In one of his latest writings, Claude Levy-Strauss compared the act of telling the myth to a choral performance: the story-teller is the conductor, and the listeners of the myth are the singers themselves and not the audience in the concert hall. Although we might be inclined to think of the story teller as of the one who re-creates the myth, here it seems that he is only the silent guide who directs the voices of the chorus. It is the chorus, the listeners of the myth, who re-create the content of the story: each voice interprets in his/her own way different aspects of the myth. Each one who hears a myth, responds to it from within, from an always different and changing Within, where this Within is instrument of music and meaning. The conductor brings rhythm to the movement of the voices. He gives the intonation (when and where to start) and in what mode (how) to perform: he offers the theme (event) and the chorus takes it up, each singer in a different way enters music. The conductor directs the rules of composing individual variations of the theme together: he organizes the harmony in each moment of the song, and he delimits the timing: the overture, the ascent and the descending of the emotions, the pauses and the coda. The conductor, the storyteller, is merely the conveyer of rules and the one who provides ground for harmony. Thus, the myth is recreated and brought into existence not in the conductor but in the singing being of each individual chorister.

Three questions occur here: who composes the music, what music is, and who is the audience. It seems that the composer is the humanity level in us: we all contain and express a set of abstract rules, motives, that reoccur or we recreate in our daily life, dreams, and individual subconsciousness.  These rules can be seen at work in our relationships at every level of our being. There is, it seems, a cosmic principle of repetition governing the fundaments of our being: the fascination of the rhythm, for example. We tend to try to apply the basic patterns of our early life to every possible realm that we develop or encounter later on. The fundamental rhythms of our lives carry, with amazing strength, the power of the fascination of the first creation of the rhythm, its first performance in the world, the first world created by this rhythm. We seem to experience inexplicable enjoyment in rhythm, as well as in the repetition of the basic patterns of our life, even if we encounter pain in effect. The fascination of myths, dreams, music, tales, art, the fascination of human relationships, expresses the power of this repetition.

The mythical level in us is a bit more refined than the level of rhythm: the myth contains more differed elements which can be connected in different ways. Plenty of world mythologies contain variations of the same story-motives, that often contradict each other and bring in different development, endings and, moreover, possible interpretation and meaning. All versions strike the reader as equally profound and powerful. Perhaps it is possible to draw an insight, that it does not matter primarily which elements are put together and how they connect: it seems that the act of bringing elements into play and the act of connecting them, is what fascinates us, both as conductors and as that silent chorus who performs the myth within our depths.

One of the basic functions of the tale, and the rhythm, is to structure our subconsciousness. The process of individuation seems to begin in a misty realm where no elements or sets of possible relations exist. The rhythm patterns time and space, both internal and external; that is, it patterns what we later call 'psyche' as a realm of time-space-events (recognized by the developed consciousness as subject-relationship-object). The first rhythm brings in the notion of 'there is.' There is sound, and there is silence. Next stage is when we bring in the existence of 'no/not' - 'there is no(t)...' Silence can be conceived as absence of sound, and the other way around. Myths, tales, induce in the subconscious mind different ways how to connect elements. From the basic relation: 'this is what that is not,' we move into more complicated realms where events begin to take place, and we are invited to interact. We find that we can act and produce events, and thus influence the world. Early in our life we are offered a basic set of possible actions: to receive, to release, to demand, to deny, and so on, all of these in the group of communication (interaction) tool kit. In the story, the hero can be attacked, can attack, can make allies, can be integrated in a larger force, etc. All these options provide us ways of (re)action to both internal or external events. When we meet an unknown element (an unknown person or an unknown emotion, for example), the first moment is one of no reaction. Here the event of 'meeting an unknown' happens, and then usually the most dominating pattern, the one that fascinates us most, or the one that we have used most frequently, acts toward the unknown. We can express anger, defeat, loss, growth, fear. We can attack, be subdued, or we can talk (learn), make friends or open into a larger force.

In our 'mature' age, we often act inappropriately, misperceiving reality by interpreting it in a childlike-way. The clusters of unresolved bundles of emotions entangled in our subconscious world, have an impeccable force to extend in our present. Our subconscious mind expresses itself over and over again in every moment of our lives, although it may contain and express patterns that do not support our health, happiness, relationships and future. Restructuring the subconsciousness toward a more congruent, harmonious mode, seems to be a common trait of all inspired human activity.

In terms of communal work, there are different levels that different systems start with, depending which level they hold for the germinating the rules that give structure to other domains. Religion tends to restructure the higher (goal-oriented) realms of consciousness, by offering an imagined perfection, aiming at the higher self of the individual. Art tends to directly communicate the subconsciousness with a mild reflection to the conscious mind. Many psychological and psychotherapeutic approaches begin with the conscious structure and from there to move toward the underlying layers. The general shortcoming of the later shows up if the work is incomplete, if the root has not been affected. The conscious mind can be seen as a symptom of the subconscious. Both need restructuring, a timed, ecologically appropriate and a harmonious one, in order to achieve the goal of the self-expanding processes. The problem is how to do that.

