Recovering Your Full Heritage:

Uncovering Both your Psychological and Spiritual Endowments

© DivineCompanion.org 2024

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2024

Table of Contents

Introduction

Recovering a Heritage

The Makah

The Spiritual Torchbearers

Your Great Spiritual Heritage

Marcus: A Modern Story

Early Life

Bedrocks from his early life

Adult Life

Marriage

His Spiritual Embrace

Spiritual Fruit

Recovered Heritage

Alternate Ending

Teresa: A Long-ago Story

Early Life with Family

Married Life

Convent Life

Her Spiritual Embrace

Spiritual Fruit

Ongoing divine embrace

Alternate Ending

Gems of your Spiritual Inheritance

Qualities of your Inner World that Enable Spiritual Deepening

Core element: Seeing your spiritual nature as well as your human nature

Core Element: Seeing the bedrocks of your worldview

Core Element: Personas inhabiting your inner world

Core Element: Your capability for remaking your inner world

Core Element: A growth mindset

Core Element: Your attachment style with other people

Core Element: The God of Highest Heaven also dwells within you

Core Element: Your spiritual attachment style

Accelerating Circumstances

Core Element: Post-traumatic spiritual deepening

Core Element: Nontraumatic Precipitating Events

Experiencing God’s Embrace

Core Element: Feeling personally embraced by God

Core Element: Bearing spiritual fruits

Core Element: Your framework for interpreting your experience

Cultivating your Bond with your Divine Companion

Core Element: A regular practice for maintain the human-divine relationship

Your Heritage in a Nutshell

Your Own Larger Story

Principles for Shaping a Spiritual Practice

Cultivating your Spiritual Attitude

Spiritual Naming and Claiming

Inner Dialogue

Companioning Prayer

Guided Inner Dialogue/Prayer

Daily Journaling

Spiritual Souvenirs: Making the Memory of your Spiritual Embrace Accessible

Spiritual Crest

Spiritual Scrapbook

Caveats

Sidebars

End Page

Introduction

Like everyone, you have a worldview that shape your life; core beliefs about who you are; how to best connect with others; how to earn your daily bread.  Your core beliefs are the bedrocks on which your understanding of life is built.  You began building your worldview as a child on whatever bedrocks were available then, even if they are shabby: perhaps they emphasize your flaws and minimize your strengths; perhaps they are overly pessimistic or frightening; perhaps they are too simplistic to guide you in a complicated world. Such immature bedrocks aren’t the best foundations for a full life but they may have been all that was available to you in your childhood.

Your bedrock beliefs may seem set in stone, as if they are unquestionable truths about yourself and life.  It may be hard to imagine that other bedrocks, often covered by a landslide, are available to you.  Because these other bedrocks are covered, you may have no idea that better options are so close at hand; these covered bedrocks are your lost heritage, your inheritance, as a human being.  If you stay anchored to inadequate bedrocks once you are grown, you will continue to be hamstrung by childish ideas about yourself and how to live and love; and your richer heritage will be wasted.

This book is about uncovering your lost-to-you heritage: more solid bedrock beliefs that provide a better foundation on which to build a more fulfilling and meaningful life.

this book might interest you if…

Building your worldview on shabby bedrocks has toxic results; with a shaky foundation for living, you can all too easily lose the heart of who you really are, all too easily to lose the truth about your innate goodness.

Perhaps you’ve lost all confidence that you have any worth.  Perhaps you feel not worthy of anyone’s respect, let alone their love.  Such loneliness really stings when you really desire to have a more meaningful connection with another person; to be really engaged with another person; to care for another and be cared for in return.  But nothing in your life has led to finding a warm and wise partner, to earning their respect and meriting their affections.  Feeling so very alone, perhaps you’ve concluded that you must not be a very good person, or even worse, that you’re actually a very repugnant person who no one could ever care about.

Or perhaps you’ve lost your way in life, lost any sense that life—your life in particular—has any purpose or meaning.  Perhaps you have a dream: an inkling of something wonderful that you want to create but your self-doubts paralyze and sabotage you; you may think yourself incapable of bringing such a beautiful thing to life.  In some ways, your dream seems so very close: you can envision what you want to create; in other ways, your dream seems so very far off: you fear that you can’t pull it off or, even if you managed to pull it off, no one would appreciate it.  And your doubts drain away your energy for creating something meaningful or beautiful, your contribution that brings something good into this world.

