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Sarah Masters reviews the documentary

Sound of the Soul

Religious tolerance is in short supply in many critical areas of the globe but in Fez, Morocco, this month, the atmosphere of religious tolerance is palpable. The Fez Festival of World Sacred Music, known as "the Fez," annually brings together musicians from throughout the world who represent many spiritual paths.

Fez is a 1,200-year-old city long known to be a center of Sufi spirituality. The camera in this new documentary wanders through the narrow alleyways of Fez and focuses on singers, musicians and dancers ranging from Japanese drummers to the Irish vocal group Anuna to African berber women to a Harlem brass band. Whirling dervishes circle endlessly and a French early music group sings 12th century chorales in this cinematic journey through the ancient North African city.

Award-winning filmmaker Stephen Olsson shot the festival in 2002 and 2004 and this hour-long documentary captures the spirit of its founders, Dr. Faouzi Skali, a Sufi professor of cultural anthropology, and Mohamed Kabbai, a member of Morocco's Royal Cabinet, who came up with the idea of "the Fez" in response to the Persian Gulf War over a decade ago and to growing religious intolerance. Chaplains will find the spirit of religious pluralism so evident in the music and in the intercut discussions by scientists, spiritual leaders and philosophers attending the festival to be very reaffirming. As an Afghani sings: “Music is the sound of the soul.”

Completed: 2005
Running Time: 70 Minutes
Director: Stephen Olsson

If you are interested in purchasing this film, you can do so at www.hartleyfoundation.org. Just click on “Sacred Sounds” on the homepage for more information. The cost of the film series is $ 29.95 for a DVD.

Book Review

Rev. Dr. John Bauman reviews

The Psychospiritual Clinician’s Handbook: Alternative Methods for Understanding and Treating Mental Disorders

When I first read the title of this book, The Psychospiritual Clinician’s Handbook, I needed to do some translating between a language for spiritual counseling and the pastoral care language with which I’m more familiar. I had become somewhat familiar with transpersonal psychology that came into being in the Seventies. That was, as far as I could tell, a description of an attempt to integrate and understand new age spirituality and psychology. Ken Wilber is a driving force behind transpersonal psychology.

My training in pastoral counseling used the term pastoral psychotherapy while attempting to integrate the study of psychology and spirituality from the perspectives of a variety of religious and spiritual traditions that formed the basis for the American Association of Pastoral Counselors. The term psychospiritual clinician, while new to me, seems to be an attempt by the editors, who come from ancient Sufism and Kundalini yoga backgrounds, to cast a broad net in the spirituality and psychology world.

Thomas Moore, author of Care for the Soul and Soul Mates, offers a forward. Moore describes a transition occurring in our thinking about medicine and spirituality. That is, from an evidence-based approach to healing to a new approach in which spirituality is a major part; from spirituality as a matter of belief and morals to “discovering a translucent morality, a deep sense of community, and an awareness of fate and personal transcendence.” Moore suggested caution as psychospiritual clinicians go about developing a psychospiritual approach to healing, describing this book as a step in the direction of using imagination and intelligence to that end.

The Psychospiritual Clinician's Handbook is an edited compilation of 16 articles on a wide variety of topics to help the clinician understand and treat people who may suffer from one of a number of DSM IV diagnoses. I found most of the articles had something helpful to offer. For example, an article suggested that for patients diagnosed with Adjustment Disorders, treatment could be seen as an invitation to a journey of transformation to developing new life structures. The author of this article is Dwight Judy, a psychologist who is also a United Methodist teaching at Garrett Theological Seminary, a member of AAPC, and a past president of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology.

An article on “Spiritual and Transpersonal Approaches to Psychotic Disorders” quoted Ken Wilber and Joseph Campbell, among others, in a helpful discussion of the differences between psychotic disorders and spiritual experiences. The author, David Lukoff, quoted Campbell, saying that the mystic and psychotic are “plunged into the same deep inward sea. However, the mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim: whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.”

I found helpful perspectives in other chapters that contain insights on understanding and treating depression, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, spirituality and sexuality, obsessive-compulsive disorder, among others.

The Psychospiritual Clinician’s Handbook: Alternative Methods for Understanding and Treating Mental Disorders. Sharon G. Mijares, PhD, and Gurucharan Singh Khalsa, PhD, editors. The Haworth Reference Press. New York. 2005, pp 372.

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