The sea, the soul and a woman’s heart

Connecting with nature: A view of Letterfrack in Connemara, Co Galway, along Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way.

‘Consciousness in its essence is not bound to matter and the human psyche has no boundaries or limits’. Benig Mauger

Drawing on her experiences as a Jungian therapist and spiritual teacher, and her life in Connemara on Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way, Benig Mauger has written a deeply personal memoir about the healing journey of a soul, about learning to live the ‘wisdom of the heart’.

Perhaps the essential message of her new book, The Soul & the Sea: Essential healing for everyday life (O-Books, May 2023), she says, is to understand that the healing of psychic scars is fundamentally a spiritual process requiring openness and willingness to love. It’s a warm and welcoming read, demonstrating strength and spirit in an author who offers valuable guidance for the transformative soul-work that can elevate consciousness profoundly.

Working from both depth psychological and spiritual perspectives, Benig stresses the importance of combining the two when seeking to grow spiritually and to heal. Attaining a middle ground is essential if healing from within is to take place, she says, believing that the Jungian archetypal dimension can also be seen as the spiritual dimension: ‘Jungian psychology is of course a transpersonal soul psychology and blends in well with the spiritual element necessary for healing.’

Written seemingly spontaneously from the heart, and entirely during the ‘dark night’ of the coronavirus crisis, The Soul & the Sea describes with sincerity and candour how her own personal quest for love and soul-healing, through ‘relating to and loving many men’, involved the turmoil of relationship breakdowns and bereavement: ‘I have experienced heartbreak many times and several lost loves.’

By the age of 43, Benig had three children and had been married and divorced twice, but was still ‘enchanted by love’, and came to the realisation that she was seeking to recover wholeness, to attain her own ‘inner marriage’, by balancing her psyche’s masculine and feminine qualities.

Healing heartbreak and understanding the inner dynamics of love relationships has been part of Benig’s focus, as has been helping clients move towards a sense of wholeness within — individuation in Jungian terms: ‘It had become more and more clear to me that people were…