Quick note about Fire

The fire is the main comfort of the camp, whether in summer or winter, and is about as ample at one season as at another. It is as well for cheerfulness as for warmth and dryness. ~Henry David Thoreau

As I previously blogged about spirituality and how I would like to pay more attention to it, it is funny that tonight when I opened my book on herbs, spirituality was mentioned in the chapter I happened to be reading.

I came upon an intersting anecdote I wanted to share from the book, (Plant Spirit Medicine by Eliot Cowan). The chapter I read was about the element fire and of course about spirituality.

Cowan discusses the role of fire in our lives. He says that fire is what gives us pleasure. This connection makes sense in relation to Thoreau's quote about fire being good for cheerfulness and it makes sense in relation to fire being commonly connected to the pleasure of sex among other passions in life.

Cowan goes on to mention that people look for hot stuff in life because our spirits are cold. His take on this void of spirituality and heat comes from a void of love. He says that the only thing that can truly warm us is love. This reflection is interesting to think about if one considers the person who is "looking for love in all the wrong places."

Cowan says that on top of our need for pleasure and heat, we live in a society that is cold-hearted. He explains, "We are spiritually frigid and so we have an infantile craving for pleasure. This craving is whipped into frenzy by purveyors of merchandise of every kind" (p.72). People fill their lives with all forms of pleasure but cannot seem to find happiness. Cowan suggests it is because these people have not found love in their lives.

He also mentions that the element of fire has the power to bring things to maturity. He says, "A mature human being is one whose spirit has been warmed by the fire of love" (p.72). This quote suggests that part of connecting to our spiritual selves and reaching maturity is in finding the ability to love from our hearts and in making space for receiving love in our lives.

Now to the juicy part which perhaps I have built up (I'm sorry). I'll leave it alone after I get this out. I promise.

Cowan includes an anecdote about an anthropologist that went to learn about the songs of the Hopi tribe. On the anthropologist's visit, he met an elder and had the elder sing the songs of the tribe. The anthropologist noticed that the elder kept singing songs about water. Slightly annoyed, the anthropologist asked if all of the songs were about water. The Hopi elder responded that yes, the songs were mostly about water because their need for water was so great in their community and that most of their songs reflected the greatest needs of their people.

The Hopi Elder then said, "I listen to a lot of American music. Seems like most American music is about love." He then asked the question, "Is that why? Is that because you don't have very much?" (73)

Sacred River: It's not easy to get my spiritual river flowing in the cold of winter, but I still try.

Sacred River by Theresa King

Flowing over rocks of pain
Cleansing through the sands of time
Collecting streams of insight
Graced with buds of wisdom
Heaped with leaves of knowledge
Blessed with light of self love
And flowing, gently flowing
To the vast divine sea
Saying
"I am That."

This poem recently came into my hands this past weekend at a workshop. I must say it is a pretty moving run-on sentence if I ever saw one. I cannot get it to show on the webpage like it does in my book, but I think you get the idea.

I really like the picture the words paint, and although right now the rivers in Minnesota are pretty cold and icy, I find this poem to ignite something inside of me that brings me here to reflect a bit.

I think most people can agree at some point in their life they have had a moment where they felt a sort of longing inside of them. We do not know what to name it, but often it is a longing to be part of something greater than oneself. It is not the longing to be confused with the will to find a partner or companion, but it is the longing that is bigger than that desire. It is bigger than ourselves. This longing to me seems to be on a spiritual level, on a level that for the most part appears outside of our reach in worldly terms.

The problem is that we believe that it is out of our reach. This belief is simply not true.

Today people do not take the time to see or reflect on anything in spiritual terms. I know I am guilty of it. For the most part we have truly turned to science for information and we use science as the backdrop to our reality. We ignore and abandon our intuition and our mind and body's wisdom, and instead we rely on scientific reasoning and expensive medical tools or conventional wisdom to tell us how to make our choices and decisions in life.

We may experience wondrous miracles or the friendly warmth of a neighbor, but we do not think about these everyday moments, feelings or connections to be tied to a deeper, spiritual phenomenon.

I like this poem because it reminds me again that our everyday experiences and our very being is of a spiritual nature whether we choose to notice or not. Whether a believer in a higher power or a person who has no faith whatsoever, we are all people made of energy and when we pay close attention to our energy we can truly see the divine that lies within us, waiting for us to recognize it and pay attention to it.

This idea of paying attention is important to me. It's not an easy thing to cultivate and will take lots of years of practice to get it down. However, the long-term benefits are worth it because the more you pay attention to something, the more it seems to come up in your life. For example when you pay close attention to the negative parts of a person, it seems you only find more negative. Same with focusing so deeply on what is wrong at a workplace; our brains are trained so well to search for what we are looking for, we then only find more wrongs in the situation.

