Finding Our Spiritual Courage
Facing Troubled Times with Vitality
Have you felt it?
The uneasiness? The underlying agitation and turmoil? As the waves of disruption from a number of major disturbances continue to swell, we may be finding ourselves overwhelmed or overtaken with disconcerted and unsettled feelings at times.
We may be especially sensitive to it in moments like this that feel like a pivotal time for the earth. A global pandemic. An international trend toward authoritarianism. Ongoing racial injustice. An impending election. A ticking climate clock.
Perhaps even the very ground we stand on begins to feel unsteady. Tremors and vibrations that reach even the foundations of normalcy and daily life, foreboding a looming instability.
We usually try to just carry on with life and do the best we can from day to day. We keep at it, our push to carry on and maintain a sense of normalcy, often seeking refuge in busyness, activities of productivity or entertainment to bring, if not relief, at least a little distraction from it all.
In the same way, many spiritual and mystical practices offer a means of bypassing or detaching from these feelings—some in more helpful ways than others.
And we actually need these distractions. We need these practices. It’s really ok to find means of coping and alleviation in the midst of such pain and disruption. We can give ourselves permission to disengage, to recoup, to find some comforting relief. That truly is healthy and necessary.
So we can tend to the symptoms, but eventually we want to treat the underlying cause. We want to summon the courage to face what is truly before us and within us.
We’ll find no final relief from putting our heads in the sand—or in the clouds. Nor will we be very helpful to others.
When we’re ready, we can try to bring ourselves to face these realities. To find the strength to take up our place in the world. To decide what to do with the time that’s been given to us. To address the disturbed collective global energetic field that is affecting us and others in deep ways.
The problem often is that we don’t know how or what to do in the face of such wicked problems and forceful disruptions.
So how can we respond? How do we draw on our spiritual resources to find our courage and face the reality of our life and our world?
This week, we’ll begin with our own individual process of connecting to our inner courage and fortitude, and then in the following weeks we’ll be exploring how we move out into the world in mystical, subtle activism.
So today I’d like to offer an embodied practice that takes us deep into the ground of being, underneath the ordinary foundations being shaken. A practice that brings us into the holding of our divine womb, tapping into our wellspring of vitality and courage coming forth from within.
Courage to Face our Anxiety
**Trigger warning and disclaimer** I will be approaching this from an existential philosophical and spiritual perspective, not from a mental health or psychological focus.
If you have interior trauma or mental health issues, or simply don’t feel ready or able to do this, please feel free to follow your intuition and the self-care that you need. Feel free to skip down to the next section or even all the way to the end to go ahead into the guided meditation practice.
Before we move the deeper spiritual depths within and our practice there, it will be healthier and more integrated if we can first allow ourselves to face what we’re feeling. To own what is within.
While fear runs around in the mind, anxiety comes from our gut. Anxiety is a more general feeling that does not have an object. We often concretize our anxiety into specific fears by attaching it to an object in our minds. The legitimacy of the fear we feel from the object itself can vary, but that’s not entirely the point. Whether the fear is justified or not is simply our mind’s way of trying to judge or validate the fear—and the underlying anxiety remains untouched and unexamined either way.
So very often our acts of courage, our responses to the fears that we recognize in our minds, are attempts to summon our action against the object. If we are able to do this, in a way we have “overcome” our fear. But the anxiety remains, and it will find a new object.
And so we need a deeper courage. A courage to face the foundational anxiety itself, to resist the temptation to objectify our dis-ease onto anyone or anything. That includes political figures, viruses, corporations, or even a recent trend that is particularly interesting: the calendar.
Perhaps you’ve seen people getting angry at “2020.” Perhaps you’ve done it yourself. After a particularly awful event, many find themselves blaming the year. “2020 is the worst!” The thing is, it was the same thing last year, and I don’t think 2021 will escape blame either.
Clearly the calendar is not to blame. We know this of course. It is an act of objectifying our anxiety onto the most passive, blameless thing we can find. Maybe because we know it will eventually change, regardless of any action or nonaction, because time marches on. It is the ultimate metaphor for our feelings of powerlessness before such tragedies. It gives us false hope because we know it will eventually be 2021. Change without any real change. Even if underneath we know that a different number itself won’t really matter.
