Listening to Your Sacred Body
Spiritual Knowing: Part Six – Discovering Your Mystical Language (2)
“When the somatic and vital worlds are invited to participate in spiritual life, one’s sense of identity becomes permeable to not only transcendent but also immanent spiritual sources, turning body and world into sacred realities that can be appreciated as fundamental for human and perhaps even cosmic evolution.”
—Jorge Ferrer
In Whole-Body Mystical Awakening we are doing just that—inviting our bodily and energetic worlds to join in our spiritual life.
In Part 1 we explored inviting our heart and mind to participate in our spiritual life. The mystical language of the heart is the deep feelings that flow from our heart space. The mystical language of the head is the deeper thoughts, words, and images than come from a mind cleared of its usual constant chatter. Now we explore the mystical language of the other two centers of spiritual knowing—our gut’s vital energy and our feet’s energetic embodiment in the physical cosmos.
Gut
The language of our gut is not the language of feeling or thinking. Also called the spiritual womb, hara, or the first three chakras, its language is intuition, sensing, and impressions. As you place your hands on your tummy and let yourself sink into your spiritual womb, welcome whatever comes up. The more you sink into your inner being, the more you will intuitively get in touch with your spiritual origin. You bear the divine identity of the one who created you.
Our gut also holds our constructed identity, commonly called our ego or the picture we have made of ourselves in order to make it through life. This core identity is deep-seated, containing both our virtues and our shadow—the “dark side” of our personality. These are negative emotions and impulses like rage, envy, greed, selfishness, desire, and the striving for power. If we have not addressed our shadow, what we think of as intuition can often simply be a projection of our shadow on other people and situations. “I have a hunch” in reality is then, “I have a projection which that person or situation is a screen for.” It looks and feels real but it is about us, not them.
Speaking on the Enneagram, Richard Rohr says, “Gut people react instinctively and have an immediate like or dislike for everything. Our judgments are stored in our body. Reality comes at us like one shock wave after another. We take it on like a full body blow every three minutes. EIGHTs fight back, NINEs back off, and we ONEs try to fix, reform, and control reality.”
Underneath our limited identity is our deepest and most authentic core Self, our True Self. Jesus identified it in his graphic image of living waters flowing from our “belly” or “innermost being.” (John 7:37-39). He explained this was spirit or the mystical consciousness that awakens to and holds our divine identity. The living waters do not come from the outside. They flow from deep within us, having always been there but not in our awareness. Mystical awakened and transcendent consciousness releases this inexhaustible flow of the image of God from deep within us to manifest openly in our lives.
When the awareness of our True Self emerges, we find a new and vital flow of courage and creativity. Jesus’ courageous actions flowed from his knowing he was in God’s hands and one with God. His creativity also manifested in many ways.
The other, and perhaps even more primary name for this center is the spiritual womb. In the language of the mystical awakened womb, there is often an experience of generative life and creative flow. I (Luke) have even felt a gentle expanding as if some new life were growing inside me—quite a powerful sensation for a man!
Of course it would be much better to hear a woman’s perspective than that of two men, so we are happy to say that next week we will have a reflection from one of our WeSpace participants on the spiritual womb. You won’t want to miss her beautiful reflections on five gifts of womb wisdom. (If you haven’t already, sign up for our mailing list to have it emailed to you!)
Feet
The mystical language of the feet is the metaphor and felt sense of the energetic connection of your body to material reality. The primary way that we tap into this energy is by grounding through the conductors of our feet. Grounding is being in touch with nature and in tune with our bodies. When we are grounded, we are anchored with a powerful energetic connection to the earth.
You can have lots of wonderful spiritual experiences without being grounded. However, it can be difficult to integrate your experiences into your day to day life without being grounded. Grounding is the act of balancing your spiritual and physical energy by connecting yourself with the earth.
The feet also serve as a connection point to the somatic energy of our whole body. The divine material reality of our incarnated body is charged with sub-atomic particles that do not operate according to the boundaries we normally ascribe to physical reality. Quantum mechanics and mystics alike imply that we are interconnected in ways we can’t quite comprehend yet.
We might envision this interconnection through the metaphor of each of our roots stretching into the shared soil of the earth and entangling, wrapping, and connecting with the roots of others.
The mystical dimension of our bodies knows this collective reality. Mystical somatic language speaks with energetic experiences that are shared between two or more “separate” people. One person might feel energy, tightness, fatigue, or pain in a part of his/her body that connects to a physical situation someone else might be experiencing. This can give insightful information to communicate, encourage, or even heal. Intuitive healers often diagnose from their bodily experience of connection in addition to their gut messages of intuition.
Finding Your Voice
“It is hard to sense the signal of inner knowing when our attention is absorbed in a reactive feeling, somatic contraction, and limiting belief . . . this [is] ‘noise’ in the system.”
—John Prendergast
Learning the mystical languages of our body is a process that we can develop with practice and guidance. It is something we must work at to learn how to attune ourselves to this deeper knowing in each center. It is a consciousness we cultivate best when we are in a state of free from reactivity, contraction, and limitations of belief. Our guided meditations are designed specifically for such a state.
As you grow in listening and understanding, the next step in learning a language is to start speaking!
You may start out a bit unsteady and halting. What if it isn’t “correct” or “right”? What if you’re wrong? Well then guess what, you’re wrong! You have to give yourself permission to make mistakes if you hope to learn to speak a new language. We hold all of this loosely, without authority and over-attachment. Beyond that, sometimes when we “filter” our spiritual knowing through the rational mind, we close ourselves off to possibilities of knowing that don’t “make sense” in the traditional way. As such, we limit our access to deeper truth and the wisdom of our body.
Let yourself speak. You may even discover you knew far more than you realized, that you have a natural center of knowing that has been speaking to you your whole life. And not just for yourself, but for others too. That we might bless others with the loving gift of immanent wisdom for strengthening, encouraging, and comforting one another. If we can only find our voice.
The only way to get better is to practice!
If you’re looking for spaces to practice this with others, that’s exactly what we do in our WeSpace groups. While we aren’t enrolling currently, you can sign up for the waitlist to join the next round!