Recovering a Heritage

Knowing your full heritage can be an antidote that neutralizes the toxins that flow from only knowing a part of your heritage, from only a distorted sense of who you are.  Knowing your full heritage replaces toxins with good nutrients that help you make the most of your one precious life.  One part of your heritage as a human being is your psychological endowments; the other part of your heritage of being a human being is your spiritual endowments.  Life gets better the more you know and use both parts of your endowment.

Psychotherapists and spiritual trailblazers are guides to recovering all of your precious heritage, all of your endowments.  Psychotherapists know ways of recognizing and addressing the glitches of the brain that may restrict you; ways that help you leave unhealthy views behind and maximize your psychological capabilities—your various intelligences and talents—to help you reach your goals.  Spiritual torchbearers know ways of cultivating an inner intimacy with the divine presence who dwells in your inner world so that you bear spiritual fruits more abundantly.

You likely know your psychological nature fairly well: how you have clear insights as well as baffling blind spots; your helpful and unhelpful patterns in your emotional responses to various people and events; the healthy and unhealthy aspects of your attachment style in relationships; your unique strengths as well as errors you make over and over.  You may sense the relentless voice of your Inner Critic in your inner world who is always playing Devil’s Advocate; or you may sense the presence of a faithful Inner Coach who encourages you to persevere, to seek connection or to make a contribution.  You may feel defeated by the lingering hurt and shame from being rejected by others; or you might feel the incessant attraction of whatever addictive thing seems to offer a mirage of relief.  Your psychological nature is a mixed bag of helpful and harmful aspects.  Your psychological aspects are usually so prominent, so in-your-face, that they are virtually impossible to miss.

But your spiritual nature can be so subtle that you may be unaware of it at all or just barely aware that you contain a spirituality; so you may end up thinking that you only have a psychological nature and nothing more.  The spiritual torchbearers assure you that your psychological aspects, although quite real, are not all of you.  Your spiritual endowments enable you to appreciate the goodness of God; to be able to discern what is spiritually true from what is spiritually distorted; to be able to form a vibrant relationship with God.  In today’s predominantly secular zeitgeist, you could easily come to doubt that you have any spiritual aspects at all.  Spiritual torchbearers keep alive the awareness of your spiritual heritage as a human being: that, although you are quite human and strongly impacted by your psychological nature, you also possess wonderful spiritual endowments which, if you cultivate them, can be an even stronger influence on you than your psychological strengths and challenges.

Recovering your full heritage—grasping that your human nature includes both psychological and spiritual endowments—can heal distortions you may hold about yourself and can lift you out of a too small life.  You don’t have to start from scratch to recover this wonderful heritage; you can start with the combined wisdom accumulated by psychotherapists and spiritual trailblazers over the centuries.  Harmonizing psychological and spiritual wisdom can help you to recover your dual heritage of human and spiritual endowments.

Side bar: Spirituality is not anti-science, anti-psychology, anti-religion

The more accurate and life-changing bedrock truth is contained in your inner world but it may be lost and wasted unless you out in the effort needed to excavate it.  These spiritual torchbearers can help you recover your spiritual heritage if it has been buried under a landslide in your life.  The torchbearers aren’t hoping to drown out the voice of science (associated with secular landslides) or religious traditions (associated with religious landslides).  The torchbearers aren’t anti-science: they appreciate it and the better standard of living we have because of it.  The torchbearers aren’t anti-psychology: they appreciate it and the better understanding of themselves and others we have because of it.  The torchbearers aren’t anti-religion: they appreciate it and the preserved concepts we have of God because of it.  The spiritual torchbearers value science, psychology and religion; they wanted to weave these complementary threads together.  And they also wanted to add in the threads of the spirituality that exists in the inner world.

