Coming into Mystical Embodiment
Our Four Centers of Spiritual Knowing
If I asked you to think about your body, what comes to mind?
How you look from the outside? What amount of weight we’d like to lose? Our skin and bones. Organs and tissues. Muscle and fat. Cells and neurons.
This is the body from an exterior, objective material perspective. It is true, but it is partial.
Unfortunately, so much of Christian history propagated and reinforced this division of the material and the spiritual. Body and soul apart, despite being the religion of the incarnation, of God made flesh. Combine that with a Western materialism that also tends toward disembodiment, and here we are—many of us disconnected and disassociated from our body as a true aspect of our being, not just an object.
There has been pushback of course. More yoga and tai chi, dance and movement. Perhaps we’ve learned some about our emotional body, our pain body. And perhaps, you’ve already begun to come more into your subtle body—your mystical body.
This is a big part of the spiritual work that we do at ICN, embracing and cultivating our embodied, mystical being. This is taking embodiment to the next level of development. It is a crucial component to integrate in our spiritual life, especially with the rise in meditative and contemplative movements that sometimes only emphasize going to the causal body or witnessing state. For many in this day and age, in our current context and starting place, this actually ends up further reinforcing the disconnect and disembodiment—further object-ifying and distancing without the counter-balance of more deeply subject-ifying our immanent body and being. Our mystical body encompasses both the subtle and the causal. We need to live in and as both for a healthy and integrated spiritual being, to dwell holistically in our mystical body.
So how do we do that? How do we integrate our experienced reality into a more embodied mystical spirituality? After extensive research and drawing on a lifetime of theology and experience, Paul Smith created the practice of Whole-Body Mystical Awakening to help us. For our time and context, we believe that coming into our mystical bodies is most easily and naturally accessed through four main centers of spiritual awareness: Heart, Womb, Feet, and Head.