Here’s what others are saying about SOULSPEAK: The Outward Journey of the Soul:
Justin Spring’s poetry, writings, and accompanying recordings resonate with something deep inside us all that is longing to be touched. I felt myself yearning for, and in connection with, deep mystery while reading and listening to the SOULSPEAK materials. I find Mr. Spring’s work with disenfranchised individuals to be a beacon that may be a means out of the darkness that inhabits much of our present day lives.”
Jerry Wellik, Ed.d. Professor of Special Education, St. Cloud State University
Here is a book that really explains not only the origins of poetry, but how today we can again create poetry as a form of the soul speaking. Justin Spring is passionate and compelling in his pursuit of this pure poetry, what he calls “the outward journey of the soul.” And in his text he teaches all of us how to speak from a deeper place, letting the unconscious, or the soul, rise up into language and art. Taking us step by step through the process, he provides specific techniques to break through old boundaries and limitations. Spring’s many years of leading poetry workshops have produced a very clear, strong, almost prophetic sense of where art and truth lie, and—more importantly—how to achieve them.”
Victoria Sullivan, poet, playwright, editor of PLAYS BY AND ABOUT WOMEN
“In an age in which so much of what people say is social gambit, political rhetoric, make talk cliché, I applaud Justin Spring’s powerful technique for returning us to what is truly important, a language that means something, and that echoes vertically as well as sending out ripples horizontally; that is to say, it combines communication with a reference to the soul and the realm of the invisibles. It is a language that you could never be ashamed of having spoken, because you would like these words to echo around the eaves of the universe. They are beautiful, incantatory, descriptive, and wise. They are the glittering mantle in which the soul likes to wrap itself. SOULSPEAK hovers between the realms of the shaman’s magic and the priest’s incantation, the artist’s stroke, and the philosopher’s insight. Poetry is a calculus of the emotions, and if the poem is designed for immortality, also a calculus of the spirit. It describes a curve, an acceleration of realization, an epiphany; in short, the movements of the soul. I advise you to work with this book experientially, try the exercises, sense the vast imponderable soul-animal Spring invokes for us, lying beneath us. Think that God is hovering nearby, just waiting to borrow your voice.”
Dr. Stephen Larsen, Professor Emeritus SUNY, co-author of A FIRE IN THE MIND, A LIFE OF JOSEPH CAMPBELL.