Their sense of human nature is consistent with much of psychological understanding although they would add that you also have a spiritual nature as well as your purely human psychological nature.  The spiritual torchbearers’ sense of God is consistent with the heart of religious wisdom although it emphasizes your personal connection with God.  The spiritual torchbearers would welcome harmonizing scientific knowledge with spiritual traditions and would encourage integrating psychological understanding with first-hand spiritual experience.  They aren’t waging war on those perspectives; instead, they would welcome a peaceful cooperation and collaboration among them.

The Makah

The Makah tribe now lives on the remote coast of northwest Washington state.  Their ancestors, who once numbered several thousand, sustained themselves with food and materials from the land and the sea.  They were extremely resourceful: without any metal tools, they made large exquisite canoes, seaworthy vessels capable of harvesting whales in rough ocean waters.  Using tools fashioned from rocks and bones, they built long houses and made clothes to shelter against the elements.  They embellished all of these very practical things with beautiful artistical touches.

Over time, the Makah lost much of their heritage, their sense of who they are.  The American government systematically tried to scrub their heritage out of them by obliterating their language and traditions and by undermining their families.  The settlers who displaced them saw the Makah as primitive people with inferior character which ignorantly justified mistreating them for a very long time.  So many intensely dismissive voices, heard over and over, can easily enter your mind and take up permanent residence, eroding your confidence and nearly drowning out any sense that you are a good person.  These powerful external forces eroded and obscured the valuable heritage of the Makah: that they contain the same traits as their long line of ancestors who were resourceful, resilient, and quite capable of developing practical and artistic solutions to living in demanding circumstances.

About 400 years ago, an entire Makah village of six longhouses on the Pacific coast near Ozette Lake was buried under a large landslide.  Eventually the village and its way of life were lost to memory.  The village remained buried until a powerful storm in 1970 exposed parts of the village.  Exploring these first objects eventually led to uncovering the entire village.  The excavation uncovered, not just a few isolated artifacts, but thousands of artifacts used for daily living that, when pieced together, created a very complete picture of the village and the Makah way of life.  The individual artifacts were like many small threads that could be woven into a large tapestry which, when all the threads were connected, revealed a whole way of life, the bigger picture that a handful of isolated artifacts could never show.

The Makah uncovered their heritage with the expertise of archeologists and the assistance of many volunteers, both Makah and non-Makah, who valued the treasure trove that was so suddenly revealed.  Much expertise and effort were required to carefully uncover the artifacts, to integrate the many pieces and to recreate the entire village.  The huge recovery efforts revealed the Makah’s previously vague heritage and enabled them to more concretely see and more fully appreciate their heritage and the amazing character of their people.  Their precious heritage was quite nearby for centuries but, being covered, they knew very little of it.

Uncovering and discovering these long-lost pieces brought the Makah’s rich heritage to life and created a very vivid picture of their ancestors’ amazing character: their intelligence, resourcefulness and artistry.  Recovering their heritage, a full and detailed depiction of Makah life and character, exposed the great lie that the Makah heard over and over: that they were inferior and that they had a defective character.  Recovering their heritage showed that the truth is quite the opposite: the Makah have many noble traits that others would be wise to appreciate and cultivate.  And, without knowing their actual heritage, even a Makah person might lose any sense of the wonderful character of their ancestors, a heritage that continues to live on within them today.

Imagine if you were a Makah child growing up in a world where nearly everyone saw you being seen as “less than.” And they communicated their prejudice about you in very personal ways that seeped into your mind and shaped your view of yourself as being bad, inferior and not worth caring about. Their lens of seeing you as a grotesquely diminished person became your own lens for seeing yourself.  Then imagine the big shift that happens to your sense of self when something is uncovered and clearly reveals a very different truth about you: that you are actually made of wonderful stuff, that you contain the amazing traits of your great ancestors.  Suddenly, you have a new and better lens for seeing yourself more accurately and enables you to see you too contain the great endowments of your Makah ancestors.  Imagine how uplifted you would feel once your true heritage is recovered and you can replace the distorted views of yourself with rich truths so that you can finally know in your bones how worthy you actually are and what great deeds you might do.

The Spiritual Torchbearers

People have long pondered the meaning of existence and the existence of God.  Many early ponderings in very primitive societies were quite superstitious and focused on trying to placate the gods of nature in order to merit their favor and get some desired material outcome, such as more animals for food, more rain for crops or victory over threatening neighbors.  These primitive ideas kept alive a spark of hope for Someone More who supports us in our lives.  Over time, religious groups formulated more detailed concepts about the nature of God based on their sacred texts.  These concepts, formulated by religious groups, are the most widely circulated ideas about God.

