Filling the Hole in the Soul

Printed in the  Summer 2021 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Prescott, Sue, "Filling the Hole in the Soul " Quest 108:3, pg 20-24

By Sue Prescott

For the length of my career, I have done family, marital, and individual therapy with children and adults. When I began my work, there was a popular interest in self-healing and the idea of mind over matter for creating good physical and mental health. Many techniques and principles were taught for this purpose. As I pursued my own interest in spirituality, I noticed a remarkable similarity between the practices for leading a spiritual life and what people could do to alleviate depression, anxiety, or the feeling that life had no meaning—basically the “hole in the soul.”

What do I mean when I refer to “the hole in the soul”? It is reminiscent of feeling depressed, blue, or having no reason to live, or it may mean that a person has anxiety, with feelings of fear, worry, or dread. Both anxiety and depression can be normal reactions to events that happen in life; in these cases, they are referred to as situational. A person adjusting to a breakup of a relationship may experience situational depression, while a family member laid off from work may go through situational anxiety. These conditions may lessen or go away once things change and the stress is over.

The hole in the soul goes deeper. It is a feeling of emptiness or a blankness, where life seems to have no meaning or purpose. To ease it, a person may try to find an all-consuming love but may be disappointed in romantic relationships. Or the hope may be projected into the future: they think they would be happy if they had a new car or a bigger house. Some may try to assuage their unhappiness through food, alcohol, or other distractions, such as bingeing on movies or computer gaming.

It is useful to define what I mean by the word soul here. Philosophers have written much about the nature of the soul, but I will present what Theosophy teaches. By this view, the soul is the personal self (table 1).

Table 1. The levels of consciousness according to Theosophical theory

The feeling that something is missing in the soul causes a person to yearn for peace and contentment, but it eludes them and they don’t know why. Spiritual teachers say that the cause is that the personal, everyday self is cut off from the spiritual, Higher Self.

Black Elk, the nineteenth-century medicine man of the Oglala Lakota people, said that the long-sought peace comes only when one is aligned with the Great Spirit. (In Theosophical terms, the Great Spirit is the same as the atman in a human being.) In his book Black Elk Speaks, he refers to this as the “first peace,” adding that this must be achieved before peace can come between people or nations.

The first peace, which is most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their oneness with the universe and all its powers—when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit and that this center is really everywhere. It is within each one of us. This is real peace. 

Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr, discussing the Aboriginal mysticism of Australia, writes of the peace of the spiritual Self that is felt from being in nature. One Aboriginal language calls it dadirri:

The greatest gift is dadirri. It is an inner, deep listening and quiet awareness. Dadirri recognizes the deep spring that is inside us. We call on it and it calls to us. When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again. I can sit on the river bank or walk through the trees. Even if someone close to me has passed away, I can find my peace in this silence. There is no need for words. (quoted in Stockton, 104)

The Dalai Lama XIV speaks of attaining this peace when he says, “Everybody wants a happy life and a peaceful mind, but we have to produce peace of mind through our own practice” (Dalai Lama, 2020, 197).

When people begin therapy, peace of mind is one of their goals. A type of therapeutic intervention that works well with the mind in its search for peace is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

CBT focuses on the interplay of the mind, the emotions, and the body. It is evidence-based, meaning that evidence shows it is effective. The mind has the most influence on your feelings and behavior, so it is where you concentrate your efforts for change. This is depicted in the CBT triangle in diagram 1, with thoughts placed at the top. The CBT triangle corresponds with the personal self in table 1.

Diagram 1. The triad of interaction according to cognitive behavioral therapy

CBT includes useful techniques for teaching people to change their patterns of thinking or behavior. It is used along with talking therapy, whereby clients process what they are going through. The strategies parallel the teachings of many spiritual leaders.

One technique is thought stopping. This is particularly useful for resentment, which can make a person feel down and depressed. Using the technique, every time you think of something you don’t want to recall, such as a hurtful thing that was done to you, you are to stop yourself and firmly say, “I will not think this way!” State it with power. Then consciously substitute another thought that opposes the unwanted one, such as, “I can heal from this.” It is important to include this second technique, called thought substitution, so your mind can specifically focus on replacing the old, unwanted thought with a new, beneficial one.

In the Dhammapada, the Buddha teaches you to watch your thoughts and change them if needed: “The watched mind brings happiness. The disciplined mind brings happiness.” The same point is emphasized by Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking, who wrote, “Change your thoughts and you change your world” (Peale, 18).

The Polynesian and Hawaiian traditions have a principle that speaks to the power of thinking. It is called makia and means, “Energy flows where your attention goes.” Whenever you think of something, energy will flow into the thought and make it more likely to come up again. If you allow yourself to think negatively, it will cause discouragement and create more stress in your life. It can upset your body’s hormone balance and lessen the effectiveness of your immune system.

The Buddha teaches the same idea in the Dhammapada when he says, “Whatever an enemy may do to an enemy, far worse is the harm from one’s own wrongly directed mind.” You need to choose the way you direct your mind as well as how you feel and behave.

Frequent thinking in a certain way sets up a vibratory habit or pattern in the mental body. This is referred to as a neural “groove” in current informal terminology. If your thoughts are positive, you will feel good, which reinforces the neural groove in your brain, so similar thoughts come up again. If you habitually think of things that are negative, those thoughts will repeat, and your mood will be brought down.

H.P. Blavatsky speaks to this idea as well: “Ordinary intellectual activity moves on well beaten paths in the brain and does not compel sudden adjustments and destructions in its substance. But a new kind of mental effort calls for something very different—the carving out of new ‘brain paths’” (quoted in Bowen, 4).

Mahatma Koot Hoomi, in The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, said, “A person can only think in his worn grooves, and unless he has the courage to fill up these and make new ones for himself, he must perforce travel on the old lines” (in Chin, 470).

Changing your habitual thoughts and making new neural grooves is understood by science and medicine as synaptic pruning or neural pruning. This happens all the time when certain cells or neurons in the brain are reduced or eliminated to allow greater efficiency in thinking and response to stimuli. When you work to change negative thinking patterns, neural pruning takes place. Then you can focus on happier thoughts, which make you feel better. Therapy involves more than just changing one’s thoughts, but if you don’t change your thinking, the potential for feeling your best is reduced.

The Dalai Lama teaches the same thing: “By mobilizing your thoughts and practicing new ways of thinking, you can reshape your nerve cells and change the way your brains work.”

Another type of therapy that relates well to this process and which includes spiritual components is dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), developed by Marsha Linehan, PhD, in the 1990s. It combines the use of mindfulness—or watching your thoughts—with CBT to produce change. Dialectical means from opposing sides: seemingly opposing points of view can come together to help the client, such as mindfulness combined with specific techniques to change one’s behavior. Another example of a dialectic is putting yourself in another’s shoes to understand their point of view as well as your own.

Marsha Linehan coined the term “wise mind,” which refers to your intuition or buddhi-manas. This is a helpful concept for finding insights into your feelings or behavior.

One DBT tool using a dialectic is opposite action: consciously deciding to change your negative behavior to its opposite positive. An example is being nice to someone you resent by paying them a compliment. If you do this, you need to be sincere, although you can usually find something positive in anyone. This process changes the relationship between you, and most importantly, it changes you. This idea is supported by Hippocrates, the Greek physician of the fifth century BCE who is considered the father of Western medicine: he said, “Opposites are cures for opposites.”

DBT’s emphasis on mindfulness comes from Buddhist practice, whereby one is mindful of one’s thoughts and feelings in order to cultivate peace and well-being. If a negative thought comes up, DBT says you are to analyze it to see if you need to do some problem solving or if the thought just needs to be discarded. This way you can prevent the emotions associated with the negative thought from distressing you.

The mindfulness of DBT is similar to the spiritual practice of witnessing, whereby you simply watch your thoughts, your feelings, and how you are behaving. You widen your awareness to take in all that is going on within you as well as around you.

A beautiful quote from the Upanishads perfectly describes the witness: “Two birds, united always and known by the same name, closely cling to the same tree. One of them eats the sweet and sour fruits of life; the other looks on without eating” (Mandukya Upanishad, 3.1.1). The latter is the witness.

The quote continues: “The individual self, deluded by forgetfulness of his identity with the Divine Self, bewildered by his ego, grieves and is sad. But when he recognizes the worshipful Lord as his own True Self, and beholds His glory, he grieves no more.” The last part is similar to the Australian practice of dadirri or calling on the Native American Great Spirit to help you find solace through your inner, spiritual Self.

Looking at the CBT triangle, you must also work on the feelings tied up in the problems you have. One of the most problematic is anger, which can be very harmful to you, both physically and mentally. These next few quotes illustrate this.

An African proverb says, “When you burn with the fire of anger, smoke gets in your eyes.” The “smoke” clouds your vision so you get consumed by what you are experiencing and can’t see the effect you are having on yourself and others.

You also cut yourself off from your spiritual Self. This is expressed in the Yoruba religion of Africa by the saying, “When water boils over the side of the pot, it smothers the flame.” This is the flame of atman in your spiritual Self.

A wise teaching from Basavanna, an Indian philosopher of the twelfth century, emphasizes the negative effect of anger: “Why do you get angry at someone who is angry at you? What are you going to gain by it? How can the fire in your house burn your neighbor’s house without engulfing your own?” Anger consumes both you and the person you are directing it to.

