I remember the first time college stopped just being content and started being soul.

Interestingly, it happened in my own journaling workshop with a group of ten Cornell University students. I'd just started a twenty minute timer to practice narrative journaling in a campus lounge. The air was thick with pencil strokes and quiet contemplation. At first, the students seemed disoriented. Many of them weren't used to having a dedicated peaceful time away from schoolwork.

But soon, we entered a different world. One of reflection, curiosity, and love.

When it came time to share, every student had a touching entry. A sophomore appreciated the feeling of coming back to her boyfriend at the end of a long day of work. Another reflected on how much of her day was filled with anxiety about schoolwork. One more questioning the nature of a lifelong friendship that was running its course.

As each student opened their heart, I was brought back to the beginnings of my Cornell experience. Loneliness, restlessness, questioning my major. How different would things have been if I had a space like this one? I think it's the question that motivated me to create the workshop in the first place: make the space I wish I had.

How different would college be if bringing out students' souls was the norm, not the exception?

By soul, I mean the deepest parts of what makes us alive individually and collectively: our longing for meaning, our capacity for love, our hunger to be seen as we actually are. This is a secular version of soul, but it doesn't completely reject religious interpretations. In a world of endless short form content, artificial intelligence, and financial struggles, connecting with soul is more important than ever.

That's why over the last six years, I've been fascinated by this question. In the process I've created over 600 YouTube videos, blog posts, and podcasts on how to create a more conscious college system, taught hundreds of college students and adults through six live and self-paced courses, and worked for the #1 gamification consultancy in the world, The Octalysis Group, where I learned about the roots of human motivation.

What I discovered is soul doesn't spontaneously arise out of thin air. Great professors can foster it deliberately. The reason is they understand the nine gateways to students' souls and the three invisible keys to unlocking them.

Let's dive in.

The Nine Gateways To Students' Souls

Great professors consciously open the nine gateways to students' souls. Sometimes they focus on one. Other times they work on opening many. For each gateway below, I'll share a brief story of when I've seen it opened, alongside some tips for how to bring it into the classroom. This isn't meant as a comprehensive understanding of how to open each gateway. Think of it more like a map of the territory, not the territory itself.

Deep Connection

Deep connection is the need to connect profoundly with others through shared activity, growth, understanding, and community.

In one of my triads for a course called Essential Capacities, a friend shared about his struggle with cocaine addiction, loneliness, and divorce. Here we were: a 22-year-old college grad, a 46-year-old at the prime of his career, and a retired 65-year-old connecting more profoundly than most people in any group setting. Three completely different lives, one shared room.

How do we create that in a classroom? Start with a shared activity and goal, whether that's a conversation, a sport, or even a video game. Repeat the gathering consistently so the container deepens over time. Same class, same coffee shop, same circle of chairs every Tuesday. And build psychological safety by encouraging vulnerability in a place grounded in trust. People don't open up because we ask them to. They open up because the room tells them it's safe to.

Silence & Solitude

Silence and solitude is not simply being alone in quiet. It's the need to connect deeply with one's inner nature away from the hyperconnected world of everyday living.

I used to lead a backcountry cooking course for Cornell Outdoor Education. One day in particular, we had all these activities planned. But after our afternoon meal, one student asked if we could just, well, do absolutely nothing. So we spent an hour in silence. Arts and crafts. Sitting and watching the afternoon sun warm the pine needles. Going on a short hike where the loudest sound was gravel crunching underfoot. It was magical. Disconnection with a group, something some students might never have experienced in their life.

The recipe is deceptively simple. Create space for being alone without distraction. Encourage students to dive into themselves. But have an alternative ready, like homework or reading, if sitting in silence feels like too much. Not everyone can tolerate stillness right away. The gateway opens gradually, like eyes adjusting to a dark room.

Self-Insight

Self-insight is the desire for profound understanding of one's inner nature: not only how we think, feel, and behave, but why.

Seven months ago, the person I thought was the love of my life broke up with me. I'd given her everything I had. Poems, songs, late nights coaching each other through our deepest wounds. When it fell apart, I didn't just lose a partner. I lost the version of reality I'd been living in. But in the wreckage, I came to a fundamental insight about my self. For the first time, I saw my false self not as a concept I'd read about in Ken Wilber books, but as the living thing that had constructed my entire experience of that relationship. And ultimately what led to it breaking up as it should have a long time before. The grief cracked something open that no textbook ever could.

We can create conditions for this kind of insight without waiting for heartbreak. Have students create a list of self-mysteries: questions about how they feel, think, or act and why. These can connect directly to class material. Add reflection prompts to your course. Encourage students to take self-experiments based on their learning and see what they discover underneath the surface. Self-insight rarely arrives through lectures. It arrives through the willingness to ask a question we're not yet sure we want answered.

Meaning & Purpose

Meaning is the need to find significance in existence overall. Purpose is meaning for one's individual place in that existence.