Over the centuries, some individuals grasped a sense of God as a real and personal presence in their inner lives.  In their first-hand experience of drawing close to God in their inner world, they felt assured that God personally cared for them very much and, in return, they grew to love and cherish God with all their hearts.  These individuals could be called spiritual torchbearers because they hold aloft a light to help you see more of your inner world: how it contains human and spiritual aspects; how the various parts operate; how you are personally connected with God who dwells within you; how you can cultivate that human-divine relationship.

But the light of the torchbearers’ perspective is largely neglected in today’s conversations about God: it’s as if their wisdom, and your spiritual heritage, have been covered by figurative landslides.  Some landslides are society-wide, such as a prevailing sense that God isn’t real and a suspicion of all spiritual ideas about divinity.  Some landslides are very personal, such as your own unhealthy experiences with an organized religious group.  You don’t have to work through these landslides all on your own.  The spiritual torchbearers’ perspective can help you uncover your lost spiritual heritage, which is the birthright of every person: that you can cultivate your own first-hand connection with God who you can find within yourself.

Secular landslide

Two kinds of society-wide landslides may have covered up your spiritual heritage that your spiritual endowment enables you to draw close to God.  The first kind of society-wide landslide is secular.  Science has been successful in understanding the material world and revealing many superstitious religious beliefs as silly and primitive.  Extrapolating from there, many secular-minded people lump all beliefs about God in with superstitious beliefs and consider any belief in God as foolish and naïve.  Some secularists would like to scrub spirituality out of society hoping to be rid of the very real harm caused by the recurring errors of religious organizations.  Science has been so successful that it may seem capable of explaining all of life and that spirituality is simply superfluous and unnecessary to understand yourself and life.

Psychology, the science of human nature, has revealed a sophisticated view of what it means to be human: how our mind operates and shapes our thoughts, feelings and relationships.  The psychological view of a person includes: how people bond with one another, either securely or insecurely; how people sometimes think very clearly yet how they can also hold erroneous ideas very firmly; how trauma and shame shape a person; the impact of a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset; how attention and awareness work yet sometimes seem to be almost in hibernation; how neural networks and plasticity operate in our brain to help us adapt to new circumstances.  Psychology has uncovered many things about human nature that were not very clear before the research of many psychologists.  People lead richer lives and recover from challenges more readily because of the psychological understanding of our human nature.  Psychological ideas have become so widespread and successful in helping people that psychology may seem sufficient to explain all aspects of a person’s life and that including spirituality as part of your human nature is superfluous and perhaps even dangerous.

Religious landslide

The second kind of society-wide landslide that can cover your spiritual heritage is religious.  Religious organizations have preserved the highest thinking about God by many people who have lived before you, thinking which could have easily been lost if not preserved by religions.  As well as preserving theological ideas, religious organizations sometimes preserve unconnected traditions and historical records of their group; sometimes core religious beliefs may be hard to distinguish from secondary ideas.  The presence of long-ago traditions and tangential beliefs that obscure the nature of God may discourage some people from putting in the great effort needed to sift through a religion’s many ideas to find the spiritual gems.

Religious organizations sometimes view their ideas about God as the one and only true religion; from there, it’s only a small jump to consider that God is their exclusive intellectual property, that they are the owners of the only true beliefs and consider themselves as uniquely and exclusively qualified to speak for God.  Their air of superiority may become a barrier to a person who is seeking the kindness of God.  Sometimes the primary concern of a religious organization’s hierarchy may morph into maximizing the esoteric powers of the priestly caste rather than making divine wisdom and spiritual companionship readily accessible to the average person.  Sometimes the priestly caste exhibits little of the lovely character of God which they extol in services and religious tomes.  Such religious organizations can be a society-wide landslide that make it difficult to see the initial gems of spiritual wisdom that originally gave rise to the religious organization.

