Everyday Spirituality

Unlikely spiritual leader?

Brand – voted 2011’s Sexiest Vegetarian – is an artist, a creative performer, fan of Transcendental Meditation and yoga. In his Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman Brand talked about how his spirituality helps him to expose the illusion of separation that we live under. He said he is seeking a ‘different narrative’ that is in line with our needs as individuals and as a planet.

Unlikely leaders?

Although worlds apart in many respects, these are two men simultaneously on serious spiritual quests for what unites humanity beyond the mere momentary flashes of happiness that materiality seems capable of offering.

It is people like Carr-Gomm and Brand who perhaps between them can come up with that ‘different narrative’, which might speak more meaningfully to people about their relationship with each other and the planet. My research shows they are certainly not alone, and many people today are busy pursuing their own spiritual journeys in an attempt to connect to something deeper, more meaningful and more magical than our often hollow world appears to offer. But these everyday people I speak to don’t necessarily have the influence or leadership opportunities to promote that search more widely. Indeed they very often keep their thoughts and ideas quiet, for fear of being labelled by people who don’t understand.

Russell Brand, of course, has had many labels thrown at him over the years, and would appear to have no fear of them. In an interview with the BBC earlier this year he was quoted as saying ‘I don’t mind having a reputation as a serious and spiritual person. I think that would be a nice reputation to have’.

I think that would be a nice reputation for him to have as well, and I think he is starting to build it – through things like his address to the Home Affairs Select Committee on drug rehabilitation, his role as patron for Focus12, his appearance with the Dalai Lama in Manchester Arena, not to mention his headline-grabbing obsession with yoga. Brand has the potential to step up as one of the twenty-first century’s most unlikely spiritual leaders.

He may have annoyed a lot of people over the years and done many things which might be considered inherently un-spiritual (which he describes with candour in his book). But his is a very high profile story of the way in which many thousands of people today are finding that a turn to the spiritual can fit very comfortably alongside and within the materially obsessed world we now live in. And these are the sorts of stories which have the potential to build momentum towards the unveiling of that ‘different narrative’. But we need credible leaders to build that momentum, leaders like Brand, and Carr-Gomm, who aren’t afraid of labels. Unlikely leaders perhaps, but in an age where traditional authority figures seem to be failing us, leadership has to be found in different places. Russell is passionate, eloquent and witty when he talks about his spirituality; he is also an Essex boy who many people feel they can relate to.

So, back to where I started. I’ve finished ‘My Booky Wook’ and now need to find something to fill the gap which is always left by the conclusion of a good read. Perhaps I will have to buy ‘My Booky Wook 2’ which continues the saga of Brand’s search for the contentment that fame can’t quite grant. Rumour has it ‘My Booky Wook 3’ is underway, which deals with the Katy Perry years. Personally, I look forward to ‘My Booky Wook 4’ which I like to think might start to explore Russell’s ‘different narrative’; and that would turn his autobiographical journey from the more ridiculous side of celebrity, to the sublime possibilities of a more spiritually enlightened world for all.

Waiting for take-off!

Thank you to everyone who came along to the book launch. Professor Charles Emmons and Professor Steve Pile blew me away with their very kind words, we had some lovely wine and I even sold a few books.

What more does a book launch need!

Thank you to everyone who attended the ‘virtual book launch’ earlier in the year to mark the publication of my book ‘Everyday Spirituality: Social and Spatial Worlds of Enchantmnet’. I am now delighted to be able to advertise the real thing. So if you happen to be in York that weekend do come along and join us for a drink…

Magic moments

I love it when a book stops me in my tracks and demands 100% attention from cover to cover. So it was with my unlikely holiday read this year. I stumbled across Philip Carr-Gomm and Richard Heygate’s ‘The Book of English Magic’ at the airport on the way out to a week in the sun. This book became my companion by the pool, on the beach and in the bar for my early evening ice cold beer. For anyone with an interest in not only the history of magic in England, but also the place of the enchanted and magical in our everyday modern world, this is the book for you.

