Essence Spiritual Practice

This is Lesson 8: Essence Spiritual Practice. After our brief opening meditation, we use our new authenticity to develop new avenues into our flowering spiritual life. We investigate our spiritual beliefs to create individual everyday practices that support and express our emerging essence. Includes the teaching story ‘Office Fire’. We close with the spiritual practice “Your Spiritual Companions.”

Transcript

Class 8,

Essence Spiritual Practice.

We'll begin with our meditation.

O Holy One,

Please sit here with me,

Breathe life into me,

And I will breathe life back into you.

When we leave the roles of the victim triangle more and more behind us,

And thus live more authentic lives,

We can better create our path into the spiritual realm.

As natural and human as they are,

Emotions and the roles we play come and go.

Underneath,

More constant,

Is our spirit.

Once we begin to be aware of our self as spiritual in nature,

Suddenly and mysteriously everything we do,

Everything we are,

Has the potential to be recognized as it is,

Spiritual.

With this awareness,

From this new viewpoint,

Spiritual practice can be anything and everything we do and are.

Our life can be from spirit,

Energized by spirit,

And in the service of spirit.

We bring spirit to everything.

Spirit brings everything to us.

There is no separation,

Or there doesn't have to be.

We can move toward union.

We realize everyone is spirit,

Everything in the universe is spirit,

Is essence.

Miraculously,

We realize what has always been true.

We wake up to a new reality,

As Eckhart Tolle says in his book A New Earth.

We remember how it has always been and always will be.

After the hard work in the first half of this course,

The work to identify,

Feel,

And express our natural emotions,

Then forge our own path out of the victim triangle.

The reward is the flowering of our spiritual life.

We become aware in a new way as spiritual beings,

More authentically alive,

And we experience ourselves as part of the wondrous creative universe.

We want to actively participate in this,

Our new world,

Our new earth,

Our new heaven.

Spirit is with us always,

We are spirit no matter what.

To develop and maintain new avenues into the spiritual realm,

It is useful to know more about our natural spiritual tendencies and,

Significantly,

Ways that the spiritual is already part of our lives.

It is comforting to remember that as we reach out to the divine,

The divine reaches out to us in order to create and maintain spiritual practices such as meditation,

Prayer,

And art.

It is helpful to be conscious of our present spiritual beliefs,

For they create and sustain our practices.

And they're the foundation for creating new spiritual practices in the future.

Let's look at spiritual beliefs.

How we access our beliefs depends on our awarenesses of how they are already present.

We forget sometimes until we're stunned by a magnificent sunset or melted by a baby's giggle.

Suddenly,

The belief is so present and easy to recognize.

Our beliefs often are quiet in the background so that we need to evoke them with our senses and intuition.

We need to tear away the coverings,

As the poet Rumi says.

Belief systems are waiting to be discovered.

We are called to be explorers.

We search out new belief systems as ancient sailors sought out new territories.

Spiritual seekers ask questions to find their beliefs.

They become spiritual finders.

I find it useful to bring spiritual practice to the beginning of my day in the early morning.

It's quiet in my house then.

I am still close to the unconscious state of sleep.

It is then in the quiet of dawn that I find the inner peace and the outer peace to begin again.

No matter the nighttime dreams just passed or the daytime tasks that beckon,

Here is a sweet possibility.

A few present moments of time and space.

This is the opportunity to enter that spiritual realm where there is no time,

Where there is no space,

And be.

The only thing I can do is be.

Be there,

Be here,

And be present.

The word practice is accurate because practice means to keep at it.

It is not a failure when a thought appears.

It is not a relapse when a sound disturbs me.

I know my mind and distractions are inevitable.

That's what the mind does.

Thank you.

Back to meditation.

Return.

Return again.

Watch my breath.

Say my mantra.

Experience my abdomen rising and falling.

Again.

Notice my breath coming in and going out.

Whatever it takes.

Whatever brings me back to who I am,

Sitting there.

Breathing in,

Breathing out.

Practicing.

The Buddhists remind us to practice for the day of our death.

We breathe in,

We breathe out.

Preparing for that moment to come when we breathe out and do not breathe in.

I'd like to share a story that I call Office Fire.

The path to spiritual practice can appear unexpectedly.

In fact,

A reliable sign of spiritual authenticity is mystery.

Some years ago,

My grief counseling home office mysteriously caught fire.

I was upstairs and smelled smoke.

I rushed down into my office and found a wall in flames.

I closed the door,

Got my wife and our children out of the house and called the fire department.

I sat in despair on the curb across the street waiting for the fire trucks to arrive.

