Dear Tee and Phil and others:

Here's another fray of this thread I've considered before:

What would it be like to take a few days, or even hours, and just stop doing everything we do that we call "spiritual?" I guess I stumbled onto this some years ago, finding that a kind of subtle hypervigilance can drive my best intentions, an unnoticed restlessness with life that I respond to by trying to improve on it in some way. It's easy to name this restlessness and apply a remedy rather than just let life be as it is without trying to make it meaningful, safer, purposeful, etc..

I've suggested this to people before, partly for my own reality check, and the responses I usually get are something like "Well, what's the purpose in that?" Sometimes the responses were rather strong, too, like the idea was threatening in some significant way. And that's sort of the point. What's left when when we're not trying, or not trying not to try, at least?

Peace,

Nick

What's left when when we're not trying, or not trying not to try, at least?

Very good question! The reply I'd give is that the True Self is what is left, and it just goes about being here now in love, effortlessly and without the slightest bit of "trying"

Does that make sense?

I've got to run. . . weekend wedding in La. to attend.

Phil

Dear Phil:

I wish I could mean what you mean, and I've had some real moments that seem to emerge from that open space of the Real Self. But what I'm referring to here, although perhaps not completely unrelated, is more pathological, in a sense.

What I'm referring to is when life becomes so painful that things truly fall apart all the way to the bottom, finding that even my best intentions for spiritual openness have been a kind of ploy against life on its own terms, an attempt to hold together in some way for fear of insanity. The will seems predisposed to fight this unravelling at all cost, unable to stop struggling, and so only life, which is always bigger than our will and our beliefs about it, can widdle me down to this nub, this plain unembelleshed person. Once to the bottom, there is no insanity, but along the way that is a real fear that nothing can console.

But I'm not describing an enlightened state at all, not the satori of the Buddhists, or your "Be here now in love." That kind of awareness may or may not arise. However similar your experience is to this, which I wish I had more of, what I'm struggling to refer to is something completely out of our control, more like death than awakening, and not death as in "Well, yes, one must die first in order that . . . " There simply isn't a way to the bottom I'm describing, because nobody would willingly go there or even cooperate with it as some kind of process.

Peace,

Nick

Hi Nick...
"What would it be like to take a few days, or even hours, and just stop doing everything we do that we call "spiritual?" I guess I stumbled onto this some years ago, finding that a kind of subtle hypervigilance can drive my best intentions, an unnoticed restlessness with life that I respond to by trying to improve on it in some way."

This really rang a bell with me... I have read so much about the need to keep on keeping on through periods of dryness etc... and I think this is important, but for me anyhow, I have found that breaking away for a few days... being "spiritual" in a different way perhaps keeps me connected... maybe a few days just wandering in the woods or playing with clay... or gardening...
As Phil said, a being present in love.
If prayer is relationship which I think it should be then can't/shouldn't relationship continue and be celebrated in other ways than through the ritual?
I struggle with the need to "perfect" things too... drives me bonkers at times and I need to remind myself that it really isn't my place to perfect but only to allow Christ to perfect through me... if he chooses... and what he chooses. Takes a load off but also sends me off to him with a "but don't you think this would be better... and how about this.. and you know..."
I do so like to be in the driver's seat so to speak. Think maybe most of us do in one way or another. Ever wonder if sometimes He would just like to throw up his hands in exasperation... "Would you guys quit meddling and just do what I tell you! I do have a plan here you know!"
and with that I will go pray...
Peace,
Wanda

Dear Wanda:

Thanks for your thoughts on this. For myself I don't know what I'm describing exactly in terms of a spiritual process, or how to even call it a relationship; it can be difficult to discern on one's own the difference between "ordinary" anguish and a dark night passage where consolations are withdrawn.

Again, for me it is more like dropping the whole show, not in disrespect for God, but because my relationship with life in the basic sense has a contrived quality that can even be reinforced through spiritual practice. The problem being, of course, that I can't even do the dropping. Only the pain of life, or the grace of God, can create this opening where struggle ceases, since the ego or will would never relinquish their control, especially in the face of such pain.

