Whole-Body Mystical Awakening
For our weekly articles to start this new year, we’ll be sharing (slightly) revised chapters from our foundational ebook, “WeSpace & Whole-Body Mystical Awakening.” First written in 2019/2020, this ebook has served as the foundational and baseline teaching for the core practices of ICN. We revisit these writings as an opportunity to share with those who haven’t yet read them, to review “the basics” for those who have, and to revise and update slightly based on the years of learning and evolution that have happened in our community since first published.
If you’d like to engage in shared discussion and practice around the themes of these each week, we invite you to join our Sunday Gathering online, where we engage with the articles in communal meditation and contemplative conversation. For information on how to join, click here.
If I asked you to think about your body, what comes to mind?
How you look from the outside? What amount of weight we’d like to lose? Our skin and bones. Organs and tissues. Muscle and fat. Cells and neurons.
This is the body from an exterior, objective material perspective. It is true, but it is partial.
Unfortunately, so much of Christian history propagated and reinforced a division of the material and the spiritual. Body and soul apart, despite being the religion of the incarnation, of God made flesh. Combine that with Western materialism that also tends toward disembodiment, and here we are—many of us disconnected and disassociated from our body as a true aspect of our being, not just an object.
There has been pushback, of course. More yoga, tai chi, dance, and movement. Perhaps we’ve learned some about our emotional body, our pain body. And perhaps you’ve already begun to come more into your subtle body—your mystical body.
This is a big part of the spiritual work that we do at ICN, embracing and cultivating our embodied, mystical being. This is taking embodiment to the next level of development. It is a crucial component to integrate into our spiritual life, especially with the rise in meditative and contemplative movements that sometimes only emphasize going to a witnessing state. For many in this day and age, in our current context and starting place, this actually ends up further reinforcing the disconnect and disembodiment—further object-ifying and distancing without the counter-balance of more deeply subject-ifying our immanent body and being. Our mystical body encompasses both the subtle and the causal. We need to live in and as both for a healthy and integrated spiritual being, to dwell holistically in our mystical body.
So how do we do that? How do we integrate our experienced reality into a more embodied mystical spirituality? After extensive research and drawing on a lifetime of theology and experience, Paul Smith created the practice of Whole-Body Mystical Awakening to help us. For our time and context, we believe that coming into our mystical bodies is most easily and naturally accessed through four main centers of spiritual awareness: Heart, Womb, Feet, and Head.
Whole-Body Mystical Awakening is a unique, integrated practice that is personal, communal, and cosmic — all at the same time! It accesses these four embodied centers of spiritual knowing. It integrates the three different faces of God — the Infinite Face of God-Beyond-Us, the Intimate Face of God-Beside-Us, and the Inner Face of God-Being-Us. It recognizes Christ as the Christian symbol for all of reality— divine, human, and material — in seamless oneness.
Through WBMA, we find a host of ways to be present to God that are integrative and holistic.
The following steps can be used as an introductory way to experience Whole-Body Mystical Awakening. While we can experience each face of God in every center of spiritual knowing, these might be the most natural places to start.
You can do this meditative prayer practice anywhere and at any time. You can include one part, several, or all of it. We often take 20-30 minutes with it.
1 – The feeling of God-Being-Us reveals itself in our awakened heart center
In WBMA, we always start with our hearts. The Christian understanding of God is that “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them” (1 John 4: 16). Therefore, living in love is the experience of God’s heart of love living in us. This co-creates a flow of divine-human love from within you. The love you feel in your heart space is not only your human love but also God’s divine love. This is how God feels in your heart!
To be even more pointed, this is the experience of how God-Being-You feels in your heart center of spiritual knowing! It is both your heart and God’s heart beating in your chest, radiating out both your love and God’s love – without differentiation. It is cocreated love by both us and God. We might learn to think, if not say, that it is your-God-heart center.
By heart, we mean not only our spiritual God-heart space but also our physical heart space.
To help you move into “your-God-heart,” first move your awareness from your head down into your physical heart. You can tap on your head, then tap on down your temple, jaw, neck, and chest. Continue tapping on your chest until you sense you have moved to your heart space. You can also place your hands on your-God-heart which can increase the energy there.
Your-God-heart space includes your chest, back, arms, and hands. You may also think of someone you love to help activate the love flowing from your-God-heart. You may feel warmth flowing from your heart and bliss flooding your whole being.
Are you getting the idea of “your-co-created-God-heart” now? Once “our-God-heart” understanding becomes embedded in us, we may no longer necessarily need to use those particular words. But we can know them deep within.
