If you want to know more about enactive thinking and risk, you can register for the free online workshops run on 8, 15, 22, 29 September 9am Canberra time with Prof. Rob Long, register here: admin@spor.com.au

 Registrations close Friday 28 August.

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The language and discourse of the ‘soul’ is common in Poetics (all that cannot be measured). Further see: Poetics and Risk, Feeling into Being https://www.humandymensions.com/product/poetics-and-risk-feeling-into-being/

We have discussed the discourse of ‘the soul’ in safety previously: https://safetyrisk.net/is-there-a-soul-in-safety-a-poetic-guide/. The language of the ‘soul’ is useful.  When we write love songs, music or write poems of anguish, stories of suffering, art and dance or speak at funerals, we use the language of ‘the soul’.

In such times, it helps us think of the whole person rather than getting tangled up in the language of the mind as brain.

The language of ‘the soul’ is also helpful in considering the human person as enactive (inter-connected, inter-corporeal and inter-affected within themselves, others and the world).

The language of the soul is also used commonly in consideration of ‘moral injury’ (https://safetyatworkblog.com/2025/10/09/when-leadership-fails-the-soul/; https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29142437-moral-injury). We have written about moral harm and injury here:

It is interesting that when we want to explain a state of emotion and feeling that we don’t say: ‘my brain aches for you’ we say, ‘my heart and soul aches for you’. and, we know what this means. In such times we seek holistic language rather than be restricted by the metaphor of the brain-as-computer.

If you do a search on music and the soul, you will find hundreds of events and festivals going on that use the word ‘soul’ in their marketing. Here are a few examples:

When we think of all the embodied, integrated and interactive systems of the human person (nervous, endocrine, respiratory, integumentary (skin), muscular, digestive, cardiovascular, reproductive, cellular, urinary, feeling/emotional and skeletal systems) it’s much better to use the language of ‘person’ or ‘soul’ to escape the confines of the language of mind, often interpreted to mean brain. The brain is NOT a directing organ and such belief is myth. The brain myth is mostly sustained by metaphor, symbol and attribution and, is not supported by any neuroscience research into cognition. Often in safety you will see the image of a brain attached to marketing (eg. HOP) inferring that safety is about ‘brain work’.

It doesn’t make sense to pose training as brain reprogramming when that is not how decisions are made. Indeed, 95% of all decision making is embodied, heuristical, habitual and unconscious. That is, human persons mostly make decisions not using rational ‘brain work’.

If you want to know more about enactive thinking and risk, you can register for the free online workshops run on 8, 15, 22, 29 September 9am Canberra time with Prof. Rob Long, register here: admin@spor.com.au

 Registrations close Friday 28 August.