My journey to Spiritual Support

“When you begin to nurture spirit…social constructions fall to the wayside.”

Reverend Otis Moss III

I’m in a gym. The air feels raspy. The air conditioning is always at the wrong temperature. I am meditating during a yoga class and up comes the truth. My life has been a waste of ego and fear. I have lacked compassion, acted selfishly, lied, stolen, and manipulated. I have abused my body. I’m a narcissist. Every day there is the person I want to be, who I feel inside. Every day I’m not that.

My sins are legion.

I lay on my mat and cry. At the end of the meditation the yoga instructor misunderstands someone and says, ‘who is Laura?’ Exactly.

We are the post-enlightenment, industrial revolution human

We are between the first humans, and the humans that might survive

Humanity has languished in the selva oscura, and we are journeying through the Inferno

We are facing our death

To avoid our doom, to get to Paradiso, we must climb the mountain of our sins

I finally lay in that truth and realised there is no other path forward. Not for me, and not for humanity. But before Paradiso is the in-between. Purgatorio.

I watch a moth outside my window

It’s desperately trying to get to the light

Helplessly fluttering and banging against an invisible barrier

Getting nowhere

It looks exhausting

I'm exhausted

It’s the exhaustion of the in-between.

I crave solitude, silence, nature, reading, writing, deep thinking and conversations. I also feel deeply connected - that all things are just one infinite thing. I am this human, but also that rock, and that bit of stardust. I am as moved by a Yirritja song about rain as I am watching a documentary about new physics beyond the Standard Model. I wish I could know it all.

I want to connect the dots of seemingly disparate things. Those patterns are the infinite consciousness some call God. It is my driving curiosity. I want to smash the systems. All the systems. Patriarchy yes. But also class systems, economic systems, nationalism. Anything corrupt, that shows the worst parts of humanity. Anything that tells us our only value is found in how much we can produce, where we come from, or what club we belong to. I fantasise about living the life of a contemplative.

This is the secret me. The me that I mask and compartmentalise.

There is a different me that I show to the world - the people-pleasing me. I do what I think is expected of me. I have found validation through achievement and success. I have worked stupid hours in underpaid jobs to avoid disappointing people. I pursued money because I was told that was where I would find my own value. I am expert in telling people what they want to hear. I’m bad at setting boundaries and saying no.

In my bath I clumsily try to move foam icebergs with my forearms to stop my hands getting wet. The picture is comical as I slide around. It is our ‘perfect’ bath. It looks like something from a magazine, and it has an even better view. Except I’m too short to lie in it without my head going under the water. Instead, I sit squashed up at one end, with my back to the side and my legs bent in front of me. Not luxuriating, not even comfortable. But the bath looks good, and I’ve been led to believe that is what counts.

Sitting in an office I look down on myself pretending to be a person society expects me to be. Someone who goes to an office, and meetings, and gets a regular paycheck (preferably large). But I don’t really want any of it. I hate the surface; I want to dive in the deep end.

My fear speaks in the language of ego. It is fear of telling the truth about the secret me. Being misunderstood and dismissed. Being embarrassed and humiliated. I’m scared of my full humanity being revealed. Jim Carrey says, “Your need for acceptance can make you invisible in this world.’ In the in-between we are invisible.

In real life sharing my true self meant anxiety – a racing heart, shaking hands and voice, a ducked head and avoiding eye contact. But substances became ways to access my true self without anxiety. Being high allowed me to access those parts of my brain I was too afraid to share. Pondering the mysteries of the universe while high was liberating and addictive. Eventually my body grew a fatty tumour – initially a small lump and eventually something the size of my fist. I imagined my body using this space as a place to store all the damage. The doctors were amazed by the lump, they had never seen one so big. My substance abuse was like a spiral, going round and round. Dante would describe these circles as violent sins against myself, and that is certainly true. But at the heart of these errors is a fight against change. These substances kept me small, keep us all small.

A miracle arrived in the form of a zygote, saving me from myself. Cells divided, organs and functional systems developed, and my body experienced health. I began to climb out of the spiral. Exactly nine months to the day perfection arrived and I finally understood what unconditional love meant. And I felt a new kind of terror about the world this tiny miracle was entering.

