01/10/2025
I’ve just come out of three days of systemic ritual training with Daan van Kampenhout, immersed in the landscapes of the soul. We worked with a map that orients the soul in four directions — the individual soul, the family soul, the tribal or group soul, and the collective human soul.
Each of these layers of soul holds stories, inheritances, wounds, and longings. And each one can be a place where loss occurs. When I look at the interconnected crises of our time — ecological, social, cultural, and spiritual — they can be seen as forms of soul loss in these four domains. A forgetting of who we are as individuals. A rupture in the bonds of family. A disconnection from tribe, community, belonging. A fracture in the great weave of our shared humanity.
Yet there is also movement. These domains are not fixed; they form a cycle, a flow. What is lost can be remembered. What is broken can be tended. The soul is not a static possession but a living current that moves us through different seasons of belonging, separation, and return.
To sit in ritual with these questions is to touch both the grief and the possibility of healing — for ourselves, our lineages, our communities, and for the wider human family.