There is also a developmental aspect to this struggle I'm trying to describe, having to do with infancy, especially during the first 8-10 months when the mother's presence in a most constant way is required to soothe and hold together the infant before it is capable of self-generating a sense of identity. When this attachment fails to a significant degree, and the infant isn't able to internalize parental presence as an experience of being seen as a separate self (the beginning of its capacity for self-regulation), a hypervigilance with a severe survival imperative arises, which holds both a fear of identity and of falling into nothingness, both of which are unknown territories the infant cannot navigate alone.

Phil speaks of the observer awareness having the capacity for a kind of presence that allows painful psychic material to heal, probably the most important aspect of the kundalini process, in my experience. And my work in Focusing with Ann Cornell has certainly supported this capacity, but I have my doubts about whether observer awareness can "reach" this far, since the rift I'm describing in early development occurs before the capacity for self-reflection emerges.

My last lingering thought here is how the soul transcends the confines of the nervous system, and at least by definition would be an opening for cultivating the degree of presence needed to allow the organism to heal, to move forward according to its own knowing as Gendlin would put it. Gendlin has a nice chapter on this process in his book "Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy", which he refers to as the organism "filling itself in," always knowing its own next steps in development, and only needing our open attention to the felt sense of the body as we imagine the experiences missed; this combination of imagining/fantasy and being with what comes in the body through the felt sense may have great developmental value.

Sorry to put you through the paces of my own journey, but all of this does bear upon spirituality in a rather deep sense, although the church, and other religions, have tended to relegate this healing work to psychotherapy, while psychotherapy has only recently begun to take spirituality seriously. I did run across some interesting titles by Ann and Barry Ulanov, and they seem to be taking up this subject matter rather directly e.g., "Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer," and "Finding Space: Winnicott, God and Psychic Reality." I'm looking forward to seeing the connections they draw between grace, presence, and human development, especially if they have any practical sense of healing for adults.

Peace,

Nick

Hi Nick,
Thank you for sharing do deeply with us. I see a lot of parallels between your journey and my own - nice to know one isn't exactly alone in all of this. (Grin)

"..it can be difficult to discern on one's own the difference between "ordinary" anguish and a dark night passage where consolations are withdrawn."
For me the difference seems to be the depth... "ordinary" anguish is centered around one or two things... the cause is identifiable... the "dark nights" I experience is more all-encompassing - very hard to describe but kinda like a candle going out... or of being lost alone in a gray fog type of feeling. Carrying on through this does have a very real feeling of living a contrived life and spirituality... a simply going through the motions feel.

"When this attachment fails to a significant degree, and the infant isn't able to internalize parental presence as an experience of being seen as a separate self (the beginning of its capacity for self-regulation), a hypervigilance with a severe survival imperative arises, which holds both a fear of identity and of falling into nothingness, both of which are unknown territories the infant cannot navigate alone."

Could the dark night be almost a re-enactment of this... when the Father's presence is felt to be withdrawn? If so could this be the reason for the importance of continuing the practice of spiritual disciplines - even without the consolation they previously gave? The need to carry on despite the fear of loss of identity and falling into nothingness? Like the child whose parent leaves for a short time with the assurance that they will return... and after several times of leaving and returning, the child grows to trust - could this not be a time for growing in trust as well?

I got this on another list - kinda turns things upside down a little but has given me a slightly new perspective... taken from a book entitled God Calling.

"Agony and heartache, pain and loneliness, such as no human being has
ever known, were the price of your redemption.
Truly you are not your own.
You are bought with a price. You belong to Me.
You are Mine to use, Mine to love, Mine to provide for.
Man does not understand the infinite Love of the Divine. Man
teaches that as I bought him, so he has to serve, obey and live
for Me.
"He fails to understand that because he is Mine, bought by Me, it is
My responsibility to supply his every need. His part is to realize My
ownership, and to claim my love and power."