Sidebar: Theology (groups) and spirituality (individuals)

Personal Landslides

Personal landslides, although much smaller than society-wide landslides, but can be quite devastating to one person.  A deep sense of being unworthy of love may come from harsh experiences with a person who was very important to you when you were a child, such as a parent or teacher.  Perhaps their critical voice burrowed into your mind making it very hard to see yourself as anything but innately bad.  These highly personal experiences that seem quite separate from religion dogma may have buried any sense of your spiritual heritage, any sense of how very precious you are to God. Personal landslides, even though not explicitly religious, can snuff any hope that you God could ever love you, just you as one person.

Perhaps a domineering and condemning voice may have come directly from a religious person, such as a pastor or a Sunday school teacher from your childhood, who told you with much gusto and certainty that God is deeply displeased with you.  As a child, you might easily come to think that a preacher’s opinion of you was the same as God’s opinion of you.  Such distorted opinions can seep deeply into your mind as if they are pounded into your head by words, actions and indifference of people who seemed like they spoke for God because they cloaked themselves in the robes of a religious expert or a very pious person.  Such harsh experiences can act like a landslide that make it incredibly hard to later see yourself as anything other than unholy and despicable to God.

Effect of Landslides

Your sense of your spiritual heritage may be buried under a secular landslide: the widely shared view that science can explain virtually all of life.  This scientific view considers God as the unrealistic and unfounded thinking at best or as deluded and distorted thinking at worst.  The scientific psychological view sometimes dismisses the spiritual aspect of human nature as the unrealistic and foolish hope of a person who doesn’t think very deeply.  Such secular views may be so prevalent that any views about spirituality are dismissed or seldom articulated.

Or your sense of your spiritual heritage may be buried under a religious landslide, buried by the din of the most prevalent religious experts loudly making dogmatic proclamations about God, sometimes even claiming to speak infallibly for God.  When one theology dominates the general conversation about God, any other views about God, such as the spiritual torchbearers’, are dismissed or seldom articulated.

Or perhaps you lost a sense of God’s goodness because family or religious figures shamed you specifically as being evil above and beyond the common level of depravity of all human beings.  Personal landslides really sting because they imply that God loves other people, but somehow can’t love you because you are especially repulsive to God.

Landslides—either society-wide or personal—may have buried your awareness of your spiritual heritage: that you are very precious to God and that God longs to accompany you through life.  Lies that you are unworthy of God’s love may have displaced this spiritual truth making it very difficult to grasp how much you are loved, how precious you are to God, how much a perfect lover desires you and waits for you to accept their invitation to become devoted partners.  Early landslides readily become internalized and crystallize into bedrock beliefs that seem so true as to be unquestionable.  They may seem to be the only available bedrocks, but more accurate and helpful bedrock beliefs are available although they are inaccessible until you excavate them from the landslides of your life that have buried them.

Digging out from your Landslides

Excavating your full heritage requires a map of your inner world and your efforts to excavate it.

A treasure map helps you find buried treasure; without a map, you might not even know that a treasure exists, let alone where it is buried.  The map of your inner world, as seen by the spiritual torchbearers, helps you find your spiritual endowments.  When so few people think that the inner world includes spiritual facets and endowments, you might never think that the human and divine mingle within you; you might never imagine that a loving God can be an intimate part of your psychological make-up.  Excavation begins by recognizing the landslides of your life and being willing to dig beneath them, to look beyond personal or prevailing beliefs.  The spiritual torchbearers’ map of your inner world can help you uncover and discover how precious you are to God, that you are just as precious to God as the amazing spiritual people who lived before you.

You, and only you, can uncover your full personal heritage.  If you don’t apply yourself to excavating your spiritual heritage from these landslides, then you will miss the wonderful spiritual endowment that you actually have within you right now but haven’t really experienced yet.  Without recovering it, you would miss parts of your full and vibrant human nature that contains both psychological and spiritual facets.  Excavating your full heritage (uncovering and accessing all of the endowments of your inner world) exposes previously covered bedrock that has a better soil for the blossoming of your personality.

The torchbearers assure you that you, and every other person, have the same great heritage that they found within themselves: a Divine Companion dwelling within you who longs to embrace you, to guide you and help with the challenges you face.  The torchbearers’ assurance of better bedrock to be found may help motivate you to put in the effort needed to uncover the quiet and delightful inner divine partner who is often covered under the landslides of the world.

