Voice And Vocation:

poetry and depth-oriented career counseling  

          “For poetry to be poetry,” said David Whyte (1994), “there must be a listener as well as a speaker” (p. 101).  I would amend this quote so that it reads,  “For poetry to be therapeutic, there must be a listener before there is a speaker.”  Further, the listener and the speaker are in fact the same person.  In other words, we must first learn to listen to ourselves before we can fully speak as ourselves. 

In this essay, following the example of poetry, I proceed from the understanding that practicing the discipline of listening deeply is an entry into the deeper hearing of the soul.  As a career counselor, my role is to model this kind of listening/hearing until the client is able to embody it without assistance.  Listening poetically leads into the territory of imagination, which often comes clothed in the images of memory and the feelings of grief.  This is the realm of Mnemosyne, goddess of memory and mother of the muses. 

When the readiness to listen to and hear our grief is reached, we can begin to speak with an authentic voice, perhaps for the first time in our lives.  The attention given to memory and imagination finally enables us to move ahead creatively, expressing ourselves faithfully through word and action.  As it is Mnemosyne that demands that we listen and who is the agent of our hearing, so her daughters, the muses, bid us speak.

In this essay I explore the experience of first finding and then learning to speak with one’s own true voice.

Finding A Voice  

For the purposes of this chapter, I refer to “talking” and “speaking” as two distinct activities.  It is important, for the sake of clarity, to take a moment to define the meaning of these terms as I use them here.  By “talking” I mean that activity that we learn as children and use everyday for the mostly utilitarian aspects of our lives.  “Speaking” refers to speaking from one’s authentic self, with one’s true voice.  

We all talk everyday but rarely give much thought to this activity.  It is something that we take for granted.  Our days tend to be filled with talk and sprinkled with chatter.  Often we use this chatter to keep from noticing what is really going on in our lives, how we are really feeling.  Talk is very often used to prevent any kind of silence, especially the kind in which we might really hear what is going on inside ourselves.

On the other hand, speaking, in the sense that I am using it, is dependent upon this silence and on the ability to listen.  We must be able to listen deeply to ourselves so that we are able to hear the words within us that want to be spoken.  When we talk, the words we use are often those that defend us from experiencing our lives.  Speaking not only brings us face-to-face with our own experience, it also carries that experience out into the world for others to observe.  While it is possible to hide behind our talk, when we speak we are announcing our presence in the world and taking our place.  Speaking is a declaration of the self and an assertion of our true voice.  Indeed, speaking requires a full, embodied use of the voice and this, according to Whyte (1994), requires courage: 

                The voice emerges literally from the body as a representation of our inner world.  

                It carries our experience from the past, our hopes and fears for the future, and the 

                emotional resonance of the moment.  If it carries none of these, it must be a masked 

                voice, and having muted the voice, anyone listening knows intuitively we are not all 

                there.  Whether or not we try to tell the truth, the very act of speech is courageous 

                because no matter what we say, we are revealed.  (p. 120)

Speaking with one’s own true voice is one of the hardest things for a person to achieve for the simple reason that it is one of the most difficult things to hear.  In our initial attempts to listen within, it is most likely that we will hear a thousand other voices long before we can discern our own. 

When listening for the voice that will tell us who we are, we first of all hear those voices telling us who we “should” be, the voices of our families telling us how they wanted us to be, the voices of shame and derision that followed any expression of our inner self, or the voices of fear and insecurity that come with the awareness that stepping into our uniqueness means taking responsibility for our own lives.

            The process of learning to hear one’s own voice is a journey, wrote Mary Oliver (1986).  For each of us it is a journey that begins with the difficult and frightening process of leaving behind all that we have been.  The initial awareness of our own voice, Oliver said, does not necessarily come with any sound or calling, but rather with a sudden knowing that the voices we have been listening to and following are not our own:

           According to Joseph Campbell, if we are not living for “the sense of life in what [we] are doing, . . . then [we] are living according to other people’s notions of how life should be lived” (cited in Osbon, 1991, p. 73).  It is not an uncommon experience to suddenly realize that so many of the building blocks on which one has based one’s life are the ideals and values of others.  As human beings we are subject to a lot of bad advice, be it from our families with their expectations and desires for us, from our culture with its prescribed and standardized ways of being, or from our peers and their need for us to validate their choices through our own. 

