A Spirituality of Your Own
A short quote and a few questions that invite (and STRONGLY encourage) exactly this!
I re-read a book lately and came across two highlighted sentences that have stayed with me:
The spiritual journey is what the soul is up to while we attend to daily living. The spiritual journey is the soul’s life commingling with ordinary life. ~ Christina Baldwin, Life’s Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Practice
I love this. No doctrine or dogma. No rules or requirements. No exclusion inherent within. No talk of sin or shame. Open to broad and expansive interpretation. Rich. Practical. Mystical. True. I could write paragraphs and pages, to be sure, but instead, an invitation to your thoughts, emotions, and answers.
When you read the quote above, what shows up for you? Spur-of-the-moment. Gut instinct. Without editing or censoring. What creates resistance? Where do you feel resonance, even rest? Where do you feel desire? What invites your curiosity? And underneath every response to the above, ask yourself, “What else? What else? What else?”
Want a few more prompts? What IS your ‘soul up to in the midst of your day-to-day life’? When are you aware and awake to the ways in which ‘your soul is commingling with your ordinary life’? What if this is your spirituality, your understanding of the sacred, and more than enough?
In my own experience as well as in beautiful and rich conversations with my clients, I find that most of us step into—or away from—the topic of our “spiritual journey” with hefty (and often healthy) doses of ambivalence, lots of questions that revolve around shame, and all too often, experiences of religious harm. That’s why this quote, along with its wisdom and truth, is so powerful; it gives us permission and ample freedom to consider our spirituality through the reliable and trustworthy lens of our own thoughts and emotions, our own life. Even more, it offers us limitless redemption, sovereignty, and grace. Which, it seems to me, is how spirituality should be defined and experienced, yes?
May it be so.