In her most recent book she brings the languages of soul, angels, and mythology into dialogue with the languages of medicine, psychology, and psychiatry. Dr. Bolen's credentials as physician and meaning maker are M.D. psychiatrist, Jungian analyst in private practice, and clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California in San Francisco. When you have the possibility of dying from something, you enter a phase of life that brings you into the realm of what really matters, which is the realm of soul. Soul has to do with your deepest connections to others and to why we're here.
Soul has to do with remembering the realm of divinity and prayer.
With the sense of gravity, things that were important before often enter into the realm of trivial, and instead you're with your deepest self. As a Jungian therapist and author you're using myths and archetypes as one of your primary frames of reference for the human journey. All I needed to do was describe their illness as a descent of the soul into the underworld, bring in the metaphor that fit what they had gone through or were still going through, in order for them to have access to their own experience. I think one of the main contributions that I've made in all of my writing is to find the words for experience that people very much know. Without the words it doesn't come up into the psyche in the same way.