Making a Masterpiece of Your Life:
Ideas from Author Thomas Moore
“To
the soul, the most minute details and the most ordinary
activities, carried out with mindfulness and art, have an effect far
beyond their apparent insignificance.”
Thomas
Moore, Care of the Soul: Guide for Cultivating Depth
and Sacredness in Everyday Life
and Sacredness in Everyday Life
Recently I had the chance to tune into
a free teleseminar with author, religious scholar, professor and lecturer
Thomas Moore of the book, Care of the Soul, fame. The teleseminar
focused on how to make a masterpiece of your life. According to Moore, the word
“masterpiece” harkens back to Renaissance, which he’s been studying for thirty
years or so. It offers up beauty like painting, architecture, and is such a
rich source of pleasure and psychological and spiritual insight. Moore points
out that the word “masterpiece” can be sometimes be overused to mean perfect or
refer to something too sentimental. For him, the first thing that occurs is
“making an art of your life.”
Beauty is even more important for the
soul and spirit than physical health, Moore insisted. When it comes to soul and
spirit, we might not think of health, but rather what it takes to make a
beautiful life. How might people look at life and find pleasure in it, rather
than being so concerned about being right, correct, or even healthy.
Back in the third
century, it was Plotinus who said we should “sculpt” our soul and chip away
anything that doesn’t quite fit in order to reveal a beautiful life, a
beautiful personality. As a therapist, coach, or mentor, Moore suggested, it
might be helpful to ask those you’re helping: “What would it take to make your
life beautiful?” rather than focusing on any other value.
Moore alluded to the Japanese idea of wabi-sabi,
an art form where imperfection and transiency plays an important role. Truly,
we can find beauty in anything, even cracks in the walls. Aphrodite (in Greek
mythology) or Venus (in Roman myth) is a goddess of beauty or of the soul. She
is a metaphor for living a beautiful life. She restores a sense of value for
things that today are not considered so important – like taking a luxurious
bath or taking care of our hair. One aspect of our contemporary lives is that
we have lost soul, and beauty is an important part of our lives.
A masterpiece originally could have
meant a major piece an artist has done, Moore reminded us, but it can also
represent work an apprentice has done in order to show the master; it is master
work. It is important to align yourself with someone you consider to be a
master in order to do your own work. For Moore, archetypal psychologist James
Hillman was a great teacher and master as well as a friend for 38 years. A
masterpiece is not something you create at working hard at it for a long time.
It requires good luck and good timing. It’s not always the quality of work or
effort one puts in so much a magic of timing and having good luck come your
way. One thing, Moore does is try to bring luck in and make it happen and not
just wait for it.
Talking about mastery is talking about
“craft.” Moore said as he gets older, more people are asking how they can be a
good therapist or a good writer. His suggestion: Learn the basics. Grammar,
language, punctuation are critical to good writing. For therapy: it would be
helpful to study alchemy, to read the Collected Works of C.G. Jung. For
everything, it’s a matter of trying and failing,
We are bombarded right now with
information about science and health: but it might be a good idea to tone down
expectations in that arena. Health is important, Thomas agreed, but maintained
that he allows myself some unhealthy foods and gives time to things he needs in
his own life for beauty. Before getting on the call, for example, Moore went to
his piano and played some Chopin. He says he’s not a great performer but he
still likes to play for the beauty of it. His wife is an artist, so he
surrounds himself with her art and others. Someone just sent him an image of
St. Francis of Assisi surrounded by animals and nature. It’s wonderful to focus
on simple things, and look for aspects of the beautiful. Moore tries to have
erotic art around him to invoke the spirit of Eros, the spirit of the
beautiful, he said. We have to have it in his environment before we can get it
into our hearts, he said.
When asked how we can talk about things
that matter and free people from frustration that occurs when things don’t go
as planned, Moore responded that when it comes to creating a masterpiece, you
can end up focusing on the rosy part of life, but you have to be able to
confront the dark as well. Times when we are beating ourselves up are the times
to be stronger rather than to keep doing that same kind of thing. We need to
shift out of the masochistic role and be stronger and tougher in the world, he
insists. In Renaissance times they said your anger could work for you if you
can transmute it into firmness and strength, into having the spirit of the
warrior. Moore said when finds himself getting down on himself, he reminds
himself to be stronger and firmer and to look and see where he’s being too
vulnerable, too soft or easy; where he needs to be tougher, maybe event going
so far as to say things people are going to dislike. It’s part of beautiful
life, he insists. The beauty is there only because the artist is there and
allows it to happen. The artist doesn’t let people mess with them. If you do
this regularly, it doesn’t build to explosion. We need both: it’s two sides to
the coin.
