Deep and sustained exploration of spirituality was once a total and ongoing way of life. It still lives as an essential and ineradicable part of the fabric of life today, mostly practiced during short but concentrated visits to a retreat center nestled within a pine, fir, and aspen forest in the Colorado mountains, where I fully concentrate on spiritual life and the fruits it bears.
What is the nature of spiritual life and why has it been so important to me? What does it have to offer? What does it entail, require, ask me to be responsible to?
We might start by understanding that spirituality gradually emerges through an investment of time and energy into activities which support the awakening and development of spiritual life.
Spiritual practices range in type and by tradition. As an eclectic free spirit, I have found myself cobbling together a variable assortment of practices which have resonated with my soulful curiosities and intrigues or captured my deep interest in the realm of the subtle energies, what is intuitive, mystical, and sacred, as well as in the realm of what might be called ‘religious ideals’, what is possible, hoped for, emergent in ourselves and our societies, what is evolutionary and transcendent, going beyond our problems, impasses, dysfunctions, and ills.
But that doesn’t quite get at the scope of what it is I do when I enter spiritual life nor why I precisely seek it. Let me try again, broadening what it is I try to convey ...
Spiritual practice allows me to tune in and enter what I’ve called a ‘spontaneous-reflective’ mode (as contrasted to a task-oriented, productive or ‘doing’ mode) which fosters contemplation or engagement in deeper processing and facilitates connection of body, mind, Source, and Spirit.
Spiritual practices coordinate my nervous system, usually bombarded by stress, agitation, and a congestion of unprocessed experiences. They open up and focus the capacity to sense, to feel, to know, linking up disparate channels of interoception and inner knowing. They reconnect and thus allow me to feel again like a whole, integrated organism. They calibrate my energy field: they heal, restore, and align. They offer an inner platform through which broader yet more precise impressions form, such that I may develop insight into important matters: they assist with clarity and discernment, which can guide choices with intelligence. And they can even prompt the genuine realization of desires for reformation, virtue, and ideals, so they encourage emotional maturity and character development. Spiritual practices open up a dialogue between our humanity and divinity and allow us access to wholesome feelings, higher dimensions, and integrated perceptions.
Even if nothing develops, though most of the time something does, it is best to orient to spiritual practice without needy attachment to any certain outcome which creates forcefulness, strain, and inauthenticity in one’s attempts.
The grounds on which I do this are variably Catholic, Buddhist, New Age, Hindu, and even pagan (especially as an expression of my nature-loving ways). I even consider that some of my attempts at self-analysis from a psychoanalytic framework done in self-reflection reaches into spirituality when a certain level of depth or edge of intelligibility is reached so in this case I utilize Western psychology as a spiritual tradition as well.
What is the nature of spiritual life and why has it been so important to me? What does it have to offer? What does it entail, require, ask me to be responsible to?
We might start by understanding that spirituality gradually emerges through an investment of time and energy into activities which support the awakening and development of spiritual life.
Spiritual practices range in type and by tradition. As an eclectic free spirit, I have found myself cobbling together a variable assortment of practices which have resonated with my soulful curiosities and intrigues or captured my deep interest in the realm of the subtle energies, what is intuitive, mystical, and sacred, as well as in the realm of what might be called ‘religious ideals’, what is possible, hoped for, emergent in ourselves and our societies, what is evolutionary and transcendent, going beyond our problems, impasses, dysfunctions, and ills.
But that doesn’t quite get at the scope of what it is I do when I enter spiritual life nor why I precisely seek it. Let me try again, broadening what it is I try to convey ...
Spiritual practice allows me to tune in and enter what I’ve called a ‘spontaneous-reflective’ mode (as contrasted to a task-oriented, productive or ‘doing’ mode) which fosters contemplation or engagement in deeper processing and facilitates connection of body, mind, Source, and Spirit.
Spiritual practices coordinate my nervous system, usually bombarded by stress, agitation, and a congestion of unprocessed experiences. They open up and focus the capacity to sense, to feel, to know, linking up disparate channels of interoception and inner knowing. They reconnect and thus allow me to feel again like a whole, integrated organism. They calibrate my energy field: they heal, restore, and align. They offer an inner platform through which broader yet more precise impressions form, such that I may develop insight into important matters: they assist with clarity and discernment, which can guide choices with intelligence. And they can even prompt the genuine realization of desires for reformation, virtue, and ideals, so they encourage emotional maturity and character development. Spiritual practices open up a dialogue between our humanity and divinity and allow us access to wholesome feelings, higher dimensions, and integrated perceptions.
Even if nothing develops, though most of the time something does, it is best to orient to spiritual practice without needy attachment to any certain outcome which creates forcefulness, strain, and inauthenticity in one’s attempts.
The grounds on which I do this are variably Catholic, Buddhist, New Age, Hindu, and even pagan (especially as an expression of my nature-loving ways). I even consider that some of my attempts at self-analysis from a psychoanalytic framework done in self-reflection reaches into spirituality when a certain level of depth or edge of intelligibility is reached so in this case I utilize Western psychology as a spiritual tradition as well.
My spiritual practices take up different time intervals from short daily activities up to 10-day-long excursions or immersions, which I call ‘pilgrimages’ when I take them under these intents, which almost always dictate I go in solitude and that I, even if I have developed an itinerary, a route, and have scheduled, booked destinations, ‘find my way’ and ‘what the meaning of the pilgrimage is’ along the way. Spiritual life is revelatory disclosing some of the Mystery of Life to us when we engage it.