2 – The sensation of Christic energy pulses as our feet access the grounding energy of the earth
Move your attention to your feet, making sure your feet are planted firmly on the floor. You may want to move your feet around or wiggle your toes to help your consciousness move there. Think of roots growing from your feet deep into the earth, anchoring you in your body and your body to the earth and nature itself, even the material cosmos.
Draw up this co-created Christ energy from the grounding and centering of these spiritual roots that connect you with the oneness of all divine material reality. Christ is the Christian symbol for all of reality – divine, human, and material reality. That reality was dramatically manifested in and as Jesus and includes all creatures, great and small, the glory of nature, and the cosmos itself. As Richard Rohr says, “God loves things by becoming them!”
3 – The intuition of God-Being-Us rises from deep within our spiritual womb
Draw that grounding energy up to your gut, your spiritual womb. We all have a spiritual womb, whether we have a physical one or not.
Neuroscience now speaks of our mind-brain, heart-brain, and gut-brain. We often call the gut a “spiritual womb.” Mindfulness, heartfulness, wombfulness, and grounding are all partners in our spiritual knowing.
Your spiritual womb is the home of your core self, your divine identity, which is God-Being-You. Let yourself sink into God’s being you in the deep presence of your spiritual womb. This is not accessed by conceptualizing or thinking but by intuition, which is knowing something without conscious reasoning. Rest in your spiritual womb by simply Being.
Be aware of any impressions or sensations that emerge from this center of deep spiritual being. Intuition, creativity, and “gutsy” courage, co-created by you and God, also arise from the generativity of wombfulness.
Jesus said that from here flow rivers of living water, the awakened consciousness of our divine identity (John 7:37-38). The spiritual knowing of the gut deepens into a unified field as we experience not only our own divine essence but that this identity is the one source, the one divine essence of everyone.
4 – The awareness of God-Being-Us is both in the stillness of our awakened mind and in the images, words, sensations, and impressions that may emerge
Move into your headspace, noticing that your mind is unusually calm as you carry the grounding energy of your feet, womb, and the radiant love of your heart with you into your headspace. Rest in the cleared stillness there as long as you wish.
The psalmist writes of God, saying, “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). Saint Issac, 7th-century mystic and Doctor of the Church, writes, “Silence, like the sunlight will illuminate you in God.”
At any time, you may intentionally open to images, words, and impressions that may emerge from the quiet of your mind. These are not your usual, ordinary thoughts, but instead, they come from your deeper, awakened mind.
This is God-Being-You, and through divine-human cocreation, transmitting words and images of beauty, healing, guidance, and encouragement for both yourself and others.
5 – The experience of God-Beyond-Us emerges in transcendent, formless awareness beyond our mind
Whenever you are ready, you can move up beyond your headspace into the formless transcendence that is pure consciousness that emerges beyond your mind. The metaphor of infinite, cosmic space can describe this. This is the mystical experience of God-Beyond-Us.
This vast, infinite dimension is beyond words, images, or forms of any kind. It is pure I AMness, pure consciousness, sheer Being.
6 – The sense of God-Beside-Us manifests in and as the spiritual beings present with us in our God heart center.
Move back down into your God heart space, this time becoming aware of the spiritual presences that are with you. These are sourced from God and shaped and interpreted by you. First of all, this can be the motherly-fatherly presence of God, the Living Jesus, and other spiritual companions such as Mary or other saintly presences who are there to comfort, guide, and encourage you.
Let them hold you and touch you. You can sense their presence, talk with them, and receive from them. This is God-Beside-You.
You can also let your-God-heart flow out to loved ones, friends, and others who are also spiritual beings – but have been or are now in the physical realm. As they come to your mind, send the radiant energy of love out to them in connection, healing, light, and blessing. Let your heart expand as it holds all sentient beings in the blissful, loving embrace of heartfulness.
Practicing WBMA Individually and in WeSpace
The Practice of Whole-Body Mystical Awakening can be done individually and also with a group in WeSpace. Sharing in the collective space with others increases our capacity for experience and brings forth further elements of the practice. It is really quite a powerful expansion of the practice—for we are never truly separate!
Practicing on your own regularly will help you familiarize and deepen into these centers of awareness through the Three Faces of God. We all need to practice regularly to experience the transformation into this embodied, awakened way of divine being.
For those new to this practice, we recommend starting with the beginning meditation written above or with a guided recording with prompts for learning to move your awareness through the four centers throughout the practice. You can access the introductory Whole-Body Mystical Awakening recording on Insight Timer here, or play it now here:
Questions for Reflection:
1. What embodied center of spiritual knowing feels most natural for you to inhabit? Which feels the most difficult?
2. Which face of God are you feeling drawn to in your life right now?
3. What intrigues you most about this practice?