I watched smoke pour out of my office windows.

I was consumed with feelings,

Love for my family and relief and gratitude that none of them had been injured.

Life over my books,

Papers,

Furniture and gifts from clients and workshop participants burning.

Anger at the unknown cause of the fire.

I was anxious and fearful about what the extent of the damage would be and how I would pay for the repairs.

Though I didn't know it then,

Sitting there on the curb,

I was in a state of shock and prayer.

This was a crisis that brought me to my knees there on the curb.

A crisis that challenged and changed my conception of my professional counselor self and myself as a father and husband.

For me,

It was purification by fire.

My tears burned away old patterns and beliefs about myself,

As eventually I began to find a deeper sense of purpose about my life and work.

When I recovered from the shock of the fire,

I felt and expressed my anger,

Grief,

Sadness,

Fear and love to my family and friends.

As the chaos and disruption receded behind me,

I found a new clarity.

I felt the tender and fierce love for my children and my wife and the grace of my work in the emotional and spiritual realms.

The expression of these natural emotions had scoured out a path to my soul,

Bared my soul.

I knew I wanted to live close to my soul,

My essence,

And the counseling profession felt old to me,

Outdated.

I was overwhelmed by the multitude of stories my clients were telling me,

All that drama.

I wanted to live in the realm of spirit and to provide spiritual care,

Caregiving as my work in the world.

I walked slowly and painfully along the path out of the victim triangle and left behind the familiar but outworn role of grief counselor,

Of caretaker,

Into the new territory of living and working as a spiritual caregiver.

Now I can say,

Yes,

The fire in my office was a positive,

Transformative event.

It helped me hear a still small voice inside,

Whispering to me that counseling was no longer my profession.

I now understood that when people came to me for counseling,

They brought me their broken hearts and wounded spirits.

I needed to learn how to meet them in the deep wound of those soul and spirit places,

How to care for this part of them.

To do so with integrity,

I needed to develop more of my own spiritual life.

I had not been paying attention to this still small voice,

So it had to grow louder to get my attention.

Eventually it burst into flame.

I felt scorched.

I was apprehensive leaving a known career and venturing into unknown territory,

But I felt more alive than ever.

Ultimately,

I had to listen to my inner voice.

In two months,

I flew to California and began studies at the University of Creation Spirituality.

Soon,

I discovered the riches of the world's wisdom traditions.

I realized I wanted to be ordained as a minister.

I entered a parallel program at an interfaith seminary.

In both programs,

I was exposed to many new spiritual practices.

A teacher told a story of the Hindu sage Ramakrishna.

When he was asked how he felt about his spiritual practice,

He replied,

I feel like a fish released from a pot into the water of the Ganges.

Some spiritual practices are private,

Solitary meditation or prayer,

Use of a mantra or the rosary under our breath.

We can imagine God or the divine inside us,

Beside us,

Or a field of white light around us.

Some practices are public.

When we sit with others in meditation,

March in protest,

Serve food to the hungry,

Pray together in a church,

A temple or a mosque.

Any form of spiritual practice deepens us as we wake up to change inside and out.

This sharpens the conviction,

The deep knowing,

That we are already that which never changes,

The eternal.

For me,

Spiritual practice is like sitting under an endless waterfall that cleans and washes me,

That melts away layer after layer until more and more of my essence is revealed.

We'll close our class with a spiritual practice called Your Spiritual Companions.

Sit in a place of rest and silence.

Imagine that beings approach you,

Beings that become identifiable as they come closer.

They join the deep silence and gather around you gently and serenely.

They smile and nod their heads with quiet greetings to each other and to you.

Slowly,

You understand that these new companions are ancient adepts,

Spiritual teachers,

Saints and sages from long ago.

They are here to bring their wisdom and love to you.

They softly mill around you.

Some make slow and gentle gestures of peace and others offer graceful,

Quiet blessings.

Some sing or chant softly.

Others simply stand quietly near you,

Elegant,

Calm and loving.

You realize they are present in your life now and always as tender and supportive spiritual companions.

Thank you.

I'll meet you next time for Lesson 9,

Essence,

Meditation,

Prayer and Art and some new practices including an art practice.

Reviews

Jacob - Hello again. Spiritual companion in the journey of life upon this planet earth.
Thank you. Thank you for your guidance and sharing.
Orly.
Israel

Profoundly beautiful and meaningful. Many thanks for sharing Jacob 🙏🏼🌿☮️🌹

Very enjoyable plenty to think about too. Thank you.

This is so beautiful and touching. Thank you so much for sharing your story. It came at a perfect time and it spoke to me. Blessings.