But, Like, What Does Spirituality Even Mean?

Morgan: Hi. I’m Morgan.  

My body is touching: the office chair, my shoes (Birkenstocks), a cherry pit in my mouth, the last pieces of meat being clipped off by my teeth like the weedy water plants growing up from the bottom of the lake, the armrest of the chair, a hot water bottle wrapped in a hand towel that my back is leaning into. 

Sounds: crickets, the crackle of a window a/c unit. The weird radiator white noise that happens in my apartment and is a mystery. No sirens. 

I’ve been asked by the others to talk about divinity school (we’re going; we don’t intend to be ordained) and spirituality. To answer basically: “why are you going to divinity school?” 

For me this is a fool’s errand, because it’s less why and more internally “yes,” the explanation being less in words and more in resonance.

Generally, I am less of a words person, more of a feeling and connection person. Nick says I’m disarming. 

Nick: And a big cuddly Bear. Presently with the melancholic disposition of Eeyore and the body feel of Cedar Lake. *smiles.* We were just swimming for a long time and we can still feel the mirrored resonance in our body.

Morgan: *smiles.* 

Nick: ….Okay, heyyyyy. Sooooo . . . I am here to create some momentum in this post. You’re going a bit slow and it’s freaking me out. Morgan is that okay?

Morgan: *nods* Go for it. I don’t have many words just now.

Nick: Divinity school, what even to say. I can feel a desire to prove myself or get you (the reader) to understand. 

Calvin: He’s trying to deflect against the fear that we’ll be seen as self-indulgent, lazy, privileged and disconnected. 

Nick: *wincing* yep. The truth is, some of you may feel this way about us, no matter what I say. We are privileged and we are significantly buffered from having to make choices based on finances alone. At least for now. 

Calvin: And why are we going to divinity school?

Nick: Well, it’s part of trying to bring more of our energy into our work. Hm that’s not where I want to begin. There’s this deeper, stronger impulse, like an internal river current, and if we follow the river current, we go to divinity school. 

Calvin: Is it that linear?

Nick: No, it’s more like if we follow the river current, then the way to go is toward our spiritual growth, toward the tools and the people and the know-how to grow into our spiritual dimensions. 

We HAVE been encouraging our own spiritual growth for some time, through the training and experience involved in becoming a bodyworker, through dance, through receiving various forms of somatic healing + therapy, and in our own quiet forays into extra-ordinary experiences. We even participate in a UCC church, so that we can properly acquaint ourselves with Christianity and understand if parts of it resonate. We grew up in a family that didn’t regularly attend church but still oriented toward Christianity. Several of our ancestors and current relatives are church leaders in various denominations, and we very much grew up with Protestant emotional patterns and values, and certainly with the holidays. 

Also, many of us experience spirituality as an essential and fruitful dimension of their beings, We desire more structure, space, time, and knowledge connection to grow those parts of themselves. 

Calvin: Like . . . 

Nick: Like Jeremiah, and Morgan, Callum and also me and Lucia. 

Calvin: What is spirituality? We’re throwing that word around. 

Nick: According to Merriam Webster’s Dictionary (online, obvi), the word spiritual is more or less synonymous with incorporeal: that is (and I’m paraphrasing here) substances not having material body or form. 

Calvin: Oh now THAT’s interesting. 

Nick: Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

Calvin: I mean we are literally privy to the same bundle of thoughts being connected in our brain right now. 

Nick: Yes! So . . . Dammit. It’s much easier to communicate internally through our own synapses (and whatever other structures we’re using) than trying to translate all of this stuff into words for other people to get.

Calvin: Word. 

Nick: . . . . *silently irritated* Clever.

Calvin: Thank you :). Listen, I know you want to talk about bodywork in this post, and expanding the field of perception (without sharing information meant to be kept close—that’s an anxiety of yours that I feel). I think you want to frame spirituality as dimensions of being that we can’t see with our eyes, but that science has theorized (quantum physics) and that many people have working knowledge of, and to say that those dimensions of being are a big part of the internal . . . innervation of our lives. And I think you want to approach spirituality as a practical experience—

Daniel: —and to approach spirituality as an embodied experience. For us, developing trust in our extra-sensory perceptions and our ability to connect with the world on an energetic level, like grounding, has been essential to our ability to feel held and safe and . . . smoother internally. 

