Episode 248: Reclaiming your Spirituality

 

Why spirit? Why this? Well, we already talked about our bodies and our minds and this is the thing that resides beneath both of those.

Our spirit is what lives at our core, beyond our body and beyond our mind. Our spirit is what connects us to everything around us, to every other living being to the earth itself, to nature, to the universe. Our spirits are bigger than our understanding and spirituality is likewise so much bigger than just ourselves.

And spirituality has so many different facets and a lot of different practices and a lot of different dogmas and there are many, many, many schools of thought surrounding our spirituality–surrounding our soul, if you want to use that word–what came before our body and our mind in this life, and what lives on after, and how it all connects and who is running the show.

All of those big ideas are not things that I’m going to directly address here in this podcast today. And I am not going to say that one theory surrounding spirituality is right for you. I think that that’s the work that you need to do and that’s the work that I need to do for myself and for my spirit.

You Are In Charge of Your Spirituality

And just as a first sort of introductory idea about this mothering our own spirituality, I want to offer the observation that we often freely give away the responsibility for our own spiritual health to other entities. We give it away. If we’re members of a religion, an organized religion, we can easily give our responsibility for our spiritual health away to our leaders within our churches, to the pastors and the preachers or the bishops to the congregations, to the services themselves.

If we regularly attend church services, we expect to go and have our spiritual health addressed there. That within those walls we will feel a connection to our spirit. Or maybe yoga is your thing, and that’s one of your spiritual practices. It is really easy to give away the responsibility for our own spirituality to something else.

As a starting point for this episode, I need you to understand that you must own this, that just as no one else is responsible for caring for your body and no one else is responsible for caring for your mind.

No one else and no organization and no church and no leader and no spiritual practice or spiritual guide is responsible for your spiritual health. You must own that.

You must reclaim all responsibility and within that responsibility, all of the incredible opportunity and the joy and the fulfillment and the depth and the connection and the peace that comes from owning your own spirituality and beginning to better take care of your own spiritual health.

Does that make sense? Can you look back on your own life or even think about where you are right now in your journey? Does it resonate with you? The idea that you might be giving away some of your spiritual responsibility to whatever you have signed up for or signed on for, that you expect will be helping you with the journey. But in relying so heavily on that other organization or person or guide or set of principles or rules that you might not be as much in the driver’s seat as you hope to be.

Friends, this absolutely resonates for me because I have grown up in a spiritual culture and I, from the time I was young, I learned about my own spirit and that I needed to care for my spirit as well as I did my body and my mind. And I can be so complacent. I can go through the motions of my daily life and never actually connect to my spirit and to my spiritual health and never actually step outside of my body and mind for long enough to pay attention to what’s happening in my spirit.

Three Principles To Help You Mother Your Spiritual Health

And so I want to share three tenants or three principles of owning and mothering our spiritual health that have been really helpful for me lately. And that may ring true for you as well.

Getting Out of Our Own Way

I read a quote today by a spiritual leader Arkan, who apparently has no online presence (as one who is a true spiritual leader might not). The article was by mindbodygreen , which is a podcast and a blog that I enjoy, but the quote was, “To me, what spirituality is really about is one’s capacity to be guided.” And I love that idea.

The writer who quoted him is named Christine Hassler and in that article she said, “Spirituality is really about how much we get out of our own way and allow ourselves to be guided by a higher power, or a God of our own understanding.”

That idea of getting out of our own way really resonated with me. Then allowing ourselves to be guided or to feel connected to something bigger than ourselves.

You don’t have to be deeply religious–or religious at all–to be spiritual. And the three ideas that I’m going to share with you today are ones that I hope will resonate with you regardless of your personal, religious or not affiliations. I’m going to talk about three things today. They all start with “s” to make it easy for you to remember and easy for me to remember.

1. Source
2. Seeking
3. Stillness

1. Source

So let’s start with the first one. Let’s start with source. Source is the word that I want to use to represent the fountain of Divinity. What that looks like for you. This is where we begin to build our relationship with the divine. In that quote I shared in the beginning, “Spirituality is about one’s capacity to be guided”, our source is where we look for that guidance.

For many, that source is named God. For some, that source is Nature. For some that source is Light. That source can be Intelligence, it can be Energy. Recognizing that there is a source of goodness and of peace and of power beyond ourselves and beyond. Our own experience enables us to then get out of our own way and allow ourselves to be guided or connected to a higher power.

Recognizing that there is a source beyond ourselves for power and love and peace and happiness and fulfillment and joy allows us to then know in what direction to begin our seeking (and that’s our second principle: we recognize our source and begin to desire to build a relationship with the divine, to recognize the spirituality within ourselves beyond our body and our mind).

