Showing posts with label spirituality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spirituality. Show all posts

Saturday, 13 July 2013

When Life Gets in the Way

It happens to us all: we just get busy, or something specific comes along to take up all our energy. At times like these, it's easy to neglect the very things that nourish us, those things that would help us to keep going and to weather the storm.

Unfortunately, this can so easily set up a vicious circle in which we can't get everything done (or can't concentrate enough to get anything done thanks to the current crisis), and our lack of self-care makes this worse while at the same time we feel we can't afford the time for self-care - as though it's some kind of luxury that we only deserve when everything's perfect. Sound familiar? I think it's true of many of us, and can certainly recognise these tendencies in myself.

Spiritual practices such as meditation and rituals can be - should be - part of this self-care and shouldn't be neglected, no matter how desperately we feel the time should be spent on something 'important'. The truth is, if we're neglecting ourselves, everything else will not be, cannot be done satisfactorily. I'm not saying that we should all spend hours a day in meditation or visualisation - that level of practice definitely sounds like a luxury! But actually, once you've established the habit, a few minutes can lift you out of your hamster wheel enough to give you a recharge.

Sunday, 28 April 2013

X: the Unknown

That's what all religion, all faith, all spirituality is about isn't it? That which we do not, cannot, know.

For myself, being pretty pragmatic and down to earth, I think (as I may have indicated in my "Universe" post) that our depictions of deity or the divine are imperfect and human-centric because that's where we are. We cannot understand completely, we do not know what lies 'beyond', so we imagine and we invent and we seek. I know that some believe they know what God is or is not, that they have been spoken to specifically and given messages, but ultimately I think that, just as we are flawed, our understanding and communication of these messages is flawed and becomes coloured by our experiences.

But isn't it great that still we seek, still we search and still we yearn for the truth that we are sure is 'out there', somewhere?