Spirituality - how being in touch with spirituality creates healing

[Pumpkinella]

Fellow peers,

After a brief conversation with a peer on the forums I was inspired to start a thread on spirituality.

For some, spirituality is a very important aspect of the human being and can be a source of great healing, comfort and peace.

I am interested to hear about peoples spiritual experiences and to share with each other on how spirituality has helped us grow and learn more about ourselves. For example you can discuss spiritual leaders that have helped you, quotes, experiences, philosophies etc.

I want to also welcome any form of spirituality and belief that has generated a sense of space and peace. Don't be shy!

I will start with a quote by Alan Watts (Buddhist/zen philosopher). This helped me challenge my beliefs on being not good enough, not better enough, not as I should be:

"What I am really saying is that you don't need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of the galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all."

Looking forward to hearing from you.

[Miss T]

I'm disappointed that first year psychology comes from the sceptics perspective. Even if the upcoming psychologist is open to telepathy, they are railroaded into keeping it separate from their future practice. Beliefs can certainly keep someone going.

[Miss T]

I think if you pray secular prayers you can get answers from the collective unconsciousness as Carl Jung called it. In other words wisdom from the spirits of other people.

[randomxx]

As op said in the first post , you don't actually have to do anything as such.

For me , any form of true spirituality is inside. l am very spiritual and always have been in all things nature, the earth, soil, animals,trees skies waters, all of it.

lt all has it's own powers and reasons for being and we are a huge part of that as our first nation people have been living themselves for 60,000 yrs.

lt's just such a shame that in the typical society and the everyday life and ways that forces most of us to live these days there is nothing, nothing, connecting us to any of that anymore . Even sadder in a country like Australia with probably the oldest living race on earth but yet their connections and teachings in everything has never been part of our culture,

lt should all be the first part of our culture and instilled from schooling upwards. Not materialism, shiny new cars

But personally , l've always even as a kid related to our first nation peoples connection to the land, nature and the dreaming and still do.

There's such huge healing in everything nature, lessons and guidance, tuning. lt's all there has been for millions of yrs but finally, finally, even psychiatrists, doctors, all sorts, are finally waking up to just how important it all is to us, to even just to get outside and feel the earth under your feet, my God are they kidding. What's it's taken them 100s of yrs living the way we do to figure that out, yaknow, especially in this country where we've had the best teachers on the planet all this time right here with us.

Quotes look tbh, as much as l love and feels for some, too often they're just scribbled down by some writer but not actually lived by anyone. Shame.

rx

[Eagle Ray]

Hi Miss T and rx,

I wholeheartedly agree with you Rx. In this country we have so fundamentally failed to listen and learn from First Nations people. When I go out into remote places I greet the ancestor spirits and have a reverence for those places. There is so much incredible cultural knowledge of landscape, plants, animals, tracking, the night sky, healing knowledge and capacities etc. A wealth of knowledge and insight has been overlooked and stamped on by approaches that are so disconnected from the Australian landscapes and original inhabitants of this country whose intricate relationships and connections have built up over millennia. It is to the detriment of us all that those intimate connections have not been better understood, though little by little there is some awareness.

There’s a great book I’ve read - Healers of Central Australia: Ngangkari. Some of these healers now do amazing work in hospitals and prisons, and treat both indigenous and non-indigenous patients successfully. It’s beginning to be grasped that healing the whole person - mind/body/spirit - is so important.

I think getting out there and being in country is part of learning that connection. I imagine you may be having some experiences like that on your journey rx.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Miss T. I think academic psychology is still reluctant to engage certain ideas that don’t fit Western reductionist perspectives. I’ve been using the collective unconscious lately as a source of guidance and it’s really helped me in the past too. I think Jung was aware of these spiritual aspects and was good at tapping into altered consciousness states to gain deep knowledge and insights. Some of the work with psychedelics as a treatment for trauma that gains insights this way is now coming into medical settings. I’ve found my mind will go to these places on its own in the right conditions and I start to get insights that help me in life.

I think, at least hope, there will be paradigm shifts in the future. I agree with the op’s quote that when we realise how profoundly connected we are to everything in nature and the universe we realise we are completely ok as we are in this moment now.

ER

[randomxx]

So true er and to you too op.

Even my place that l've sadly in those ways left recently now. But l could feel it all through that area and on my very property itself especially out the front and in bare feet. l'd walk all over it all the time in bare feet just to enjoy and to feel it, and soak in the healing as it was literally healing. If l'd had a really hard day or l'd been away and home again so tired, stressed, life, or even in just feeling goods and happiness. And as it turns out a few yrs after l moved into it way back and had been feeling it all that time, l find out there were tribes all though my exact area and basically around my very property which l knew, l could feel it.

Our landscape, it's everywhere and so powerful, so ancient.

rx

[Miss T]

When I first learnt about the dreaming at school, I dismissed it as being just mythology, now I realise it is so much more. I am interested in dream weaving, dream catching and my more literal dreams than dream symbolism. Unfortunately, I don't believe I have the power to visualise or draw a dream sequence.

[Eagle Ray]

Hi Miss T and rx,

Miss T, all the ways dreams are used in different cultures is fascinating. Among the Ngangkari healers of Central Australia, individual healers, such as a father and daughter, will co-dream. They will actually go and do a healing together on someone remotely - in their shared dream state. It's hard for people to comprehend who haven't grown up in a culture that develops these capacities, but there are whole dimensions of being in which healing processes and profound experiences can take place. Most recently I have been using waking dreams - dropping into an altered state of consciousness - to understand and resolve deep issues from my life. There can be things profoundly repressed in us that our system wants to resolve but it's not always easy to do this with everyday conscious reality or trying to use everyday cognition. Sometimes we need to connect much more deeply within ourselves and with deeper realms of existence to access the information we need to genuinely heal.

You may find that with practice you may have more capacity to do things like visualise or draw a dream sequence than you realise. My experience is that it is about allowing things rather than trying to make them happen. It's more about letting go rather than trying to do something or control an outcome. If you do sit down to draw something, for example, I think the most helpful thing is to just allow expression without any conscious control but let the unconscious directly speak. It will have its own language. A few years ago I used to go to a writing workshop. We did a thing called wild writing where you just write from a stream of consciousness - absolutely no editing or trying to control or direct the output. You can start to feel a kind of energy move through you and it can be quite remarkable what ends up on the page. So that could be something to try to explore the depths of your own unconscious and like a portal into the collective unconscious.

Rx, I deeply relate to what you describe - feeling that spirit energy, whatever you want to call it, through your feet. I have powerfully felt that at certain places in particular. It's like something coming up through you. I stayed on a property for a few days many years ago where a friend was living at the time. I could really feel an energy coming up through my feet and a feeling of ancestor spirits. I think something in your heart and mind has to be open to feel it and then you are like a receiver for it. From an indigenous perspective there isn't a linear past-present-future but an imminence in everything that defies space and time relativity. An early anthropologist named Stanner who was trying to decipher and explain The Dreaming described it as "the everywhen". I think being in bare feet is such a powerful, connecting experience too. I find swimming in the ocean really powerful as it is that total immersion that is deeply connecting and healing somehow.

ER