Spiritual Cowgirl

There is such a unique shift in my body, mind, and world when I’m in a state of gratitude. It’s like my cells turn into sparkly pink cupcakes and my heart puffs up like it’s supposed too and my perspective loans reality majesty, elegance, awe.

I bow my head to the utter simplicity of a power so great and life changing. I thank the Universe for providing me so many opportunities to experience gratitude.

Then I spank my own bum with a Sarah Ban Breathnach book when I think about how freakin’ long it’s taken me to climb aboard the gratitude gravy train – a movement the spiritual arena has been chugging for decades.

This makes me sit back and wonder just how many popular spiritual ideas I’ve nodded to but not really tried to tango with because they’re just so, well to be quite honest, damn common. Boring. Duh. Take Joseph Campbell’s famous quote “follow your bliss”. This phrase when first heard was profoundly moving…for my parents generation. But if you walk up to most people my age and tell them to follow their bliss they just might slap you. Or roll their eyes. Or smile, swivel away, and order another saketini.

I’m realizing that as cheesed-out or over-used as some of these spiritual maxims have become for us, when faced with the spirituality aisle at Barnes and Nobles we gotta try to distinguish our spirit’s wolf whistle from our ego’s snort.

So I now send energetic thank you notes to the universe all ze time – for my friends, family, snails, Joss Whedon, and the inventor of Hitachi vibrators. For this one seemingly ordinary tree outside my window that provides my workspace with such green vibrance (I swear it waves at me). I thank my organs, my veins, my nervous system, my skin for doing a job well, one more day. I kiss my shower head for giving me warm water. I hug my steering wheel when my car starts. I’m grateful that all I have to do is walk down the street to purchase rainbow chard. I’m grateful for the local farmers, the soil, the elements for creating such a yummy veg. I’m even grateful for my credit card.

Here’s the thing, my attitude of gratitude does not cover up what is seemingly “wrong” or seriously dark or just totally yuckmeister about life. I’m well aware of the nastiness around the credit card biz and health care and current politics and social injustice and environmental devastation. My gratitude does not coat my reality with vanilla pudding (despite the fact that it turns my cells into happy little sweet cakes), but if I work at it and allow it too, it does afford me the ability to see through life’s mirror.

For a basic example: Sure, I could easily cry and moan about the evilness of credit card companies and my current debt – or I could pull one over on the darkies of life and instead of griping, thank the hell out of this weird little piece of plastic that allows me to buy organic groceries and pay for my dance classes and donate to a few wonderful environmental causes and write about the divine feminine without a steady income.

In the past few weeks I’ve tried to be extra conscious of any negative thoughts or feelings or fears I’m having and once I sense those suckers, I write em down, sit and meditate a little, then scribble out the positive side to these seemingly negative things. Jut to be clear, this practice doesn’t feel like the “think positive” new age cliche, because again, I don’t look away from the dark - I’m just also searching for and naming it’s de-lighted twin. And as soon as I make this balanced shift in my perception, I experience a sigh so deep, so lovely, so powerful that I swear Goddess and God are getting it on inside my heart.

And I’m so utterly grateful I can feel this.

And I’m so utterly grateful you can too.

Of course, in your own way, through your own practices.

If you want.

But oh how the universe wants you to want this…

Two Giant Fat People

God

And I have become

Like two giant fat people living

In a tiny

Boat

We

Keep bumping into

Each other

and

L
A
U
G
H
I
N
G

-Hafiz translated by Daniel Ladinski in Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West p. 171

This not just in,

(cause I totally missed this amazing announcement from the Pope on July 11th)

Pope Benedict XVI recently announced that…

Catholicism is the only true religion.

Surprise!

Sorry all you Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus and Taoists and Jains and Wiccans and Presbyterians and San Franciscans - you’re religion (or lack there of) is false. You’re pretty much spiritually screwed.

Now don’t you feel like you’ve truly heard a divine declaration? Doesn’t this statement just widen your heart and open your mind and fill you with hope? Isn’t this sort of exclamation from one of the world’s “holiest” leaders exactly what this confused bloody planet needs to hear more than ever right now? I bet Jesus is beaming with pride.

In case this ignorant and truly sad message upset you at all - meaning caused you to have sunday school flash backs and/or reach for vodka before your yoga class and after your morning meditation while praying to God/dess for his dearly misguided soul - I’ve got two popular parables to share.