Jeremiah: We just read a little quote by Joseph Campbell on the Somatic Experiencing Instagram, about how people are looking less for the meaning of life and more for the experience of being alive. 

Daniel: And that cuts right to it. 

Nick: Say more. 

Daniel: Previously in our lives we viewed spirituality as abstract, and linked with words like transcendent, elevated, otherworldly. And those words aren’t wrong, but the way we put it together was to make ‘becoming spiritual’ about looking down at life from above, and transcendence about disconnection from suffering. 

Jeremiah: In other words, we understood “spirituality” as a form of dissociation. And that makes sense, because it’s what we knew. Traveling into our mind and away from our body was and still is a primary way that we know to alleviate our own suffering, at least in the short term. 

Daniel: The difference is, before we weren’t aware that we were dissociating when diving into books or staring off into space for literally hours. We dissociated a lot as a kid. Also as an adult! Though, as we run back through childhood memories, I also think y’all used exercise and sport effectively as a way to be present in the body. 

Lucia: Yea, sports were a safe enough place, though I am reflecting now on the disconnect in our schooling, asked to either inhabit our mind (academic subjects) or our body (sports), with not much integration between the two experiences. 

Jeremiah: Like, no integration. 

Lucia: In college we became aware of the possibility of a deeply embodied spiritual experience, mostly through John Donne’s poetry. The bits that we remember are all about the ecstasy of being filled up by God. 

We were introduced to John Donne about the same time we were reading about butchness and power play dynamics and queer erotica. Really, we were reading a lot of testimonials of queer people (and especially genderqueer and trans people) finding who they were through role play and ecstatic connection in BDSM and sex scenes. 

Nick: There’s a paper or two waiting to be written comparing John Donne’s ouevre with, like, Pat Califia’s collected works. 

Lucia: I’m sure those papers HAVE been written. 

Jeremiah: It would not hurt to run through the material more than once imho.

Lucia: You are not wrong.

Jeremiah: Okay, I’m going to try and do the heavy lift to make connections here on this one. 

John Donne was our first glimpse of spiritual connection as an experience of aliveness and even fullness in the body. It was like “Oh!” God can connect with me here *thumps his chest.* I don’t have to wait until I’m dead or drift away from myself in order to find Him, or . . . That. 

Lucia: J is speaking of the Christian God there, as it’s what we were surrounded by growing up. We would say, generally speaking, that Pagan, polytheistic and animistic worldviews better describe our spiritual experience, and J still resonates with parts of Christianity. It’s a bit like flipping channels on a TV; it’s a different bodymind feeling to orient to a Christian worldview than a Pagan one. They are not polarized opposites or strictly separate, but they are definitely distinct, at least in our mind and heart. And we aren’t even getting into how Christianity has been used as a driving, legitimizing force for colonization, and the violence of colonial Christianity’s erasure of polytheistic, land-based and Indigenous spiritual, life-ways. 

Jeremiah: Thanks L. I’m going to keep going with my point in the hopes that we come back to some of what you introduced here. 

I’m noticing that we’re throwing around the word spirituality again, and that, in addition to the dictionary’s definition, describing “spiritual” as more or less synonymous with “incorporeal,” we’ve introduced the idea of embodied aliveness as a spiritual experience. I would posit (and really not on my own here, this comes from lots of exposure to mystical osteopaths in the bodywork world and most especially from our own experience) that aliveness is the sensation of “substance without form”—be it energy or consciousness or light or likely a combo-pack of those things—entering the form of our bodies and lighting them up, building connections and fluidity. 

I think (we think, but it’s my words so my spin on it), that spirituality is about connecting consciousness with form, in our case, earthly form. And that can sound abstract, but in our experience it’s quite a practical skill set, and encompasses a large number of activities from practicing sport, to cooking, to stretching, to developing self-trust, to in general supporting your sense of presence in your body and surroundings. 

And there’s so many different levels of consciousness. There’s the universe of our bodies. For instance I think of our experience connecting with our tissue/cells post top surgery. 

Lucia: Yea. We started gently connecting with our chest, and found so much emotion there, which we understood as cellular emotion. It was quite raw and intense—literally the emotional experience of being cut apart. 

Jeremiah: We processed that for about an hour, just crying and feeling the rage and fear and general vibration of that area post surgery. After that it felt like we all (our body and us) were moving forward together. 