This speaks less of a servant/master relationship which the church tends to promote and more of a lover/beloved relationship. This speaks a bit to healing as well.
"I have my doubts about whether observer awareness can "reach" this far, since the rift I'm describing in early development occurs before the capacity for self-reflection emerges."

I can only speak of my own journey here but in the "dark nights" I somehow come to an awareness of causes - reasons why I tend to react to things in certain ways... maybe like opening the closet and facing the skeletons that I had hidden or a necessity to face and examine my fears. Not a pleasant experience but a very healing experience... a type of letting go of all those things that restrict you and box you in so to speak. In losing your identity you gain your true identity and are freed somehow to live, not as you thought you should or as others think you should but as who you truly are and this cannot be done until you can accept and trust that you are loved just as you are.. just because you are. Which is the message of Easter.. He cared for himself so little because He loves each one of us so much. I think that this is the awareness of presence that Phil speaks of and this awareness is what opens the door to healing.

I'm not very knowledgable about the Kundalini experience per se, but healing I think would encompass both body and soul... physical and spiritual. Could the Kundalini be a healing of the body - a bit of a tune up so to speak and the physical sensations be the outward signs?

Don't know if any of this makes much sense. Still so much to learn myself... again thanks for sharing! Please don't stop.. Would like to hear your thoughts on all of this.
Peace,
Wanda

Dear Wanda:

Thanks for your insights on this. What you say may be quite true - that a dark night may reenact the early losses so that our depedency shifts from human to divine care, so to speak. But for myself there isn't enough clarity to know what it is I'm going through. Your remarks distinguishing ordinary anguish from the dark night passage give me pause . . . "a candle going out." The problem for me is that the early childhood attachment failure seems to color most of everything, so your contrast is difficult for me to estimate; it could be a global sense of struggling to be with this preverbal despair, or it could be a dark night passage. I certainly can't pray now, not in a way that feels personal, but then again confrontation with attachment loss feels this way to, that intimacy and connection seem impossible.

Your description of how the infant learns to trust the parent will reappear, and in having these brief losses develops a healthy sense of separation and the beginning of self-soothing is what we hope happens, whereas, in the case of attachment failure, the parent not only may physically separate from the child for overextended periods, but not have the capacity to be with the child in an authentic, warm, non-intrusive way even when physical contact is being made. If you don't know what this is I'm describing, just be thankful. And so I'm left wondering if God would even draw such a person into the dark night passage when the ego is lacking these basic strengths.

As for kundalini, yes, it seems mostly a creaturely response to Divine Presence, sort of a rewiring of the body as its temple. I certainly wouldn't recommend focusing on it directly, unless one were looking for a way to cultivate aspects of physical health, such as through Tai Chi, or qigong, but generally I think acupuncture is much safer.

Thanks again for responding. What you've said just shows me I'm not in a place to understand this intellectually right now, whatever the nature of the struggle actually is.

I'll be on retreat for the next few weeks, and back in town around April 17, and look forward to further sharings.

Peace,

Nick

Thanks for your insights on this. What you say may be quite true - that a dark night may reenact the early losses so that our depedency shifts from human to divine care, so to speak. But for myself there isn't enough clarity to know what it is I'm going through.

This has been a very depthful exchange, and I think it best to simply honor the truth and authenticity you share, Nick, and the integrity with which you journey along. However one might analyze your process (and I'm sure you could do the best job of that), living through it is a totally different matter.

One thing that comes to mind as I read your posts is the radical nature of trust--sometimes not even being clear about what/whom we're trusting in, or hoping for. I do understand that kind of trust, especially when it seems that one's mental sanity is up for grabs. Here I connect with Christ's "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me," and his "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit." Only, sometimes I didn't even know that there is even that kind of clarity about what's going on. What is clear is that God wants just everything about us to belong to Him, and that includes the pains we've been wrestling with in an effort to try to give the Ego a little room to breathe.

. . . If you don't know what this is I'm describing, just be thankful. And so I'm left wondering if God would even draw such a person into the dark night passage when the ego is lacking these basic strengths.

That's a tough one. The Ego will always complain that it doesn't have enough strength or balance (read: control!), but in the kind of early development pain and healing you're describing, that could well be true. Only, see here that you're writing these wonderful, lucid and insightful posts. You're getting up in the mornings and doing a good days' work. You're even going on a retreat for a few days. There's some kind of Ego or conscious agent that has found a way to keep going.

Let's hear from you after your retreat.

Phil

Dear Phil:

Thanks for your encouragement.

Something I haven't described in detail before are the times during focusing when pain of the developmental variety has transformed, "filled itself in" as Gendlin says. This doesn't happen very often, since it takes a lot of courage, even desperation, to face anguish at this level, since developmental pain/emptiness is uniquely painful in having existential elements in it as well.

With Ann Cornell's help and support of focusing partners I've been able to "be with" the emptiness long enough to allow it to begin having its own space inside my body(usually chest or stomach areas), which then can lead to meltings or shifts that reveal the emptiness to have its own life, something anything but empty. What tends to happen is that the emptiness has within it, in a cognitively unforseen way, the very life and love one longs for and least expects to find in such a wasteland. It's as though it turns inside out, suggesting that any lack of development has within it not only the intimate knowledge of what it needs, but also the very essence of what is needed in the need itself.

It's almost like a parent being with a child whose budding self-awareness is simply waiting on certain conditions of attention to emerge. We don't make the child aware, or loving, or anything else, but simply provide the containment and soothing that foster discovery and emergence. Gendlin describes this aptly in his book "Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy":

"Most current theories assume-quite wrongly-that one knows only what one has in fact experienced. Not so. An infant's organism knows before birth how it should be received by a mother. That includes being received by arms that pick the infant up and cuddle it, and by nipples that bring first a certain fluid and then later milk. Infant and mother are one system together, and the whole system is prepared . . . . The infant organism knows(feels,is,implies) its next bit of life process, which means how it will be with a mother and father. It implies how its life process will be carried forward by them. Just as it "knows" how to inhale the air into its lungs, so it "knows" how it will be held, nursed, welcomed, and protected. The bodily implying is always still there. If it can generate the missing interactional events, it will."

Gendlin's description above is partly referenced to therapeutic interactions where the client is supported in sensing what is happening in his body as he imagines the missing experiences which are needed. The "implied next steps" known organismically are then being given the needed interaction, and can emerge at visceral and cognitive levels. In my experience of Ann Cornell's version of focusing, where I believe this would certainly be supported as Gendlin describes it, the implied next steps emerge once a certain degree of presence i.e., unbiased, "interested curiosity" has been reached as the response needed for the undeveloped aspect of self to be seen. Once it feels seen, then it can begin to unfold and live in its own right(see Ann's and Barbara's descriptions of this process at www.focusingresources.com).

This goes back to what you said in another thread, Phil, about how the observing self is irreducible to whatever pain its feeling. My quagmire has been that if this pain/emptiness/developmental arrest begins before real-self awareness emerges during infancy, then is observing awareness still capable of providing those authentic qualities of attention needed in the way Gendlin and Cornell describle? Again, my experience suggests "yes," but happens so infrequently relative to the immensity of this sort of suffering that it is easily forgetten as a sort of post-mortem encouragement.

What then seems to come from this is an increasingly cohesive bodily ego that can let go more easily into grace/I-Thou relationship.

I've also found a lucid, in-depth exploration of spirituality and human development in Ulanov's book "Finding Space: Winnicott, God, and Psychic Reality." Ulanov is apparently Catholic, and a Jungian/developmental psychotherapist with a strong spiritual foundation.

Peace,

Nick

Thanks, Nick, SO much for continuing to share this journey!

sincerely,
johnboy

Nick, that's wonderfully rich sharing you're gracing us with. I feel like I'm being privileged to observe an almost miraculous rebirth happening in the process you describe. It's especially good to hear that something of a healing is taking place as deep wounds give way to love and life.

