What Is Soulmaking? From Keats' Vale of Soul-Making to a Daily Practice

Soulmaking is the practice of using your life, all of it, as the raw material for becoming someone with depth. The word describes a simple wager: that experience, including painful experience, is here to make something of you. A soul is what gets made when a person stops trying to escape their circumstances and starts working them the way a writer works a draft or a potter works clay.

That is the short answer. The long answer runs through a dying poet, an art classroom, a prison cell, and a workbook, and it is worth taking slowly, because the word is older and stranger than it sounds.

Where the word comes from

In the spring of 1819, John Keats wrote a letter to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana, who had emigrated to Kentucky. Keats was twenty-three. He had already nursed his brother Tom through tuberculosis and watched him die. In the letter, he takes aim at the phrase people used then and still use now: this world as a "vale of tears," a place of suffering to be endured until rescue arrives from somewhere else.

Keats proposes a different name. "Call the world if you please 'The vale of Soul-making,'" he writes. "Then you will find out the use of the world."

His argument is precise. Intelligence alone, he says, is not yet a soul. Intelligences are "sparks of the divinity" in millions, but they only become souls "till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself." And what turns an intelligence into a soul? A world exactly like this one. "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?"

Read that again, because it reverses the usual complaint. The friction of the world stops being evidence that something has gone wrong. It becomes the schoolroom. The heart, Keats says, is the horn book, the primer children learned their letters from. Experience is the text. The soul is the student that emerges, and there are as many ways through the school as there are lives.

Keats died two years later, at twenty-five. The letter survived him, and the term slipped into the underground river of ideas that feeds poets, psychologists, and contemplatives. The depth psychologist James Hillman picked it up in the twentieth century and built a whole re-visioning of psychology around it, arguing that the point of inner work is soul, not cure. Artists and teachers found their own uses for it. The word keeps resurfacing because it names something people recognize the moment they hear it.

What soulmaking is, in practice

A definition helps: soulmaking is the deliberate conversion of experience into depth.

Notice what that requires. It requires experience, which you already have in abundance. It requires deliberateness, which is where practice comes in. And it produces depth, which is a real and recognizable quality in a person. You know it when you meet it. Someone who has metabolized their life rather than merely survived it. Someone whose attention has weight.

Three moves sit at the center of the practice, whatever form it takes.

First, contact. Soulmaking begins with the willingness to actually feel what is happening, in the body, while it is happening. Most of us have a sophisticated repertoire for avoiding this. The practice starts when the repertoire is set down.

Second, articulation. What is felt gets worked into form. Written, drawn, spoken, prayed. The forming is the point. An experience that stays vague stays undigested; an experience given precise shape becomes material. This is why writing sits at the heart of so much soulmaking practice, and why the letter, the journal, and the sketchbook keep appearing wherever the work is done seriously.

Third, return. The practice is daily or it is decorative. A soul is made the way a path is made, by walking it.

If this sounds like art, that is because it is one. Which brings us to the classroom.

Soulmaking in art

Art teachers have used "soulmaking" for decades to describe a particular approach to creative work, and search any art-education syllabus and you will find it. In that context, soulmaking means art made as inner work: the sketchbook as a site of self-encounter, the image as a way of finding out what you actually feel before you have words for it.

The lineage is the same Keats letter. The art classroom simply takes his claim literally. If experience schools the intelligence into a soul, then making images of your experience is a way of doing the schooling on purpose. A student who draws their grief is not decorating it. They are working it into form, which is the second move of the practice, articulation, carried out in charcoal instead of sentences.

For working artists the stakes are the same at higher voltage. The studio is a vale of soul-making or it is a production facility, and every artist knows the difference from the inside. The work that costs you something and changes you in the making carries that charge to the viewer. The work that doesn't, doesn't.

The workbook: soulmaking as a structured path

At some point a practice this useful gets written down. The Art of Soulmaking, published by Soulmaker Press, is a workbook that turns the three moves into a structured daily path: contemplative writing, meditation, inquiry, and service, organized so that a person can pick it up with no background and begin.

The workbook's premise is Keats' wager made practical. Your circumstances, whatever they are, are sufficient material. The exercises don't ask you to have a better life first. They ask you to work the life you have, precisely, on paper, daily.

Two details about how it is used tell you most of what you need to know. Readers work it alone, and readers work it in pairs, exchanging letters, because articulation deepens when someone receives it. The letter is soulmaking's native technology: slow, physical, addressed to an actual person.

The prison edition

The strongest test of the premise is the place with the fewest escape routes. A prison edition of The Art of Soulmaking now circulates in more than 1,500 facilities across 48 states, used by incarcerated students who work the same exercises with, in many cases, more seriousness than anyone on the outside brings to them.

The prison edition exists because the wager holds there or it holds nowhere. If a soul can be made anywhere, it can be made in a cell; if the world is a school, the hardest campus still counts. Students inside write the letters, keep the practice, and report what practitioners everywhere report: the circumstances did not change first. The person did.

That program, including the letter exchange that pairs outside volunteers with incarcerated students, is run by Unconditional Freedom, and it is its own story.

How to begin

You do not need the full apparatus to start. You need fifteen minutes and something true to work with.

1. Pick the live material. Whatever is currently costing you sleep qualifies. Soulmaking works the wound that is actually open.
2. Write it precisely. One page. What happened, what you felt in your body, what you made it mean. Precision is the whole discipline; "I felt bad" is avoidance wearing a pen.
3. Ask the school's question. Keats' question, put to your own page: what is this here to make of me? Sit with it. Write what comes.
4. Return tomorrow. The practice compounds. One page a day outworks one epiphany a year.

For a structured version of this path, with the meditations and the letter practice included, The Art of Soulmaking is the workbook. For the philosophical deep end, the essays and volumes in the Soulmaker Press catalog take the ideas as far as you want to follow them.

Frequently asked questions

Is soulmaking religious?
No tradition owns it. Keats was writing against the theology of his day, Hillman was a psychologist, and the practice runs comfortably alongside any faith or none. It asks for attention, honesty, and repetition, which no creed has a monopoly on.

What's the difference between soulmaking and self-improvement?
Direction. Self-improvement works toward a better version of you, measured against an external standard. Soulmaking works downward, into depth, and treats the difficult material self-improvement wants to eliminate as the curriculum itself.

What did Keats mean by "vale of soul-making"?
He was replacing "vale of tears," the idea that the world is a sorrow to be endured. In his 1819 letter he argues the world's pains are how an intelligence acquires identity and becomes a soul: "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?"

What is soulmaking in art?
Art practice undertaken as inner work: making images or objects from lived experience so the experience gets worked into form. The term appears throughout art education, and the lineage traces to the same Keats letter.

How long does it take?
The daily practice takes fifteen minutes to an hour. The making of a soul takes exactly as long as you have.

From the catalog: The Art of Soulmaking and The Art of Soulmaking: Prison Edition.