When would you say the soul movement first began?

ANNE SIMPKINSON: When we were doing the book, Soul Work: A Field Guide for Spiritual Seekers, I realized that we had been doing soul work for the last 18 years or so.

I don't know whether back in the early '80s, when we began, we could have identified it as soul work.

But looking back, we realized that methods that use the mind, as in psychotherapy, and approaches that use the body, like massage or body psychotherapy, and methods that use spirituality, like meditation and channeling, all have had to do with the soul.

Your magazine, Common Boundary, began as a newletter and is now a significant part of soul movement literature. How did you get the idea to start it?

ANNE: Chuck gave a presentation in a symposium sponsored by the Family Therapy Networker magazine, which he had started in the mid-'70s. He thought, 'Well, maybe 25 or 30 people will come and hear me.' He had organized a panel where he had a therapist, a rabbi, and a psychotherapist, a Hindu swami, and I think there was a female Episcopal priest on the panel too.

In any case, instead of 25 or 30 people showing up, he had nearly 100 -- they were just packed in the room. And it was electric, because the feeling was, 'Oh, my goodness! All these people are also interested in the interface between psychotherapy and spirituality' People had been thinking about it and doing some reading back then, but they had never broached it in a professional setting before.

CHARLES SIMPKINSON: So in 1980, I organized a conference at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. It was quite a success and a large number of people came. Many of them were family therapists and mental health people. As a way of staying connected to them, I sent out a photocopied typewritten publication called Kindred Spirits Newsletter. As the years went by, their patients started subscribing and then friends of patients and friends of therapists, and it became a much wider angle than just for psychotherapists.

Why do you think people were so interested in this kind of material?

CHARLES: Psychotherapists had a language of the inner life already developed, which was used and understood by many people. They could talk about spiritual experience without having to use dogmatic or theological terms. They could use terms that people in our generation understood, which were the different inner processes that were discovered and described through psychotherapy. I think that's why all these people came together and said how exciting it was because it was a common language.

At the Common Boundary Conferences you've had speakers like Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hahn, Maya Angelou, and Al Gore. What are these conferences designed to do?

ANNE: We wanted to explore certain topics, and we tried to get the best people possible. The most well-attended conference was on sacred stories, and another one on nourishing the soul. But we've also held conferences on body therapies, body psychotherapy, creativity, and intentional living. The most recent was on how to bring about spiritual changes into your own life.

You started in the soul movement before people really understood what it was, and now it's so huge. How do you define its growth?

ANNE: Well, when I worked on the Common Boundary newsletter in the early 1980s, our job was to find the resources, the people, and the programs that looked at the inner world. And it really was like being a detective. But today, what we find is that it's quite the opposite.

In fact, there's like an inundation of resources and people doing these things and books. And so as far as we're concerned, Common Boundaryhas become almost like a clearinghouse, to say, 'Okay, of all the meditation books, these are the best.' Or 'Of all the creative arts, this is the one that's on the leading edge at the moment.' In other words, we're trying to make distinctions and trying to evaluate all the material that's out there.

Were there any defining events that significantly propelled this recent explosion of books, conferences, and therapies centered around spirituality?

ANNE: I think it was Thomas Moore touching a nerve with Care of the Soul, and people opening up and saying, 'This is what I want.''Or Clarissa Pinokla Estes' Women Who Run With the Wolves. In some ways, the men's movement had something to do with it, and also the 12-step program. I mean, lots of things happened in the culture to make it okay to pursue spiritual growth.

What tools do you find most useful in your own personal and spiritual growth?

ANNE: Well, personally, I can say that I still see a therapist. I'm very regularly going to an acupuncturist who really just keeps me in tune, spiritually and physically. We also have a 10-day centering prayer group, and use centering prayer on a daily basis. And lastly, we have a story group that has been meeting for about 8 or 9 years.

People get together and they bring a poem or a story or a fairy tale or a chapter from a novel that they're reading, or even something they've written themselves. Sometimes we've brought little pieces, sort of personal stories, either written or oral, and we share those.

CHARLES: It gets very deep because people bring that which is most important to them, and that gets us into a discussion of what's most important. The only thing I would add to that is that I have a spiritual director now that I didn't have when we were writing the book. But I was so impressed with what spiritual directors did when we investigated it for the book, that I decided that was for me.

How has having a spiritual director affected you?

CHARLES: Well, I think it has a different focus than psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is looking at how to live your life more effectively, and how to cope with issues and take care of the needs of the self. But in spiritual direction, the focus is on how your prayer life can be developed, how an understanding of the scriptures is an important source of wisdom, the communication about my spiritual journey with someone who has preceded me, a 70-year-old woman, who has been down the spiritual path a longer way than I have. And we can compare notes. It's very nourishing to me to have the chance to look at the spiritual side of healing. Psychotherapy doesn't do it all. It does a part of it and spiritual direction does a part of it, but they're often separate.

For me, I think the combination is very important. If you believe that all problems are solved by just a force of will and character, then you don't actually sense the larger picture, that you're involved in a larger interconnected part of life. My focus is expanded by doing this, in terms of what heals, what is good for you to practice, and how you use your life to be of service to others. That part of service to others is a very important part of spiritual development.