The Spirit’s Janitor

There’s a broom in the corner of the psyche.

It’s not shiny. Not magical. Just a broom. The kind you might overlook. The kind that waits in silence for someone to notice the dust.

That’s how the sacred art of psychotherapy begins — not with a breakthrough, not with insight, but with the slow, almost invisible act of tending.

James Hillman, clinical psychologist and mythopoetic thinker, called us back to soul. Not the soul of salvation or self-improvement, but the soul that dreams, limps, wanders, and remembers. He asked us to see pathology not as a problem to fix but as a voice to hear. He taught that the soul doesn’t want to be healed — it wants to be seen, heard, and honoured.

In this light, psychotherapy is far from the science of the mind. It is a ritual of the imagination. It is not a clean white coat but a janitor’s uniform — dusty, worn, and full of stories.

Enter The Spirit’s Janitor.

This is the archetype I’ve chosen to walk with. He doesn’t seek perfection. He’s not here to sanitize suffering. His task is gentler, stranger, and more devotional: to tend to all of the soul’s spaces. To sweep not away, but around. To make visible what has long been exiled to the edges or buried.

Because the psyche is not a puzzle to be solved. It is a myth unfolding in real time.

Hillman often said, “Stick with the image.” That is, don’t rush to interpret. Don’t leap to solutions. Stay close to the symbol, the symptom, the dream — and listen. Let the soul speak its own language without translation. The janitor knows this. He doesn’t impose order. He waits. He watches what the dust is trying to say.

Sometimes, that dust is grief — thick and unspoken.
Sometimes it’s a childhood image that still lingers.
Sometimes it’s rage, silenced for decades.
Sometimes it’s wonder — buried beneath burnout.

In a culture obsessed with fixing, ascending, and optimizing, this approach feels almost rebellious. But it’s sacred. It’s diligent. And it matters.

The sacred art of psychotherapy, as I see it, is not about getting better. It’s about getting closer. Closer to the dream that won’t leave you alone. Closer to the wound that’s asking for ritual, not remedy. Closer to the mystery that lives just under the surface of the everyday.

Therapists are not healers in any heroic sense. We are custodians of the soul’s weather. Witnesses to the storm and the silence. We hold space for the myth to speak — not in grand pronouncements, but in the flicker of the eyes, the tremble in a voice, the forgotten object on the shelf.

This is archetypal work. It honours the presence of Hermes in the anxious one, flitting between thoughts. It sees Hades in depression, as in the invitation to go down, not up. It notices the Trickster when chaos erupts in therapy and the Old Wise Woman when silence feels full.

Psychotherapy is not about control. It’s about reverence.

Psychotherapy is about accompanying someone as they walk the corridors, paths or trails of their own story — broom in hand, yes, but also heart open, throat open, imagination awake, and myth alive.

In my own work — especially with those the world has wearied: caregivers, parents, people of all walks of life aching with unwept tears — I see again and again that the soul isn’t asking to be fixed. It’s asking to be accompanied.

To be mirrored in its mess.
To be named in its greatness.
To be given room to breathe, not be managed.

That’s the janitor’s gift. He doesn’t flinch at dirt. He knows that sacredness often hides in the shadow, in the breach, in the corner.

So this is my invitation — to therapists, artists, seekers, and those simply trying to stay human:

Return to the dust.
Tend what others overlook.
Resist the urge to sanitize the soul.
And remember that presence, not progress, is the deeper healing.

Psychotherapy, at its most sacred, is not about transformation.
It is about fidelity.
To the image.
To the soul.
To the search.