I remember the day when President of the United States was elected in 2016. It seemed as if humanity, in the form of voting Americans, had suddenly wrenched open its scared, nasty, small side. But the post-modern developed world has worshipped that President, and everything he stands for, for a long time. We like a show, dominance, power, money, ‘me first, me only’, success at any cost, white people. This story was sold to us for centuries. Ego, greed, hate, envy, abuse, overconsumption. We appear to destroy everything. Nature, compassion, ancient wisdom, love. The feminine. Hope.

Our sins are legion.

Then a microscopic organism infected the human world wide web and brought us to our collective knees. The symptoms and consequences of the virus feel like a message. Breathing (our lack of presence), hair loss (our obsession with the physical), no travel (our excess), lockdown (our fear of solitude and quiet), the end to the standard work from an office model (our systems). A forced hard stop requiring us to evolve and find new ways of doing things.

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

Arundhati Roy

The pandemic was devastating. And maybe the pandemic was nature’s last chance for humanity. Maybe it was the start of our evolution.

My own last chance came in the form of spiritual evolution. It was all I had left.

The religious scholar Huston Smith describes a ‘spiritually realised being’ as a person with ‘an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.’ I think this describes the great scientist Albert Einstein as much as it does any person of faith.

Long before language existed, the universe communicated in patterns. Language calls these patterns mathematics or science. Patterns show us all things are One. The Golden Ratio, Benfords Law, Cymatics, fractals. The ‘Universal Archetype’ refers to universal patterns in mycelium, the roots of trees, neurons, the networks of our human nervous system and brains, the Internet, and even dark matter. These can teach us as much as the great spiritual truths as a religious text. Lothar Schafer says, “Quantum physics gave us a way for science and spirituality to make logical sense”.

The wind, like love, like breath, is a no-thing and yet we can feel it, see it, hear it

It is immensely powerful while also being gentle and joyful

It can be hot or cold

Move up or down or in a spiral

Be magical and devastating.

Some believe the wind is the universal consciousness playing with us and being with us. In a children’s movie a little cartoon snowman calls the wind Gale and says hello whenever she comes by. Now I also call her Gale and I say hello whenever she comes by.

I have beliefs about the world, the universe, ‘God’, and existence that are completely outside of the scientific method to explain.  Spirituality is a big ask for someone like me who can be infuriated simply because a decision is not evidence-based. For someone who can be suspicious of organised religion. Someone who, by my very nature, questions every aspect of dogma. This led me to consider what areas I do put blind faith in. Eventually the only thing I could come up with is love.

Hear me out. Love is felt in a great many, varied ways. Sometimes it feels like wonder and awe. Maybe it is an orgasm, or hiking in nature. Maybe it is a divine amuse-bouche. Maybe it's your favourite book, or a song, or a painting. Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek said, “there’s a remarkable overlap between the concepts of beauty that you find in art and literature and music, and things that you find as the deepest themes of our understanding of the physical world.” It is all Love. Capital L love. There is no scientific explanation for it, or way to measure it. It’s not the same as measuring arousal or our body’s biological response to connection. There is a way I feel about my children that is unconditional and infinite and that I know to be truth. It may be the closest expression to 'God' that I will ever know.

Love might not encompass all of spirituality, but it is the doorway to it. Thinking deeply about what it is we truly Love, how we experience Love, is the first step.

Shavasana is the most difficult and most important of all the yoga poses. The cycle, the return. Sink, and then a thought enters your mind, start again. On and on and on to awakening. Just like the patterns in the universe. Just like facing my truth that day in the gym. Just like my own spiritual journey to get to Spiritual Support.

Being brave and opening our minds to whole new way of looking at, and approaching, things is key to our climb through purgatory. Our bridge between two worlds. I want to help people, and the world, to walk that bridge.

‘Creating a better world within and without is a work in progress. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it feels hopeless. Sometimes it’s a big experiment. Sometimes it doesn’t quite work out and it collapses and falls apart. But I’m showing up, I’m participating. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll start again.’

 Ronni Kahn