BEGIN YOUR SPIRITUAL AWAKENING
By
Mary G. Jackson
Author of PRESENCE Recognizing the Divine in Your Everyday Life
What does it mean to be spiritually awakened?
How is it possible to go from where you are now to a level of awareness that is new, refreshing, and powerful? We can begin by looking at ways in which you may have missed the opportunity for your own spiritual awakening.
“What is the matter?” is a question we say or hear often when we find ourselves or our friends troubled. I have pondered the reason we use this precise language and have come to a belief that the issue is in the word, “matter.”
We Are Connected To Matter
We are matter, aren’t we?
We have bodies that need constant care and attention. We build shelter to withstand the elements of this Earth on which we live. We design and use modes of transportation to get from one place to another. We are connected to matter in so many ways, shapes and forms.
Our physical selves and the world as we experience it are, quite frankly, distracting.
They can be wonderfully absorbing and can keep us constantly occupied. We are inundated with color, shape, size, weight, form, beauty (or lack thereof), speed, and innumerable ways to keep us in survival mode. All these concerns keep us grounded and focused on what is here and physically present now.
How can the spiritual realm, in whatever form you imagine it, have a chance to compete with all that we have in the here and now?
Realizing The Physical And Nonphysical
If we find ourselves experiencing the matter of our world and the nonphysical aspects of our nature as two different and separate entities, we then suppress our spirituality. We might then begin our spiritual awakening by realizing that the physical and nonphysical make up the whole.
We can take that first step into our spiritual awakening by embracing certain positive ideas. Consider this: our bodies are a spiritual gift to be honored and treasured as they give our souls an opportunity to experience the duality of the physical and nonphysical as a whole -- not separate, not different, but connected.
If you can accept that idea as meaningful to you, how might that be a first step in your spiritual awakening?
Spiritual Awakening Is Constant
Now, you can literally see God. You can see God in your own body and all bodies. You can experience the Divine in the creation not only in what we call nature, but in the creation continued by humans. You can awaken to the awareness that the essence of the Divine is abundant and ever present. Now you can experience, by moving from the idea of separateness to the idea of wholeness, a spiritual awakening that is constant.
A lovely friend of mine who, although raised in a devout Jewish home, has now become more atheist asked me this tough question, “How do you know that God exists and how did you become a spiritual person?”
She had recently learned that I wrote the spiritual awakening book PRESENCE, and her question was a sincere query. I told her something that, until then, I had never spoken; when I was a very young child, I had a sense of something. Sometimes I recognize it in other people. Most of the time it was a feeling that was similar to that sense that someone is following you or watching you – but without the creepy feeling.
I might not have been able to put it into words as a child, but the best way I can describe it now is that it was a presence. That presence has always led me not to answers, but to questions. For me, my spiritual awakening takes root in the mystery of it all.
Can you redefine the physical and nonphysical as whole? Can you acknowledge a presence that is your companion? Perhaps you might have opened to your spiritual awakening simply by asking the question rather than seeking the answer.