If you feel called to learn about the themes I uncovered in my doctoral research on spiritually advanced social change agents, I invite you to view the following presentation given at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.
Heaps of gratitude to Kenny Johnson, Phileena Heuertz, A. T. Ariyaratne, and Mona Polacca and their communities for making my research possible!
The dark moon envelops me,
holds me in a sweet blanket of tearful surrender.
Mourning unborn Life,
Roads not traveled,
Lives not shared,
Endings.
The blanket of darkness envelops—
Holds.
Space and time collapse in death,
Energy flows free.
Which door will open?
Which path will unfold?
The grieving of loss beckons the heart to open further—
To feel Death,
and rise in hopeful anticipation of
Birth.
The in-between uncertainty
and its enveloping darkness Potentiate.
Patience—embracing, sitting, Be-ing, opening, loving, mourning.
The dark Goddess holds it all.
Embodiment is no small feat. It is, however, your birthright.
In my view, we get born into bodies as our souls pour into these infamous “skin bags,” but becoming fully embodied is not a given. Even relatively minor traumas or unsupportive primary family environments may halt full embodiment as states of dissociation remain preferable to constant awareness of one’s own pain. This is best seen without judgment because partial embodiment upon birth usually serves to protect the emerging psyche until a fertile environment is present. Disembodiment then becomes a stage of one’s own growth.
So, rather than being an affliction of the “mentally ill” and a state limited to a unfortunate few as most might imagine, I posit that dissociation from one’s embodied experience is our norm. Most of us, especially in Western contexts, live disembodied lives to varying degrees. This means that our society and culture have been built upon and structured from places of human incompleteness. Thus, the Age of Enlightenment and the subsequent gifts of the modern era only just begin to inform how we as humans would best approach our lives, each other, and our collective engagements even though those antiquated and disembodied individual and social habits are what seems to surround us and feel most real. Our past appears as our present, and incompleteness pretends to be fullness.
Think of your current surroundings, including the buildings, social systems, and interpersonal mores, as ancient rather than modern and up-to-date. If you have ever visited a historical site of ruins, you will then have a picture of what I am effecting to portray. We’re living in the equivalent of an ancient Rome or Athens with perhaps beautiful (and often ugly) vestiges of a disembodied past around us. My point is that what we surround ourselves with everyday, including our own inner landscapes, are only partial truths and do not reflect to us the fullness of our humanity. As many have said, we are human becomings rather than human beings.
Why begin the new year with such unsettling news?
I believe that all of us at some point touch into the places inside ourselves that feel unsettled. Often, in a moment of pain, uncertainty, or struggle, a feeling can well up that suggests that the pieces we have put together do not complete the puzzle. Something is felt to be missing or “off.” It can often feel like we are not as well as we might hope, that things are not turning out as we had imagined, or as a deep disappointment. Often, we push these feelings back into our subconscious because they threaten how we have chosen to live our lives, and we cover those feelings with distractions of various kinds—food, activity, and work can all serve to pacify the small but strong voice that feels the pain of living in incompleteness.
In the new year, we are all offered a fresh start to deepen, heal, and grow. I want to reach out and proclaim as loudly as I can from the virtual mountain tops that this state you reside in and have come to know as normal is only a partial truth. Inside of you lies the seeds of radical embodiment, and with those, a full expression of yourself as a divinely human being/becoming. Your pain serves then as a fantastic guide to show you where to dig, open, and explore. And, while pain is well painful, this profound inquiry into your pain is a journey that will lead you deep into your own heart and will illumine your body and ignite the spark of your spirit.
Embarking down the road to recovery from disembodiment has been my most worthy quest. Inviting and claiming radical embodiment has offered me the opportunity to read from the future and live the new world now rather than rely on antiquated and out dated models for human relating and social architecture. It has also brought me into contact with fellow pioneers and visionaries that are dreaming reality into being.
I invite you to join us, find your human birthright, and dance your way into cocreating our shared existence in the collective interawakening. I am happy to guide you in this process if you are curious about your next steps to find your own radical embodiment. Much love and happy new year! May this year be the year that you come home.
Great article in the newest issue of Tikkun magazine! Nine Qualities of the Spiritual Activist by Kabir Helminski
Coming out of the haze of the go-go-go world is both a welcome relief and a critical necessity to those who are profoundly engaged in a worldly mission. As time perceptively speeds up with “round the clock” connectivity capacity, the snail mail days of yore have all but disappeared—along with it the experience of having time to respond. Can you even imagine the days when you might communicate by correspondence delivered by the postal service? As a lover of the art of letter writing, it’s easy for me to imagine living a life slowed down to the speed of molasses and luxuriating in the viscosity of communication slowed way way down. Reveling in that fantasy, I find that the physical tension and contraction in my body begins to unwind and release. My breath begins to deepen and my abdominal cavity opens further to life.