Martyn Carruthers' Soul Centered Changework (Soulwork) begins with the question "What do you want?". This happens on fully conscious level with the function to clarify the often contradictory voices in our mind who want dissimilar things. At the end of this process, the client can come up with a single, positive, specific and timed goal that makes sense and whose achievement would bring in positive effect on all levels of client's life. To be able to state such a goal, means to draw a threshold on the ground and to say: "Here I am. There I go. I start."  In the process of clarification, all parts of the client's psyche that disagree with a certain goal are invited to come up with a goal that would accord all present parts. At this point the conscious and the subconscious are brought as close as possible together, and the journey in the subconscious can begin.

In Soul Centered Changework it is the client that makes the journey, through the realms of his own subconsciousness, usually interpreted by the mind in archetypal or symbolic elements. In this realm the basic patterns show up, from the deepest and long-forgotten layers of the psyche-building process.  Moreover, these basic patterns can be met as individual elements (ex. guilt producing pattern can be experienced as a thick, grey wall of fog.).  Neither the client nor the Soulwork therapist know what they will meet in advance. The therapist plays the role of the music conductor in the therapeutic process: at each point he offers a variety of choices how to interact with the encountered elements. When the client meets, for example, a dragon, the usual patterning would be 'flee or fight.' In Soulwork the therapist offers a larger choice, with preference for kinder modes of communication. Asking the most horrid monster 'Dear Dragon, what do you want to tell me?' and "Dear Dragon, what do you want me to learn?' has an incredible effect of immediate alteration of what we meet into a kind, helpful resource of strength and wisdom. With the Soulwork tool kit monsters, ghosts, walls, darkness, quickly take a creative, life-affirming position and function within us: we integrate, we expand.

In Soulwork we often encounter our partial identities frozen in earlier periods of our lives, not aware of the passing of time, still holding and producing emotions that recreate some too-powerful events from our past. These portions of our identity prevent us from having clear relationships in the present. They withhold the power of our age-regressed emotions. They build our subconsciousness and if entangled, form negative patterns of behavior and at their maximum, disease. The Soulwork view is simple:  about 85-90% of diseases have roots in uncleared relational patterns contained in the subconscious. These are expressed on the body and in every relation the person creates with the world.

Soul Centered Changework enters the subconscious through the consciously formed gate of Goal defining, guilt resolution and integration process. This leads to a Soul experience. To use the metaphor from the beginning: Soul experience is when an individual singer of the chorus senses the infinity of the music in his or her individual singing performance. It is to intimately experience the touch of the absolute music into one's own continuous singing. This experience literally 'throws light' on all aspects of client's life, so that the fundamental perception of one's self changes, the perspective shifts and thus another set of choices appears. At this point it becomes possible to recreate relationships to the world and to the self in a more harmonious way, to re-evaluate the perception of the past, as well as to create fulfilling ways of achieving long-term goals for the future. As an overall conclusion, what makes SW so powerful is the completeness in resolving fundamental relationship patterns, experiences (emotional conflicts and traumas) and thought forms, the long-term all-level effects: a process performed in a gentle way of walking through the world that the client's subconscious mind creates.

One of the most important differences from other psychotherapeutic approaches is that in SW the client is the source of activity, images and solutions. While in 'trance,' the client is able to communicate  his subconsciousness, but as in dreams in unable to invent ways of action other than the previously set ones, he is unable to think of new possibilities and re-evaluate the content of the experienced. The therapist takes on the role of the conscious mind (not the superego role) providing the content-free function, that can think in terms of past and future, and of possible choices. SW therapists offer their clients a safe possibility to explore their subconsciousness, and to change their patterns of behavior, their relationships formed and frozen in the past; to bring in love and comprehension in the domains where these have lacked. Changes on the subconscious level take effect on all other levels of our being. The client is enabled, both in personal strength and in comprehension, to change his life in accord to a fulfilling goal. Long-term SW therapy aims at affirmation of a harmonious, self-dependent being, with clarified past and future, and healthy relationship to support the individual life-goal. To emphasize the point I made in the beginning: the therapist does not create or evaluate client's goal or relationships. All choices and inventions are left to the genuine resources (to the genius) of the client.

Let us slide back into our triple metaphor set in the beginning of this text: in music (mythology/therapy) the conductor (story-teller/therapist) does not create the song (myth/therapeutic-process). The chorus singer (story-listener/client) is not the song either, although he creates it. If we translate the functions of this metaphor onto therapeutic process, we have a possible representation of what SW therapy resembles: the therapist as a conductor, offering more harmonious rhythms to the performer, and the client-performer sings; he learns to recognize his own song, to clarify the voice and to enjoy the creativity of the infinite song, in accord to the rest of the chorus-the world.

We still haven't answered two questions set from the beginning: who is the audience and what is the music? We will have to use metaphors and poetry again to try to picture a possible answer:

"I wake to sleep and take my waking slow, I learn by walking where I have to go."
                        - Theofore Roethke, "Awakening"
 
Soulwalk pacing resembles drumming individual rhythm on the ground, and singing acts both as expression and connection. Sometimes it feels as if we make things grow when we offer our pacing rhythm to the earth. Perhaps the earth is the audience, the earth we walk in our dreamwalks, and the sun from which we come and where we pace to, is the absolute music.