This is a metaphoric rendering from her subjective experience of what an integral spirituality might feel like.
Read the whole article.Integral Spirituality
Integral spirituality is the experience of a Sacred, embodied, evolutionary “now”, speaking through us in multiple voices. It incarnates all facets of our lives, inviting past and future into one moment. Integral spiritual practice, then, seems to be a consummate, persistent inquiry of many shades and shadows extending throughout life. Though our assumptions about reality restrict and bind us, they also protect us from tumbling permanently into those amazing states into which we “peak”, but do not yet have the energetic capacity to live in consistently. As the formless universe awakens to itself through form, like a sleeping child, our incarnated being begins to know the Sacred as the Sacred simultaneously knows us.
The beauty of this day awakens within me. The ocean tides in my eyes wash over my cheeks with the surprise glimpse of the elegance of the blue from which the sun arises, spilling its kisses onto the shimmering moss-filled branches in my back yard. I arise into the practice of the day, which calls me through its contours, finally, into the night.
I spend little time sleeping even though the night of sleep and dream is the other favorite part of my day. There is that small window of time between the night and the day that is so liminally inviting; the practice of the night calling me into the day and the practice of the day calling me into the night.
Lying in impending slumber I am aware of the gradual decreasing of my bodily rhythms. I witness a lightness of mind and a deepening of the heaviness of my body; the room lights up through closed eyelids and feelings of love course through every cell in my body. In time the body fades away. A dream eventually arises in my field of sight. As I watch it, fully alert, I feel no need to alter it in any way. This incarnated fleshy soul relaxes more deeply as the lucidity drifts away and on this night, for a while outside of time, there is nothing but Awareness.
A wispy dream begins to formulate as this borrowed body begins to arise into the consciousness of the morning practice. This lucid dream becomes so enlivening that even though Awareness knows it’s a dream, it is as real as a boulder in a stream. I have to ask myself, “Am I really dreaming, or am I actually awake”?
This is a prophetic dream. I just watch with ease and delight. I feel my body senses awakening as my dreamy state becomes diffused and wispy. Awareness of my soul infused body arises in full bloom. I sit up on the bed, and feet touch the floor like every other morning, but Awareness has something else in mind this morning. Awareness remains watching Itself dream as I stand shaking the sleepiness out of my eyes. I shudder with disorientation. Am I awake, or am I asleep and still dreaming?
Living fully into our earthly personhood as we “peak” into the transcendent, two prominent, implicit questions seem to be “Who am I?” and, “Who am I not?” Our embodied, immanent experience is with us in awareness from the day we are born. How can we wake up in consciousness to the everyday sacredness we hold within our flesh, skin, heart and bones, and unite it with the transcendent within which we are coming into being?
A question that arises in more comfortable times is “Who am I?” Steeped in the confidence of our own incarnate measure of knowing, there seems to be no other truth. “This is who I am!” In this full exploration of our knowing, we envision everyone else as having, or needing to have, these same beliefs. “Yes! This is the way the world works”!
But inevitably, a disorienting dilemma arrives; we tremble, wondering how we can survive this torturous and ghastly occurrence. We have no way to make sense of this experience. We flail, squirm and wish we could do something to get out of this agonizing space. Our assumptions and beliefs do not make sense any more. There is a discomfort in every cell in our bodies, for our beliefs are not large enough to make sense of the anguish we feel so deeply. Mind numbing fuzziness creeps into our ordinarily cogent mind; the simple task of making a “to do” list seems impossible; let alone the capacity to carry out a plan. We find ourselves living suspended in this liminal space where the being we once were no longer makes sense, and the being we are yet to be, has yet to emerge.
It may take a day, a week, months or even years; be it abrupt or gradual; the perturbation triggers the necessary neural connections to grow throughout the body, to meet, and to shake hands with one another. At that juncture, the entire world of belief and assumption expands to make sense of our suffering and to relieve the disorientation of the dilemma. With a gasp, we suddenly see who we are not… and, it is the person we used to be before the disorienting dilemma! The next investigation comes into view; “If I am no longer that person, then who is this new self that I seem to be?”
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