Field Notes #5: Embodied Spirituality: Coming Home to Transformational Humanness
There’s a theme that is radically missing in most contemporary spirituality: ‘maturation’.
There is something irreducibly vital about maturation—the missing ‘eldership’ in contemporary societies, and perhaps especially in the West, where spirituality is so capitalistic and generally consumptive. What passes for spirituality is so often a performance—a kind of sensationalism. The internet is full of adverts for ‘four weeks to full Kundalini awakening’, ways of manipulating energies and ‘higher vibrations and states of being’—a kind of ceaseless search for that which is driven by experiences. Online conversation after online conversation covers what happens, how it feels, the lights and fireworks of spiritual states. None of it is deep enough. It’s as if much of contemporary spirituality simply misses the point. Perhaps that’s why Jesus of Nazareth once famously said that the way is narrow. It’s so easy to miss or dismiss the painfully mundane truth: maturation is a material process of becoming, iterated over time, through lessons learned and deep, sometimes challenging, often painful, self-encounter in a process of letting go of the knots of ‘selfing’ that constitute the ‘reality’ that most of us live in.
We tend, don’t we, to make the mistake of mistaking ourselves for the thought patterns, the ongoing material tides of neuro-transmitters and habits of self-holding in muscles, fascia and more, that we take to be the fundamental ‘us’? But there is no fundamental ‘us’ in these patterns. There is just this material knotting and fluxing, tides of becoming, always on the move, never still—and emergent in all that, somehow, the radical and fundamental peace of a beingness that ‘passes all understanding’. That’s a radically non-cognitive knowingness. And yes, it’s fully available as an embodied reality—never separate from the embodied organism that we are, and fully emergent in our ongoing unfolding.
Whenever spiritual teachers use the language of ‘high vibrations’ or ‘transcendence’ to avoid the mundane invitation to ordinary embodied life, to deep shadow work, to facing up to relational inner and outer conflict, to addressing systemic injustices, we are not becoming ‘more spiritual’. It’s never spiritual to evade, to pretend, to choose positivity as a vapid substitute for true encounter. No, we are not becoming more spiritual when we avoid the deep work of spiritual transformation. We are fragmenting. True maturation requires staying present to and through discomfort, not leaving it behind.
And true maturation has markers. And the markers of true spiritual maturation are all thoroughly embodied—joy, compassion, equanimity, givenness, surrender, humility, service—all embodied. And these qualities emerge in a human being when spiritual experience and practice have done real work in a fully embodied life, reshaping how we actually move through the world, how we actually show up, our material presence to material others. True spiritual maturation has a deeply ethical character, and true spiritual awakening is an invitation into a depth transformation—and it takes time.
There is a temporal arc to maturation. It is never an instantaneous thing. It is far too easy to mistake an awakening for completion, but in reality, awakenings are beginnings, new phase-shifts, invitations to go deeper. In my own experience over decades, awakenings come in pulses of expansion and integration—as a bodily matter. And they are never the point. The point is to evolve. To mature. To bear fruit. To become, in the words of Ram Dass, a field of loving awareness—and that’s a work that never reaches an ending, precisely because Love itself, as the ground of all things, is limitless.
And what is Love?
Love as Givenness
This brings me to what feels most essential: love is not sentiment, or even a sensation, or even an energetic state (though it can be those things too) but Love is ‘givenness’. Love invites us into a fundamental stance of offering ourselves to what is real, to one another, to the repair of what has been broken.
To put this, if I might, into Christian language, this is incarnational Love, thoroughly fleshy and real, vulnerable, material. A spirituality of Love is a lived, material, bodily inflection of the entire being of a human organism towards radical presence to a world in pain. Every breath, every sensation, every encounter is where Love does its work. Not somewhere else. Not later. Not as a conceptual trip of non-dual imagination, but here, the living and lively non-dual lived out as this flesh, this moment, this messy, beautiful, suffering, joyful moment, radically continuous with all that is.
Why not notice, right now, what you notice in the intelligence of your body as this site of Love becoming a fuller expression of Love? Can you stay present with discomfort instead of spiritualising it away? Can you feel without repressing or acting out? Can you drop identification with your thinking patterns, with emotions and sensations, and allow that other knowing, that deep peaceful presencing, to emerge in your somatic experience, here and now, as the embodied awareness that you are? Can you welcome the world as a site of sacred encounter, rather than a space of temptations to overcome, or sensations to chase in the name of a fast-food take-out version of spirituality?
Always
Someone asked me recently how this way of relating to spirituality and maturation shapes daily life. I answered with one word: always. This is not a theological or theoretical proposition. Spirituality is an invitation into deep encounter with the continuous texture of existence itself—into the ongoingness of mundane being. The way I inhabit my skin, meet another’s eyes, taste food, feel grief, experience desire, witness injustice, offer presence—all of that is incarnational, isn’t it? When are you ever not embodied? When is your body ever not the unfolding of new life?
The ordinary is the holy. The body is where living, spiritual becoming happens. This moment, this breath, this encounter is where Love is unfolding. Our calling is to serve that process.
Always.