28 Dec Spirituality and Cosmology of Becoming Safely Embodied
Entering into this conversation feels like a plunge into a vast ocean replete with so much yet without there being any “truth.” The question is about spirituality, religion, and ultimately about God. Is there a god, is there someone out there watching over us, managing us, judging us? Do I have to adhere to certain rules of religion to find healing?
Truly, I don’t know. The question burns a hole in me, urging an inquiry.
The truth is that I don’t know if there is a God or what that word even means. It points to something so grand and beyond comprehension that it defies a simple response.
In some ways that question doesn’t matter to me. What does matters to me is the quality of love that I can contribute to the world. What matters to me is that we move toward living more fully in our bodies and ultimately in our hearts, allowing compassion to flow and be our guide. What matters is that we learn to trust our neediness, our profound aching for love, kindness, compassion, safety, caring. I simply bundle all that into the word love.
As a mystic what we call it doesn’t matter. The words, the labels only point to something that beacons us forward beyond our personalities, beyond our suffering.
From that perspective I have seen that love seems to have a unifying force, connecting us, allowing us to belong to each other, decreasing separation, loneliness, and mistrust.
Plus love makes living easier!
It is, however, one of the hardest conundrums to address if you have trauma or attachment issues in your history. Having been hurt by love, betrayed by others who were supposed to love you, and even worse, you, as so many, may have felt abandoned by whatever God you believed in or by the goodness that you were told was there protecting you. In the eternal cry of the Christian faith, if there is a God then “why have you forsaken me?”
That eternal question resounds with anguish.
Having worked with many thousands of people over the years exploring and healing the hurts that happen between people, the most complicated and painful inquiry is why I have I been left alone to suffer? Why was there was no one to help me? Why is there is such pain?
Rilke tells us in Letters To A Young Poet to love the questions themselves.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart.
Try to love the questions themselves.
Do not now seek the answers
which cannot be given,
because you would not be able to live them,
and the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then,
gradually,
without noticing,
live along some distant day into the answers.
–Rilke
The profound questions that you carry often have no easy answer yet they are the key to unlocking the grace of your own heart.
Can you take the question of whether there is a god or not into the depth of your heart and hold the question there with the utmost care? Not predetermining the answer but rather holding the question in your heart, opening to an answer, living, as Rilke suggests, living the question, waiting, expecting a response, and then deepening into the response, holding the question more deeply.
The only answer that matters is contained in your heart, buried in your own longing. What is true for you?
When you hold the question in your heart it might churn, it might open up territories buried within you. If you can turn toward what arises, exploring it, taking a thimbleful to sort through. Revisit when you can.
Many of us only explore the depths of these existential questions when the darkness enfolds us, when the foundations beneath our feet groan and shake.
Religion, or spirituality, has been a response to these knotty questions and can provide structure to depend on when all else has seemed lost. Yet there are those for whom it hasn’t been enough, the questions lingering when you can’t sleep, when you feel lost and alone.
David Whyte’s poem Self Portrait addresses this conundrum.
Self Portrait
It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.
I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.
~ David Whyte
Even as I write this article someone leaves me a question.
Deirdre, If you have anything you know that would help for me to read or work on please let me know. I feel so desperate and needy and I hate myself for it. You have alot of insight and I thank you for your response.
Perhaps the short response is to trust that these questions are emerging in your heart to help guide you to the answer. We ask these questions to unlock the secret of our own answer.
It’s hard to hold on to the question when it feels hopeless but I can guarantee you that there is hope, there is a way through. Part of how you are awakening to your own answer is in struggling with these questions.
One last thought is that I am a firm believer in opening to our neediness. It has become a fundamental beacon for me on the journey to authentic wholeness. Trust your neediness. It’s important. Our needs are the deep ground urging us toward healing.
It’s in the cauldron of these kinds of questions that your own, perhaps unique, spirituality will bloom. As these questions grow in your heart, as you listen to their calling, a cosmology will open in which the questions about suffering, about trauma will emerge.
I leave this post now with an open question to you. What resonates in you? How do you explore this question? What makes sense to you? How do you make sense of it all?