This goes back to what you said in another thread, Phil, about how the observing self is irreducible to whatever pain its feeling. My quagmire has been that if this pain/emptiness/developmental arrest begins before real-self awareness emerges during infancy, then is observing awareness still capable of providing those authentic qualities of attention needed in the way Gendlin and Cornell describle? Again, my experience suggests "yes," but happens so infrequently relative to the immensity of this sort of suffering that it is easily forgetten as a sort of post-mortem encouragement.

It seems to me that you're answering your question as you go along, here. My hunch is that the spiritual soul brings a primordial kind of awareness to bear on our development from a very, very early age--well before birth, I believe. It's not a conscious, conceptual awareness, of course, but is sufficient to "hold" whatever development is taking place in the formative intelligence to which the soul was created to exert on matter. It is that simple, accepting awareness applied in disciplines like focusing, vipassana, and even contemplative experiences which enables the coiled up, blocked patterns of energy within to begin to move anew and be ordered by the intelligence of the soul. At least that's my intuition about all this, confirmed by many experiences with my own healing, and through descriptions such as you share.

I hope that doesn't sound too analytical and reductionistic. It's certainly not intended, as terms like "intelligence of the soul" imply a rather amazing phenomena to me, before which I stand in awe. We are most fearfully, wonderfully made, as even our suffering and healing reveals.

Phil

Here's another offering to this thread which links spiritual formation and psychological development for me: the practice of praying for others, including those who have hurt us, which brings together the presence of God, the intelligence of the soul, and the wounds of the heart. I stumbled on this as something unexpected, since my previous experience with intercessory prayer was more wrote or prescriptive, and not so inclusive. Now when I pray for others, it is more like affective mental prayer, almost like lectio divina, where there is a quiet savoring or appreciation of the other person within the larger Presence. In other words, the prayer isn't about how the other person should or could be, but an opening to that person which God gives as we open to that grace which is for/in all. With respect to certain people with whom I have a most troubled relationship, this allows a contact I couldn't manage on my own.

"My hunch is that the spiritual soul brings a primordial kind of awareness to bear on our development from a very, very early age--well before birth, I believe. It's not a conscious, conceptual awareness, of course, but is sufficient to "hold" whatever development is taking place in the formative intelligence to which the soul was created to exert on matter. It is that simple, accepting awareness applied in disciplines like focusing, vipassana, and even contemplative experiences which enables the coiled up, blocked patterns of energy within to begin to move anew and be ordered by the intelligence of the soul. At least that's my intuition about all this, confirmed by many experiences with my own healing, and through descriptions such as you share."

Lots of good stuff here Phil, words for my own feeling of how God, the soul, the nervous system, and conscious attention interplay with each other. When you speak of "blocked patterns of energy being moved anew and ordered by the intelligence of the soul," I think you are touching on how qualities of the soul can come through attention to those undeveloped areas of the psyche. Principally, the quality of being with a pain and tuning in to just how it is in the body (starting with not knowing how it is, just as we would respect a friend in pain who cannot yet form words for what he is experiencing) allows this latent intelligence to come back into conscious life. Ann Cornell speaks of this as keeping it company. What tells so much about this latent bodily intelligence is how, in keeping it company, we can become its focus.

Perhaps if others want to share about their experiences with praying for others, and what this imparts, then we could later carry this other fray forward regarding the body as the temple of the soul and Holy Spirit, and how being receptive to the body as an innately sacred intelligence might bring openings that the conditioned conscious mind alone is usually unaware of.

Peace,

Nick

That's a great new turn in this thread, nick. Jesus' commandment to love our enemies and pray for our persecutors comes more alive with your sharing above. We see that the primary beneficiary of such prayer is the one who prays, as it configures us more deeply in patterns of unconditional benevolence and loosens blockages created by past hurts and resentments.

A problem is that many times people don't want to let go and forgive and pray for the welfare of their "persecutors." I found this many times in working with people from dysfunctional families. What I did was encourage them to pray for the grace to want to forgive, which they were generally willing to do, and that was all God needed. Such forgiveness enabled them to be free in the presence of the other where, before, their unhealed hurts and resentments kept them in a defensive posture.

Yes, let's hear more from others about experiences concerning this topic.

Phil