Asking people to imagine their soul is a very interesting exercise. At first they don’t know what to do, but as they begin to meditate on the assignment, they realize that they do have some feelings about it. Most people have the intuition that they are more than a body, that there is something spiritual, or essential, or "something more" about themselves, however defined. So forgetting about words, how do you diagram it, draw it, put it down on paper?

We don’t know much at the moment about how we come to understand something through using the imagination. But it seems to be a very important process. With our imagination we can explore something. We move in with our feelings, empathically. When use our imagination to explore, we use intuition to look inside.

The results are not random or arbitrary. There seems to be some patterns, some visual regularities in the drawings. As you see these patterns, you may begin to recognize aspects of your own implicit understanding of soul.

Let’s look first at one kind of imagining of soul. These are images that are round. The soul psychologist Carl Jung would call these images "mandalas." The images suggest that the soul is the ALL of a person, ALL of life, ALL of God. The soul is ALL while the human life lived by the body is just a part.

Sometimes these circle images blossom. A soul blossoms in the life (or lives) of the individual.

Cynthia Thurman	Jane Dykes
Margaret Kupferle	Roger Riehm
Nancy Wasserman	Kathryn Cervello
Nancy LePage	Donita King
Bill Thomas	George

 The Balloon Soul

 Sometimes the round image, the "mandala," floats above the person, up in the air, like a balloon. It seems to suggest that the soul is "above" somehow, and that our bodies are "down here." The floating balloon mandala has some kind of communication downward to the physical body which roams the earth.