A very wise counsellor I have worked with for many years once said to me: ‘It is not that the body has a soul; it is the soul that has a body.’

Your April 2010 cover illustration shows two body parts: a leg labelled as ‘somatic’ and a brain labelled as ‘psycho’. No reflection on your artist, who was presumably following his brief. Psyche, however, means soul, and I am quite certain that the soul does not reside in the brain, any more than the BBC exists inside a radio.

The picture seems to me to illustrate the way in which a reaction to the worn-out dogma of medieval religion has given way to an equally unproductive faith in science as The Way, The Light and The Truth. Because soul cannot be measured, it therefore does not exist, and the spiritual baby has been thrown on the rubbish heap with the holy water.

It is, to my way of thinking, poor science that takes this stance, and more indicative of a need for certainty in the face of ignorance than any real desire for knowledge. One dogma has been replaced by another. And there are just too many things that the science of technological measurement cannot explain.

This doesn’t mean that we have to opt definitively for some other theory – that’s just another route towards dogma. What it does mean is that the many spiritual practices which exist the world over, and which have one commonality – the existence of some sort of energy or existence which lies beyond the physical and cannot normally be seen – are worth noting as the myriad facets of some sort of truth. There is something here, and to say that, so long as it cannot be measured, it cannot exist, is as foolish as ignoring bacteria or nuclear fallout.

My counsellor’s statement resonated for me. What he was saying was that the energy systems which surround my physical body are not some sort of after-thought, tacked on to the body, relatively unimportant until I die, at which point, by some magical process, everything that I am will transfer to the soul, ready to go to heaven, hell, reincarnation or oblivion, depending on which particular stance I take.

My soul is who I am, and my physical body, without which I have no existence on this very physical planet, is the means through which the soul expresses itself.

Emotion, pain, disease, thought – all these things find voice through my physical existence. And what I experience through my body, including self-care and physical healing, is reflected back into the heart, essence and soul of who I am.

There is no separation; physical matter is, after all, only a form of energy, held in a very tight matrix. I say only a form of energy; it is, I think, the most remarkable manifestation of energy that there is; and everything that I perceive as both beautiful and terrible, together with my ability to perceive it, expresses through the colossal energy that my physical self represents.

My counsellor’s statement resonated with my own experience; for others it will be different. The blind men gathered around the elephant and describing their god are alive and well if we allow them to be.

I certainly cannot accept the Western medical refusal to consider the energetic body even as a possibility, despite all the evidence for its existence. (Anecdotal evidence, if it represents the experience of millions of people over thousands of years, is evidence of a very potent sort.)

What saddens me is that so many counsellors also appear hesitant to accept the possibility of what ‘mind’ or ‘soul’ might really be. Is it for fear of being ridiculed by mainstream thinking?

This is something touched on by Salma Khalid in her ‘Day in the life’ interview in the May Therapy Today issue. The point about soul is that it is neither airy-fairy nor a product of religious dogma, but something very precise and real – even if we do not yet have tools precise enough to define it objectively.

Our own sensitivities, however, are alive to the existence of soul if we are prepared to allow our own experience – and the experience of our clients.

The Enlightenment must have been a terrifying time for those whose security depended on faith in Christian dogma – as terrifying as Darwinism is for hard-line creationists. And, if there is any truth in the concept of the energetic body, then much mainstream medical thinking and practice becomes a nonsense. If I were a doctor with years of hard training, I should hardly relish that thought.

Astrophysics is now further challenging us with the notion that 95 per cent of what exists cannot (yet) be seen or measured. How can the implications of this not be threatening?

I have a choice then either to join the retreat into terror, deny such existence and persecute anyone who says otherwise; or I can become excited by the thought that, just as it seemed there were no hidden corners left to explore – unless that is I had access to billions of dollars and a few rockets – the psyche might itself be a realm to explore, unimaginably huge, on a scale which transcends normal concepts of time and space; and all I need to explore it is a willingness to be open to experience.

William Johnston