Steiner's teaching that thoughts, feelings and passions break out of the soul as lawlessly as storms break into the sky, unlike the sun's harmonious course.
The Weather Nature of the Soul in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's description of everyday inner life, thinking, feeling, and willing, as weather rather than sunlight: thoughts, affects and will impulses break out of the soul's depths with the same lawlessness with which lightning, rain and storm break into the atmosphere, never with the harmonious regularity of the sun's course. Steiner gave this picture in the lecture Earthly Winter and Solar Spirit Victory, held in Bochum on 21 December 1913 and collected in The World of the Spirit and Its Impact on Physical Existence (GA 150). He adds a sharper claim: these changeable inner forces are embryos, germinal counterparts of the demonic elemental beings that live outside in air, water and fire, and only the Christ, the spiritual sun of the Mystery of Golgotha, brings a sun-like order to them. Mindfulness teachers today use the same picture when children give a personal weather report of their feelings.
The Weather Nature of the Soul names Steiner's contrast between two rhythms: outside us, the sun crosses the sky with unbroken regularity while wind, rain and thunder obey no visible law; inside us, our thoughts, feelings and passions behave like the weather, not like the sun. The soul's everyday life is storm-country, and Steiner asks what kind of sun could ever rise within it.
In Steiner's Own Words
Just as lightning and thunder break in, so human passions break into the soul. Just as no law governs rain and sunshine, so human thoughts break out of the depths of the soul. We must compare our soul life with the changing wind and weather, not with the regularity with which the sun rules our earth. Out there it is the spirits of air and water, fire and earth, that work in the elemental realm and that actually represent the egoism of the earth. Within ourselves, these are the elemental forces. But these changing forces within us, which regulate our everyday life, are embryos, germinal beings, which, only as germs, but as germs, resemble the elemental beings that are found outside in all the vicissitudes of the weather.
What it Means Today
A century after the Bochum lecture, Steiner's picture reappeared, almost word for word, in secular mindfulness training for children. The Dutch mindfulness teacher Eline Snel built her book Sitting Still Like a Frog: Mindfulness Exercises for Kids (and Their Parents) (Shambhala, 2013, first published in Dutch in 2010, with a foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn) around an exercise she calls the personal weather report. A child closes her eyes and asks: what is my weather right now, sunshine, rain, storm, fog? The instruction that follows carries the whole method: the child is not the downpour but the sky that watches it. Snel's Academy for Mindful Teaching has since trained teachers in this exercise in the Netherlands and abroad. Children take to it at once, because anger really does arrive like thunder, uninvited and lawless.
Thalira synthesis: where Snel treats the inner weather as metaphor, Steiner treats it as kinship, the storm in the soul and the storm in the sky being the same order of being at two stages of growth, the inner one germinal, the outer one full-grown. The watching sky the child learns to become is the first faint experience of the sun-nature that GA 150 places behind all weather, within and without. The practice is modest: take your own weather report daily, and notice that the observer is never itself the storm.
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