This blame game is a form of one of the most destructive human impulses: the scapegoat mechanism.
This deep-seated behavior was even exposed by Jesus on the cross. That in the face of great disruption to our systems and codes, to our power and our way of being, we will even objectify our pain and fear even onto the divine itself. Blaming God and dis-owning our own pain and anxiety.
So let’s not do that. Let’s allow ourselves to recognize and own that we are living in a crazy time. It’s ok to feel the disruption and dis-ease. And those feelings and anxiety cannot be relieved by putting them onto anyone else, or blaming it away. We can seek to respond in a healthier, more integrated way. We can find the source of deeper courage within.
Moving Toward the Courage Within
“The courage to be is a function of vitality. Diminishing vitality consequently entails diminishing courage. To strengthen vitality means to strengthen the courage to be.”
—Paul Tillich
I find the word vitality to be full of power and energy. Even just saying the word gives me a jolt of life deep within. Perhaps it’s because I think I spent most of my life disconnected from any real sense of my own vitality, of my own interior power and full being. I’m afraid that so many have seemingly lost touch as well, that our modern culture, society, and even religion have largely divorced us of the means and attention to discovering this life from within ourselves.
Humans will go to great lengths to simply feel alive. They’ll risk danger and even death for the thrill of that feeling. This is a form of courage, but ultimately misplaced in the external. Thrill-seeking and risk-taking depend on putting ourselves in dangerous situations to evoke the adrenaline, excitement, and relief. Not only is it mostly just in service to self, but it leaves no inner ability to generate or call forth that feeling again without a more dangerous, more challenging, or more thrilling situation. This is not vitality.
Personally, I’ve never been much of a thrill-seeker. But I’ve sought my own forms of stimulation and enjoyment from “the pleasures of life.” There is nothing wrong with pleasure, but it too will not reach deep enough within us to draw forth a life lived to the fullest. Despite the many messages of consumerism and commercialism, we know this, don’t we?
Our vitality is sourced from within. It dwells in our innermost being, and comes forth from our spiritual womb as “rivers of Living Water.”
Our society has often so removed us from this deep spirit within, keeping us up in our heads far more than is healthy or helpful. We often try to meet everything as a problem to be solved, a situation to figure out, a plan to be made.
“Every cell of his [sic] body participates in his freedom and spirituality, and every act of his spiritual creativity is nourished by his vital dynamics.”
For many Christians and others, in addition to an over-intellectualization of our spiritual life, there is often a “heart-up” approach. While offering deeper connection, love, and even bliss—this alone will not take us to the depths we need to go to discover the vitality and courage we need to face such times.
So how do we tap into our vitality? How do we discover again the source of being deep within?
We must go deeper. Down into our depths, into our spiritual womb. What flows forth can penetrate every cell of our being. What emerges is full of the potential. We might even find not only the courage to face all that is set before us now, but also the creative power to be agents of generativity. To be vital forces of life counteracting entropy, unifying against dissolution, evolving ourselves and the world forward in the face of all that is being dismantled.
Our courage to be and to become.
Finding Our Source
I’m sorry to say that words will not get us there. Writing about it, reading it, thinking about it, nor even feeling the emotions of hope or consolation will do the trick.
We will only tap into our vitality by moving down within, by deepening into the space of our innermost being, underneath all of it. Underneath the anxieties and the worries. Underneath the foundations of the structures of our lives and the systems we rely on. Underneath the waves, the currents and the tides, the ebbs and flows.
To the ground of our being.
And even to the divine wellspring bubbling forth from that very ground. The point of creation within.
There we will open to the vitality, to the power coming forth, into the thousands upon thousands of creative expressions flowing into the world, arising with the courage of geyser, without any hesitation. A surge in just the right moment, in the moment of our very life.
So I encourage you to go there now. If you’d like, you can use this guided meditation to hopefully help bring you there: