The way ahead

Nature carries the original within it. The body has developed in interplay with nature, and can recognise the original in a landscape as something stable and lasting.

Soulcrafting leads you through a process across four stages. The first makes room for anchoring to be experienced as glimpses of contact. The second invites you to make that anchoring firmer, and easier to find your way back to. The third builds on the two before it, and invites you to bring along something that unsettles you, in doses never stronger than the body can carry. The last is about integrating what you have experienced, in preparation for meeting the stillness you originally sought in meditation.

Taking part is always an invitation. You decide the pace, the depth and whether to go on, and you are welcome to break off in the middle of an exercise, to feel that the control is yours.

In Arctic Soulcraft the polar bear is there to remind you of the inherent strength of the body, and nature is with you all the way, as a companion.

Here you are invited to lead your attention to the points of touch between the body and its surroundings, between yourself and nature.

The exercises give the nervous system time to take in the original in the surroundings. At the same time a meaningful experience can arise inside you, one that makes it easier to come into contact with your own body.

In this way nature can help you find a standpoint inside yourself. Since the body is shaped in interplay with nature, this standpoint can be experienced as familiar and lasting.

A glimpse of anchoring is anchoring found.

Go at your own pace, and feel free to return to the same exercise several times. It can be wise to let the body come to know these three exercises well before going further.

Open to all

Where the first stage let anchoring come as glimpses, the second is about making it firm enough to rest in and easy to find the way back to. It is built through closer contact with the original in nature, and through practice in orienting yourself in the outer and the inner landscape.

The nervous system reads the surroundings without pause for signs of safety or danger, and adjusts the state of the body accordingly. Survival comes first, always. So danger is read rather too quickly, and safety rather too late.

When nothing in the surroundings is actually threatening, inner unease can still disturb the calm you are looking for. It can feel as though, in meeting stillness, you slip from a calm and nourishing stream of experience into a restless and depleting one that is hard to find the way out of.

The core of the second stage is recognising this slightly too rapid reading, as a shift between calm and unease. Within it lies an invitation to let the nourishing stream of experience be your standpoint, also when the restless one pulls at you. The stillness you are looking for finds its way back to you most easily when you are in safety. The exercises are always done with open eyes, you stop whenever you wish, and you are reminded to look over your surroundings along the way.

Go at your own pace, and feel free to return to the same exercise several times. Anchoring is a state that comes to you when you place yourself in contact with nature.

Part of the Soulcrafting programme

With firmer anchoring you can now practise staying, also when something unsettles you. The exercises are arranged so that you meet unease in small, manageable doses, with a steady return to what is safe. By moving back and forth between what is calm and what unsettles, your nervous system gradually learns that unease can be held without you losing yourself.

The stage has two parts. First the way of working is explored in contact with the landscape, without any concrete content from your own life. In the exercises you move between the original in nature and what is disturbed, the human-made changes in the landscape.

Once the way of working is predictable, and the body has come to know the movement between calm and unease, you are invited to bring in settled stories from your own life. Nature is with you all the way, a living landscape your body can borrow calm from.

Go at your own pace, and feel free to return to the same exercise several times. Even where an exercise is simple to understand, your body needs time to experience and to learn. Your capacity to experience calm widens along with your capacity to hold unease.

Part A — The way of working

Here you are invited to follow what happens when everything is calm and original, then to approach what is disturbed with care, and further, to move in and out of contact with it. Here it is the landscape itself that carries both the calm and what unsettles, and nothing from your own life needs to be involved. In this way the body has time to come to know the alternating movement before anything personal is added.

Part B — With a field note

Here you are invited to bring forward three different situations from your own life. All of them should be settled and long since over. The purpose is to call up unease of the kind that typically arrives in meditation. First a general unease with no particular content, then a conflict you once stood in, and finally a fall – a concrete loss of footing out in nature.

You are invited to write these situations down on a field note. It is a small handwritten note with a short heading, where you describe how the situation feels in the body. The situations should shake you lightly rather than overwhelm, be close enough for the body to answer, and far enough away that you do not topple.

Here too, go at your own pace, and return to the same exercise several times, with the same field note, until it feels as though the story is finished.

Part of the Soulcrafting programme

When the body's capacity to hold has widened, a time comes for recognition and integration. Here you are invited to find your way back to the boldness you had before the difficult thing happened. Boldness is the lightness and creativity that are there before something hard arrives, and the courage to stay once it has. You are also invited to recognise your own steadiness. Steadiness is rising again, and again, and speaks of the inherent strength of the body.

A human being is formed to belong in the world. What we call a self keeps its shape through contact with life outside itself. Stronger anchoring is therefore also a stronger belonging.

The world you return to is the same as before. What is new is that you can choose, more consciously, where you want to stand in it. The invitation from the second stage, to let the nourishing stream be your standpoint, is now something your body can carry out into the world.

Choosing that standpoint is at the same time letting go of the grip the depleting stream has on you. It is this letting go that makes the freedom your own.

Freedom is staying in the presence of stillness.

Go at your own pace, and feel free to return to the same exercise several times, and allow yourself along the way to feel pride in what you have carried through.

Part of the Soulcrafting programme

In Soulcrafting you are first led to a standpoint in the nourishing stream of experience. After that comes practice in moving between the nourishing and the depleting stream. It is this movement that strengthens the capacity to stay anchored. Work done in peacetime, when everything is safe, calm and settled.

Through the written material, and through the voice that reads the listening exercises, someone is there with you. Nature and light are drawn in as an equal and active part, and carry alongside the relational. In this way a practice held close to nature can make different forms of meditative practice easier to stay in.

All the training behind you is what carries you onward.

Meditation, like much else, can come to feel static once the interest of novelty fades, or when society's demand for efficiency pulls at you. The impulses to move out of stillness have countless sources.

One way onward can be to alternate between Soulcrafting and meditation. Between what is now known and predictable, and the training that may at some point tempt you into steps that are too large. Unease often arrives unannounced, just as you have found calm enough to bear it.

In this way both forms of training can become something to return to. Boldness and steadiness settle in you as you practise.