A similar idea is taught in the Jewish scriptures: “Who takes vengeance or bears a grudge acts like one who, having cut one hand while handling a knife, avenges himself by stabbing the other hand” (Talmud, Nedarim 9, 4).

These quotes allude to the unity of all life in saying that when you hurt another, you are also hurting yourself. This is the unity at the level of the spiritual Self.

The principle of thought stopping was demonstrated by Nelson Mandela, the first president of South Africa after apartheid ended in the early 1990s. Mandela had been imprisoned for twenty-seven years. When he was set free, he said, “As I walked out the door toward my freedom, I knew that if I did not leave all the anger, hatred, and bitterness behind, I would still be in prison.”

Because this process can be difficult, breathing exercises are useful for relaxing the body and reducing the flow of adrenalin that is produced by anger. These exercises are also promoted by spiritual leaders who emphasize meditation. Research on Buddhist monks while meditating show that their brains modulate the functioning of the amygdala, calming the fight, flight, or freeze response.

In your daily life, anger serves a purpose: it tells you that something is wrong. Dora Kunz, the late Theosophical writer and teacher, wisely taught that you should only feel anger for a fraction of a second. This means you experience the signal that something is amiss, but not so that you vent your anger on anyone. Then you use the wise mind to help you decide whether and how you want to react.

As you work to improve your emotional functioning and offset your response of irritation or anger at others, it is useful to develop your ability to forgive. This was demonstrated by Fred Luskin, PhD, of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, who says that forgiveness is a life skill that needed to be learned. He has found that forgiveness causes people to have happier and healthier lives, with increased vitality and optimism. They were less angry, experienced less hurt, had less stress, and were more self-confident. Additionally, if people just thought about forgiving the offender, their hearts and nervous systems improved.

Very often people resist forgiveness because they believe it is equivalent to saying that it is OK to be treated poorly or to be hurt. The mind objects to this and holds on to grievances as a shield of protection. However, this is only an illusion: in this condition, you remain even more vulnerable, because you’re on the lookout for another slight. This hypersensitivity prevents you from forgiving and ultimately healing.

Mindfulness and witnessing not only help you forgive but also prevent you from judging others. This keeps you aware of your own shortcomings so they aren’t pushed into what is called the Shadow, which consists of qualities within you that you don’t like or don’t want to admit you have. Judging others allows you to avoid facing your own Shadow qualities and gives you a false sense of your own purity.

This quote from Confucius illustrates the nature of the Shadow: “When you see a man of worth, think of how you may emulate him. When you see a man who is unworthy, examine your own character.” The qualities you judge in others are probably in yourself and could be improved.

The witness helps you see yourself fully and realize that the potentialities of all negatives are within you. This is a process called assimilation by Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who wrote extensively about the Shadow. He said, “I would rather be whole than good.” Then you can recognize aspects of yourself that you want to change and transform them using such DBT techniques as thought substitution and opposite action.

Lastly, techniques to deal with depression and anxiety include doing things for others, which not only helps them but also helps you. Through the selflessness of altruism, your personal problems take a back seat to what you are doing for another, and you feel better by expressing the unity of the spiritual Self.

The Dalai Lama wrote in The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World, “Adversity, illness, and death are real and inevitable. To heal your own suffering, turn away from your self-regard to wipe the tears from the eyes of another. This is the true secret to joy.” Then the soul is filled and happy, just as the Persian poet Jalaladdin Rumi said: “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river of joy moving inside you.”

Sources

Bowen, Robert. Madame Blavatsky on How to Study Theosophy, 1960: https://fohatproductions.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Bowen-Notes-HPB-on-How-to-Study.pdf

Chin, Vicente Hao, Jr., ed. The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett in Chronological Sequence. Quezon City, Philippines: Theosophical Publishing House, 1998.

The Dalai Lama XIV. The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. New York: Riverhead Books, 2020.

The Dalai Lama XIV and Desmond Tutu. The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World. New York: Avery, 2016.

Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom. New York: Back Bay Books, 1994.

Neihardt, John G., ed. Black Elk Speaks. New York: William Morrow, 1961.

Peale, Norman Vincent. The Power of Positive Thinking. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952.

Stockton, Eugene. The Aboriginal Gift: Spirituality for a Nation. Alexandria, Australia: Millennium Books, 1995.

Sue Prescott, MSW, is a therapist, life-long Theosophist, and frequent lecturer at the Seattle Lodge and surrounding area. She is author of Realizing the Self Within, an overview of the concepts of spirituality that can be applied to relationships and self-improvement.