Sometimes we may be open to experiencing spirit guides in our lives but don’t always know how to. Usually, we can’t see them with our physical eyes and it can take time to recognize their voice. Learning to sense their presence is a mystical experience we can all open up to.
Read MoreThe accompanying painting, rather than being called The Transfiguration, could be called a dramatic moment in Jesus’ very own WeSpace group! (Matt. 17:1–8, Mark 9:2–8, Luke 9:28–36) Like our WeSpace groups, this was a small group of followers of Jesus who shared their lives with one another. They also experienced the presence of God along with other spiritual guides.
At the Transfiguration, the most intense part of the mountain top meeting began as two-centuries-dead heroes of the Jewish tradition, Moses and Elijah, appeared in living, visionary color and sound. In their non-physical, but recognizable energy field forms, they were giving encouragement to Jesus. “They spoke about his departure, which he was about to bring to fulfillment at Jerusalem” (Luke 9:31). Jesus needed some help about his upcoming crucifixion which was weighing heavily on him. Who better to encourage him than two dead guys?
Read MoreI saw standing on the stones of the riverbank
a dark bird with its back to me.
It turned its head to left, then right
revealing a beady eye
and an outrageous orange beak
almost as long as its head.
In some other world
I knew it as an oystercatcher.
I have seen different birds’ beaks adapted
in manifold ways to feed self and offspring.
I have also seen human minds adapted to their purpose:
displaying stabbing verbal sharpness
or the scattering gloom of anxiety
or the tight gleam of avarice.
And I have seen the enlightened mind
intimate with everything
like a soft beak the colours of the rainbow
big enough and flexible enough
to nourish the world.
From: Some Palaeolithic Creature in Me
Read MoreSometimes we think of “embodiment” as getting out of our head. Going back into our body and living more deeply in the physical, not always stuck in our thoughts or jumping with monkey mind. Being “disembodied” is sometimes even pictured as a detached cranium, like an old sci-fi cartoon with just a head flying around in a glass container.
The shadow side of the great evolution of our mental consciousness has been to negate the body. But in returning to the body, we certainly don’t want to fall prey to the same error, which would be to negate the head.
The head is part of the body—a pretty important one! And we’re not going to get very far without it.
Read MoreRegeneration is taking the step from seeing the earth as an object and into experiencing it through our interbeing. Into “humans doing things as nature.”
The incarnation of Christ in the cosmos is the divine interfused in all things, very much including the earth. And so our living into and as the Body of Christ will also be through the divine earth.
We must reimagine and reconfigure our relationship with the earth and the orientation of our consciousness. We cannot and must not “sustain” the way things currently are, but rather we can come into our generative participation in loving service and care for our larger body.
Read MoreChristianity is the religion of the incarnation. Sadly, throughout much of Christian history, instead of embracing the divine presence in all of material reality, Socratic dualism and Greek philosophy became more prominent in the tradition. Misreadings of the apostle Paul did not help in this respect either. Spirit was set apart from and even put in opposition to matter. Many other spiritual traditions, including Christian expressions, further continue to reinforce this immateriality of spirit and separation of the mystical from the physical.
Thankfully, it is not only a resurgence of animist and shamanic spirituality that is reincorporating our spirituality with our bodies, but also science itself that is beginning to intimate that matter is far more energetic and dynamic than we once thought. This is, as well, in the roots of Christianity that saw God dwelling in flesh, not just in Jesus but in all matter and the whole of creation—which includes you and me.
Read MoreIn our WeSpace groups in ICN, we most often and naturally experience the shared space among us primarily from our heart center. As the heart is our center of relationality, that makes sense.
The womb center also has a powerful capacity for collective awareness. The WeSpace of the womb is of a different nature, and for many, can be difficult to experience—especially if our attention is caught up in the strength of our heartful connection of love and relationality.
What would it look like to set the intention to directly explore the shared womb space in integration with our heartful connection?
Read MoreThe mystical body can include but is not limited by gender, race, sexual orientation, or any other category of personal identification.
Poetry and the arts can be wonderful portals to help us enter into the felt awareness and experience of our embodied centers. They help us integrate our participation and understanding through engaging our mythic and magic structures of consciousness.
Read MoreSince we are usually so mind-centric, we may need to give extra attention to the heart. That doesn’t mean we abandon our mind, just that we need more work on the other centers.
