Spiritual Community - A sustainable way of life

Spiritual communities are shooting up all over the globe at the moment, as groups of people work together to make the change from materialism to holism a reality. The Wirral Soul Circle is a personal and spiritual development group that focuses, like many other groups, on expanding the consciousness of its members.

The Wirral Soul Circle has now ceased to meet. We met every week for six years and we learnt and practiced tools that allowed us to continually increase our self awareness, heal our psychological wounds and expand our consciousness.

As I now offer these tools in the format of workshops, yoga classes, chanting and the Amazing Lyfe Project I felt it no longer served us as well to have the small weekly meetings at home. However, far from reducing the spiritual community and our connection we have now opened up with the new format of classes and workshops to all interested parties in Merseyside. We still meet weekly, but now within the context of the more public forums and we are growing in numbers all the time.

We feel that it is so important to regularly share practices and experiences that are rooted in closeness, honesty, openness, truth, authenticity and a shared sense of the sacredness and privelege of living on the earth, and in our modern society there are not too many places to share those experiences. If you long for a deeper sense of connection, community and creativity, where you will be welcomed for who you are and able to interact from your depths of heart and soul, come along to a class or workshop and see if this community is one you would like to be part of.

To get a fuller idea about the type of practices we follow and the inspirations for them - go to the BOOKS menu for a full bibliography, which contains many of the sources of our material.  Primarily, we follow practices based on meditation, visualisation, psychosynthesis, and many other psychospiritual practices designed to support the flowering of human potential.

Consciousness expansion reveals connection and interdependence between all elements in the cosmos and the essence of the divine within everything.  The notion of this interconnectedness appeared in my consciousness as a metaphor one day, which I wrote about as a short story some years ago, called “Web of light”.  In this story all the manifest universe was linked at multifaceted connection points that sparkled with every thought, action and feeling created within the network and each sparkle set up a resonance across the whole web.  Since that time I have become aware that this image has also reached other people’s consciousness and a novel has since been published with the same name, presumably about the same concept – I haven’t had time to buy it or to read it yet.  Perhaps I don’t need to – I think that ideas and concepts are passing throughout the web to all who are listening and we are getting similar messages across the world.

As our consciousness expands we begin to perceive these connections for ourselves and our relationships to each other change.  We begin to see that we are one global family, where all children should be treated as if they were our own offspring, and we begin to see that we bear responsibility for the fates of all children of the earth. We begin to recognise that all women are our sisters, daughters, mothers, aunts, granddaughters, grandmothers etc. and that all men are our brothers, sons, fathers, and so it goes on…  This gives us a STRONG SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY to care for all people, no matter who, even for the people that we struggle to understand, or like.  Even the people would rather not be in the same room with.  This is where the real work comes in…

This concept of a global family is not just a fluffy hippy idea.  There is some quite astonishing science to back this up.  In fact, there have been only 7 mitochondrial DNA strands discovered in the whole of Europe – that means 1 in every 7 people in Europe is related to me by DNA.  There are only 33 known strands of mitochondrial DNA so far in the whole world – that means that 1 in 33 people on the planet are my kin.
I LOVE THAT!!!

Practicing seeing everyone I meet as family, as THE BELOVED is a huge part of my spiritual practice and a big part of spiritual community.  This is a transpersonal* and holistic way of relating to others.  It can be challenging at times, but with persistence I and many others have come to embody this concept in our lives.  This perception is going to lead to the type of cooperative, (head+heart)** based strategies that will build a solid base for a sustainable way of living.  US & THEM thinking can only have one outcome, as we see all around us – and it is not one we should wish for.

SEEING OTHERS AS A MIRROR is a particularly important aspect of the transpersonal or holistic approach to human relationships.  This means that we recognise that how we feel about others is a reflection about how we feel about aspects of ourselves. 

For example; if I can’t stand someone’s anger, if I judge them for it and react to it with discomfort then I have some issues around anger to work on.  If I am thinking holistically I thank them, (rather than judge them) for the opportunity to learn about myself and then I look within to discover what issue I have to heal. 

If someone is angry and I feel no painful reaction, or judgement around it, but instead feel compassion for the pain that they are in and I want to support them, then I know that I do not have an issue around anger myself.  Instead I thank them for giving me an opportunity to be compassionate and to be of service, if they need help or I just send them a kind thought, or blessing, if they seem to need that.  This is how it works.  It is not always easy to do.  But the more I practice the more I improve and my heart opens more fully each time.  Thus it becomes easier to feel connected to my global family.

Holistic thinking also leads us to see the earth, Gaia, as our mother.  From her - all nourishment and sustenance comes.  Without her generosity and unrelenting, unconditional love we would not last a moment.  She gives, without fail, no matter how we rape and scar her, no matter how we take and dig and rip and tear her body, she never stops giving. 

We must heal and honour our earth mother.  She is precious, holy, sacred.  Just as all life upon her is precious, holy and sacred.  Until we all see that we will never live peacefully on our earth.

Expanded consciousness also means recognising that animals are not simply resources to exploit as food/labour or to keep as pets for company.  They are so much more than that.  They, as manifestations of divine creation, just as we are, deserve all the same reverence and respect as we should accord human beings. 

Thinking globally, holistically, spiritually, means we embody different values and we try to share those values, inspire others to embody them too.  For their benefit and for the benefit of all. 

GILL EDWARDS, author of many wonderful books, describes expanding consciousness as awakening to our higher self - that part of us that is the divine spark, in other words our soul.  She expresses in a wonderful way how life feels when we awaken to that higher self, or align ourselves with our soul.  She tells us that our experience becomes as follows:

• Inner peace and harmony

• Spontaneous humour and delight

• Waves of joy

• A deep sense of gratitude

• Feeling complete in oneself

• Being unhurried and free from busy-ness

• Freedom from fear and struggle

• A sense of wonder and curiosity

• Unlimited thinking

• Energy and enthusiasm

• Taking ‘leaps of faith’

• Speaking from the heart

• Having the strength to be vulnerable

• Self-respect and calm dignity

• Expressing feelings and opinions openly

• Trust in one’s inner knowing (intuition)

• Willingness to trust others

• Happiness in simply ‘being’

• Taking oneself lightly

• ‘going with the flow’ (the Buddhist way of no grasping no pushing away)

• feeling fulfilled

• a sense of purpose and destiny

• creative inspiration

• focussinf on the process rather than the goal

• leading a balanced life

• seeing the larger picture

• taking 100 per cent responsibility for one’s life

• feeling powerful (empowered personally within, not power over others)

• giving from a sense of abundance

• compassion and respect for all beings

• reverence for the planet

• a sense of connectedness

• loving and forgiving oneself

• loving and forgiving others

• being honest

• being intimate

• having a positive impact on the world

• forever changing and growing

• living in the present moment

• realising one’s dreams

• feeling 100 per cent alive

(p 218 Living Magically.  A newVision of Reality by Gill Edwards 1991)

I think Gill has it absolutely spot on.

So, this is what I understand Spritual Community to be all about.

Numbers in workshops are kept quite low, and Thursday's yoga class is fairly full,so if you wish to join a group or class (or waiting list if we are full) see the contact email address on the contact page.

*Transpersonal means to go beyond or through the personal, to move beyond the normal limitations of ego self, and to connect to the ‘other’ be it people, animals, energy, etc., or the divine.

**(head+heart) = a formula that I use to express and embody the notion of uniting the energies of the mind and intelligence with those of the unconditional, open and loving heart.  Not heart in the sloppy greeting card sense. One without the other lacks fullness and depth.  We need both to create a sustainable way of living.

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