In my journaling workshop, there was this girl who felt like she was defined by her work. She couldn't get to the creative writing she wanted to do because of how bad she felt whenever she wasn't doing schoolwork. A familiar trap. She knew there could be more profound meaning in life, one not beholden to the homework-to-grades-to-internship conveyor belt. Perhaps a purpose in creative work she hadn't yet uncovered. My workshop didn't hand her that purpose. But it gave her permission to look for it.

Professors can do the same. Encourage students to reflect on how your class shapes their individual purpose, not just their transcript. If possible, tie course concepts, discussions, and projects to universal questions of meaning. And create space for students to discuss meaning and purpose with each other. Don't hide from "the big questions." Most students are already asking them in their heads at 2 a.m. anyway.

Creativity

Creativity is the human drive to express, solve, or design, whether practically or for leisure.

I used to TA for a cooking class at Cornell, NS2470. Thirty students from all sorts of different majors (CS, Biology, Psychology) came together and cooked dishes each week. Every single one of them walked in with slumped shoulders, tired from the week's work. Every single one left buzzing. My favorite class was the one where they could make their own dish as a culmination of all their learnings. I saw Egyptian Pistachio Cake, Zucchini Noodles and Tilapia, Pumpkin Mac and Cheese, and so much more. The room smelled like cumin and accomplishment. It was a sight to behold.

Fostering creativity means finding the balance between constraining students too much and giving creative-boosting constraints that channel their energy. Encourage students to come up with their own unique solutions to problems rather than replicating yours. And build a growth mindset, iterative classroom culture where the first draft is never the last. Creativity doesn't bloom in an environment that punishes imperfection.

Excellence

Excellence is the drive toward mastery in an endeavor, the hunger to go beyond competence into something that feels like craft.

I've felt this most as a writing tutor for one of my good friends. Over the tutorship, we spent less and less time on the writing itself and more discussing the meta-principles behind what writing actually is and what makes it effective. Hilariously, this brought us to areas far outside typical writing. We broke down what emotions are, the power of relationships, and so much more. He'd write something between sessions and I'd give him comments on it. I've been writing for six years with over 400 articles, but I didn't realize how much I'd learned about writing until that tutorship. Sometimes you don't know how deep the well goes until someone asks you to draw from it.

Creating the conditions for excellence means teaching the meta-thinking skills behind an endeavor, not just the endeavor itself. Help students coach themselves. Gradually increase difficulty as skill increases. And provide evaluative feedback, not just a grade. A letter on a page tells a student where they rank. A conversation about their work tells them where they can go.

Transcendence

Transcendence is the drive to rise above one's self-imposed limits and experience universal love and connection.

I and six Bhakti club members are inside a college apartment sitting in a circle. The week before, we'd been asked to write a letter to God, Spirit, The Universe, whatever you want to call it, about something we wanted answers to. Naturally, with such a big task, I'm called first. I hesitate before speaking. Never in my college experience had I been given the platform to discuss something so deep to my heart. As we shared, something shifted. We stopped being a group of six people and became one person learning more about themselves through their parts. That's how connected we were. An act of true transcendence of one's self boundaries. It tasted like communion without the wafer.

How do we foster this? Psychological safety, first and foremost. Then, dissolving the judging self: rooting more in embodied presence rather than conceptual understanding. And finally, removal of ownership. Nobody owns the experience. Everyone holds it.

Joy

Joy is not pleasure. Joy is delight in an experience's beauty, its finitude, without optimization or a craving for it to repeat.

In high school, my 9th grade friend group set up a competitive survival Minecraft server against our 10th grade friend group. For days my brother and I tunneled through the Nether searching for their base. We found it in the sky and slowly stole diamond gear from their chests, reveling as they blamed each other. Then we paid off one of their teammates to gather them all for a meeting in the sky before we drank invisibility potions and blew the whole thing to bits with TNT. I remember the laughter in the Discord server at the spectacle. Pure, unbothered, cackling joy. An encapsulation of our high school selves and the lessened responsibility that comes with it.

Sparking joy in a classroom means lowering the stakes. Creating an environment of play. Helping students absorb into the environment rather than endlessly optimize everything. Joy has a hard time surviving in a room where every moment is measured.

Initiation

Initiation is the need for graceful, meaningful transitions through life's chapters and seasons: high school graduation, entrance into the working world, becoming a parent.

This is what my Cornell graduation didn't have. A structured setting for reflecting on our last four years. I felt myself wanting it as the days led up to it. I had conversations with my friends about what we learned and hoped for. But I didn't feel it was woven into structure by the school itself. I found myself walking the streets with my fellow classmates on graduation day without really feeling it with them. We had the ceremony. We had the hats in the air. What we didn't have was the moment where someone looked us in the eye and said: you are different now than when you arrived. Let's honor that.