It also reminded me why I started out on this research journey. The leading texts in social science are very dismissive of contemporary alternative spirituality, and have very little time for anything magical or otherworldly which may lie at its heart. My research with a wide range of practitioners suggested this was missing the mark completely, because magic and enchantment are alive and kicking in modern Britain. But also, social science is very dismissive of contemporary expressions of spirituality because they are very eclectic, and this they argue undermines their capacity to serve a useful social function. However as Carr-Gomm and Heygate say in modern witchcraft, for example, we see ‘the way in which a religion can grow from a combination of different influences into a belief system that can sustain communities, nourish them intellectually and spiritually, and offer a satisfying alternative to what is already on offer’ (page 183).

So however eclectic and DIY so many forms of spiritual pursuit may appear to the outsider today, I would urge the critics and the cynics to take a closer look, and maybe even invest in a copy of ‘The Book of English Magic’. It certainly nourished me intellectually and spiritually much more than any other holiday read ever has, and offered a thoroughly satisfying alternative to what else seemed to be on offer this summer – which judging by most of the poolside reading was ’50 Shades of Grey’ in 50 different languages…

So ditch your usual holiday read and try something a little more magical this year instead…!

Sustaining security and wellbeing with good food, wine and company after the conference session

I have recently come back from the Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference which this year had the theme of ‘Security’. Together with colleagues I organised a session on the role of alternative spiritualities in promoting wellbeing in an age of insecurity. One of our speakers was Sandy Edwards, a volunteer healer at Good Hope Hospital in Birmingham. Sandy carries out healing in a gastroenterology ward, and the impact of healing offered by Sandy and her colleagues is currently being evaluated in a £205,000 controlled trial funded by the National Lottery. The results of the trial will be presented to the NHS at the end of the year to inform their decision around whether to introduce complementary therapy more widely in the management of conditions such as IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) and IBD (inflammatory bowel disease – with Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis being the two major IBD conditions).

This is something that Good Hope Hospital and the National Lottery are clearly taking seriously; trust the Daily Mail then to dismiss it as ‘voodoo’.

Alternative treatments are popular amongst people with IBS because it is widely recognised as a condition which is stress related and responds well to dietary changes. IBD however is very different and potentially much more serious.  Whilst dietary changes can bring some relief to some sufferers, this is a disease where the bowel is inflamed, ulcerated and bleeding and it has to be managed with lifelong medication and often surgery. Not only do people living with IBD face a lifetime of very expensive medication and difficult to manage symptoms, they can also experience repeated hospital admissions to deal with acute flare ups requiring intravenous steroids, are highly likely to end up having to have surgery to remove part or all of the bowel, and face an increased risk of colorectal cancer. If they’re very unlucky they might die from toxic megacolon or bowel perforation. You can imagine this costs both the NHS and individual sufferers a lot of money – and can lead to a high degree of insecurity for patients!

And this is something I know about as I live with Ulcerative Colitis. So Sandy’s talk interested me not only from a professional point of view, but a personal one as well. If healing has the potential to provide any form of relief to help maintain remission for people living with Crohn’s and Ulcerative Colitis then surely this is something the NHS is right to take seriously. Longterm conditions are one of the biggest burdens on the NHS and social services in the UK, and spending a lifetime on heavy medications such as steroids and anti-inflammatories is no fun for anyone. I for one am waiting with eager anticipation to hear the results of Good Hope’s trial. Voodoo or not, if healing can help to relieve the pain and distressing symptoms of living with Ulcerative Colitis I’m more than willing to give it a try and it will certainly make me feel less insecure about my future health!

York Festival of Ideas

Join me at the York Festival of Ideas on 11th June where I will be talking about the research for my book and why I think we need to take seriously the place of spirit in the modern world.

I am speaking at 7pm in the Voltiger Suite, Holiday Inn, Tadcaster Road. Tickets are available here. 

The sacred might be found in the most unlikely places if only we stop to look.

I have just spent three enchanting days at a conference on Sacred Practices in Everyday Life (SPEL) – one of the culminating points of the religion and society research programme, directed by Professor Linda Woodhead of Lancaster University, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council. This £12 million programme was created to respond to, and I quote ‘a shortfall in knowledge’ about what is happening in the UK and beyond in terms religion.