2. Seeking

There exists within us this dimension of spirit that’s so important and so Principle No. 2 is Seeking. I included this one because I think that the desire piece is really crucial to mothering our own spirituality, to taking care of our spirituality. If there is no desire there, then of course we’re not going to do it right. It’s the same with taking care of our minds and our bodies as well. If we don’t have the desire, if we don’t recognize for ourselves the importance of this act of this process, then we won’t do it.

I use the word seeking, first, because it implies desire. Seeking means that we are looking for something that we’re working toward. Something that we’re actively involved in. The process of development.

Reading Meaningful Text

Seeking, for me–in the context of spirituality–includes reading meaningful text to learn more about spirituality, about myself, about my source, about how to build these spiritual connections, those texts or articles or, or different, uh, opportunities to research and to learn.

It can be overtly religious. If you’re Christian, you probably read the Bible as a meaningful text. But they don’t have to be overtly religious.

You can find and seek spirituality in places that simply uplift and inspire and enlighten you.

I’m currently reading “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle (for the second or third time). And it’s a deeply spiritual book that isn’t overly religious.

I also have frequently referred to the book “Essentialism” by Greg McCown as a Bible. I call it my Bible and I keep it on my nightstand along with my Bible and I read it from time to time to just remind myself of these core inner values that are so meaningful to me.

Another book that’s on my list is one that my friend Kim–from Talk Wordy To Me–just sent over to me last week. It is the “You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment” by Thich Nhat Hanh.

I’ll link all of these in the show notes. If you’re interested in diving into some of these meditative texts in your seeking.

But seeking is looking for, reading, researching, and discovering.

Listening to Music

I also love to seek spirituality and seek source through music, and listening to the music of nature.

Sometimes just being out in nature is seeking. For me, it’s taking myself apart, finding some solitude and finding a place where I can be actively engaged in creating connection to my spirit beyond my mind, beyond my body. Getting down to the real core of it all where I feel that connection. For me, having grown up in nature, in the outdoors, it is a natural place for me to resort to.

When I am seeking spirituality, I feel connected to creation and to my part in this big expansive, never-ending universe and–like I experienced on that mountain at Machu Picchu–I can feel all at once incredibly connected and individually understood. Seeking spirituality in nature for me gives me that experience in a way that I can’t find in a lot of other places and this like so many other things is so unique and individual so it takes some time.

It Takes Action and Experimentation

It takes some action–and some experimenting–to discover what it is for you in your seeking that helps you to feel that way. What it is that helps you feel connected to more than just your own mind and body, but also to your spirit, in a way that you’re connected to the world, and to the universe, and to your own source.

I want you to think just in the last week or two, how often you are actively engaged in developing your spirit. Do you have regular daily practices that develop and enhance your spirituality or not and if you don’t, is that something that you would like to include in your life? I believe that it’s vital.

Spiritual practices have more potency and make a bigger difference when we do them with intention.

When we aren’t simply, you know, taking a walk down the street because we have to walk the dog, but we add a level of intention and awareness to it, that we want it to become part of a spiritual practice.

I love Shawn Achor, who’s a researcher on happiness. One of the quotes that I love of his, “Optimism is a daily spiritual practice”.

I love that so much because we could easily be positive and optimistic and not recognize it as a spiritual practice, but the moment that you do, the moment that you call that your spiritual practice, that you bring a level of intention to it, then all of the sudden you create a spiritual practice out of it. You allow it to connect to beyond your body and your mind, but allow it to connect to that spirit within you and your intention behind it makes all the difference. Bringing that presence and bringing that mindfulness into those actions is where that seeking really becomes powerful.

3. Stillness

So now I want to move on to number three which is stillness.

Stillness is where we quiet both the body and the mind in order to access the spirit. This can look a lot of different ways. It can look like meditation, and meditation is probably the most widely recognized form of this deeper connection in the stillness. You all probably recognize that this stillness does not happen by accident.

Life is just not set up in a way that gives us a quiet, peaceful moment to just meditate and to feel that connection to a higher power. We have to create that.

We have to decide that we are not going to do the next thing on our list until after we make place for this stillness, we make place for a moment of pondering, we make place for a moment of prayer, an actual connection to that source, seeking out that source.

This is part of where that mothering comes in because without adding intention and giving ourselves permission to take the time necessary to have this stillness in our lives, it simply will not happen. We wake up and we begin our day, and we go throughout the day and we do all of the things and never quite as much as we think we want to do. And then we go to bed and then we wake up and start all over.

Take Time Out For Stillness

And I think one of the most interesting, I don’t know, bits of wisdom that I have learned in the last few years especially, is that this cycle, the rhythm of our lives, doesn’t ever slow down unless we choose to slow it down. By acknowledging that it is a rhythm, that it is a cycle, that the list of things that we want to do will never be completed. And so it’s okay to not do it all right now. It’s okay to take one step at a time. It’s okay to take time out for this stillness, for this meditation, for this prayer.