Conscious initiation means creating a structured process in which students are guided to become conscious about the irrevocable transition they are in, whether through journaling, discussion, or ritual. Give tools, expand capacities, and acknowledge the strength it took to make the crossing.

These nine gateways aren't a checklist. They're a constellation. Some professors will naturally orbit one or two. Others will find that certain gateways open the rest. The real question isn't which gateway to start with. It's what's standing in the way of opening any of them at all.

Three Invisible Keys For Unlocking Students' Souls

Uncover Your Own Soul

Here's the uncomfortable truth. We can only bring out students' souls as far as we've brought out our own.

Students can smell it. If we aren't comfortable talking about the things they're wrestling with, how can we expect them to be comfortable talking about it with us? The professor who hasn't sat with their own loneliness can't hold space for a student drowning in it. The one who hasn't questioned their own purpose can't credibly invite someone else to question theirs.

Uncovering your own soul means engaging in the nine gateways yourself, especially self-insight. Without building self-understanding, we won't have the capabilities to foster the other gateways in others. Experience. Reflect. Be vulnerable. Not performatively, but in the quiet, ongoing way that changes how you carry yourself into a room.

Create A Curriculum With Soul Structure

The times soul comes out of students, it can seem like a fluke of magic. It's so natural, so spontaneous. But if there's one thing I've learned from education design, naturalness is often heavily structured.

That seems paradoxical. Until you think about what's actually required for soul to show up. You need a professor with self-understanding, a container built on trust, and triggers that invite the soul forward. In other words, you need structure.

Four practices prove crucial to inviting soul into the classroom. First, a ground rules process that empowers students to define and take ownership of the conditions for safety in their group. Second, games and symbolic expressions that offer students an indirect way to express themselves and meet each other gradually in deeper, more personal ways. Third, a process of reflection and contemplation, whether that's journaling, mystery questions read aloud anonymously a week later, or just five minutes of silence before discussion begins. And fourth, a means of connecting students to each other's souls through dialogue, council processes, or shared storytelling.

This also means unblocking what's stopping souls from surfacing: phones, chronic stress over grades and exams, the ambient hum of social media pulling attention elsewhere. And it means earning systemic permission. How do we get buy-in from other professors and administration? How do we hear out their concerns without activating their defenses? There are no easy answers to these questions, but they must be asked.

Nurture Trust

It doesn't matter how good your curriculum soul structure is if you don't have trust with your students. The skeleton is the curriculum, but trust is the breath that moves through it. Walking into a beautifully designed classroom without trust is like entering a Buddhist monastery with takeout: the environment promotes depth, but you don't have the right relationship to draw it out.

I organized the core of trust into an acronym: I TRUST. Intimacy, Track Record, Reliability, Understanding, Selflessness, and Tailoring.

But it can get even simpler than six words. The entire acronym collapses into one: vulnerability. The daily actions we take with our students and fellow professors tell them whether they can be vulnerable or not around us. Whether they can trust us.

Brené Brown defines vulnerability as the courage to act even when things aren't fully in our control. Living life is the most profound act of vulnerability there is. Whether we like it or not, the vast majority of things we do exist outside of our control.

We can react in a plethora of ways. We can close ourselves off to the world, becoming hermits in huts of our own making. We can exit into the world but with emotional armor that would make King Arthur gawk. Or we can do the hardest thing of all.

We can trust.

We can trust to be vulnerable with our students. To work alongside them, to share our time, energy, and perhaps even our feelings and insecurities, and to hope that our relinquishing of control will not be mishandled.

The Beauty Of Unlocking Souls In The Digital Era

We're living in a strange time. AI can write our essays, short-form content can hijack our attention before breakfast, and the average college student scrolls more in a day than they sit with their own thoughts in a week. The digital era has given us extraordinary tools for connection and, paradoxically, made us lonelier than ever. The soul hasn't disappeared. It's just gotten harder to hear under all that noise.

Which is precisely why this work matters more now than it did a decade ago. The nine gateways aren't relics of a pre-internet era. They're the antidote to a post-attention one. When we create a space for deep connection, silence, self-insight, meaning, creativity, excellence, transcendence, joy, and initiation, we aren't just improving education. We're reminding students that they have an inner life worth paying attention to.

I think about those ten students in my journaling workshop. Pencils moving, foreheads creased, the slow exhale of someone finally putting words to something they'd carried for months. None of them needed an algorithm to tell them what they felt. They just needed a room, a prompt, and the implicit promise that whatever surfaced would be met with care.

That's the invitation. Not to overhaul the entire university system in one semester. Not to become a guru or a therapist or a spiritual director. Just to open a gateway. Just to ask a question that goes a little deeper than the syllabus requires. Just to sit in the silence after a student shares something real and resist the urge to fill it with advice.

The soul doesn't need much. A crack in the routine. A moment where the performance drops and the person shows up.

Maybe that's enough. Maybe it always was.

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