Seonaid Lee
Soulwork Labs consolidates thirty years of reflective practice. On one level it is a report on the application of the practices to my own life, with guidance on what worked and why. On another, it is a work of philosophy, grappling with the nature of consciousness and knowability.
I spent my early career obsessed with moral reasoning, especially about technology. I studied it in school. I wrote about it. I enticed people at technical conferences to talk about ethics over coffee. But my path never fell into a related role, even while it was obviously needed.
My days focused on other things: caring for children and community, building websites and barns, using my skills of perception to document systems and teach about them. Some of that work was well-compensated and came with prestige. Most of it was unpaid and done on the invisible margins.
Soulwork Labs contains what I learned from the self-directed question: “Why am I obsessed with this thing?” Not the outcomes of the academic inquiry - those are elsewhere.
Rather, it is a set of trainings on metacognition and meaning: What is happening in my body? What is happening in awareness? How am I wrestling with the myriad demands on my time and energy? Why is this question, despite all apparent forces to the contrary, mine to hold?
Even after all these years, I wish I had been content with a conventional, well-paid job with clear boundaries… the type that’s easy to explain at dinner parties.
But I burn for deep reality, and I invite you to join me on that quest.
I don’t claim to know the nature of the universe. I’m agnostic to the point that I have trouble deciding whether I’m agnostic. I don’t even claim to know if we have free will or if the narrator we experience in our heads is just reporting on what’s happening in here.
But I’ve come to trust the felt sense of alignment. I believe that we can learn to move with what we have perceived rather than against it. I trust that we can tell the difference between the discomfort of the ego and a yearning that brings us closer to the living world and the consciousnesses that we share it with.
This is a lab, not a temple. Everything here is provisional and experimental by design. It is also grounded in thousands of years of other people’s teaching. This is not, “I tried this and it worked,” but rather, “I tried all of these things and I’m pretty sure that this one worked because of this other thing that is usually considered something else entirely, but YMMV, let’s give it a shot.”
If you’ve had real, uncanny, hard-to-explain experiences but stayed skeptical of the systems that rush to explain them… welcome. I have some things that might help.
I don’t know what happens next. But nobody else does either.