Each of these spheres, consciously or unconsciously, makes their demands on us; we feel from them “the old tug at our ankles” (Oliver, 1986, p. 38).  Those around us may object to any move on our parts away from their field of influence.  As Oliver wrote, “the whole house begins to tremble” in protest.  The world in which we live—our culture, family, or social sphere—often requires us to sacrifice our own well-being to maintain the collective cohesion of the group.  “Mend my life!,” they all cry.  It is a difficult plea to ignore. 

It is not just those around us who begin to tremble, but some part of ourselves as well.  Moving out of any of these groups is frightening and stirs up our deepest feelings of responsibility.  Often it feels as if our very survival depends on keeping those around us happy so that they will continue to love us.  We can become terrified of making any kind of change; it feels as if “the wind pries at our stiff fingers” such that we can barely maintain our resolve to move ahead. 

However, when the absence of our own voice drowns out the clamor of the other voices around us, we may at last find we have the courage to become deaf to all these demands and to make room for our own needs, our own longings, our own voice to come through.  When this moment comes, as we read in Oliver’s The Journey, we must grapple with the fear that we may have begun this move too late in our lives and that the obstacles we have to overcome are too great:  

          Entering this place of fear and the unknown, what I referred to in the previous chapter as silence, seems to be a necessary first step to being able to hear the first stirrings of our true voice:

           Oliver’s The Journey presents a picture of many of the struggles our clients bring into the therapeutic encounter.  On some level, each client is struggling with the problem of finding his or her voice, of saving his or her life, and of moving deeper into an engagement with the world.  Oliver’s poem tells us that these three elements: the quality of our life, our engagement with the world, and finding our voice are all connected, all of a piece.  It is essential to be able to speak our own truth, if we are to find our place in the world.

Voice as Vocation

A further element of speaking—and something of a paradox—is that when we find our voice, it is both ours and not ours.  “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me,” said D. H. Lawrence (1964, p. 250).  By cultivating our deeper hearing, we open ourselves to a deeper voice.  It is not, in psychological language, the ego’s voice, but the voice of the soul.  The voice we hear and with which we begin to speak resonates as if with the sound of something older, more eternal, and more lasting than our ego-centered lives.  This is voice as vocation which literally means calling.  We hear the call of our soul, of our destiny.

            Hillman (1996) described this calling as proceeding from one’s daimon, or guardian spirit.  The daimon is the image within that explains and enlivens our lives.  Hillman meant the daimon to be understood as a figure of the soul, of the deep imagination.  “The way we imagine our lives is the way we are going to go on living our lives,” he wrote elsewhere (1983, p. 23).  To those of us living in the modern world, the notion of a daimon or a calling tends to present us with a particular difficulty.  That is, the demands of such a calling are often in conflict with the conscious wishes and desires of ourselves and others for a simple, stable, comfortable existence that will not cause “the whole house to tremble,” to paraphrase Mary Oliver (1986). 

            Hearing this call then and speaking out of this vocation—be it a job or a way of living in the world—is likely to be experienced as a kind of death.  Indeed it is a death.  It is the death of the primacy of the ego with its litany of fears and “shoulds.”

            The idea of dying to one’s vocation is beautifully expressed by Emily Dickinson in a poem that seems to describe her coming into awareness of her own vocation as a poet:

            This poem seems to be an allusion to the poet Keats whose famous line “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is echoed within it.  Dickinson read Keats’ poetry voraciously (Johnson, 1961) and is perhaps expressing with this poem how reading Keats opened her to her own vocation as a poet, as one devoted to the expression of beauty through poetry.  Through her reading of Keats and other poets, Dickinson “died for Beauty.” 

            Stepping into one’s vocation—one’s destiny—is a death because we are no longer serving our own ends, but those of the soul, of the daimon.  The daimon makes extraordinary demands upon us, and in order to serve it we cannot remain attached to the security and status quo of our ego self.  In the words of Dickinson’s poem, we must let the moss “cover up our names.”  The notion of vocation or calling as a service is consistent with a therapeutic understanding of poetry because, as Hillman has reminded us, the word psychotherapy literally means “to serve soul” (1975b, p. 74).

            Although this death may in fact be a revivification of our lives, giving to our lives a feeling of purpose and meaning, it can be a terrifying thing to embrace.  Dying into our vocation, into service to the daimon, awakens all of our fears.  We fear that others will disapprove, and we feel again the child’s fear that we will lose the love of those upon whom we depend for safety and survival.  We fear also that if we allow ourselves to hear this calling, we may not be up to the task that it presents to us.

