Dear Friend: I devoted a few years to writing my book, Grounded Spirituality. I consider it to be one of my satisfying accomplishments. Here is an excerpt from the book’s preface written in 2018. The message feels even more imperative right now…
Grounded Spirituality Preface: A Spiritual Imperative
We are a magnificent species. Endowed with remarkable gifts and abilities, each of us carries a profound and luminous purpose at the core of our being. Each of us is here with an unlimited bounty of treasures to bring to the world. This extraordinary human birth, this powerful physical form, this uniquely nuanced personality, all the threads and strands of our consciousness—are not cases of mistaken identity. We are not accidental tourists on this planet. We are here because we have a sacred offering to bring. We are here because we are intrinsically valuable and wholeheartedly worthy. We are here because we are needed here.
And, at the same time, we are at war with ourselves. It’s a nasty, insidious war, one that has left few of us unscathed. Somewhere along the way, many of us became separated from our authentic humanness. We became fractured, adrift, severed from what is real. We moved further and further away from the inner wells that nourish us. Our self-alienation is now bleeding out everywhere we look, showing up in the forms of: misplaced aggression, meaningless materialism, psychotropic drug dependency, a perpetual dishonoring of the Divine Feminine, a lack of reverence for the earth that breathes us, and a blatant disregard for those humans we share a planet with. As brilliantly as we have excelled and evolved on a techno-logical and virtual level, many of us are still at war with our humanness. We are still not at home in our own sacred skin.
In the throes of this estrangement, it becomes difficult to see through to its source. It is easy to imagine that our self-alienation is caused by something outside of us. But make no mistake—most of this madness is a direct reflection of our unhealed and misaligned inner worlds. We are manifesting our individual fragmentation everywhere, and it has now reached a stage of dangerous perversity, threatening our very existence as a species. There is no time left to distract from the core questions of our lives. The present state of the world requires that we dig deep, and get to the root of our fracture. World events have made it perfectly clear that we can no longer find our answers independent of the self, itself. There is real work that must be done now, within each of us, to right this earth ship and to bring us into alignment. All self-avoidant flights of fancy must be grounded until further notice.
At the heart of this war is our fundamental amnesia as to who we are and why we are here. That is, what is our purpose here on earth? What does it mean to live a life of meaning? What is it to be a self-actualized species? What ways of being will bring us together, and into co-creative alignment—with ourselves, with each other, and with the natural world? What does it mean to be fully conscious, for this entire human experience? What is it to be fully alive? What is REAL spirituality?
To answer these age-old questions—we have often relied on systems of belief. This has taken manifold forms across the globe: world religions, scriptures, self-proclaimed masters and gurus, Father God in the sky, and a whole gamut of teachings and methodologies. With unrelenting determination, we have sought many of our answers outside of ourselves. And throughout the course of 2000+ years, these systems haven’t managed to heal our fundamental divide. They may have served limited purposes, but they have not remedied our fractured awareness. In fact, many have made our fragmentation more pronounced and taken us further away from a healthy wholeness. One thing has become certain: If we continue to look for our answers and direction outside of our embodied experience—we will not find our way home.
It is time that we looked in another direction—right at the heart of our humanness. Not out there—in the alleged wisdoms of others—but deep within our own uniquely constituted human blueprint. Not the self-reflective brand of looking within that is confined to our thinking and rational mind, but the one that integrates every aspect of what we are into the equation: our emotional bodies, our flesh temples, our intuitive knowings, and yes, even our often misunderstood ego-self. I am not talking about a narcissistic honoring of the self—I am talking about a healthy and reverential regard towards our manifold components—in the full spectrum of what we are. Deep within our brilliant natural-born selfhood lie the answers as to who we are, and why we are here. We don’t just have those answers—we actually are those answers. They make their home at the heart of us, continually feeding us information about our path and purpose. We just have to learn to attune to the subtle intonations and intimations of our inner knowing. We have to learn how to recognize and honor our inherent wisdom. We carry the information we seek.
This perspective runs counter to the culturally embedded tendency to diminish and desacralize the self. If we weren’t born ‘sinful,’ we were born histrionic (women) or violent (men). We were born allegedly wild, and the only way to contain our unstoppable life-force was to condition and repress the self, making us dependent on religious institutions and marketing constructs to frame our lens on reality. When we are in a weakened state of fragmentation, it is easy to be subjugated. If you are not standing in the strength of your own embodied intactness, you will invariably seek a sense of wholeness from outside systems. You will have no other choice but to look to them to direct your path and purpose. Someone else’s version of God, someone else’s idea of truth, someone else’s idea of where to spend your money, someone else’s version of purpose, and someone else’s idea of your inherent worth.
It is time to put an end to this delusion. It is time to restore power back to the individualized self and to see it for what it is—as the only authentic course in miracles. Far too many of us are spending our precious lives apologizing for our wondrous humanness. It has been systemically and collectively shamed—and somewhere along the way, we bought into it. Yet, the truth is—we are no mistake. We are a benevolently intended miracle in process, each here with a uniquely constituted sacred purpose residing in the bones of our being. Our life’s work is not to shame and shun our magnificent selfhood—it is to celebrate and embrace it. It is to plumb its depths for encoded information as to who we are and why we are here. It is to embody and integrate all of the gifts and callings that we came into life to manifest. This is how we regain our sovereignty and how we evolve as human-beings.
Before we can identify our reasons for being, we have to arrive here, in the most inclusive sense. If we are disempowered, distracted, dissociated, or in any way fragmented—our experience of the here, now, will be intrinsically limited. And through that limited lens, we can only access a tiny splinter of possibility for our lives. We can only see the whole picture—and actualize the full range of our destiny—to the extent that we are, ourselves, whole.
