Spirituality, Religion and Mysticism
Underpinning my therapeutic and teaching work is a deep consideration that there is a greater Mystery - decentering each of us as supreme, and reconnecting us to a greater web of connectivity and existence. I understand spirituality is an experience, not a dogmatic practice or set of ascribed rules. So being spiritual cannot be exclusive to a particular religion or practice. However, I value how religious institutions or spiritual traditions can be a rich source of wisdom, history, ritual, and ceremony.
I encourage you to explore what spirituality means to you. Turn towards what engages the soul and tend to whatever practice, philosophy, or container that enables a connection to what you see as sacred, and worthy of deep contemplation, devotion, meditation and prayer.
You may choose words like God, or Goddess, Greater, the Mystery, the Universe. Oneness. Or to just be with.
Walk the mystical path with practical feet
Cultural anthropologist Angeles Arrien suggests that post-modern life offers all of us a “golden invitation …. to walk the mystical path with practical feet”.
This is truly an incredible phrase, and one I’ve been consciously trying to embrace as a living question. While the word mystical / mysticism/mystic holds a numinous and sacred quality, it doesn’t have to be religious (but it can). The capacity to walk the mystical path predates religion as we know it today.
Mystical describes a non-linear process of thinking or extra-cognition that incorpores the symbolic,sacred, ancestral, contextual, and relational.
To walk the mystical path with practical feet is to value this way of being and seeing with the reality of modern life and through a Western mind that’s values by science, hierarchies and pragmatism. It's not about turn-taking, or doing something this way then that way, but by living in a way that is both-and not either/or.
I've written an article, Walking the Mystical Path with Practical Feet. Being ‘both-and’ in and ‘either-or’ world [hyperlink] if you’d like to read more
