Open Spirit – coming back to life

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Tam knows a great deal about being happy (not sure about that T shirt though!)

Today we started our new weekly group, called Open Spirit. It always seems very special to take time out from everyday jobs and meet with others to explore our deepest concerns. Today, as often, I was inspired by the honesty and depth that emerges in meeting, talking and engaging in spiritual practice together.

I want to try and distill in writing some of the key themes as I see them, partly to focus my own thinking and practice over the next week, but also for group members who can’t always make a meeting. If you are reading this from afar, why not journey alongside us in your own thinking?

My grandparents, and even to a large extent my parents, grew up in what seemed like a smaller world and one with more defined choices. In terms of religion, one was unlikely to be exposed to anything other than a local Christian Church where traditional patterns of belief and religious life were clearly formalised. Now we have so much choice and the freedom to choose. While some still opt for a particular path, perhaps now in Buddhism or Paganism (or Atheism for that matter) rather than Christianity, many of us do not choose to commit to ‘one way’. This is often denigrated as a kind of spiritual immaturity or a dilettante approach but the people I know who find themselves outside tradition are often anything but immature dilettantes. They are people struggling to make authentic and conscious choices about what they believe, about what the guiding principles are in their lives and, perhaps most importantly of all, how to put them into practice everyday.

The word ‘dilettante’ comes from the 18th century Italian dilettare ‘to delight’, from the Latin delectare. Perhaps this would not actually be a such a bad approach to bring back into the arts, including the spiritual ones. When was the last time you found going to church delightful? I certainly found deep delight in the silence and conversation shared this morning.

What has stayed with me were the questions about suffering. Every spiritual tradition asks about the nature of suffering and how to alleviate it. Everyone of us grapples with this in our lives. Suffering seems so often to be cyclical….ignorance leads to hate, leads to violence etc. I can see how suffering spreads out in my own life…my fears and tensions leach out into my relationships and limit how I live. Have you ever had that moment of losing your temper, of hurting a loved one, of speaking or acting in ways you can’t seem to control and later deeply regret? We all know this in our lives and we see it everyday on the news. I know I’m not alone in really wanting to understand and transform those forces in my life.

The question is how? There are lots of answers, lots of resources but really the question is always a personal one, am immediate one. We talked today about recognising in ourselves a state of fear or disconnection. In Buddhism it’s called dukkha, which in the Buddha’s time was a word referring to wheels whose axles were off centre or bones that had slipped from their sockets. In Christianity it’s called  sin, a word that means ‘to miss the mark’. But whatever we call it, we all know it in our own experience – that sense of ‘wrongness’, of feeling somehow numb or ill at ease or quietly despairing. This is the real suffering. It’s possible to feel grief, even anger and yet paradoxically still feel open and connected to others…suffering then is a shared state, an opening of the heart that, while it may hurt, also brings release and understanding. How different is that state of tense and fearful isolation in which hurt becomes overwhelming and a justification for shutting ourselves off from others, from life.

‘Lucifer’ enjoys the Autumn sun

Today it really came home to me how much I want to come out of these cycles of suffering, not to feel this inside or inflict it on others… and that what I really need to notice is this disconnected, fearful state. This is what I need to take care of when it arises. Not with some blanket, super ego driven ‘spirituality’, the ‘I ought to be kind, grateful, mindful’ etc. It never works for long because it really comes out of the fearful, judgemental state we are trying to heal. Instead I need a personal, authentic, conscious approach. What right now is truly going to help me reconnect with life… a breath, to step outside and see the sky, a quiet cup of tea?

It seems to me that one of the amazing things about spirituality is that we all know a great deal about it, just from our own experience. We all feel the difference between being anxious and being genuinely happy and we all have the capacity to find our own answers about how to move from one state to the other. So that’s the work of Open Spirit this week….to notice when we feel disconnected and to discover and delight in what brings us back to life.