What Is the Soul? A Living Question at the Heart of a World in Crisis
The world is going through a time of upheaval. Ecological crises, social tensions, landmarks coming undone, a deep fatigue in many of us. And in the midst of it all, an ancient question resurfaces. It often returns in a low voice, in moments of rupture, loss or transition: what is the soul?
There is a deep reason for this reawakening. A crisis is a moment when the superfluous falls away, when we return to the essential. Many people discover this during an illness, a bereavement, a separation: at the very heart of the ordeal, something brings them back to what truly matters, to what touches the essence of life. When outer certainties waver, something in us seeks a deeper foothold. The research of psychologist Dacher Keltner on awe points in this direction: it is often in the experience of the vast, sometimes even the overwhelming, that the sense of connection grows and the small self settles. Crisis makes the question of the soul audible once again.
This article invites you to keep company with this question with the help of very different voices: a Greek philosopher, a poet, trauma therapists, a young woman writing in the heart of the worst. Each, in her own way, says the same thing: the soul is a depth to be recovered.
A Living Question for 2,500 Years
Twenty-five centuries ago, Heraclitus already wrote:
The boundaries of the soul you could not find, though you travelled every road, so deep is its logos.
— Heraclitus, Fragments
In other words: search your whole life long, and the depth of the soul will always exceed what can be measured or circumscribed. This observation could discourage. It can also set free. For if the soul escapes all definition, then this very mystery is an indication of its nature.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke offered precious advice to a young man who pressed him with questions: he invited him to patience, and to “live the questions themselves.” Perhaps one day, he wrote, you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer.
The spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl, whose work links contemplative wisdom and the science of trauma, encourages the same posture in his teachings. He invites us to cultivate “walking questions,” questions we journey with. Some accompany us for a season of life, others for years, sometimes a whole lifetime. We carry them because they work on us, open us, refine us. The question itself becomes a companion on the road, more precious than the answer. For it is the question that makes us grow. Journeying with a question nourishes curiosity, the impulse to learn, the very movement of our development.
It is in this spirit that this article is written: to carry the question of the soul as a companion on the road, to let it work within us, and to observe what it opens.
What Trauma Does to the Soul, and What It Does Not Reach
Many of the people I accompany tell me, in different words, the same thing: I have lost contact with myself. Something has gone out, or moved away. Is my soul damaged?
The physician Gabor Maté sheds precise light on this experience. Trauma, he says, is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you. What wounds most lastingly is the disconnection that then sets in: from one’s body, one’s emotions, one’s felt sense, one’s inner truth.
The shamanic traditions of many cultures describe this same experience in other words. They speak of soul loss: faced with too great a shock, a part of our vital essence takes shelter to allow us to survive. Sandra Ingerman, a shamanic practitioner trained in psychology, devoted a book to this approach, known in English as Soul Retrieval. Its premise closely echoes what contemporary psychology calls dissociation: during a trauma, she writes, a part of our essence separates from us in order to survive the experience, escaping the full impact of the pain. And most important is this: in these traditions, the part that moves away remains intact. It has put itself in safety. And it can return. This is the whole meaning of soul retrieval: welcoming back what was waiting to be able to come home.
There is an ancient name for this wound. In the 2000s, the clinical psychologist and researcher Eduardo Duran, who worked with Native American communities in California, brought to light an essential difference. Where the Western world described symptoms in clinical, pathological language, these communities named differently what history had left in them: a wound of the soul. Duran devoted a book to this concept, Healing the Soul Wound, published in 2006. In it he shows that historical trauma is transmitted from one generation to the next and, even more, accumulates. What waits to be moved through passes to the following generations, and can gain in intensity along the way. This way of naming therefore comes from an Indigenous wisdom, born of peoples who knew that certain wounds lodge in the depth of a being and of a people, beyond the body and the psyche alone.
Thomas Hübl explicitly takes up this concept and broadens it. For him, the soul wound marks us all, to varying degrees, through our lineages, our cultures, our inherited silences. And its healing is a task we accomplish together. He even sees a promise in it: by healing this shared wound, we awaken to our mutual nature, to what connects us as humanity.
Wound, for Duran as for Hübl, means covering over, obstruction, the transmission of what is waiting to be healed. The essence itself remains. That is precisely what makes healing possible. Three witnesses, among the most credible there are, bear the lived proof of it.
Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist, survived the concentration camps. He brought back from them an observation that runs through his entire work: everything can be taken from a human being but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, that of choosing one’s inner attitude in the face of what happens to us. Even where everything was taken, something remained free.
The psychologist Edith Eger, also an Auschwitz survivor, made this the heart of her work and of her book The Choice. Reading Frankl, years after the war, gave her the words to move through her own past, and he became her mentor and friend until his death in 1997. Even in hell, she testifies, there remained within her an inner space in which to choose. That space carried her whole life and her work as a psychologist alongside countless people. She died in the spring of 2026, at the age of 98. Her work continues to pass on what she embodied: inner freedom is chosen, at any age, in all circumstances.
Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman from Amsterdam, is the writer who accompanies me most deeply. Her spiritual writings, of a rare depth, were born in the worst of circumstances: as the Nazi vice tightened, she noted in her diary:
There is a very deep well inside me. And in it dwells God.
— Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life
She added that stones and rubble sometimes block this well, and that it must then be cleared. But the well itself remains.
This is perhaps the most important thing to hear if you are going through a dark time. What seems extinguished in you remains alive, sheltered. Fragmentation, inner distance, numbness are protections: faced with what was too much, a part of you moved into safety. What fragments is our energy, our experience, our access to ourselves. The essence itself remains intact. And beneath these protections, the well remains. What waits is for conditions of sufficient safety to let itself be found again.
A Soul Never Alone
We are used to thinking of the soul as something strictly individual, lodged somewhere in each of us. Many traditions, and today many therapeutic approaches, tell a different story.
Thomas Hübl puts it this way: the unresolved past is destiny, it repeats itself. What our ancestors could not digest, move through, mourn, goes on living in the following generations. It is transmitted in family silences, in fears with no clear origin, in invisible loyalties. In other words, our inner life begins long before us. It is inscribed in a lineage.
The African wisdom of ubuntu says it with magnificent simplicity: I am because we are. A person becomes fully human through their bonds. Their soul stands within a living fabric of relationships.
The psychotherapist Francis Weller, who has devoted his life to grief work, adds an essential dimension. Maturity, he writes, consists in holding sorrow in one hand and gratitude in the other. Sorrow is an expression of the soul, the living trace of all that we have loved, including what we received without having known it directly: ancestors, places, a more intact world.
To care for what connects us to our soul is to care for what we are connected to. For we are interdependent beings: a lineage precedes us, communities surround us, nature carries us. And the reverse is true: a world in crisis needs people connected to their depth, able to feel, to weep, to connect, and to act from that place.
Living the Question
So, what is the soul? At the end of this path, the honest answer remains open, and that is just as it should be. Heraclitus was right. Its depth exceeds our maps.
If the soul escapes definition, it can be recognised by signs. It can be recognised in what you love, in what makes you curious, in what moves you and stirs you, in what fills you with passion. It can be recognised in depth, when an experience touches you beyond the ordinary. In resonance, when something or someone meets you exactly where you are. In a meaning taking shape, however fragile, in the midst of chaos. In a belonging, to a lineage, to a human fabric, to the Earth.
Certain traditions go further still. They describe the soul as accompanied by a living memory: a field that would carry the information of all that has been lived, in this life, in the lineage, and according to some of them across other lives, as well as the potential that still waits to be unfolded.
And the soul is more still. Many spiritual paths describe it as a gateway: an opening toward the infinite, toward our essence, toward the light, the divine, the sacred. The names vary from one tradition to another, the experience they point to is much the same. Thomas Hübl puts it, in his teachings, in a way that overturns our habitual view: it is not our body that has a soul, it is the soul that has a body. It is far vaster than the person we believe ourselves to be. What the soul is in the great spiritual traditions, like this memory that accompanies it, deserves an exploration of its own: I will share both with you in future articles.
These signs ask for only one thing: attention. And perhaps this is, in the end, the most fitting gesture in the face of this question: to make room for it. In a world that moves fast and goes through so much upheaval, taking the time to descend toward one’s inner well is a way of staying human, and of contributing, from one’s own depth, to a more alive world.
If this exploration resonates with you, you can continue it through direct experience: in meditation, in individual sessions, or in a circle where this depth can be shared. For many of us, it is in relationship that it is lived most intensely: others, like mirrors, allow us to dive more deeply into ourselves. The question of the soul is lived, far beyond thought.