Whilst I’m not a scholar of religion, the notions of the everyday and the sacred appealed to me and it seemed like the perfect place to share my work on spirituality and the everyday. But without a background in theology or religious studies, it came as a surprise to me in the opening plenary that to adopt the word ‘everyday’ seemed for many to bring with it connotations of ‘folk’ religion which – it was then implied – were somewhat ‘lesser’ forms of practice. For me, my appropriation of the term everyday was specifically to celebrate that which lies beyond the religious spaces we know so well, to shed light on the hidden, yet equally legitimate and illuminating aspects of what it means to be a spiritual person in the world.

One of the overriding sentiments of the conference was the need to engage as social scientist with the worlds we explore on a more reflexive level. Many of the papers started from an assumed level of knowledge about what it is important to study – we know Islam is on the rise in the UK, but do we know how young people engage with it? We know pilgrimage is making a comeback for some religious communities, but do we know what people expect from such pilgrimages in the modern world? We know there is religious conflict in Northern Ireland, but do we know how the architecture of religion influences understandings and experiences of being religious in Northern Ireland? All fascinating questions, but there were other questions which we could have been asking but very few of us were.

We know, for example, that people are claiming to be increasingly ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’, but can an academic gaze, coming from a perspective of ‘studies of religion’ really engage with what that means? We know that a growing number of people talk to angels and spirit guides on a regular basis, but can frameworks of understanding which seem to deny a place for the otherworldly in modern Western spirituality really understand the implications of that?

What was problematic for me about the conference was this sense of always having to come back to some strangely amalgamated but acceptable notion of a ‘rational’ approach to theological beliefs and experiences, which then delimits what we allow ourselves to see. And on the whole, this meant that there seemed to be a continuing assumption that we have to frame spiritual experience somehow with the religious frames available to us. But to start from that point of view means we may never get to see the things that really matter; because we won’t know to ask the right questions which will shed light on these hidden spaces. We can pose some interesting areas for study, but then we should engage much more with how people we encounter in those areas want to direct and define the questions we ask – we should be asking them to frame the picture and to help determine the direction of the light we shine on it. If we think we already know where the sacred is, and what it looks like, we will fail to see the sacred hidden in the shadows.

So what became clear in the final panel discussion was that whilst the programme had certainly filled some gaps in the knowledge we have, it had also served to open up new questions, and thereby create new gaps. And with this in mind, perhaps the most illuminating for me, therefore, was the work of a young photographer from Italy. Daniele Sambo is not a theologian or a scholar of religion, but someone who sees the ‘sacred’ – whatever that might be (and certainly not confined to a religious framing) – in empty places, disused spaces and forgotten corners of the urban landscape. And upon finding such potentially interesting instances of the sacred, he has invited people to work with him to bring their energy to that space, literally and metaphorically, shedding light on it in ways which reflected their interpretation of what he was doing as much as the expertise of his photographer’s gaze.

Quite apart from producing some beautiful images, for me Dan’s work highlighted precisely where a lot of social science work fails. Despite years of post-postmodernism, it still privileges the ‘expert’ gaze, to the extent that we sometimes fail to even see what is right in front of our eyes.

But of course Daniele Sambo has the freedom as an artist to do that. But as social scientists the whole process of research funding seems to prevent such an organic approach. We have to carefully frame our research concepts, drawing on the existing knowledge in the field, and present it in such a way that it will convince funders that we know what we are talking about. But there is the danger that this framing immediately closes down so many potentially interesting things we might like to do if we could simply wonder around with a torch and see what we find hidden in the corners of everyday spiritual practice.

But maybe we can do that as well? I’m not saying I got it perfectly right in the research for my book, but at least I tried. I went with few preconceptions – and on reflection perhaps a lack of expertise in the sociology of religion was a good thing – because it meant I had to let the people I spoke to show me where to shine the light. And this produced a very different picture – although admittedly still partial and partisan – to one which might have been framed by ‘religion’. It did free me up to change the relationship between the observed and the observer, the one who held this hidden knowledge and the one apparently tasked with shedding light on it. I let my research participants show me the way and joined with them as they framed their own spirituality. But as I’ve said on this blog before, academic reception to such an approach isn’t always very positive. It seems the social science community is much more happy to accept someone experiencing mainstream religious practices as part of their participatory fieldwork, but if that fieldwork involves ‘dabbling in spookery’ (to quote Carl Jung) then people become suspicious…

Anyway, frustrating as these academic conferences always are, there was also something truly spellbinding about SPEL and I hope, as Desmond Ryan said in his closing words, that we continue to engage with the wholeness and holiness of what the spiritual (whether or not religious) means in the modern world. In order to do that, we need to continue to shed light on the new gaps in knowledge becoming apparent, as well as those neglected everyday spiritual spaces that are just waiting for an open-minded academic to stumble across and stop long enough to begin a collaborative process of shedding some light…

‘I was deeply sceptical about the existence of paranormal phenomena, and had confined them to a mental file-drawer labelled “not true, but fun to talk about at parties”’ (Wiseman, 2011. 3).