Their wisdom is especially valuable in current times when or when most people don’t even consider the possibility that their bedrocks may actually be a landslide covering something even more valuable.

Imagine if you live in times when nearly everyone thinks that science or theology is the best possible bedrock for building your worldview and these views were so pervasive that they took root in your mind.  Imagine that you grew up with people constantly telling you that you are a sinner: bad and unworthy of God’s love or concern.   And they communicated their view of you in very personal ways so that they seeped into your mind and formed an unshakeable belief that God sees you as bad and inferior.  Such landslides can completely obscure of your true spiritual treasure of being dearly loved by God in a very personal and intimate way.

Imagine the big shift in your sense of yourself when you grasp this truth about yourself and life.  Recovering your heritage—the nearness of God to you and your great value to God—can correct even severe and deep-seated distortions about yourself acquired from less-than-perfect parenting or religious organizations.  It’s much easier to move your foundation off of faulty bedrocks once you have discovered new and better bedrocks to move onto.  Having the option of better bedrocks diminishes the once-powerful grip of lesser bedrock beliefs.

The wisdom of the spiritual torchbearers gives a new lens for seeing all of yourself, even parts that were so blocked from your view that you had no idea spiritual parts of you existed.   Imagine how uplifted you would feel if you replaced distorted views of yourself with rich truths, and finally knew in your bones how much God values you and desires to draw close to you.

Your Great Spiritual Heritage

A Divine Companion Lives within You and Craves your Partnership

The spiritual torchbearers uncovered spiritual wisdom that is the heritage of you and every other person:

1) God personally dwells within you as a Divine Companion who is longing to share this life together;

2) you possess all the endowments needed to cultivate this precious inner relationship;

3) you will blossom when you fully engage with and cooperate with your Divine Companion.

Your spiritual heritage is a powerful antidote for correcting errors in how you see yourself and value yourself; it assures you that loving companionship is possible right within yourself; it enables you to see that every other person, even those who are looked down on, are also quite precious to God; your full heritage reveals a very inspiring view of your nature and a noble sense of your life’s purpose.

Unfortunately, life often provides much bleaker bedrocks with a discouraging view of your nature and a dull sense of your life’s purpose.  Your self-respect may have been shredded in harsh and neglectful relationships.  Having succumbed to self-loathing under the loneliness of mean relationships, you might see yourself as unworthy of anyone’s love.  Your self-respect may be eroded even further if you’ve then settled for being party to more unloving or barely-functional relationships which repeated your original experiences with other people.  You might have easily come to believe that such emotionally poverty is the only lot you deserve in life; you might have accepted low self-respect and disconnection as your only heritage.  If your self-respect has been decimated, uncovering your spiritual heritage can provide a life-changing lift out of that mental quicksand that powerfully sucks you in.

The specialized knowledge of archeological experts helped the Makah recover their heritage so that the excavation went smoothly; the deep wisdom of the spiritual torchbearers can help illuminate your wonderful spiritual heritage so that your personal excavation is less trial-and-error. The light from their first-hand experiences may help you see and appreciate spiritual insights that may be obscured under the landslides of theological dogma or hidden by accumulated layers of secondary ideas associated with God.

Just as recovering their heritage assured the Makah of the wonderful traits that they possess, recovering your spiritual heritage assures you of the wonderful spiritual endowments that you possess.  The spiritual torchbearers assure you that it is a grave error to think that only a few people have the spiritual capacity for intimacy with God.  The torchbearers knew their own inner landscape well, the same inner landscape you possess; and they knew that it can be a meeting place for you and God.  If you spoke with them directly, they would assure you really do have a wonderful partner dwelling within your inner world who is longing to connect with you.

Uncovering your spiritual heritage is the ultimate Cinderella story: a story that begins when people close to you think that you aren’t worth even a shred of their time; that you don’t deserve to be treated with consideration or any kindness at all.  And then learning that, despite being so devalued by people who are close to you, a magnificent partner has set their eyes on you and sees you, and only you, as the partner they desire above all others.  And, even more, this partner loves you so much that they will go far out of their way to reach out to you; this partner will go to great lengths and do whatever is needed so that they can be with you; this partner longs to weave their world and your world together into one intimately shared life.