In order to truly arrive here, we must first acknowledge something that the powers-that-be often want us to forget. That we are all wounded. That we are all trauma survivors (to one degree or another). That we all long to be healed. The age-old established structures that were built on a maligned sense of self—are dependent on us forgetting this. When we focus on our own healing, it severs their reins of control. It empowers our voice. It strengthens our intuition. It reminds us that our hunger for personal meaning cannot be satisfied by religious edicts, media sound-bites, or substitute gratifications. Our buried wounds and feelings keep us fractured and easily manipulated. Healing them brings us back into a strong, stable and rooted selfhood. Once there, we can no longer be controlled, and we begin to see more clearly the ways that all of us—even those in positions of authority and power—have been imprisoned by a divisive consciousness. It may have served some of us on certain levels, but it has served none of us from the perspective of a wholly integrated human-being.
The truth is that we have been denying our woundedness for centuries, and it has only made things worse. We are pretending all is well, while stockpiling our grief and anger. Denial has trapped us deep within our woundedness. A few more generations of unacknowledged trauma, and we will all be lost at sea. The weight of our undigested baggage is making us mad. Because we all know where the unresolved material goes—back into destruction. It builds into a cache of weapons that turn inward against the self, or outward against others. It is imperative that we clear the trauma stockpile before it reaches a tipping point where we no longer care about our impact on the planet, or each other. We must address this at the root. Healing is the only thing that can save us. Time’s up, in more ways than one.
Write with me beginning April 10th!
You feel the call to write. You feel it there, below the surface of your daily life, demanding expression. You don’t know where the call is coming from, but you can’t quite turn it off. You know there is something in there for you—a healing, a spiritual path, a great creation, a way to finally say what’s on your mind. Something that wants to awaken you or others. Something that wants to come alive. Something abundant and beautiful. Something true.
Yet you can’t quite get it out of you. You either begin and then retreat, or you can’t begin at all. You delay, deny, distract. Perhaps you feel afraid of its intensity, its honesty, its impact on your emotional life. Perhaps you are overcome with self-doubt, resistance, perfectionism and shame. Or you can’t quite figure out how to integrate it into a busy daily life. It seems impossible to create the space to just write. At the same time, you are simply not willing to deny the call any longer. You are tired of burying it. You want to open the gift and see what’s inside. You want so much to give it life.
If any of this describes you, then Writing Your Way Home is for you. An affordable 6-week on-line course that supports your calling to write, the course begins on April 10th at Soulshaping Institute. Join me!
When you walk through the door to your calling, you walk into yourself. Blessedly buffered from the madness of the world, your calling filters out those relationships and energies that undermine your expansion. Infused with vitality and a clarified focus, new pathways of possibility appear where before there were obstacles. Life still has its challenges, but you interface with them differently, coated in an authenticity of purpose that sees through the veils to what really matters. If writing is truly your path, it is a spiritual practice that will help you to make sense of yourself and the world. It will transform you and deepen your relationship to the moment. And like any true spiritual practice, the quest for perfection is both insignificant and impossible. The gateway to divinity opens when we surrender to the call, whatever form it takes. How it is perceived by others- and that includes those parts of us that are self-critical- is of no consequence. Just write, and the act of creation will bring you home.
Quotes of the Week
“You can’t transmit to a faulty receptor. This is as true in the technological world as it is in the realm of human relationships. If you are trying to get heard by someone who can’t hear you, your signal will inevitably crash. Whether it’s because they don’t have the listening skills, or the interest, or the necessary bandwidth, you will find yourself feeling frustrated time and again. Sometimes, you will have the good sense to take your transmission elsewhere. But that’s often not the case for those who grew up with relationally unavailable parents. In many cases, they find themselves habitually drawn to unavailable listeners. Their frustration feels a little like home, and—without realizing it—they are locked inside of an impossible quest for attunement. In other words, they keep going back for more in the hopes that they will finally feel heard. Unfortunately, they are looking for listening in all the wrong places. And holding themselves back. Better to transmit to a functioning receptor. Better to turn towards those who can receive you with an open ear. You deserve nothing less.”
~
“I often hear people say that anger is not the real emotion. That below it is always grief, or sadness, or some other feeling. This is sometimes true, but it’s been my experience that it is not always true. Often our primary emotion is anger, and it signals that we have been violated in ways that matter. It’s as real as real gets. Imagine yourself as a perfect circle. You are intact. Now, imagine yourself being violated by someone, or by something that happens to you. You become angry. Now you have a choice. You can express it, if possible, thereby preserving the integrity of your being. Your circle is still intact. Or, you can bury it, and watch as it undermines the integrity of your beingness. If there are too many dents in your beingness, it becomes very difficult to function healthily in your life. You end up hobbling through life as a dented circle. The only way to restore your integrity, is to push that dent back out. Not violently, unless self-defense is necessary, but assertively, expressively, with vigor. In other words, you own that you are angry, and you take action to release and express your rightful rage. Anger is a sacred force when it is honored authentically, without needless destruction. It is a legitimate emotion that signals that you have been violated. Don’t carry it, bury it, or ferry it from place to place. Express it.”
~
“You don’t measure love in time. You measure love in transformation. Sometimes the longest connections yield very little growth, while the briefest of encounters change everything. The heart doesn’t wear a watch—it’s timeless. It doesn’t care how long you know someone. It doesn’t care if you had a 40 year anniversary if there is no juice in the connection. What the heart cares about is resonance. Resonance that opens it, resonance that enlivens it, resonance that calls it home. And when it finds it, the transformation begins…
Treasure yourself, Jeff
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More and more I am puzzled by the emphasis on the Divine Feminine....
Where does the Divine Masculine fit into this picture?
Sincere question.