My spiritual practices include yoga and other contemplative traditions like hiking or cycling in solitude with contemplative music or to quietly sit under a juniper tree to do some contemplative writing in nature. I, at times in my life almost daily, indoors and out, do formal soul-searching through the practice of extensive journaling which promotes self-reflection and builds self-awareness, not to mention creates a vast and useful archive or database of thoughts, impressions, recorded experiences, work-throughs, and breakthroughs, which captures the evolution of the way I understand the life process. I often take visits to sacred sites whether they are landforms in nature or places of worship, retreat centers, or tiny sanctuaries, within which the sacred can be more accessible, places of stillness, beauty, and simple affordances which inspire spiritual life to unfold.
Nature, as I come to grips with what spiritual life has been for me just now, presents itself as an indispensable medium: it seems spirituality is largely and for the most part sustained by immersing myself in it.
This is assuredly revealed by the fact that I took my experimentations with cycling in a contemplative form in my early to mid-thirties to involved extremes in which even ecstatic experiences were opened up as I traversed long hours across varied landscapes, along the length of seashores, across mountain chains, and through lonely, quiet deserts, an activity that put me in necessary contact with something at the outskirts of the ‘everyday’. In its contrasting ‘extraordinariness’, in its ‘fringelands’, I perhaps felt closest to experiencing what in religious terminology, and to a religious devotee, would be called God.
Though I am highlighting and honoring solitude as a mainstay defining the core of my spiritual and self-reflective practices, I have enjoyed and benefited immensely from spiritual communities as well, in diverse forms, such as ecstatic dance groups, hot springs run by fellow nature-loving souls upholding values like simplicity and shared communal life, meditation centers, Taoist gatherings, and yoga studios. Both the activities that like-minded individuals and I practice together in these spaces as well as the fruitful conversations that hatch within these contexts augment the process as we reciprocally encourage our explorations and awakenings.
Relatedly, I need to also highlight the importance of spiritual literature in the development of my spiritual life without which I would not be nearly as enriched or elaborated through direct transmission alone. Books and other media which capture ideas about spirituality and prompt spiritual life are an encoded, preserved form of spiritual community, which have allowed me to eavesdrop on a broad and transhistorical conversation with masters and seekers from all parts of the world, uploading notes from others keen on things I deeply appreciate but only have a hazy understanding of.
So it seems that I am describing the interplay between ourselves and others, and that even though solitude holds a special and critical role in my spiritual life, that I’m never really altogether alone on its quest, but listening equally to Alan Watts and the wind on a ridgeline, holding open to deliveries from my fellow human beings, the products of my own mind, and conversations I am implicitly having with my subconscious and with God. An encounter with an ‘Other’ is required to advance, is requisite to producing something new. Being open and seeking more are qualities which activate vitality and aliveness within spiritual life and make spiritual life grow.
My spiritual practices include yoga and other contemplative traditions like hiking or cycling in solitude with contemplative music or to quietly sit under a juniper tree to do some contemplative writing in nature. I, at times in my life almost daily, indoors and out, do formal soul-searching through the practice of extensive journaling which promotes self-reflection and builds self-awareness, not to mention creates a vast and useful archive or database of thoughts, impressions, recorded experiences, work-throughs, and breakthroughs, which captures the evolution of the way I understand the life process. I often take visits to sacred sites whether they are landforms in nature or places of worship, retreat centers, or tiny sanctuaries, within which the sacred can be more accessible, places of stillness, beauty, and simple affordances which inspire spiritual life to unfold.
Nature, as I come to grips with what spiritual life has been for me just now, presents itself as an indispensable medium: it seems spirituality is largely and for the most part sustained by immersing myself in it.
This is assuredly revealed by the fact that I took my experimentations with cycling in a contemplative form in my early to mid-thirties to involved extremes in which even ecstatic experiences were opened up as I traversed long hours across varied landscapes, along the length of seashores, across mountain chains, and through lonely, quiet deserts, an activity that put me in necessary contact with something at the outskirts of the ‘everyday’. In its contrasting ‘extraordinariness’, in its ‘fringelands’, I perhaps felt closest to experiencing what in religious terminology, and to a religious devotee, would be called God.
Though I am highlighting and honoring solitude as a mainstay defining the core of my spiritual and self-reflective practices, I have enjoyed and benefited immensely from spiritual communities as well, in diverse forms, such as ecstatic dance groups, hot springs run by fellow nature-loving souls upholding values like simplicity and shared communal life, meditation centers, Taoist gatherings, and yoga studios. Both the activities that like-minded individuals and I practice together in these spaces as well as the fruitful conversations that hatch within these contexts augment the process as we reciprocally encourage our explorations and awakenings.
Relatedly, I need to also highlight the importance of spiritual literature in the development of my spiritual life without which I would not be nearly as enriched or elaborated through direct transmission alone. Books and other media which capture ideas about spirituality and prompt spiritual life are an encoded, preserved form of spiritual community, which have allowed me to eavesdrop on a broad and transhistorical conversation with masters and seekers from all parts of the world, uploading notes from others keen on things I deeply appreciate but only have a hazy understanding of.
So it seems that I am describing the interplay between ourselves and others, and that even though solitude holds a special and critical role in my spiritual life, that I’m never really altogether alone on its quest, but listening equally to Alan Watts and the wind on a ridgeline, holding open to deliveries from my fellow human beings, the products of my own mind, and conversations I am implicitly having with my subconscious and with God. An encounter with an ‘Other’ is required to advance, is requisite to producing something new. Being open and seeking more are qualities which activate vitality and aliveness within spiritual life and make spiritual life grow.
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