends. You don’t go into therapy with this problem, and you get rid of the problem, and you change, you change your personality, and you leave. That’s not what it’s about. It’s care. It’s not change. It’s not cure. It’s care. It’s ongoing care so that you’re always, throughout your life, looking at your life and being able to gain some insight and move through your life more gracefully. That’s what it’s about. I don’t think it’s about changing your nature or anything like that.
The man I worked with, who I was mentioning today, is eighty years old, and he’s not interested in change. He’s interested in living a graceful, beautiful life with the time he has left. I think that’s a wonderful mode for therapy.
TS: I just have one final question for you, Tom. You’ve told me two things that your family teases about, and I’ve found them the most interesting, actually, just at a personal level, out of our conversation. I’m curious if you can tell me one third thing that your family teases you about.
TM: Sure. That’s easy. They call me “Mr. Magoo.” I’m pretty oblivious to what’s going on in the world around me. I live in another time and space, really, in so many ways. I mean I spend so much time reading and writing (I love to write. It’s such an internal thing.) and as a result, when I go out into the world, I don’t know what century I’m in half the time. I’m not too good at it. You know, I don’t handle the world too well. I’m not very sociable. I don’t know what to talk about too well. Fortunately, when I go out to give lectures and things, people are there to hear me, and they’re looking at this person who they know from the books, and it’s not really me, so I can do that pretty easily. But I’m not Mr. Magoo. I just bump into things and don’t handle the world too well.
I don’t worry about it too much, really. At times, I do, when I have to deal with . . . well, I’m not good at dealing with money, but I have to do that. I try to force myself. Things like that. But I’m not good at the world.
TS: Mr. Magoo!
TM: Yes.
TS: Mr. Magoo is a, well, I don’t know what that character is.
TM: Oh, you don’t know that character?
TS: No.
TM: That’s another problem: I often use comparisons that other people don’t know.
He was a character who, in cartoons, used to constantly bump into things. He couldn’t see very well, and he didn’t understand what was going on in the world, and he was funny—you know, a funny character—because he just couldn’t adjust. That’s who I am in many ways.
TS: Well, I’ve really enjoyed talking with you, Tom, the Magooey part of you and just the caring part of you. I really appreciate it.
TM: I’ve enjoyed talking with you, too, Tami.
TS: Thomas Moore has created several audio programs with Sounds True over the past two decades, including a six-part series on Soul Life, and a program on creativity, as well as a program on meaningful work. And coming up beginning October 28, Sounds True will be hosting a three-part online event series on the Gifts of a Dark Night, and that’s something I’m looking forward to and I think will be of great benefit for everyone who tunes in beginning on October 28. SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
