Listening to Your Sacred Body

Spiritual Knowing: Part Six – Discovering Your Mystical Language (2)

“When the somatic and vital worlds are invited to participate in spiritual life, one’s sense of identity becomes permeable to not only transcendent but also immanent spiritual sources, turning body and world into sacred realities that can be appreciated as fundamental for human and perhaps even cosmic evolution.”

—Jorge Ferrer

In Whole-Body Mystical Awakening we are doing just that—inviting our bodily and energetic worlds to join in our spiritual life.

In Part 1 we explored inviting our heart and mind to participate in our spiritual life. The mystical language of the heart is the deep feelings that flow from our heart space. The mystical language of the head is the deeper thoughts, words, and images than come from a mind cleared of its usual constant chatter. Now we explore the mystical language of the other two centers of spiritual knowing—our gut’s vital energy and our feet’s energetic embodiment in the physical cosmos.

Mysticism, PracticePaul Smith & Luke HealyJanuary 19, 2020Gut Path, Feet, spiritual knowing Comments

Discovering Your Mystical Language

Spiritual Knowing: Part Five — Mystical Awareness from Our Whole Body

“We cannot recognize God’s hand and voice in the world without a special sensitizing of the eyes and ears and of our soul (‘grace’) – that is, without a special sort of sense or super-sense.” —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Last week, we talked about how mystical intelligence is something that we can develop and cultivate. We do this by undertaking practices that awaken and engage our centers of spiritual knowing. Based on research from transpersonal psychologists, we have identified four major body centers of spiritual knowing, each with their own ways of sensing. To develop your intelligence in each of these areas, you can practice Whole-Body Mystical Awakening either by yourself or together with a group.

There are certainly other practices that engage with some of these centers, but most traditional mediation and prayer forms stay in the head, or some may also include the heart. Other body-practices that may involve scanning or movement most often stay in the physical realm, or keep the seat of awareness in the mind, perceiving the body. Very few seek to listen and know, including our body and gut as places of spiritual knowing together with the heart and the head.

MysticismLuke Healy & Paul SmithJanuary 12, 2020 Comment

Mystical Intelligence

Spiritual Knowing: Part Four – Developmental Learning

When I was in school, I decided to try my hand at the drums. I say “hand” fairly literally, as I could never get myself to play two rhythms at once. I could hold a beat though—as long as it was just one beat. My band director mercifully put me on the big bass drum and I pounded away with the single count in my head. It’s the same reason I failed at the piano. Two hands doing different things at the same time? Not for me. Throw the feet in there as well on a drum set? Forget about it.

I would claim that I just wasn’t very musical. Until later in high school when I picked up a trumpet and found something I could do pretty well—after some practice naturally. With the encouragement of my friends and a kind teacher, I also discovered that I had a half-decent singing voice. My shower-voice had fooled me, for I was certainly not a soloist. Rather, I had a nice blending voice for duets and harmonies.

You may not think you’re a mystic because you don’t have visions or ecstatic trances. Maybe you think you’re just not a very mystical person because of your history of one-sided prayers. There’s a pretty good chance you’re probably not Mozart—or you would know by now. But you’ve almost certainly got a little music in you. . . .

MysticismLuke HealyJanuary 5, 2020spiritual knowing, developmentComment

Christianity Beyond Tribalism

Why We Still Need Christianity

If we adopt a posture of growth in our lives and seek to continue to evolve in learning, practicing, loving, and more, we will discover one of the core principles of development: evolution moves toward greater inclusivity and greater complexity.

Fortunately, this direction of evolution will ultimately be the end of tribal religion—religion that is defined by its hard boundaries of saved and unsaved, believer and nonbeliever, holy and heathen, sacred and secular. The fuel for religious wars will run dry. Persecution and ostracization will be replaced by harmony and welcome. The lion will lay down with the lamb.

This beautiful utopia of the future is possible (if we have enough time to get there as a species), but some people believe the way we arrive at such a place is through the conglomeration or unification of spirituality into a synchronized path for all. That dissolving the boundaries leads to not only no separation, but also no distinction.

But this homogenization is not in keeping with the principle of complexity. And sometimes our hopes . . . .

MysticismLuke HealyDecember 29, 2019evolution, Teilhard, Mystical, worship Comments

A New Christmas Story – God in 3D

Christianity’s familiar and beautiful Christmas story depicts a heavenly father sending his son to be born into the world to save people from their despair, and then later sends the Holy Spirit to comfort and guide them. This is a warm image of God as a loving father, a self-giving son, and an ever-present, encouraging Spirit.

