The soul does not shout. It waits. It waits in the body, beneath language, beneath logic, waiting for the moment when something opens. Often, it begins with an image. A simple image, but one that leaves an imprint.
Perhaps it comes in a dream. A deer walking through tall grass. A cracked bowl filled with water. A child singing with no sound. You wake with the image pressed into your chest like a stone. It stays. It lingers behind your eyes, not asking for interpretation, just asking to be seen.
If you return to the image, if you let it rest in your bones, something begins to stir. The image begins to warm. It begins to move. And in that movement, the image starts to become a symbol.
The body recognizes the symbol before the mind. The back tightens. The breath slows. A small ache rises in the throat. These responses are quiet and truthful. They come from the place in us that remembers. The place that cannot lie.
A true symbol does not explain. It does not offer a clean answer. It lives in the unknown and draws us toward it. It holds opposites together without forcing resolution. It asks to be lived through, not figured out.
To stay with a symbol is to become porous. It means allowing the image to pass through your skin and into your story. It may not speak in words. It may come through the fingertips, through tears, through a sense of something unfinished.
We are not taught how to carry symbols. We are taught to define, to reduce, to rush toward certainty. But the symbol waits. It asks us to slow down. To trust the rhythms of the unconscious. To allow the discomfort of mystery.
Some symbols wound as they open. They tear through old defenses. They bring forgotten memories to the surface. They shake the body awake. This can feel like illness. Like falling. Like dissolving into something unfamiliar. And it is. The symbol remakes us.
There is a moment in the work when the symbol begins to breathe. It comes alive in the space between knowing and unknowing. It speaks in gesture, in scent, in silence. It moves through the cracks in our defenses and plants itself in the soil of our being.
To tend a symbol is a daily act. You feed it through attention. You walk with it. You let it reshape your seeing. A symbol may stretch across years. It may disappear, only to return in another form. A phrase. A sound. A bodily sensation you cannot name.
Each time it returns, it asks again for your presence. And each time, it takes you deeper. Into the layers beneath the surface. Into the grief beneath the smile. Into the longing behind the ambition. Into the feminine ground of your own becoming.
This is where the psyche begins to trust. When you show up. When you stay with the image long enough for it to breathe. When you allow your body to speak, even if your mind does not understand. The soul is drawn to this kind of honesty.
In the quiet relationship between body and image, something begins to shift. A symbol grows there. Rooted in lived experience. Held in the tenderness of attention. Carried in the soft, rhythmic pulse of the body.
The work is never quick. It is not tidy. But it is holy. A slow unfolding of what was hidden. A return to what is true. A place where the soul can rest, knowing it has been seen.
Rose – Soulful Nuggets Team
This blog is a reflection on the course ‘Complexes and Archetypes‘ taught by Ken James .