Richard Wiseman is a highly successful psychologist, with a background in magic, and perhaps has a different set of ethics governing his approach to his research. As a social scientist however I believe that retaining an element of respect is a vital part of what I do. Reading Wiseman’s words in this quote make me feel uncomfortable because he is very dismissive and judgemental.

During my recent fieldwork I had direct firsthand experience of an ‘otherworldly’ presence – or what Wiseman might dismiss as a ‘paranormal phenomenon – and the impact of such an experience. I was told by one of the mediums I have been interviewing for my research that I would soon face a challenging meeting with a difficult senior manager. But the good news was that his spirit guide had given him a message for me. I was to look over this person’s left shoulder and I would receive a sign that spirit were looking out for me and that everything would be ok.

When the meeting actually took place – several hundred miles from the location of the medium, in the private office of a member of staff on a university campus that the medium had never visited – I looked over the manager’s shoulder and received the ‘sign’. There on the shelf directly above his left shoulder was a lone mug carrying the slogan ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’. It was sound advice in the circumstances, because the manager was antagonistic, so it helped me psychologically to deal with that successfully.

Regardless of the fact that the ‘message’ was somewhat vague, and the mug on the shelf a very mundane physical object, it seemed to me that in that moment I had experienced something of the sensation of what it must be like to live in a world and feel spirit ‘there’.

I will never know how the precise circumstances behind this ‘coincidental’ event might have come to be, but it reinforced in my mind as a researcher that I have to take these experiences, and their impacts on practitioners’ lives, seriously. It also told me something very useful about how as social scientists we go about our fieldwork. Had I relied solely on observing the medium giving similar messages to other people I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to spontaneously experience something decidedly otherworldly in the way that he and my other research participants routinely do.

Leaving aside Wiseman’s question of what might be classified as ‘real’ and what might be consigned to a drawer marked ‘not true’, as Sociologist Charles Emmons said on the Anomalous Experiences Research Unit’s online forum: ‘even to the extent that anomalous experiences are not “real”, they can still be real in their consequences, which is why no social scientist should ever condemn the study of any such subject’.

Certainly after my experience with the ‘Keep Calm’ mug, I’m ready to admit that as critical social scientists we can never really file away anything with complete certainty!

If you want to read more about my reflections on social science methods and otherworldly encounters go to Methodological Innovations Online.

Charles Emmons is Professor of Sociology, Gettysburg College, USA, and co-author with Penelope Emmons of Science and Spirit and Guided by Spirit

Reference: Wiseman, R. (2011) Paranormality: why we see what isn’t there. London: Macmillan.

In July 2011 I posted about my experiences with a media training day at The Open University. The day found me traipsing through a graveyard tossing Tarot cards over my shoulder and I have kept the results well hidden until now!

But as my book is now out I thought it might be a good time to share the video from that training day with you, as it gives a flavour of some of the things I explore in the book. So here it is!: Introducing an everyday spirituality…

As I say in the clip, through my research I found that people’s experiences with spirit in the modern world can have a profoundly therapeutic impact in their lives. This is something the academic literature to date has tended to ignore. My intention with the book, therefore, is to develop a deeper understanding of spiritual evolution in modern Western societies by putting ‘spirit’ right back at the heart of spirituality.

I would like to invite you all to my ‘virtual book launch’.

Join us with a toast on Friday 10th February to mark the publication of my new book ‘Everyday Spirituality: social and spatial worlds of enchantment’ (Palgrave Macmillan), based on my research into contemporary alternative spirituality. It is out first in hardback, which makes it expensive, but order it in at your local library – the more copies that are sold the sooner it will appear in paperback, and the sooner it will become affordable!