Recently many priests and imams and rabbis and monks and swamis and other religious leaders gathered together to discuss religion and their beliefs and soon there was shouting and arguing “this is THE truth, no this is THE truth” and lots of spittle and so on and so forth. In another room, all the founders of the world religions such as Buddha and Jesus and Mohammad and Abraham and Kali gathered in a circle for their own meeting. And all they did was look at each other and smile.

and

Rumi, the luminous 13th century Persian mystic tells us that once upon a time a community of blind men heard that an extraordinary beast called an elephant had been brought into the country. Since they did not know what it looked like, they resolved to find the animal and obtain a “picture” by feeling the beast – the only possibility that was open to them…

One man felt the elephant’s trunk and declared the creature to be like a water pipe. Another man brushed the elephant’s ear and stated that the creature was like a fan. Still another man touched the tusks and found the creature to be sharp. Another man rubbed the leg of the elephant and declared the creature to be like a pillar, while the last man felt the elephant’s back and believed the creature to resemble a throne.

This, explained Rumi, is exactly like the various human beliefs about God. All are absolutely convinced they know exactly what it is, yet none can see the big picture and thereby realize that each of their beliefs illuminate part of the same essence, the same overarching energy, the same big honkin’ divine pachyderm

I guess the Pope hasn’t heard these stories.

He also just reinstated the Latin Mass – meaning all Catholic masses should be said in Latin. Which is funny cause if he really wanted to be authentic, he should have ordered the masses to be said in Aramaic – the language Jesus really spoke. And hold them outside. With prostitutes. And more wine. That might draw the crowds that the dwindling American catholic churches so desperately need. I’m just sayin’…

And as always…winkin’

with fierce love.

Check out this inspiring talk about beauty from author, healer, and shaman Robin Rice. I read her free ebook Venus For The Day a while ago and totally bawled my eyes out during this one part where the main character goes on this intense shamanic journey where she lets loose a primal feminine WTF!!! wail at the divine. And if you’re a conscious women, you know this cellular cosmic wail is so dearly earned, and deeply familiar. The book isn’t all waily - it’s also fun and enlightening, especially if you need a reminder about the beauty of your unique booty.

Now for a light academic tongue bath brought to you by a dutch historian of Gnosticism, Gilles Quispel, who can be found in Jeffrey Kripal’s book The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion. FYI, Jeffrey Kripal is one of my academic mentors and Gilles Quispel was BFF with the psychotherapist, C. G. Jung.

Quispel shares 3 major ways of “knowing” in Western Culture:

1. Faith - a way of knowing the world and your self via religious community, authority figures and religious doctrine like holy texts which are believed to be “revealed”.

“Revealed” meaning once upon a time ago the goods came straight from God’s mouth to a man who wrote the wisdoms down. And we can be sure that the men writing down the words of God weren’t filtering, or politically motivated, or power hungry, or well-intentioned, but a bit tired that night, or misogynistic or sexually confused or from a dysfunctional family, or basically a product of the culture they lived in. And then these holy words have been translated about 9 times till we in English speaking lands, could read them. And we all know nothing gets lost in translation. Uh huh. Except cute Bill Murray.

2. Reason - a way of knowing through such things like logic, analytical thought, linearreality (I think I just made that word up), and empirical data to help you arrive at “the objective truth” of things. Hence such things like the scientific method.

Quite honestly I’m surprised people still believe there is such a thing as “total objective truth”. We know that when an object is perceived it changes on it’s most atomic level…even our thoughts are able to change scientific experiments in a slight, but now quantifiable degree. And quantum physics tells us that we mostly see or don’t see reality based on our internal lens that we (and society) have created due to past experiences and too much T.V. and probably some really bad sex.

3. Gnosis - a way of knowing that’s based on intuitive, visionary, or mystical knowledge. A knowing that is based on direct personal experience.

Ah, the Red approach. The way of knowing I kept fighting against in my grad school days because it wasn’t a way of knowing I could easily footnote (footnote 34: vision in which Kali chopped off my head, again) or share with my colleagues (till I met Prof Kripal).

My gnostic revelations provided new insights about the religious and spiritual truths I was studying and helped ignite my divine spark. My intuitions helped me experience the heart of the material and not get so stuck on the technicalities.

Now what’s wrong with all this? Well nothing really, but gnosis also slips the divine into a silky nightgown of the subjective and this spontaneous dynamic ever-changing way of knowing freaks out not only many academics and scientists and priests, but many of us as well because it doesn’t offer external stability to rest on (or get lazy and disempowered with) and it points the power of creating reality and meaning and life right back to you.

But I’ll tell you what this way of Gnostic knowing does do, in my subjective experience – it makes the divine drool.

In heat.

In love.

In you.

Of course, all 3 ways of knowing are important and often make for a sweaty threesome. I illuminate the Gnostic way of knowing in my work because it needs some serious TLC after being banned from the spiritual bedroom within most religions and western culture. It now needs some frisky action, some serious play.

So how do you know?