We are not wholly defined by our body, nor it by us. On a cellular level, our body has its own logics and processes that are oriented to, like, prehistoric amoeba type needs, not the social and emotional experience of a human being in 2022. And there’s so many levels of body: bone and connective tissue, organs, skin, nerves, electromagnetic field(s) etc., that have their own priorities and to some degree exist without us, though with a louder song if we’re inside of there. 

Lucia: Oh god, the woo. 

Jeremiah: Yes, embrace the woo! Ha. I revel in your discomfort. 

Lucia: Lovely. 

Nick: And then there’s us, and the entities outside of us. 

Jeremiah: Precisely my dear Watson. 

Nick: Why. 

Jeremiah: For that look *smiles.* 

Nick: This is hard stuff to put into words. For us. 

Jeremiah: I hear you. I’m going to try to slow down and back up a bit here. 

Nick: Okay. Here for it. 

Jeremiah: A fundamental pivot in our thinking has been the shift from the statement: “I am my body, there is no separation,” to “my body is a part of me.” Our body being a part of us, but not all of us, doesn’t mean we’re separate or disconnected from our body, but that there’s a distinction to be made between our selves and our body. 

Nick: Our selves can and do inhabit our body, living inside of it. But we also sometimes orbit our body, or stand next to it, or leave it. And honestly some of us check out and go back to the inner world while others of us are running things up front, either by hanging out in our mind (safe-harboring in the prefrontal cortex), or relaxing more fully into our limbs and thorax and abdomen.

Della: Omg you just made us sound like a beetle. Thorax.  

Nick: Ha! It does sound a bit like that. Those words do apply to humans though too.

We would say that even when one of us isn’t in the body we’re still related to it, kind of like there’s an umbilical cord of energy connecting us to it. It’s a central place for us, but not all of us live in the town’s center. 

Jeremiah: Each of us have distinct vibes, basically. We feel larger or smaller in physical shape, we have different moods, ages, understandings of what we look like, and genders (of course). And those selves can be inside our body, or out—

Nick: —or weirdly partially in, which honestly is where we’re at most of the time, like 3-5 people having a hand in the pot, hence the fascial tension. 

Jeremiah: True. And each of our selves inside of our body has a particular feeling—

Nick: —and particular, distinct thought patterns too.

Jeremiah: Yep, In general when one of us is more In the body, our body feels good, more fluid, more supported, etc. 

Nick: There’s just literally more organized energy inside of there. 

Jeremiah: When we’re in the body (partially at least) we have various ways of perceiving others of us around the body. 

Nick: This is different from feeling someone in the back in our mind—

Graeme:—or in the wild inner landscapes of our headspace—

Nick: Lol too true my dear Watson. 

Graeme: Is today the day of play-acting as Sherlock Holmes?

Nick: It appears to be the way we’re making things fun my dear boy. Anywho: sometimes we have a spatial felt-sense of one or many of us surrounding the body. For instance, we’ve felt someone move from the left to the right side of us, or we can often say “Morgan’s on the right, Lucia’s on the left,” etc. 

Jeremiah: Sometimes we are aware—through inner vision and body feeling—that our selves are exploring the physical environment around us separate of our body. Like, if we’re on a walk in a beautiful place many of the kids and teens will “clamber over hill and vale,” checking out the flowers and the trees and exploring as kids are wont to do. It’s  like our mind is scoping out our surroundings beyond the immediate physical abilities of the body to do so. 

Lucia: It’s a cool technology and we’ve decided to trust that the information we need from forays like this will eventually filter into our consciousness, even if it’s in flashes. And, all of this is subjective reality, meaning it’s our experience and not necessarily a testable phenomenon. 

Jeremiah: I mean, objective reality is a problematic idea/l.

Lucia: Yes. We hold these things in truth, especially as we become more confident in trusting our internal signaling. But our interpretation and our experience may change over time. You don’t have to believe us either, but these experiences make sense to us. 

Jeremiah: Plus we’ve been affirmed by hearing other systems’ recounting of similar experiences. 

Lucia: That’s true. We feel pretty centered in our own experience at this point—

Jeremiah: Most of the time, especially when we feel more relaxed and organized in our body—

Lucia: —and it does help us to feel reflected in others’ experiences as well. 

