SOUL AND THE POETICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

On Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul and the Art of Reframing to unfold the Self

BOOK REVIEW:

Thomas Moore: Care of the Soul: An Inspirational Programme to Add Depth and Meaning to Your Everyday Life. 1992. Piatkus. 309 pages. ISBN: 978 0 7499 4120 8

By Hanri Mostert

Thomas Moore: Care of the Soul: An Inspirational Programme to Add Depth and Meaning to Your Everyday Life.

The Word on a Paper Heart

It was a word written down on a tiny scrap of paper, cut out in the shape of a heart, and handed to me by a workshop facilitator — a flamboyant, larger-than-life presence with a huge, relaxed smile, who wanted to inspire.

Mine said: ‘soulful.’

I was puzzled. Soulful?

Macmillan’s dictionary said: expressing strong emotions, especially sadness.

A soulful tune. Big soulful eyes.

This was meant as inspiration?

Sadness, in me? Someone so head-driven, who vaults emotions lest they make others uncomfortable?

I didn’t find it inspiring.

Until Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul landed on my coach’s bookshelf. Through his reframing of the stories we tell ourselves, I came to see that there could be no better inspiration than being envisioned as soulful. Soulful is not sad. Soulful is full of being.

A Humble Kind of Self-Help

The cover of Moore’s bestseller promises “a guide to cultivating depth and sacredness in everyday life.” Yet this is no ordinary self-help book. Moore distances himself from the “salvational tone” of modern improvement manuals. His model is humbler: a Renaissance self-help that accepts human foibles and finds dignity and peace arising from that acceptance, not from transcendence.

In other words, it is absolutely fine to be exactly as human as we already are. We can learn from our troubles, tragedies, and follies; they are doorways, not detours.

“If we neglect our souls, we lose both our humanity and our individuality and risk becoming more like our machines.”

For Moore, Soul is not abstraction. It is linked to body, family, work, love, and power: the seat of our feelings and our depth. When Care of the Soul appeared, it spent almost a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Clearly, the world was hungry for a more poetic way of being human.

The Subtle Art of Reframing

What astonishes me is Moore’s gift for reframing familiar moral narratives: stories so over-handled they have hardened into cliché.

He revisits Narcissus, often reduced to vanity, and turns it inside out. The moralistic attacks on narcissism, he suggests, may hide a disowned yearning:

“Anything that bad must have some value in it.”

Is our irritation with narcissism a defence against the soul’s call to be loved? When Narcissus gazes into the pool, it is the first and only time he reflects on himself, and he finds nothing but a marble image. In grief, he begins talking to the trees. That, says Moore, is when the soul awakens: in dialogue with the living world.

“The trick to healing narcissism is to find a way to that water of transformation where hard self-absorption turns into loving dialogue with the world.”

Moore offers a similar reframing of jealousy and envy: those “sickening and corrosive” emotions we strive to banish. For Moore, anything so difficult to accept can germinate creativity.

Rational understanding cannot defeat jealousy; the only way is through it. In the mythic triangle of Hippolytus, Artemis, and Aphrodite, our jealousies become the cries of neglected gods within: parts of self that demand attention. Through reframing, Moore turns condemnation into invitation. Every dark feeling becomes a clue to wholeness:

“Jealousy is the preservation of the hearth and interiority. Without it, too many events would take place, too much life would be lived, too many connections made without deepening.”

What the Soul Demands

What struck me most, is Moore’s gentle assertion that, for the soul, nothing is off-limits. No feeling is too debased to be felt. Sometimes there is a gold nugget in the clump of dirt we’d rather avoid.

“When the soul stirs, you feel things — both love and anger — and you live life fully instead of skirting it with intellectualism or excessive moralistic worry.”

This echoes e.e. cummings’ reminder that to “be nobody-but-yourself in a world doing its best to make you everybody else” is the hardest battle one can fight. Feeling, Moore and cummings agree, is not weakness; it is the frontier of authenticity.

Moore warns that caring for the soul may bring “upsetting changes and upheavals,” yet once we discover its worth, we willingly remain in that “unsettled state of transformation.”That insight tugged at an awareness I have long held: to live soulfully is to keep one's inner wildness alive. And to return again and again to the place where poetry resides: the centre.

From Myth to Practice

Though Moore offers no exercises, his reflections overflow with inspiration for coaching and inner work. Each myth becomes a map for understanding human experience.

When he writes of the labyrinth, it becomes a way to explore conditioning at the start of a coaching journey:

Minotaur – What hides at the centre of your labyrinth?

Theseus – Who or what are you rescuing?

Ariadne – What is the red thread that guides you home?

Other self-observations arise easily:

“What melts my wings?” — a meditation on Icarus.

“Where do my competing values tug against each other?” — a reflection inspired by Hera’s jealousy.

Each question reframes what we might otherwise judge or avoid. Through reframing, the soul finds its own language again.

Moore’s Wider Conversation

Care of the Soul is only the beginning of Moore’s lifelong dialogue with the sacredness of ordinary life. Later works — Dark Nights of the Soul, A Religion of One’s Own, Ageless Soul, and Soul Therapy — extend the same invitation: to live intimately with life through imagination, friendship, memory, art, and beauty.

Moore integrates Christianity, Jungian psychology, and Eastern philosophy, insisting there are many ways of being spiritual. To care for the soul often means, he writes, “not taking sides when there is conflict at a deep level … to stretch the heart wide enough to embrace contradiction and paradox.”

He reminds us that caring for one’s own soul leads naturally to caring for the world’s.

“My own position changes when I grant the world its soul. Then I respect things because I am not their creator and controller.”

In a time when creative expression is the first casualty of scarcity, Moore’s reverence for art and music feels like a profound wake-up call. The soul speaks in images and sounds long before it reasons in words.

Returning to Centre

Reading Care of the Soul taught me that reframing is not just mental exercise: it is a way of coming home to oneself. Each reframe restores orientation to Centre, that quiet clearing where meaning hums below language.

“When we see differently, the world becomes poetic again.”

Caring for the soul, Moore suggests, is like good horsemanship: a daily practice of feeding, brushing, tending. Not because the horse is broken, but because it is alive. So, too, with the soul. The work is not to transcend or tidy it, but to attend to it: to feed it with art and friendship, to brush it down with gratitude, to let it wander back to water when it thirsts. In that sense, Moore’s book is less a manual than a mirror. It reflects what is already within us: the steady pulse beneath intellect and ambition.

Moore's work reminds me that care, whether in coaching or in living, is not about fixing. It begins with seeing. And that sometimes all the soul needs is a new way of looking — a reframing — to find its way back to the poetry at the heart of things.

“The soul should always stand ajar,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”

Perhaps that is the essence of Moore’s invitation: To live with the door ajar.

To re-see what we thought we knew.

To let the ordinary shimmer again with meaning.

And to keep returning — gently, faithfully — to that place at your core, where poetry resides.

Note: Any references to client or family experiences are shared with respect for confidentiality. Identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.

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