Returning to the idea
of wabi-sabi, Moore stated that it’s related to Hillman’s idea of polytheism.
You don’t have to settle on one or the other. You can dye your air to cover the
grey all the while appreciating the moss growing on the wall. It’s about
allowing the natural aspect of things. As you get older and feel older, you can
reveal your age. You begin to realize the things you can’t do outnumber the
things you can do. In nature, for example, you try to create a house and before
long you’ve got moss growing where you don’t want it. After awhile, you get
cracks but those cracks can look beautiful. Allow your self with all the light
and dark and good and bad and see the beauty in the whole picture. If you
repress or hide elements that are imperfect then the perfection you personally
try to show won’t be complete; it will look suspicious to yourself and others.
Part of wabi-sabi is allowing yourself to be seen.
In the conversation, the moderator,
Katherine mentioned an article she had seen recently about Stradivarius trees.
There is a culture of people who look for the perfect trees to make the
violins. These trees grow so slow sometimes they stop growing altogether in
order to gather their strength. Our culture is so much about “new” and “do,”
she said. But the trees that stop growing produce the most beautiful sound.
James Hillman wrote an essay against
the idea of growth, saying human beings shouldn’t try to grow, Moore responded.
In Moore’s books, he doesn’t promote growth as he believes there are times when
there is no growing taking place at all in the soul. It’s a sentimental idea
that we should be growing all the time. There are times of setback and when we
seem to be going backward. Those times are important too. When we stop growing,
people go to a therapist or coach. That’s often why these periods are good for
a psyche or soul, because it forces you to stop and wonder why. A deepening
happens. It’s not about being better, but deepening more into who you are; it
creates more substance to you. If you’re growing all the time you don’t have
the substance necessarily.
Moore took questions from listeners at
the end of the teleseminar. I took the opportunity to ask him what he thought
about something that is frequently on my mind these days: how to cope with the
extreme devastation of the planet we see all around us on a daily basis in
media and in nature. Moore’s response was to reinforce the idea that can do or
hold many things at once. You can be concerned about the devastation AND you
can appreciate the beauty. Every year for twelve years, Moore went to
Schumacher College in England with his family, he related. Even though he’s not
a scientist, he would talk to the people he met there about philosophy and
spirituality and the arts. One reason we are treating nature badly is that we
personalize it by thinking hierarchically, that humans are the top of the pile.
It takes more of an artistic sense for people to appreciate nature. Maybe it
would be helpful for us when we are deeply disturbed to paint or photograph
nature. Turning something into art gets it into yourself, gets it into us,
he said. Turning more to nature as art might help develop that relationship. We
need more art and spirituality. Moore mentioned that his new book has a chapter
on natural mysticism. To be mystical you don’t have to go off and be in the
ethers, he said. Just stopping to contemplate allows you to meditate and it
prepares you for what you need to do. Moore said he learned this from Thoreau,
for whom these types of activities were a sacrament. Read Walden closely, Moore
suggested. Follow it and learn from it.
Walking in nature or watching bees may
more important than you think, he insisted. It’s a form of meditation. The
things that seem the least significant may be the most important. To go out in
nature, feel like you’re wasting time; the sight of nature is a darshan
–it transforms. It gives you the courage to go on and do your work.
Bonnie Bright is the founder of Depth Psychology Alliance, the world's first
comprehensive online community for depth psychology, and hosts
a podcast, Depth Insights, as well as editing the
semi-annual scholarly e-zine of
the same name. She
recently founded www.DepthPsychologyList.com, a free online database to find or
list depth psychology oriented
therapists and practitioners. She holds Masters degrees in
Psychology and Depth Psychology, and is a Ph.D.
candidate at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, CA. Follow her on Twitter @bonniebright5 or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/BonnieBright.DepthPsych