Jeremiah: Yea. 

Calvin: So we’ve managed to explain that we have a distinct sense of how our body feels in and of itself, of how we feel IN our body, and of our perceptions of ourselves OUTSIDE of our body. We also have some experience of perceiving other entities, NOT US, inhabiting parts or most of our body. 

Jeremiah: Good to mention that last one as a dimension of things, but it’s marked private atm. 

Lucia: I want to make an attempt at tying all of this together. 

Jeremiah: Go for it bro. 

Lucia: *raises eyebrow*

Jeremiah: I mean—

Lucia: Yea, I know. 

This post is us trying to define spirituality. 

Jeremiah: spurred on by Nick’s desire to justify why we’re going to divinity school. 

Lucia: And we’re going to divinity school for fun, and for some extra help and structure to center spirituality in our lives. Also to encourage our written speaking voice, and to integrate much of the information we’ve been receiving these last several years. 

I think one way to summarize this conversation is to say that we’re trying to reconcile the definition of spiritual as that without body or form, with the powerful, spiritual-feeling experience of embodied aliveness. We find the body to be such a powerful, layered, information-laden place. It is the access point to our deeply felt sense of connection to the earth, her elements and children, and the universe, all of its dimensions and realms. 

We have also tried to express our experience that we exist in connection to, but not wholly INSIDE of our body. That we feel ourselves to be sometimes retreated within our mind, and sometimes to be moving outside of our physical form, though in relation to it. It  feels so important to honor this connection with distinctions. That is to say: we honor the divinity of our body distinctly from us — that our cells and organs have priorities that don’t track directly with the priorities of being a human, they are about the experience of being a cell or an organ. And we honor our divinity as it is distinct from our body — that we are many and our self-images do not match wholly how our body looks, that we sometimes experience dysmorphia and dysphoria, that we live in our body now AND we will exist in some other form after we die. 

We also honor that our body can be a source of energy and expression for entities that are not us (and that is tricky to figure out when you’re a system and you’re discerning who is part of us and who is not).

Jeremiah: From a bodywork or healing perspective, we think embodied aliveness (being present in your body) is an essential experience to feeling power and connection. And we think that connection to the earth and to the universe around us further supports our feeling of safety in our body—our sense that we are not alone. Given our relational trauma, it is easier for us to build connections with the earth, non-human relatives and other-dimensional beings, and to build security that way, as we slowly step into more secure feeling relationships with other humans. 

It’s also important to say that feeling connected on the inside is related to feeling connected to the earth/outside. Allowing energy from the earth to flow up into us and energy from the heavens to flow down into us—which is a distinct feeling—often allows us to feel the inside of our body and feel safe there. When we are connected within and without (this energetic washing through of energy from the earth and heavens, allowing us presence on the inside of our body) we feel powerful, and . . . clear about our integrity in our day to day lives. We feel that we will be okay as ourselves because we are connected and supported. 

And that’s the feeling that we want to write more about and experience more and share, while at divinity school. 

Nick: And beyond. 

Jeremiah: Yes, the great mysterious beyond of our personal/professional life :). 

Nick: Thanks Jeremiah. Thanks Morgan. Thanks everyone. It’s so helpful to get all of this out of our head, especially before we’re in school. We could write a 100 essays on this topic, and we might!

Do you have anything to say or express Morgan?

Morgan: I think you all did a very good job putting that in words. My interest is more in doing it. I’m quite social on the inside, speaking with those outside of us and caring for our inner children. And I would love more structure and space to continue to do that, and to do that with community and understanding on the outside, like in the world. 

Lucia: That makes sense. 

Morgan: So you all writing this helps me, because you’re making more real (externally at least) the dimensions of experience where I spend a lot of time. You’re helping to articulate my experience, especially as I’m one of us who feels invisible to the outside world (except for in certain queer community). So much of my life has happened on the inside, or operating in the body without being seen or understanding myself as exactly “real.” 

Lucia: And there we are, back to the question/insecurity of “are we real?” Accepting our spiritual experiences as real–like extra-ordinary dimensions of reality–feels distinct and connected to understanding our many selves as real. 

Jeremiah: Lol! Way to tie it together. 

I agree. 

Morgan: *nods.* 

Nick: Ta-ta for now. 

END