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Who or what do you need to help make sense of – or to experience – ‘the spiritual’ in your life?
For many centuries various religions have provided organisational structures to help followers understand and practice their spirituality – from churches and pews, to rules for everything from patterns of prayer to dress and diet.
But what if you do not follow a particular religion or are trying to develop a spiritual path that makes sense to you? Do you still need these orders and structures and ‘ways of doing’?
And if so, what orders and structures do you use?
In the words of one of our bloggers:
‘spirituality…is a letting go of everything.
And in this state of having let go,
peace, happiness, openness and wonder well up…
Inevitably we bring with us to this state
our own background and experience,
and this influences how we accept the new realization.
Angels, gods, spirits, Wicca,
whatever helps to put it all into context.
Great spiritual thinkers
like the Buddha, Christ, Lao Tsu can help us,
but we must each find our own way.’
How do you find your way?
>Just do it, whatever it is.
Some years ago, I was living in a scruffy shared house in a depressing neighborhood doing an underpaid job which I didn’t enjoy, with long and antisocial hours.
I kept reasonably sane by taking time out in the forest, walking in meditation with a mantra. My high spot of the day was to get back to the house and cook myself a meal. Mediterranean cooking. Good stuff.
My utensils were basic, and one night one of them, my wooden spoon, split in two. I had had it for years, and it was stained and blackened, but when it split I could see from the freshly revealed surfaces that it had been made from beech. So the next available day, I drove out of my way to my favorite beech wood, and under a beech tree I moved aside the leaf cover, dug a hole in the leaf mould underneath, interred the two parts of the spoon, and replaced the leaf cover.
I still can’t say why. It just seemed at the time to be the right thing to do. The spoon had been with me a long time, and we had produced some great meals together.
Was this a spiritual ceremony? I didn’t think of it that way at the time. I was just giving an old friend the chance to return to its roots. (Ouch!) It felt the right thing to do then, and it still feels right now, many years later.
>That’s a really interesting story, Michael. So the spoon was a way to help you get in touch with what made your life meaningful, and when it was gone you felt it was important to respect it for what it had helped achieve.
I wonder – did you ever replace the spoon…?