Letting Go Spiritually — Part 3
Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. — Howard Thurman
Close your eyes for a moment. Place yourself in a deep, serene forest, light filtering through the canopy, the smell of earth and moss. Or perhaps you are standing at the ocean's edge, waves breaking at your feet. Or maybe you are inside a grand cathedral, the scale of it pressing gently on your chest. Wherever you are, notice where your attention sits.
Something shifts in these moments. The tight, preoccupied self loosens its grip. Our perceptual frame expands. We release the myopic, separate self and come into a deepened relationship with something larger. As we let go of the self that usually drives our experience, a more spacious awareness opens. We are, without quite trying, letting go, spiritually.
What Is the Spiritual Realm?
It goes by many names: God, the Tao, Great Spirit, the Muses, Lifeforce, Higher Power. Whatever we call it, it is a refined, luminous realm of energy: light, love, and intelligence operating at frequencies beyond the ordinary mind. It is a spectrum that contains and transcends both the ego and the soul. It is inhabited by non-physical presences - angels, allies, guides, saints, ancestors - and through these channels, it’s always communicating with us.
Spirit reaches us through dreams and intuition, through a song that arrives unbidden, a cloud formation that stops us, a sign that makes us pause. We receive this guidance in those moments when body, heart, and mind are functioning in a balanced way. This balance opens what I think of as a vertical channel.
And when the channel is open, we begin to perceive “pings” and cosmic downloads. We become available to the Divine leadings and grace that seek new streambeds to flow through. We experience synchronicities and things seem to fall into place in surprising ways.
Sometimes called the imaginal realm, this spiritual energy field presses against our physical one inviting a kind of alchemy where lower thoughts, feelings, and actions can be transmuted into higher forms.
A writer sits stalled, circling the same tired paragraph. She steps outside, lets her mind go quiet… and within minutes a sentence arrives, fully formed, from nowhere she can name. The frustration has been transmuted into a flow that continues for five pages.
A man has carried a grievance against his brother for years. One morning, half-awake, an image comes unbidden into his mind: his brother as a young boy, frightened and alone. The resentment he could not will away simply releases. What was bitter becomes, quietly, compassion.
A woman is washing dishes, tired and irritable. She glances out the window at the last light moving through the trees, and the irritability dissolves into something she can only call gratitude. The mundane has become, briefly, luminous.
And on our end of these experiences, we are not exiles yearning for the absolute. We are alchemists and artists, teasing the shape of the Divine out of the eternal and into the now. We are recruits, called forth by light and love to be their face, hands, and feet in the world.
Coming Alive for the World
This ascent is never merely personal. When we heal something within ourselves, we contribute to the healing of the world, through our thoughts, feelings, actions, and the quality of our presence. People who are coming alive spiritually change the rooms they walk into.
The playwright Christopher Fry said it with startling urgency in his play, The Sleep of Prisoners, written in the shadow of World War II:
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere.
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul people ever took.
Affairs are now soul size,
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake
But will you wake, for pity's sake?
Affairs are now “soul size.” The awareness we glimpsed in the forest, at the ocean, in the cathedral - that is not an escape from the world. It is preparation for a deeper engagement with it. It is a moment of rubbing shoulders with God.
It has all been in the works for so many thousand years. A soulful letting go. A coming alive that lifts us into Spirit.