Thomas Moore said: “Care of the soul requires ongoing attention to every aspect of life. Essentially it is a cultivation of ordinary things in such a way that soul is nurtured and supported.”
Welcome to The Soul Podcast, I’m Stacey Wheeler.
Today we begin a three-part journey into something both ancient and urgently timely: soul sickness. That deep sense of fragmentation, emptiness, or disconnection many of us feel — even when life looks “fine” on the outside. In this first episode, we’ll explore where this idea comes from, how our ancestors understood it, and why it still whispers to us across time.
Let me start with a personal note. There have been seasons in my own life when I felt like a part of me had gone missing. Not dramatically — just a quiet fading. Motivation dulled. Joy muted. A sense that I was going through the motions, doing the things that used to bring me alive but now felt flat. I would wake up, move through my day, check things off the list, and still feel strangely hollow at the end of it. If you’ve ever felt that way, you’re in good company. This isn’t new. Cultures long before us had language and practices for exactly this kind of inner experience.
Soul sickness, or soul loss, refers to the idea that our vital essence — that animating spark we call the soul — can fragment or partially depart under the pressure of trauma, shock, prolonged stress, or spiritual imbalance. It’s not a moral failing or a purely psychological issue in the modern clinical sense. It’s a holistic wound that affects the whole person. The individual might still function, go to work, maintain relationships, and appear okay from the outside, but something essential feels absent: vitality, clarity, passion, or a sense of being fully at home in their own life and body.
This concept appears across many indigenous and shamanic traditions worldwide. In shamanic worldviews, soul loss is often seen as a primary cause of illness — physical, emotional, or spiritual. A part of the soul flees to protect itself during overwhelming events, leaving the person diminished until that missing piece can be located and called back through ritual or ceremony. The soul, in these traditions, is not some distant, abstract concept. It is dynamic, relational, and deeply intertwined with our daily life, our emotions, our bodies, and the living world around us.
One vivid example comes from Mesoamerican traditions, particularly the concept of susto — often translated as “fright sickness.” A sudden scare, a profound loss, witnessing violence, or any overwhelming event can cause the soul to leave the body. The symptoms that follow might include listlessness, insomnia, depression, anxiety, loss of appetite, or even physical ailments that don’t have a clear medical explanation. Traditional healers respond with ritual, plants, prayer, ceremony, or symbolic acts — such as sweeping the body with herbs or using symbolic tools like a gourd, which appears in ancient Mayan imagery as a vessel for retrieving the lost soul. The goal is always the same: to gently invite the missing part of the person back home.
Similar understandings echo across many native and shamanic traditions around the world. Shamans often journey to other realms — helped by rhythmic drumming, helping spirits, or power animals — to locate and return what was lost. These journeys are not metaphorical in the way we often use the word today. They are lived, experiential processes aimed at restoring wholeness. The underlying belief is that when a part of the soul departs, the person becomes incomplete, and true healing involves restoring that connection rather than simply managing symptoms.
As the influential American psychologist, writer, and lecturer, James Hillman reminds us, the soul is not in the body; the body is in the soul. This perspective flips many of our modern assumptions upside down. In this view, the soul isn’t a tiny passenger riding inside us like some invisible passenger. Instead, we exist within a deeper, more mysterious reality — a reality that includes the body but extends far beyond it. When that deeper reality feels fractured or inaccessible, we feel the effects in our bones, our hearts, our energy, and the texture of our days.
The American cultural historian, philosopher, and psychologist Richard Tarnas speaks to the longer historical arc when he describes the disenchantment of the modern world as the price we have paid for our growing sense of autonomy. In simpler terms, as human beings we have stepped into greater freedom and control over our lives — which has brought incredible gifts like scientific progress, individual rights, and personal choice. But in the process, we’ve often lost the felt sense that the world is alive, meaningful, and full of purpose. The universe started to feel more like a machine than a living cosmos, and we began to feel like isolated observers rather than participants in something sacred. That shift has left many of us with a quiet but profound sense of alienation and meaninglessness — a soul-level emptiness that no amount of achievement or comfort seems to fill. It’s a very human struggle: we gained independence, but at the cost of deeper connection. This feeling is often especially sharp in cities, where the constant hum of human activity and concrete landscapes can make the natural world feel distant and the sense of aliveness harder to touch. Disconnection with nature removes us from the reality that we too are part of nature. We are animals of the Earth. Every plant and animal are a piece of nature. But none are further removes from it than humans. We are removed, yet the longing remains the same wherever we live — a quiet call from the soul to come back into relationship with something larger than ourselves. And nature is often the way we start to heal. In an episode from November 2023, I talked about this disconnection from nature and how urban employers were able to improve employee contentment and reduce sick days simply by adding plants to their offices. This episode is called HumaNature Pt. 1. I'll share a link in the show notes in case you'd like to check it out. The issue is expanding in our cultural awareness, as more people each day are forced to manage the symptoms.
Yet this struggle with disconnection is not new. Ancient cultures already had sophisticated maps for understanding and addressing it. They recognized that the soul could be wounded and that specific practices existed to tend those wounds.
Why does exploring this ancient understanding matter now? Because naming soul sickness gives us a different lens — one that is compassionate rather than purely pathologizing. It suggests that many of our modern aches — that low-grade burnout, the quiet sense that something essential is missing, the feeling of going through life on autopilot — may be calls from the soul itself, asking to be noticed and tended. Instead of rushing to fix or medicate the symptom, this perspective invites us to listen more deeply.
In our next episode, we’ll bring this ancient understanding into today’s world and explore how soul sickness shows up in the midst of our busy, hyper-connected, yet often disconnected lives. We’ll look at the meaning crisis many people feel and why this old wisdom feels so relevant to the challenges we face right now.
For now, I invite you to sit with this question: Where in your life might a part of you have stepped back for protection? What ordinary thing — a walk, a moment of stillness, a creative act, a conversation — could you tend today as a small act of soul care?
Thank you for joining me on this journey. If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts or reflections. Drop them in the comments or reach out directly.
Until next time, tend your soul gently.
