What is Spirituality Anyway?
This was the topic "discussed" at a meeting I attended recently of holistic health care practitioners. I became more and more disquieted by the discussion because it felt to me that much of what it quickly became was an expression of personal pain, fear, and hopelessness from the practitioners, with its "butting heads" and unsuccessful systems to provide health care for both patients and providers.
As I listened to people rush to insert their particular belief system – "prove their point" -and watched sharp egos in panic strive to insure their own conditioned survival – so evident in these "opinions " – I became more and more heartened to watch an evolution in that small conference room as another kind of sharing emerged. It was a simpler sharing of one’s own clinical experience, and a surprising note that emerged, that elements like compassion, attentiveness, unconditional listening, the willingness to be fully present and empathic, and a strange trust in human-to-human, unadulterated exchange are the keys to transcend the current challenges in health care that providers can "own" and keep, no matter what.
An Emerging Definition
I watched, through this shifting exchange, an emerging definition of spirituality as what I believe is the center for integration for all healing, all centering. In fact, we can afford, if all else fails in our lives, to sacrifice anything but our own amazingly indestructible spirits.
We find that out quickly enough when our lives – not our egos – are threatened. Spirit is all there is, has been, and ever will be, for it is who we are and what we are as an original expression of the divine Creative. I am moved to use the word "Creative" rather than "Creator", for the Infinite is a constantly moving, endlessly dimensional work in progress.
Affirming the Imperfect
So much for perfection. Instead the real crisis of our times is to know that our innate spirituality – our willingness to dare to be fully present, empathically listening, letting go of all agenda and conditioning through our free will’s choice and courageous commitment, and share from a place of One – is all we get and all we need and all we can, in so many creative ways, offer to sustain ourselves and support the emerging world we live in.
On that note, I offer a poem I wrote for an Oversoul class I facilitated last year as an inner-journeying guide for you. Please consider, as yu read, how your divine spirit is all that there is, that defines your innate spirituality.
The Free Purpose of Our Lives
Know that we cannot survive without it. It is present in every breath (which means, from the Hebrew, Latin and Greek root from which it comes – "Spirit") we take . . . every moment of our purposely-free lives.
Listen to your emerging Spirit, then. As you listen, it will bring you love as trust, love as clarity, love as innate divine power.
Extending Evolutions
Your life will correspondingly transform. This pain-filled, lonely, violent world will then correspondingly transform with it.
My Center cries in life and death
Against the rhythm of my sweet breath
Fading, rising through each new dawn
In birth, awareness and journeys spawned
My heart sore pressed with each new date
Comes to know they’re all just gates
For choice, and love, and strength above
Beyond, belonging as the dove.