Dear Reader:
In 2019, I finished writing my book, Grounded Spirituality. I had spent many years exploring the ways that spirituality had often been characterized, and found myself longing to explore other possibilities. I had come to believe that what we had been calling “spirituality” was often something bereft of humanness—a patriarchal construct (Patriarchal Spirituality defined) that confused self-avoidance with enlightenment. It was helpful if your primary goal was to dissociate from the challenges of human life, but limited in value if you sought to heal and transform in the heart of daily experience. At the very least, the more expansive perspective that you garnered had to be integrated with your humanness, in order to be of value going forward. If not, you were at risk of crashing back to earth, with very few practical tools left in your toolbox.
A grounded spirituality is an all-encompassing experience of spirituality that is rooted in, and threads throughout, all aspects of our humanity and earthly experience. We begin and end our spiritual quest within the ground of our being—our embodied humanness—as both interpreter of experience and as our individuated portal to divinity. We don’t look outside our humanness for spirituality, defining spirituality as something formless and pure. Instead, we look deeper within name and form, cultivating a more refined understanding of the divine reflection that exists right in the heart of our selfhood. We honor its sacred qualities and transformative properties, celebrating it as the perfectly constructed laboratory of expansion that it is. With our feet rooted firmly on Mother Earth, and in daily life, we become grounded in reality in all its identifiable forms. We expand outward, and inward, from there.
In essence, Grounded and Spirituality are synonyms. They both mean reality. The more deeply grounded you are in your body and selfhood, the more fully you are here. The more fully you are here, the more spiritual your experience. It is from the depths of your being that you have the greatest access to the everything. What this means, in concrete terms, is that we stop stepping away from the uncomfortable elements of our humanness, and we fully incorporate and live deeper within the often maligned self, understanding and appreciating that the more developed the self is, the more profound is our connection to the spiritual realms. Rather than identifying the self as the enemy of the sacred, we recognize that it is indistinguishable from it, and we embrace, honor, and live through every aspect of the self. Your selfhood: the thing you can truly stand in. The only thing that is truly yours. And the only way you can connect with the world at large and sense, feel, penetrate, this awake universe.
If ever there was a time for us to ground our spirituality in reality, its right now. Even if we accept that the "the spiritual bypass" served a purpose in various circumstances, there is little time for it. Our species is in trouble on a variety of different levels. If so many of us are floating above the human condition, where will we get the human power that we need to effect and co-create change? How will we see our systemic, relational and planetary challenges clearly, and initiate action? What chance will we have of surviving and flourishing as a species if we don’t get our heads out of the clouds? The powers-that-be will do everything they can to maintain the status quo. To shift it, we need billions of sacred activists with their boots on the ground and their hearts on their sleeves, fighting for our individual and collective right to the light. It’s time.
Below, I provide a free copy of my book, Grounded Spirituality, for you. May this book ignite your own explorations and serve you well!
I have divided this book into three parts: The Journey, Here, Why. In an effort to frame and contextualize the perspectives on spirituality presented later in this book, I begin by sharing their origins in my own personal story—my decades-long quest to understand the true meaning of enlightenment. It’s one thing to briefly detach from personal story in the hopes of gaining a different perspective—it’s quite another to deny our storied roots altogether. What will we stand in, then? At a time when our stories have been shamed and shunned in the spiritual community, it is all the more imperative to revive them and make luminous their sacred, transformative properties. The past is not an illusion, as many would suggest. It is the ground of our being, the karmic field for our soul’s transformation, a living vibration that echoes on, the mystery that threads right through our history. Story is where we come from. Story is what roots us in the present. Story is how we arrive at the next place intact. A spirituality without story is like a body without breath. Dead to the world.
Parts 2 and 3 consist of a dialogue between myself and a caricatured seeker named Michael. Although Michael is a ‘construct’—I am not. I speak my truth, as it stands at the moment of writing. And while Michael does not actually exist, he is an amalgamation of various ways of being I have directly encountered—including myself at different stages of my own journey. He conveys a hodgepodge of common spiritual philosophies, past and present. During the writing process, he came so alive for me that I could almost see his form sitting in front of me, or hear the unique tenor of his voice. I would finish writing one chapter, and feel an eagerness to get to the next one—so he and I could sit down and re-connect. And when the book was complete, I felt a real sadness—like I had lost a true and dear friend. Parting is never easy, even when we are parting from a seemingly fictitious relationship.
In the same way as I used personal sharing in part 1 as a tool for critical review and the expression of ideas, I utilize our dialogues in parts 2 and 3 with the same intention: to critically review particular spiritual philosophies, and to forge new ideas to support humanity going forward. I don’t for one moment feel like I have come to a point of completion with many of the ideas presented, but I believe this book succeeds at planting a seed of grounded possibility for humankind. Throughout my journey, I always longed for a spiritual model that was more self-honoring and grounded in the reality of daily life. This book is my best effort to craft that model. It will take time—and a varied palette of contributors—before we can form a more relational and inclusive framework of possibility for humankind. If this book contributes in some small way to that co-creation, then my sacred purpose has been faithfully honored.
As you read this book, I invite you to paint your own picture of possibility. What does a spiritual life mean to you? If you were seeking to find the sacred in everyday life, what form would it take? What, if anything, have you been excluding from your spiritual equation? Have you differentiated your spiritual life from your daily life? Connect in with every aspect of your experience—your senses, your feelings, your body, your mind, your toes, your practical challenges, your relationships, your callings, your sensual nature, your pleasures and your pains. Imagine being alive to it all at one time. What would it mean to unite your spirituality and your humanness? How would you look, move, talk, relate, prioritize, feel? What would it mean to live everything as Godly? What would it mean to be truly here for all of it?