Book review: The Soul & The Sea: Essential Healing for Everyday Life

by Benig Mauger

ISBN: 1803411279

Reviewed by Ursula Somerville

I am pleased to write this review of Benig Mauger’s new book The Soul & The Sea: Essential Healing for Everyday Life. Benig has been a good friend of this journal Inside Out in the past and most recently she delivered an online workshop as part of our (IAHIP) series of regional meetings in June 2022.

This book has personal, Jungian, and spiritual aspects, coming from within Benig and contained within 215 pages. Benig’s unique style of writing invites the reader to lean into the story and visit the “rooms” she cleverly offers. “Rooms” which allow the reader to rest a while and ruminate in the memories which come to visit. It would be useful to have beside you a pen and paper to record your own creativity that will open up within you.

As I read the Soul and the Sea: Essential Healing for Everyday Life there is a real ethereal felt-sense for me because of how it is written and I was instantly brought to a soulful place as I settled into the beautifully presented book. Lovingly placed between the covers, which is sea blue and has a spray of waves on it, there is an invitation for the reader to engage with the author and you want to know more. Benig tells us she wrote this book while in lockdown in the early days of Covid 19 in her “soul home” in Connemara on the Wild Atlantic Way. It looks back on her life as a woman who was born to love, and she weaves in both Jungian depth psychology and spirituality to help bring to life her experiences as a loving woman and as a therapist. She uses inspirational quotes from Rumi, and Rainer Maria Rilke, and Mary Oliver. Perhaps, most importantly, she introduces us to her spiritual master, Sai Maa, as she describes her influences on her and, in part, dedicates the book to her.

She tells us, early on, that “… healing was not simply a matter of will… I understood the mystical nature of transformation and healing” (p. 1). This sets the tone of the book, and she deftly brings us through coloured “rooms”, each colour representing a healing nature: the red room, the pink room, the blue room, the rose room, the green room, the purple room. The room I wanted to remain in was the green room which starts out with nature and the Soul. This section opens with a beautiful quote from Heraclitus: “You could never arrive at the limits of the Soul, no matter how many roads you travelled, so deep is its mystery” (p. 113). Once in the green room, Benig is accompanied by the Earth Goddess who tells her: “Write about creativity; write about renewal and new life, write about how deep is our soul” (p. 112). In this room we visit our complexes and Benig asks us to “trek our soul” (p. 120). By this she means be creative and do not be led astray by a strong ego, rather, go to the deep sense of self. In the green room she introduces us to “inner archetypes” (p. 120) which may get in our own way and names them as “Victim, Prostitute, Child and Saboteur” (p. 123). I understand, from Benig’s writings, that we must not be afraid of meeting these archetypes if we can become creative. Before we leave the green room, we will have been exploring a “healing from within” (p. 126) and, to augment the creative side of healing and transformation, she offers a “workbook and exercises” section which help us “change our patterns” (p. 128).

I have highlighted just some of the “rooms” but there are also rooms for birth, life and death, all of which are powerful testaments to our living experience. I would certainly encourage reading this book as it will open your creative side and much more besides. For such a small book there is a wealth of resources in it for everyday living, as both a human and a psychotherapist.

Ursula Somerville, MIAHIP, SIAHIP, is a psychotherapist and clinical supervisor who aligns herself with the teachings of Carl Jung and has completed an MA in Art, Psyche and Creative Imagination.

IAHIP 2023 - INSIDE OUT 100 - Summer 2023