Spiritual awakenings can and do happen to people in the middle of the concrete jungle.

Initiation does not look have to look a certain way. Initiation looks like challenges.

Westerner spirituality is different because westerners are different. We are of the urban, capitalist, consumerist world. We are in separable, one and the same. And that world is ours to own through using the challenges it brings to us with eyes wide open.

If we neglect our spiritual responsibility, the work overflows to the cultures and peoples who are already carrying the spiritual ‘weight’ of a society impending to extinguish them.

Exotisising spirituality, keeping a certain search for depth practises at arms length, either 'out of respect’ or out of not believing you deserve it, is an act of handing your agency as human co-creator, away.

The biggest support you can give to old ways of wisdom is by understanding, learning and sharing their visions.

Yes - you’re different, you grew up in a different place, and you learnt to ‘see’ a different way.

But its all the same-same-same at some level.

What would happen in our life stories, if we began to realise that all of our challenges, no matter how banal or ‘separate from spirit’ they seem, are an important part of our initiation?


Life is working for us. If you’re always challenged, you are always awakening!


“
Every dark thing one falls into can be called an initiation. To be initiated into a thing means to go into it. The first step is generally falling into the dark place and usually appears in a dubious or negative form - falling into something or being possessed by something . . . . You can take every psychological illness as an initiation. Even the worst things you fall into are an effort at initiation, for you are in something which belongs to you, and now you must get out of it.
~ Dr Marie-Louise von Franz
“

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Sarah 

28th Nov 2020



Inspired by “Of Water and the Spirit, Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman” the work of #malidomapatricesomé #ofwaterandthespirit