What would happen if we searched for the spiritual? What would happen if we challenged ourselves in that way? Instead of choosing not to believe and looking for the reasons not to have faith, what if we looked at it from a different perspective?

I believe we would find that sacred place we long for.

To close this random thought of the day, I will end by stating some questions/thoughts I want to focus on as a result of this post.

* How can I get my spiritual river flowing? In other words, how can I pay better attention to the spiritual aspect of my being and how can I nourish my spiritual self?
* What do I learn from myself when I look deeply at the spiritual aspects of my life?
* How does paying attention to my spiritual needs affect my health?
* How does paying attention to my spirituality affect the world?

An expanded consciousness and spirituality

So I once was a huge science-lover and I still am, but like most people I used to think that science and spirituality don't really mix. For awhile I had a thing against people who went to church. I clumped them all together. I was one of those people that thought that if you wanted to be scientific and an intellect, that religion was something that was meant for the uneducated, etc. But now I know that I was wrong to think in that way, that you can be an intellect and still believe in the spiritual nature of life and humanity; and I am excited for the changes that will follow in my life from this realization.

Let me pull from a passage that has been taken from a facebook profile of a person who prides themselves in being an atheist (which might I add, I am fine with atheists in the same vein as I am with people in general, as long as they are open minded, compassionate, and good natured, they are my friend).

Here it is:

"The priests of the different religious sects . . . dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live."

- Thomas Jefferson

(No I am not friends with Thomas Jefferson on Facebook, although, I wish I was...this is just a quote found in a profile).

This quote is quite ignorant, outdated and aggressive when you think about it with a more expanded perspective. Now, I don't know what was included in the "..." of the quote, but I do know, that very soon and already in some churches today, transformations are happening. On a whole, churches and religious sects are realizing we live in a changing world and if they want to continue to grow their congregation, they must cooperate with the many different realities out there, science being one of them. This also means that the arrogant side of science must admit that they have left a lot out of the picture by ignoring what spirituality does for a person, a commuinty, and a world. And rather than continue to draw lines of division, they must find ways too to integrate other ways of thinking into their scientific approaches. Aren't both science and religion just in search of truth? Why not work together?

As I pursue my degree in Holistic Health Studies, this topic comes back to health for me. While I agree with Thomas Jefferson that separation between church and state and all of that business was necessary to purge America from corruption, I must admit that there have been some negative effects of this purging too. As I am coming to a better understanding of it all, this separation of church and state seems to have gone so far as to separate the mind and body. It in a way has alienated the human spirit from itself. We have classified all of science to be something separate from the spirit, and as noted in the quote, we liken spirit-minded people to witchery and to churches. But times are changing. Churches are just one center for spiritual growth. The human spirit lives with the humans, and people have forgotten that.

What I see in my readings and in my daily life more and more, is that in order for humankind to continue to evolve in the sciences and in life, we must bring the spiritual back into the picture, doesn't have to mean RELIGION, although it could, but it does mean opening oneself to spirituality and inner knowing. Its just the bottom line thing that is going to have to happen if we want to continue to thrive. Here is the passage from my reading for this Thursday that puts these thoughts into words with a bit more grace. Okay, more like a lot more!

"We have denied and devalued all inner ways of knowing, leaving ourselves no way to grasp or understand the groundless and mechanical world we have so brilliantly envisioned with our science. The result is the epidemic anxiety of our age--a lostness, an emptiness, an alienation from ourselves and our world that is reflected in our mind, body, spirit, and social institutions. It has become increasingly apparent that an understanding of life acquired solely through a sensory-based outer knowledge cannot in itself provide us with a progressive and endless improvement in the quality of our health and our lives. For this we need something else. We need to expand our consciousness and regain a rich inner life. This leap in consciousness will provide us with the knowledge and capacities that are required for larger healing and health. To understand this is to comprehend that the changes we must now envision are fundamental rather than cosmetic and as much historically compelled as chosen. We either grow larger in our consciousness or our science and medicine will remain much the same, irrespective of our sincere efforts to change it through the addition of more therapies and remedies" (Consciousness and Healing, 10).

With all that said, I'd like to conclude by sharing something about myself right now. I am trying to be more open-minded myself. I generally consider myself to be extremely open-minded. However, I also see myself get hot-headed and think differently of others if they do not share my view points. I have learned that getting angry and putting people's belief systems down is not going to get us anywhere, so with that I am trying to stay positive and not jump to apocalyptic mode or defense mode or anger mode or accusatory mode. I am just being open to the journey and sharing my thoughts about my journey so far.

I hope that this passage maybe made you think a little bit about spirituality and where you are at with your own personal life journey and how you feel about the way the world is today. Are you where you want to be? Are you going in the right direction?