ASCENDING WITH BOTH FEET ON THE GROUND

Ascending with both feet on the ground

Patriarchal Spirituality is a way of supposingly finding enlightenment, transcendence and finding bliss to which I have fallen prey to the first decade of my own spiritual journey.  All the practices I’ve attended mostly alienated and detached me more from my sense of self than any other intellectual activity ever did – as it was mostly just another escape hatch. Not that I was aware of that, far from it. Guru's and teachers have a very persuasive way of messaging and imposing ‘their’ truth on you.

I had some hardcore beliefs on what serenity, calmfidence, emotional regulation and mental resilience meant for years, until I learned that ‘zoning out’ and ‘detaching oneself’ through certain techniques, didn’t make a person in any way self-resilient, self-efficient or truly enlightened. It wasn’t until I entered the 12 step program of Codependents Anonymous that I started awakening to the fact that inner work, real spiritual work, included a full-on mental, emotional and spiritual cleansing and clearing in which I worked bottom-up instead of top-down.

Spirituality isn’t unicorns and rainbows, it isn’t distancing oneself from one’s ego because it is a monster with bad intent. Nor is it that we are ‘all one’ and feelings are illusions. It’s none of that. I consider these concepts as much a part of spiritual bypassing and denying (inner) issues that need to be addressed in order to mentally, emotionally and spiritually evolve.

To me it’s about enrealment, getting to the nitty and gritty of all the dark and dirty that’s lurking in my inner shadows. My fears, my desires, my unmet needs, my dreams, my pet peeves, my bad sides… the list is endless really. Somewhere a couple of years ago I came across this amazing ‘raw & real’ author that said everything that has been on my mind, in my heart and was yearning to be expressed, understood and mirrored.

Something had felt off for me for so long,  then I encountered this amazing book written by someone who had voiced all of this.  He had done the work, not only talks the talk but walks the walk, and debunked all the myths that I feel are so true and need to be out there to undo counter all the toxic spirituality that is flying around. Before this turns into a book of its own, let me end this by saying, spirituality isn’t about floating away and detaching from society, it’s about how to deal with life on life’s terms.

It’s about how to show up and suit up. How to root yourself, be agile, resilient, be in flow, evolve your consciousness and embody all that you do. Or, as a final take, as Bill O’Hanlon, a world-renowned leader in the fields of brief psychotherapy and clinical hypnosis presents three different pathways to accessing spirituality which are: through connection, compassion, and contribution.

Each pathway reveals specific tool and ideas to enable someone to feel (re)connected and empowered, competent and all right with him or herself. My personal and professional work consists of knowing, understanding and embodying oneself – all of it – nothing left out.

The higher one’s entire wellbeing quotient, the better one’s relationships and ability to choose an environment you truly fit within and thrive in. No skipping steps, no flying high, no downplaying, just raw, real and realistic, just the way you are, with a true sense of self and freedom. Which is specific and unique for each and everyone one of us.

Loving it forward!

Dy,

xoxoxo

* Important note: my post was originally written as a reflection on Jeff Brown's work on patriarchal spirituality after reading several of his books such as Grounded Spirituality and Ascending with both feet on the Ground. See below one of his posts I reflected upon:

Those ungrounded and inhumane "spiritual" models that have been fostered by emotionally armored, self-avoidant men.

These models share some or all of the following beliefs:

* the ego is the enemy of a spiritual life

* the "monkey mind" is the cause of suffering

* your feelings are an illusion

* your personal identifications and stories are necessarily false

* witnessing your pain transforms it

* your body is a spiritually bankrupt toxic quagmire

* the only real consciousness is an "absolute" and "transcendent" one

* stillness and silence are THE path

* isolation is the best way to access "higher states"

* there is no "self"

* meditation is THE royal road to enlightenment

* enlightenment actually exists

* formlessness over form

* the ultimate path is upward and vertical

* real spirituality exists independent of our humanness

In fact, most of the above is a blatant lie. Here are more accurate hypotheses about the nature of human life:

* A healthy ego is beautifully essential to healthy functioning

* The monkey mind is fed by the monkey heart (the unresolved emotional body)

* Many of our identities and stories are fundamental to who we are, where we have been, why we are here

* Healing your pain transforms it; watching it is only a preliminary step

* Our bodies are our spiritual temples

* The only "real" consciousness is one that integrates all that we are and all that this is

* Stillness and silence are only one path; many people prefer movement and sound

* There is no "higher" state (we aren’t birds). But connection may be the best way to access deepened states

* There is a magnificent self; the work is to align it with your sacred purpose, not to deny it altogether

* Meditation is not THE royal road; it’s one road, and it is not any more effective than embodied movement and emotional release as a clarification and transformation tool

* Enlightenment does not exist; enrealment does. (Be real now.) And it’s a relative experience, changing form as we and this changes form

* We are form, and we are here to in-form our humanness

* If there is an "ultimate path," it's downward (rooted) and horizontal

* There is no distinction between our spirituality and our humanness

The wool has been pulled over our eyes. Men who were too unhealthy egoically to admit that they couldn’t deal with their humanness, their feelings, their trauma, had to find a system that smoke-screened their avoidance. They found it. It’s called "Enlightenment." It’s also called "Spiritual Mastery." And it usually involves leaving the world, in one form or another. This way, they can convince themselves and others that they have mastered the one true path.

In fact, Enlightenment is just a construct that is intended to avoid the multi-aspected nature of reality. In fact, they are mastering nothing. They are merely fleeing their fragmentation, their confusion, and the fact that they don't know how to find their center in the heart of the world. Don't be fooled. They know less about reality than day to day people. They know less about reality than those who live from their hearts. They are camouflaging their unresolved trauma below a 'realization mask.' What we need now are models that lead us back into our hearts, into relatedness, into a deep and reverential regard for the self. Those models may invite us to detach in an effort to see ourselves through a different lens, but they will not leave us out there, floating into the eternal emptiness and calling that a life.

Detachment is a tool; it’s NOT a life.

The models we need will then invite us back into our bodies, back into our hearts, and back into relatedness with each other. (No more "enlightened" masters sitting in caves while the women of the village bring them food. If you can’t find your transformation in the village, you haven’t found shit). The new models will invite us to integrate what we find "out there" with who we are "in here." They will invite us to embody the now, rather than to pretend we have found it in the heart of our dissociation. It’s time to co-create spiritual models that begin, and end, within our wondrous humanness. It’s not "out there," dear friends. It’s right here, inside these aging body temples.