In the face of raw unadulterated technological speed, social and internal pressures mount to encourage rapid response styles. “He emailed me a few days ago, and I haven’t responded yet. I need to get on top of that!” Does this sound familiar? For those that are social change artists—activists, bodhisattvas-in-training, and agents of deep change, your pressures to respond quickly may be even further heightened. Facing the world and those around us in the midst of many crisis/opportunities seems to spawn extra degrees of internal and external pressure to respond and take action. Have you ever thought, “If I could just do more…get in touch with that organization…call that person…connect those people….” Yeah. Me too. In the face of marginalized, impoverished, traumatized, and forgotten beings, human or otherwise, I feel called to use my humanness to respond, even if it means just being present with what is happening around me.
Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with responding quickly, and greater technological capacity comes with many obvious and novel gifts. What I have come to understand, sitting at the feet of great spiritual activists, is that staying in tune with my own rhythm—the beat of my unique drum—is utterly essential. As the world spins itself into a maelstrom of orgasmic frenzy, your unique and indigenous rhythm may become more faint, difficult to discern with all of that background fuzz. Know that it is still there. Behind the go-go-go beat of the world is your beat—steadfast and genuinely you.
Tuning into your own signature rhythm means turning one of your ears inward and listening inside to your own needs, desires, and dreams while you attune one ear outward to the needs of the world around you. Let’s call it “stereo” attunement. Attuning to your rhythm might ultimately mean taking some days off, a vacation, a retreat, or a new direction for your professional and/or personal life. Ultimately it means being able to commit to profound engagement for the long haul. Being a deeply engaged social change agent means dancing to your own beat so you can keep dancing, serving, engaging, and caring for the life of this party to which we’ve all been invited. The world and your internalized notions of it may not tell you to slow down, take a break, or stop, but your own beat will. Your own beat knows you.
Just imagine what engaging from a place of renewal would feel like. Nice, huh?
If we can do anything to revision and refashion the archetypal humble servant for the twenty-first century, let’s sacrifice the archetypes of the stoic martyr and the glorified disembodied workhorse to the alchemical fires of transformation so that we in service can open ourselves to balance and self-love in a harried world. Self-love and balance yield wise responses—the ones we most need and the world craves. I encourage you to find your rhythm and give yourself permission to attune to it—live through it. May you give yourself this gift so that your well-worn dreams of freedom take root and blossom through you into embodied glory.
[Part of a conversation with Phileena Heuertz, Co-Director of Word Made Flesh]
Recent travels, a new volunteer gig, and amazing meetings with exemplars in socially engaged spirituality have me struck with deep tones of sweetness. Struck with deep tones of sweetness? Yes! While the words do not necessarily make sense together, and I find myself nearly at fault for mixing metaphors, those words seem right. “Struck” meaning hit, impacted by, affected by. “Deep” meaning profound, moving. “Tones” meaning essences—a felt presence of a quality of…”sweetness.” Sweetness to me speaks to the intensity of heart connection or heart opening that has been inspired in all of these meetings. I have been deeply and wonderfully affected by the profound essences of heart expression that I have been blessed with in my latest ambulations.
Without tuning out the pain of the world (a daily intake of NPR keeps me abreast of this), learning from spiritually mature social change agents and becoming active in my own small way in social engagement lets me relish in the “what’s good/exciting/inspiring” stuff of our times. As a good friend said to me a few months back, “I’m living the better world right now.” No talk of when we get to that new place of world peace/functionality/empathy/kindness sometime far off in the future or of the post 2012/consciousness transformation worldscape. The new world is happening now—right under our fingertips and toes. People all around you are living as if true freedom existed right now, and they are giving all of us permission to do the same. For every negative conception you have of a people or group, there is another collective turning that feeble expression on its head. Unhealthy societal patterns are being rewritten by thoughtful trailblazers around the globe every minute of everyday. Love as much as you want to! Treat yourself like you treat your best friend! Pretend like that person next to you in line at the market is one of your friends! Do not fret too much—please. Even just a tiny step in this direction can change the cosmos. Yes, I really believe that!
The other week, I was gifted a free session with the Berkeley Psychic Institute. My “reader” reported to me that my heart chakra was only 37% open. I was immediately forlorn. How, after all of this “work” on myself could I still have a heart that is not ready to love completely? My sadness transformed into compassion for myself, and I gave myself credit for that 37% and became aware that I could give myself a little push to express more of my love and gratitude, open my heart with folks I might normally shy away from, and feel what I am feeling as those things arise. My spiritual teachers and spiritual community are an ever-present invitation to do just this, and I am grateful that I have such a place to feel more safe in revealing the never ending folds of my heart.
What does this “new” and “better” world look like to you? What would it be like to pretend as if this world was already real?
As the darkest most introverted day of the year approaches with the winter solstice, I am hoping life offers you some space for reflection on what waking up together means for you. And, I wish you much joy this holiday season in waking up on the “new” side of the bed where every preconceived tired notion is up for evolving and where your heart moves your feet. Many blessings on your journey friend! Let’s wrap each other in our prayers and hold our dreams close.