However, this traditional story only portrays a one-dimensional God – where the metaphors of personal relationship are limited to the male images of father and son and a gender-neutral “spirit” (although feminine in both Hebrew and Greek). It is true that God is revealed in these images. It is also partial. Today’s cosmically informed world longs for a God who is bigger than “the man upstairs,” closer and more real to us personally than just an ancient story, and more like us than only a heroic figure from the past.

Integral Christianity gives us a God, not only beside us in the personal dimension, but also a God who is at the same time in the transpersonal dimension—beyond us. And at the same time a dimension of God who is within us—being us. This is a God in 3D!

JesusPaul SmithDecember 22, 2019worshipComment

Embodying Incarnation

Spiritual Knowing Part Three: Feet and Legs

Jesus — God being us with a human body

Did Mary realize the baby she held to her breast was one that John would later write about as “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14)? Notice John does not say the Word came to live “in the flesh.” Rather, this profound prologue to John’s Gospel makes the astounding claim that the Word, God, actually became flesh!

The Christmas season is an excellent time to talk about bodies, flesh, and earthiness as we celebrate God with us in the body and person of Jesus. . .

Practice, JesusPaul SmithDecember 15, 2019Jesus Comments

Transcendence

Part Two: Spiritual Knowing—Transcendence

Three primary outcomes of Whole Body Mystical Awakening are:

(1) Deep connections with God, Jesus, guides, and one another

(2) The emergence of our spiritual gifts

(3) Transcendent consciousness.

Transcendence is the loftiest and most difficult dimension to describe. It is, most simply . . . .

Practice, MysticismPaul SmithDecember 8, 2019transcendence Comment

Spiritual Knowing—Then and Now

Part One: Spiritual Gifts as Windows of Wisdom

What is the goal of the Whole Body Mystical Awakening practices that Integral Christian Network advocate? Is it just to have mystical experiences? Or feel peace and bliss? The reason to do Whole Body Mystical Awakening is far bigger than just these things. Any reading of the Bible and the foundational writings of many spiritual traditions will find a stream of mystical experiences providing unique knowing, guidance, encouragement, and transformative transcendence. As Paul describes in detail, these mystical experiences often happened with one another in the early gatherings of Christians. They have continued down through history in the writings of the mystics.

These mystical experiences seem to take the three primary forms of (1) personal presences or guides (including God and Jesus), (2) gifts, and (3) transcendence or union with God. We’ve written several articles about guides recently, which you can read here. Next week we will explore transcendence. This week, let’s look at spiritual gifts from the standpoint of their function back then in the Bible and how they are emerging in today’s understanding.

MysticismPaul SmithDecember 1, 2019spiritual knowing Comment

WeSpace Whole Body Mystical Awakening

“WeSpace” is a new form of spiritual practice and community that is on the forefront of the evolving spiritual landscape of today. Recognizing the hyper-individualization of not only Western society and American culture, but also the individualization of the interior experience of the forms spiritual practice, many are seeing the need for a higher, more evolved “WE.” Various forms are emerging in many different places to more intentionally engage in collective wisdom and interconnected healing.

If you’re familiar at all with Integral Christian Network, you’ve certainly heard us talk about WeSpace. It is the heart of . . . .

WeSpace, PracticeLuke HealyNovember 24, 2019Mystical Comment

Gathered to the Transforming Heart of Jesus

Devotion for Cultural Creatives Part Four: Together

This is the final section of this six-part series that began with Why Christian Worship Doesn’t Work for Many Cultural Creatives—and What Might. We begin with a reminder about who cultural creatives are.

Paul Ray is co-author of The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World. He has been researching their values, lifestyles and beliefs for 25 years. He says that Cultural Creatives are the carrier population for the emerging wisdom culture:

Across the planet, they are innovators for the culture, not so much in technologies as in beliefs, worldviews, values and ways of life. They are the opinion leaders, and the participants in all the new social movements of the past 60 years who have time and again shaped others’ views, practices and adoptions of these new ways. Their Green values and lifestyles and their values of inner development both psychological and spiritual are the key to the emerging new culture. New Cultural Creatives surveys in Europe, Japan and the US all show the same trends.

The Cultural Creatives care deeply about ecology and saving the planet, about relationships, peace, social justice, and about authenticity, self-actualization, spirituality, and self-expression.

Practice, WeSpacePaul SmithNovember 17, 2019worship, WeSpaceComment