A ten-year-old Native American, a girl from the Hopi people, once told Robert Coles, author of ‘The Spiritual Life of Children’, “The sky watches us and listens to us. It talks to us, and it hopes we are ready to talk back.”What is this thing called “spirit”? If people (as many people do) consider spirituality in psychotherapy, certainly the basic consideration is spirit itself. Is spirit the same thing as soul, or for that matter as mind? Pardon me while I think out loud about some of these things.Aristotle, in his work called De Anima, spoke of the soul as related etymologically to respiration; yet, spirit in both the Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek is translated as “wind” or “breath”. Furthermore, both soul and spirit are aspects of the immaterial part of a person, as is “mind” or “self”; so, there is overlap in these concepts.Is there simply overlap, or are these different words for the same thing? Are these different and separate things in and of themselves? Is it possible to have a disembodied spirit or truly out-of-body phenomenon? Is the person made up of a soul (a thing in and of itself), a body (an obvious thing we can see), a mind (some might say some people lack one of these), and a spirit (whatever that is)? Is there actually a community of these things huddled together somewhere inside of me?The “soul“, or psyche, is the term used in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament for nephesh in Tanakh, the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible. (The term is an acronym formed from the initial Hebrew letters of the Masoretic Text's three traditional subdivisions: The Torah or first five books called the Pentateuch, the Nevi’im, or prophets, and the Ketuvim, or writings. Thus: TaNaKh). However, the Latin word for "soul" is anima, from the Greek anemos (or air, breath). The term nephesh is most often translated as “soul” but what it points to is the holistic entity having breath and life, and so could also be understood as a reference to the person, as it is also translated on occasion. The person is an embodied being having the capacities of life (it is animated), intellect (it has nous, or mind), and relationship. The person is substantially one, a unity, but exhibits a property dualism in the relationship between body and mind (meaning these are two attributes of any given single human being as opposed to being two different kinds of things in an of themselves). As the body is engaged in the world, the mind emerges from that lower level of organisation and supervenes on the body, providing agency the person chooses and is capable of acting in his or her best interests. (Thus, by the way, a reductive physicalism that makes mind the same thing as brain is rejected the mind is not the brain but a non-reductive physicalism is accepted, the brain in the world gives rise to the emergent mind, including the self, which is the subjective sense of being a person).This is all thick philosophical reasoning and a rationale for valuing neuropsychology as relevant to the psychotherapeutic process. Yet, by the time anyone encounters a fellow human being this emergence and supervenience is fully integrated and operational in the whole person. Thus, a soul is an embodied entity in which the soul is the life of the body. According to Aristotle the soul keeps the body together: “…the soul seems rather to hold the body together; at all events, when the soul has departed, the body disperses in air and rots away.” He regarded the attributes of the soul to include knowledge, perception, opinion, desire, wish and appetite.The medieval scholar Thomas Aquinas, a student of Aristotle, upheld this holistic view of persons. In describing his anthropology in an article for the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, Eugene DeRobertis asserted: “For St Thomas, it makes no sense to refer to concrete worldly existence in terms of a body without a soul or a soul without a body. Thomism holds that it is only possible to stop, reflect, analyse, and explicate the characteristics of “body” and “soul” because we have already encountered both in their original, holistic, synthetic form as “human being”. It is the human existence that one encounters in the real-life world of day-to-day experience, never a body, never a soul. Thus, in common vernacular, to have encountered “a body” is to have found a corpse. To have encountered “a soul” or “a spirit” is to have seen a ghost. To consider body and soul in isolation from each other in relation to a living human being is something that can only be done mentally by abstracting from concrete experience.The works of Edith Stein, in her books titled ‘Potency and Act’ and ‘Finite and Eternal Being’, brought together this Thomistic view of persons with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. She also read Martin Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ and was influenced by his use of the concept of dasein (roughly understood as “being there” ie existing as a situated being). People exist among others in a world already going on by the time they are born, and they exist as part of that whole, complex situation. It makes little sense pragmatically to consider the person apart from the situation, the soul apart from the rest of a situated being, the mind apart from soul, the self apart from mind, or to consider spirit apart from soul. These are not substantive in themselves; they are potentialities in the holistic being of the person.The spirit is that potential property of the whole human being that orients the person towards God. The mind is the property that enables the person to contemplate a given world. The self is the property that enables the person to consider what it’s like to exist AS that person in the world. The soul is the life of the person, another word for the immaterial and material properties bundled up together.What is this “thing” called spirit? It is that potentiality in me that enables me to think about God using my mind, to engage WITH God in my soul, and to experience God myself. Where would I be without it?