Jeff Brown is a sculptor and his medium consists of nouns and verbs that he lovingly carves with finely honed tools. The results are exquisite word creations that truly belong in a museum. I am in awe each time I read his postings and when I moved through the pages of his book entitled Soulshaping: A Journey of Self Creation.

Jeff lives his bliss  “by excavating and honoring my divine purpose. At the heart of Soulshaping is a quest for those soul-scriptures that we came into life to humanifest. Those scriptures are a combination of callings, lessons and archetypal transitions that are unique to my Soul’s journey. When I am honoring them, that is, when I am on true-path, I feel blissful. When I am diverting, bliss-less.”

I found Soulshaping to be a wrenchingly personal and sometimes painful expression of Jeff’s life journey. I wondered if when he reads it now, it seems as if it is someone else’s story.

Jeff poignantly responded, “It IS someone else’s story, and my story as well. Often now, I look at it and it feels foreign to me, primarily because so much has changed inside of me since it was published. My lens has been re-clarified, my emotional body more solidified, so my perspective has shifted. Still, though, I recognize the consciousness that experienced the journey as my own, I identify myself within it, but now there is more- a new soulshape that includes but goes beyond where I was when I embodied those stages.”

Jeff has two ancestors/guiding spirits that allowed him to survive the traumatic events in his life. They are his loving grandparents that he refers to by the Yiddish terms: “My Bubbi and my Beela breathed life into me when my lungs were breathless. They stood beside me, within me, and around me every step of the way, giving me the love I needed to stick around through the horrible early years. They gave me reason to believe that there was another way of being loved and supported, another path worth working towards.”

He intends for the book to “express my own life force by honoring my calling to write, but also to help liberate others from the egoic ties that bind.”

Jeff has a particularly engaging way of mapping out his text…a word wall that is a canvas for the verbal paint splashes that find their way into his writing.

“I wrote Soulshaping in the back room of my house in Toronto. At some point, I felt the need to write on the walls themselves, particularly when some of the language in the Soulshaping dictionary started coming through me. That wall is now a video on my Soulshaping channel on You Tube that is called Chaotic Magnificence. This wall reflected my own belief that it was essential that I take my light out from below its bushel of shame and express my truth everywhere. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVlgwm9F2Hw “

A former criminal lawyer and psychotherapist, Jeff Brown is the author of “Soulshaping: A Journey of Self-Creation,” recently published by North Atlantic Books. Endorsed by authors Elizabeth Lesser and Ram Dass, “Soulshaping” is Brown’s autobiography — an inner travelogue of his journey from archetypal male warrior to a more surrendered path. You can connect with his work at www.soulshaping.com