            These fears of abandonment and failure cause us to spend much of our lives actively trying to ignore the calling of the daimon.  We deliberately grow deaf to its demands because we intuit the upheaval that will result in our very ordered lives if we were ever to open to that deeper, darker voice.  However, the voice of the daimon does not go away.  Ignored, it expresses itself in the symptoms and struggles that bring people into therapy.  The challenge of the daimon is one that we cannot deny, though we may try very hard to do just that.  While writing a poem I called Daimonology, I encountered exactly this dark aspect of the inner voice:

Speaking In Order To Hear

               Once we have opened our mouths and spoken in this new voice, we have come full circle and must now face the necessity of hearing the words we have just spoken.  Putting thoughts and feelings into words and speaking them aloud transforms them.  The words we speak are not the same as the words that we hear silently inside.  Speaking is the necessary last step in truly hearing our authentic voice.

            Speaking aloud is an undeniably physical act.  We take the breath of the outside world into our bodies, and when that breath returns to the world carrying words, it is colored with our very being (Whyte, 1994).  The words we speak, then, are embodied words, solid and undeniable.  Words once spoken are no longer only inside us where they remain indistinct from the rest of our being.  Spoken words are words with which we must come into relationship, because they now stand outside us and confront us with their reality.  Our responsibility for the words we speak is more concrete and unavoidable than it is for the words that go unspoken.  “Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat,” says Whyte (1994, p. 287). 

            Another transformative characteristic of speaking is that it connects us to other people and to the world.  As I suggested above, because of the physical mechanics of speech, our speaking is literally the place where self and world meet.  In the attempt to communicate something to another person, it is essential that we understand precisely what we are trying to say.  As we speak, we hear as if through the ears of the other and think, “Does this make sense?  Is this really what I mean?”  The moment in which we speak to another becomes the moment we either embody or betray the inner voice we have heard.

            According to Whyte (1997), the betrayal of the inner voice is like turning our face away from our own reflection, a reflection beheld deep inside in the mirror of the soul.  It takes courage to stand by one’s self, and often it involves breaking a promise made early on to the others in our life: the promise to be only what they wanted us to be, to show of ourselves only what it was safe to show and what would ensure the continued love and security of those around us.  Courage is further required because the moment to speak authentically comes and goes quickly and the temptation to let it pass by is strong.  Whyte describes this succinctly in a passage from his poem All The True Vows:

           In one sense it is simply this—the desire to speak in one’s own voice—that brings a person into therapy.  People turn to therapy because there are things happening in their lives that are preventing them from living in the way they want to live, from being the people that they would prefer to be.  Often one’s own voice has been put away and denied in order to simply survive.  Speaking with an authentic voice meant danger, the possibility of losing the love of one’s caretakers.  As I stated above, the denial of one’s voice does not eliminate it, but instead dramatically increases the need of the voice to be expressed.  Often the only outlet for one’s deeper voice is through one’s symptoms.

Soul-centered career counseling is about finding and speaking in one’s unique voice.  When we do finally stop to listen to our own voice, to hear it—perhaps in the therapeutic setting—it is often so large and insistent that it is overwhelming.  There can be so much force behind our new-found voice that we don't have the strength at the beginning to contain it, to match it, to live up to this expression of our deep soul, which is the subtle matter of our being.  Because our voice feels so big, it is necessary to develop a kind of subtle-body muscle strength to really embody it fully, to ground it and support it.  It is to this end that poetry is most helpful. 

References

Bly, R., Hillman, J., & Meade, M. (Eds.).  (1992). The rag and bone shop of the heart: Poems for men.  New York: HarperCollins.

Hillman, J. (1983). Healing fiction. Woodstock, CT : Spring. 

Hillman, J. (1996).  The soul’s code: In search of character and calling.  New York: Random House.

Johnson, T. H. (Ed.).  (1961). Final harvest: Emily Dickinson’s poems.  Boston: Little, Brown.

Lawrence, D. H. (1964). The complete poems. New York: Penguin Books.

Oliver, M. (1986).  Dream work.  New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.

Osbon, D.K. (Ed.).  (1991). Reflections on the art of living: A Joseph Campbell companion.  New York: HarperCollins.

Whyte, D. (1994) The heart aroused: Poetry and the preservation of the soul in corporate America.  New York: Doubleday.

Whyte, D. (1997).  The house of belonging.  Langley, WA: Many Rivers Press.  

© 2001 J. E. Smith, All rights reserved