In the writing group on Monday, July 17 I wrote about how miserable I was feeling, how despairing about the future of what humans are doing to our planet. Then how the spiritual reading I’ve been doing is not helping me. Then I ask “what spiritual experiences have I had?” and discovered that I’ve had a lot. Reminding myself was pretty amazing.
The writing:
Red sunlight coming through the window shining across the room. Apocalyptic — that word means the lid has been taken off. The heat is like a heavy lid, oppressive. heavy weight.
Reading Joanna Macy on our failure to dispose of radioactive waste safely. Who was it who was talking about time, how time has speeded up, how there is no time and because there is no time we might as well use everything up and leave nothing for the generations to come. They are not real to us.
And then there was the thing about children in the Congo mining cobalt, in dirty and unsafe mines, for use in the batteries of our smartphones and electric cars.
Where are we going? where am I going? What sort of future is there when it keeps getting hotter and the air is unbreathable…
I’ve been reading books about spiritual practice, spiritual transformation, but I feel confused and overwhelmed. The practices they describe don’t work for me.
What experiences have I had? I wrote some of them down recently. There was the dream I had, some time in my twenties. I was in Heaven and they told me to go back down to earth and tell everybody they were already forgiven before they had ever sinned. Then I was back on earth and starting to tell people, and then I woke up. I never even wrote the dream down but I’ve never forgotten it.
Then there was going to the Chalice Well in Glastonbury. I sat down on a bench near the well cover with the design of the vesica piscis, and felt the most amazing relaxation and peace settle inside me. All burdens laid down.
The Nature Sanctuary in Findhorn, an odd little building hand built of Lewissian gneiss, with a sod roof, in the shape of a spiral. A bench running around the inside and a sort of altar at the center. My companion and I sat down to meditate. I got the oddest feeling. It was like there was a soft pink fluid, sort of like water, it filled the building and held me up the way water holds you up. It came up to my heart. I somehow knew it was like an ocean, all around the earth. I could feel compassion even though there was no sense of a personal presence. It was an Ocean of Compassion. Several years later I learned that one of the names of the Dalai Lama is “ocean of compassion.”
Then there was the time I was sitting among the Stones of Carnac in Brittany. There was a short piece of rainbow in the sky. I was feeling discouraged and talked to the Goddess, saying “Thank you for your gifts. Maybe when I learn to see that your trials are also gifts…” and on that thought the rainbow stretched to the top of its arc.
This was as far as I got in the 20 minutes we usually have for writing. Some other experiences are described in blog posts so I’ve listed them. But there was one I never talked about.
In May 2021, I participated in a prayer call for India which was overwhelmed by COVID. It was on Zoom, put on by ServiceSpace. I was surprised to find that I could feel healing energy flowing through me to India, a wonderful feeling. Later I found out there were 500 people, all over the world, participating in that call.
I participated in a class put on by the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Foundation and Wilka Roig. A number of people talking about near death experiences and experiences of life after death. I remember in particular one man who said when he was with a dying person he would pray silently “May my presence be a blessing.” I liked the sound of it, so I started doing it as I walked through the halls of Kendal where I live. I was very surprised to find that I could feel the same energy flowing through me to everyone, the same energy that I had felt on the prayer call to India. It’s quite a lovely feeling and it hasn’t failed me yet, I think partly because when I feel “I can’t pray now I feel completely empty” I think O BUT empty is just right for having the blessing energy flow through me.
Other experiences described in blog posts::
God in a Sheet
Goodness Beyond Goodness
Foundation