I want to mention here, too, that this can take a lot of forms. Of course it would be incredible if we could just sit and quiet our minds and slow our breathing and feel our heartbeat and take this quiet moment to just breathe and be present and access our spirit beyond our body in our mind. But it doesn’t necessarily always look that way.

I already mentioned that one of my very favorite ways to connect to my spirit is in nature and not always sitting on top of a mountain. Sometimes simply taking the dog for a walk or I’ve mentioned in other episodes how I walk my kids to school and then when I walk home I keep my phone in my pocket and I take that time, that 10 minute walk, to bring awareness to my connection.

I recognize that the David Austin roses that are just so beautiful growing on the fence. A couple houses down from the preschool or the beautiful delicate would work on one of the houses that I walk by that must’ve just been hand carved by someone a hundred years ago and how incredible that craftsmanship is.

I feel the breeze or the rain or the sun as the case may be. I listen to my footsteps on the sidewalk and at the same time that I feel so in-my-body and so present on this earth as a human. I can recognize that this isn’t all there is and I can feel my spirit–how it extends beyond my body and my mind through into the eternities and how it connects me to everything around myself, as well as to my source.

In The Stillness You Gain Perspective

And in that moment of stillness (even though I’m walking)–that quiet, because I’ve put away what I need to do for the day and I’m just in the moment with that mindfulness, I can feel all filled up. I can feel like, in that moment, I am where I need to be, doing all I need to do. That’s such a powerful feeling to recognize in this moment. Right now, I am doing everything that I need to do. I am more than enough.

The huge benefits of developing our spiritual life, or the feelings that come along with that spirituality, are love and peace and joy and fulfillment–like deep, lasting, real fulfillment. And those things live in a place–if they live in our spirit–they live in a place that is underneath or beyond what happens with our bodies or our minds. It becomes sort of untouchable.

If we develop our spirituality, then what happens in the here and now of our lives is important, yes, but it doesn’t rock our core. It doesn’t take away our joy or that love or that feeling of fulfillment that we can find deep within ourselves as we exercise and practice and develop our spirituality.

When you approach the challenges and trials and unexpected experiences in your everyday life, from a place of deep peace and deep joy and deep fulfillment, you’re going to always be okay.

You know that it’s all gonna work out and you can approach things that are hard or scary, terrifying, even sometimes with this faith that comes when you understand that you are connected to this source and to enter the universe into the earth and to this power that’s beyond what you can do on your own and you know that it’s going to be okay.

That’s a pretty inviting reason to exercise our spirituality and to develop our spiritual selves, isn’t it? Ever-present peace and joy? I think that we could all use a little bit more of that, friends.

Summary

Here again are my three S’s for mothering your own spiritual health:

1. Source: Find that source, recognize what it is for you or who he or she is and start to build a relationship with that divine.
2. Seeking: Read meaningful texts. Find those words and those people and those guides, those spiritual leaders who resonate with your soul and and seek them out and listen to them and actively engage in developing your spirituality. Spend actual time on this. Try, try some things, experiment with it. Seek for added inspiration. Seek for added knowledge, seek for added understanding.
3. Stillness: Find moments of stillness to quiet your body and mind where you can access that spirit and start to absorb that those truths that you are seeking. You can do this through meditation. You can do it through mindfulness practices. You can do it through prayer. You can do it through gratitude. But you need to do it with intention to bring stillness to the moment. You have to let yourself put down your phone, put down your to do list, put down the dishes, put down that email, put down that next responsibility. Put that child to bed and give yourself this moment of stillness to just feel present and to feel connected.

I hope that this message of taking care of your spirit has resonated with you. I would love to hear your very favorite spiritual practices or things that you’re working on or what you’re trying, what’s working or what you could use help with.

You can head to the show notes that live free creative.co/podcast and leave some responses in the comments.

I would love to have a discussion about how we can more actively be engaged in fostering our spiritual wellbeing.

My Closing Thoughts On Spirituality

I know that this episode is timely and necessary for me because life is busy and it’s so wonderful, and I can easily be caught up in taking care of all of the things that are right in front of my face so much that I forget to take care of what is beyond and underneath that.

When I quiet all of that for a minute, then I can start to access my eternal self that I can get out of my own way and allow myself to be guided by a higher power that I recognize that my life is bigger and more important than just me. That I am a piece of this tapestry, that I’m a thread interwoven and that we’re all connected.

Wrapping Up the Mini-Series on Mothering the Mothers

I want to thank you so much for being here and for listening as I wrap up this mini series, mothering the mothers. I sincerely hope that something in these episodes has touched you and awakened you to how important you are, that we need you to be healthy and that we need you to think clearly and make good decisions and that we need you to give yourself time and peace, to seek and to to develop your spirit as much as your body and your mind.

You matter beyond what you accomplish, what ideas you have, what your family looks like, what your job looks like, how many critically acclaimed anything ever happens to you.

You are important simply because you are a thread in this tapestry. We need you.