• This and That

    • February 7, 2019 7:20 am

    Dearest Readers,

    The other night I was getting ready for bed with my 7-year old nephew who was visiting for the weekend and we had the most profound conversation while brushing our teeth in front of the mirror.

    “Isn’t it amazing how we can look into a flat piece of glass and see ourselves doing the exact thing that we’re doing right now in perfect clarity?” I asked him.

    “Yeah!” he replied with delight, “And how do our eyes even see everything?” he asked with genuine amazement.

    “I don’t know!” I exclaimed.

    “And who even invented words?” he went on.

    “I don’t even know!” I replied.

    “And how is this flat glass,” he said, motioning to the mirror, “Made from sand? How do you heat sand and get glass?”

    I laughed and shook my head. He ran his electric toothbrush through his grinning mouth. We were both in a state of awe about How Things Come To Be.

    What a joyful state. Taking time to experience this kind of childlike wonder is one of life’s great pleasures. It is truly a spiritual experience.

    As an interspiritual person, I draw my inspiration from a number of traditions to get that kind of joy. One is astrophysics and I am a big fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and television host, and am currently reading his book Astrophysics For People in a Hurry. It is full of hard-science facts like, “Every one of our body’s atoms is traceable to the big bang,” [p.33] and humble admissions such as “astrophysicists have no idea how the cosmos came into existence.”

    [p.32, p17]

    In Tyson’s broad-minded view, “accepting our kinship with all life on earth is a soaring spiritual experience.” (Cosmos, Episode 2, 27:25)

    I also follow Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk and brilliant spiritual teacher whom I had the great pleasure of meeting at St. Benedict’s monastery in Snowmass, Colorado. (As I write this, Fr Thomas is very close to death.) He, too, is a lover of science and feels strongly that religion has to listen to science because science is giving us up-to-date information about who and what God is. By Keating’s definition, God is “Is-ness”.

    Yogic philosophy also informs my spirituality. I teach yoga and bring the spiritual teachings to my classes as well as sharing the physical practice. This weekend I will be leading a workshop called Yoga, Meditation and Self-Realization. Self-realization is waking up to who we really are. “We are stardust brought to life,” writes Tyson [p.33]. Our very essence is Cosmic. Whatever you choose to call that Essence, be it God or the Universe or All, It is the very nature of who we are. I Am That.

    But even though I Am That, I still have to be this human being. I still have to be Celia on a daily basis. I am a person with a busy mind and an imperfect body. Self-realization, or enlightenment, in my view, doesn’t mean sitting on a cloud. It means understanding that even though we may not be our busy minds and imperfect bodies we nevertheless have to live with them both.

    How do we do that? How do we hold both truths that we are human and we are this Cosmic Oneness?

    It takes practice. And willingness. It’s easier to shut down the truth of who we are and just grit the teeth and get this business-of-being-human over with. But look how much we’re suffering. When we bring the reality of our inter-connectedness into our individual realities our perception will change. If we are not separate from one another or from the Creative Force of Life then why would we ever hurt each other? We would only be hurting ourselves.

    “How do our eyes even see everything?” When my nephew asked that question with such sincerity and openness, he was in a state of wonder. He was also self-realizing. There is something else going on here. We are participating in an astounding phenomenon we call Existence. And we are not doing so in isolation from one another. The more we awaken to this truth, the deeper our human healing will be.

    From the fires of love,

    Celia

    Spiritual Bushwhack

    • July 27, 2016 3:27 pm

    During a recent Centering Prayer retreat at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, I ventured forth on an afternoon hike, scrambling up a steep cliff to check out some rock formations that had enticed me from the ground below.

    After exploring the ancient outcrop where birds nested and faces appeared in ghostly patterns, I made my way down the steep incline in the mid-afternoon heat. As I got closer to the bottom I found myself in the middle of a dense thicket of scrubby trees and realized I had no choice but to make my way through it to get out. This is when it hit me: the Spiritual Journey is a bushwhack.

    Maybe you’ve been there yourself? It goes something like this:

    You are in the thick of it and you can’t see the path and the branches are in your way and you’re getting scraped and scratched and you just want it to be over.

    But it’s not over and you’ve got a long way to go before you get to the clearing. So the only thing you can do is be where you are as you move each branch out of your way, carefully avoiding the thorny and prickly ones, crouching down low to avoid poking your eyes out, pulling up your pelvic muscles to support your legs as you take each tortuous step, one at a time.

    There is no rushing this.

    And you’re parched because you didn’t bring water (you didn’t want to carry it) and you’re bleeding a little from the thorns and it’s hot and you wonder if you’re going to die. But you don’t die you take another breath and move the next branch and then… you’re out.

    You’re out and you’re grateful. So you turn back to look at where you’ve come from and give thanks.

    Now you’re safe and you walk on the clear path for a while and you meet a friend who was smart and stayed in the lowland and you smile at each other with recognition but you don’t stop. And then you come to the crick and you wonder if you have the energy to jump it and you do. And you’re still not home so you keep coming back to each step because you are not really there until you get there.

    And when you do get there you rest because tomorrow… you will go again.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: May we all support each other no matter where we are on the path.