Product Description

Care of the Soul is a powerful and uplifting book which offers a new way of thinking about daily life - its problems and its creative opportunities. It offers a therapeutic programme bringing the soul and spirituality back into your life, and helps you to look more deeply into emotional problems and sense sacredness in ordinary things - real friends, satisfying conservation, fulfilling work, and experiences that stay in the memory and touch the heart Thomas Moore draws on his own life as a therapist practising 'care of the soul', his studies of the world's religions, his teaching of Jungian psychology and art therapy, and his work in music and art to create this inspirational guide that examines the connections between spirituality and the problems of individuals and society.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8490 in Books
• Published on: 1992-08-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Synopsis
Care of the Soul is a powerful and uplifting book which offers a new way of thinking about daily life - its problems and its creative opportunities. It offers a therapeutic programme bringing the soul and spirituality back into your life, and helps you to look more deeply into emotional problems and sense sacredness in ordinary things - real friends, satisfying conservation, fulfilling work, and experiences that stay in the memory and touch the heart Thomas Moore draws on his own life as a therapist practising 'care of the soul', his studies of the world's religions, his teaching of Jungian psychology and art therapy, and his work in music and art to create this inspirational guide that examines the connections between spirituality and the problems of individuals and society.

About the Author
Thomas Moore is the author of the phenomenal bestseller Care of the Soul. He lived as a Catholic monk for twelve years and later became a psychotherapist, with degrees in theology, musicology and religion. He now lectures extensively throughout North America.

Customer Reviews

A Classic
Of the many books that I have read, I would say that this is the most important.
Some people say that health is the most important thing in life. It's not. Soul is.
I have read this book many times and yet I always find something to inspire me.
Moore basically makes the point that loss of soul or narcissism can affect us and cut us off from feeling and imagination.
He offers many ideas for care of the soul such as honoring symptoms, working with dreams and reading good books.
I reccommend this book to anyone who is curious about themselves.

The sleeper awakes
It is the nature of people to try and pigeonhole this writing in some category or another. Several times though the book there is a warning against this. I my self see him as a hybrid of Jung and Catechism.

However I find this a revolutionary work that allows one to see the world in a new or ancient light. We have an opportunity to require or gain a perspective, a reality, a dimension that Thomas Moore calls soul. If nothing else reading the introduction will make this clear. I do not want to paraphrase Moore's works.

The book is well written and the layout is perfect to take you from ground zero of the process of Care of The Soul to a whole new life. However for me I felt a little like reading Dave Berry where he takes the normal and mundane and expands it beyond logic. You wonder how you got there.

He gets into interpreating dreams but not the standard stuff in other dream books. And shows how to relate tem to the topic of Care of The Soul. Somehow he bypasses a subject that I would be interested in. I use dreams to be more creative in work. Usually I can come up with unique solutions or insights in the middle of the night.

By the time you reach chapter eleven "Wedding Spirituality and Soul" you can see he is more into Jung than S. Freud. Also items that start to look like hypnosis byproducts ate creeping into the conversation.

Towards the end of the book he gets more concrete and wraps up lose ends.

Bottom line is you can not just read the book; you must live it to, to know it. And then again there is no guarantee.

From suffering to growth: a symbolic language for the soul
This book, while not perfect in its delivery has a real contribution to make. The author's premise is that the basis for much of the psychology and culture upon which contemporary personal growth methodologies are based is flawed. These approaches being founded on concepts of linear, monotonic development in the healing process. Such approaches overlook many issues which we might term existential. Moore addresses one of these in this book at length, an issue which in some philosophical contexts we might call the meaning of suffering. He argues that suffering has a use and that there exist symbolic languages which enable us to employ it as a part of our growth. Furthermore, he argues that suffering is an inherent part of growth, and that many modern approaches to healing are limited if not in some instances useless in respect of their ignorance of this point. Moore's presentation is to some extent narrow, and concentrates very much on the symbolic languages of Jungian and mediaeval archetypes. It does not, however, take much effort to read in it the presentation of a radical reworking of the therapeutic process: one that frames it in a spiritual context, and offers one route to a powerful new way of looking at our lives.