Shake the dust off your feet, don’t look back.
Nothing now can hold you down, nothing that you lack
Bob Dylan, Pressing On
One October morning in 2005, I sat in a café in Salt Lake City with my good friend, the Zen priest and Jungian analyst Stephen Proskauer. I was in Utah for a two-week-long training at the Zen Centre. I loved the practice then as I do now, and loved my teacher, whom I felt very close to, having spent precious time with him, often as Jisha, during the nine years Sarita and I organised sesshins in the English countryside, as well as large Zen workshops in central London.
On that morning, I was in turmoil and over a cup of coffee, I told Stephen that although my passion for practice was undiminished, I felt sick with a yearning to quit. You know the drill: my head says stay, my heart says go.
A few days before, I had unwisely publicly challenged my teacher. An impromptu, informal, and very public argument followed (I could call it ‘dharma combat’, but that would be an embellishment), at the end of which I felt like I had been hit on the head with a ton of bricks. A few people congratulated me. They said that transmission was clearly on the cards, given the concerted attention my teacher gave me during the encounter. But I just hated it. I asked Stephen, Is this, you know, resistance on my part? Was it simply my ego kicking and screaming? And even if it was resistance, isn’t there a place for it? Shouldn’t resistance be respected and understood as a struggle for the emergence of a truer part of oneself, as protection against a potential catastrophic loss of individuality? Why is it, I went on breathlessly, that resistance is such a bête noire in spiritual communities? I grew up associating this beautiful word ‘resistance’ with the blowing up of trains and tanks in the 1940s, as resistance to the Nazi occupation in Europe. And when Freud used the word, didn’t he mean resistance to our own nature, desire, and integrity—rather than resistance to a system, a teacher, a guru?
A silence followed. We sipped our coffee, a delicious brew so rare in the area and maybe in the whole town. Manu, Stephen replied slowly, I know you are committed to the practice. I understand and sympathise with your intent. You want to keep going regardless, to persevere, and weather the difficulties. I admire that. But there is one problem: your soul won’t let you. It urges you to quit—hence the sleepless nights, the emotional upheavals, and all the rest.
*
I knew Stephen well enough to know that what he meant by soul was not the allegedly indivisible eternal unit preserved in mothballs in a purgatory cupboard, waiting for a lift to heaven. Soul, the way he meant it, was something else. It’s hard to describe, which is why I am going to try, as I believe it is integral to Zen practice as I understand it.
Reflecting on the way in which I tend to run retreats, I retrospectively found that ‘soul’ is at the centre. Zazen remains the backbone, assisted by dreamwork, butoh, daimonology (my own version of Big Mind), and group process—practices which, in my understanding, come close to the ambivalent domain of soul. And this is what we did in the afternoon sessions on the zen retreat in September 2025 at Fell End. By bringing together zazen and these other practices, the twenty participants and I drew an architectural sketch for a Soul Kitchen.
*
We exist within the soul; it’s not the other way around. Soul is trees, mountains, rivers, grass, walls, clouds. It cannot be owned. It is not territorial. It shuns politics with a small p, including the politics within spiritual communities. It extends beyond the human. You will not find the limits of the soul, wrote Heraclitus (a contemporary of the Buddha who shared remarkably similar insights), even if you travelled to the far corners of the earth, so deep and wide is its measure. Soul is communal, effortlessly, by default. It is an antidote to my self-centred, self-conscious striving to ‘share’ and act or look compassionate and caring. In Heraclitus’ fragment, the word for soul is, as with all ancient Greeks, psyche. How did it happen that such an expansive notion became narrowed down to ‘my’ psyche, to something within the small self?
There is an evanescent flavour in Zen that gets easily overlooked. I can’t grasp it, but I know when it’s there. Zen travelled far: India, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the Americas, Europe, the UK, and beyond. Among the cultural hues the Dharma acquired in Japan, there is one aspect I would call soulful. Tales from the Edo period (16th–18th century)—stories of mist and moonlight, ghosts and demons’ stories, tales of strange metamorphoses allude to that elusive dimension. Some koans do that too: Hyakujo’s fox, dating back to 1036 and recorded in the Gateless Gate. As I remember it, it is the story of a monk who gave a wrong answer in relation to the law of causation and was turned into a fox for many lives until he sought help from a compassionate and wise teacher. An instructive tale that is also a warning for those among us who like to think, as I myself once did, that Zen is ‘beyond good and evil’, whatever that means.
In the soulful dimension, the dividing lines between human and nonhuman, the living and the dead, become blurred. Animism, the attribution of a living soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena, is part of that. It may have found a systematic formulation in Shinto, but it also permeates Zen lore and philosophy. Openness to soul does not mean glamorising the irrational but simply attenuating my own tendency towards defensive rationalisation. Being reminded that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by my puny beliefs is something Zen practice does well whenever I give my heart to it.
Here’s another way of saying this: sitting zazen, I enter the stream, and on a good day, perceive the current travelling through generations across centuries and now traversing this bodymind. This happens whether I know it or not (I don’t); whether I notice it or not (I don’t). Some will say that this is a romantic projection. It isn’t. ‘Romantic’ has the ego-self at the centre. Soul doesn’t. Others will say it sounds mystical. It isn’t. The mystical dimension grants nebulous certainty and pseudo-answers to our core, existential questions. ‘Soul’ does not answer them. It retains the richness and ambiguity of our genuine questions.
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Here is one more way of saying this: aspects of this infinitely subtle Dharma are lost when absorbed by a worldview that bypasses soul in the name of self-improvement, secular salvation through work, and a punitive idea of success often culminating in burnout. The latter may include spiritual success through a conventional hero narrative that climaxes with kensho, after which I will live as a liberated bloke beyond good and evil. What a lot of cobblers. The Buddha himself had a challenging, difficult life after his awakening.
I don’t know about you, but probably due to my own limitations, I have mostly learned Zen within the narrow lane of two coordinates: self and spirit. Self is the focal point, my restricted viewpoint. Spirit is the distant horizon, the eagle’s gaze, the absolute. But even the horizon of spirit, so beloved of mystical adventurers, is fading fast, with spiritual practices becoming one more decoration of the self.
Could it be that my longing for spirit is sterile? That I forget how it entirely depends on others (“72 labours brought us this food”)? And that in my so-called spiritual practice, I remain stubbornly self-bound? Could it be that the transcendence I long for is ultimately parasitical, in the sense that it is blind to the ongoing presence, support, challenge, and love of others?
Could soul be the medicine?
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For the first time, my wife Sarita and I went to a musical a couple of months ago, Girl from the North Country by Irish playwright Conor McPherson. We couldn’t resist it—all the songs were Bob Dylan’s. We found it moving and inspiring. After the show ended, the lights went off. When they were turned back on, the whole cast sang an a cappella version of Dylan’s Pressing On, which riffs on St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians. Its beauty and power made me shiver; its meaning reached my heart before it reached my head. Pressing on: taking the next step and in so doing creating a new path, for no true path is already laid out for me. To follow ‘the higher calling of the Lord’ as the song says, strangely reverberates in my heart and takes on new meanings. Sometimes soul wants us to join, sometimes it urges us to leave. Both actions require daring.
I bow to the retreat participants who, through their sincere commitment, taught me the strength and beauty of being true to our experience. I bow to all the accidental teachings reverberating from dreams, involuntary memory and reveries, from neglected parts of our collective psyche. I bow to the whispered teachings coming forth from sitting and dancing together with courage and tenderness, and from sharing a meal in silence in our Soul Kitchen.