Who could have seen such a plot twist coming?  That you, who are so completely disregarded by so many (who themselves are actually mediocre partners), are so greatly desired by someone so incredibly far out of your league? That, although many people want nothing to do with you, the perfect partner wants to be your everything?  That an amazing partner has chosen you as the one to whom they are fully devoted to?  That such a wonderful partner is courting you with much fervor hoping that you will accept their invitation to love? That such a partner will be loyal and devoted to you for all of your life?  Yet such a seemingly impossible pairing is actually quite possible.  And this very real possibility lies dormant within you right now, in this moment, in your imperfect circumstances, on this far-from-perfect planet.  This possibility is not a fairy tale fantasy at all; it is your very real spiritual heritage for you to seize and cultivate.

This spiritual heritage has always been yours: a precious treasure waiting for you, an inheritance that has belonged to you all along but you may not have known that you possess such riches.  The bedrock beliefs of your spiritual heritage are a worthy foundation for your life but they are only useful and available to you if you uncover them and then use them.  Without excavating your heritage, you’d have no idea that you contain spiritual endowments and you might fall for the quite common opinion that a spiritual nature is simply a primitive myth.  Excavating your spiritual heritage can breathe new life into you, restoring oxygen that landslides have deprived you of.  Excavating your spiritual heritage gives you a new lens that shows you your true nature with less distortion than your older lens. Your wonderful full heritage is well worth the effort of excavating if it has been buried under landslides

Marcus: A Modern Story

The story of the Ozette village and the Makah is an example of a group recovering their rich heritage that had been lost to them.  The spiritual torchbearers are examples of individuals who experienced the presence of their indwelling Divine Companion; their pooled stories collectively illuminate everyone’s rich spiritual heritage.  The next sections describe stories of two individuals who found spiritual intimacy in their inner world: Marcus is a modern story; Teresa is a story from centuries ago.

A number of people have shared with me their experience of encountering the Divine Companion in their inner world: seemingly ordinary folks who had an extraordinary spiritual experience that fueled a growth spurt of meaning and purpose in their life and produced a bumper crop of spiritual fruits.  Marcus’ story is a composite pooled from the life stories of 12 people: some shared in great detail; others just shared a pivotal moment that changed the trajectory of their life.  Each person’s story is very unique to that person.  Yet pooling their stories reveals some common elements that create a picture of the heart of a spiritual experience in the inner world, just as pooling the many individual Makah pieces revealed the larger tapestry of their village and way of life.

Early Life

temperament

Marcus was a curious baby who was always interested in people and new things which, as a newborn, was everyone and everything.  He often watched what was happening around him with rapt attention as if he was deeply fascinated by the world; he often tried or struggled to reach out and play with whoever or whatever interested him in the moment.  He was an easy-going baby who was especially happy when he was close to his parents or siblings; he often tried to mimic whatever they were doing.  Right from the start, he was reaching out and trying to connect with other people.

He had a happy and easy-going temperament: he smiled often, taking delight in his little discoveries and interactions.  He loved learning about the things in his world and getting to know the people in his life.  He was sometimes frustrated by his limited ability to do what he could imagine in his mind but not actually do.  He was usually able to calm himself when frustrated, often simply because he was easily distracted and quickly forgot what had frustrated him so much a few minutes ago.

Marcus was generally healthy; he had the usual childhood sicknesses and he recovered fairly quickly from them.  His most serious illness was several moderate seizures when he was 19 months old that seemed fleeting at the time but, in hindsight, they likely contributed to some subtle cognitive deficits, especially executive functioning, that would impact him a great deal later in life.

a seemingly adequate family that wasn’t really adequate at all

Marcus’ family adequately provided for his physical needs; his material circumstances were neither extremely extravagant or greatly impoverished.  His family was emotionally cool, almost to the point of being cold: he didn’t feel much warmth or receive much nurturing.  He occasionally got blasts of anger that seemed to clearly express how disappointing he was to his parents, siblings or teachers.  Like many emotionally far-from-ideal families, his family appeared quite ordinary on the surface; he never thought of his family as inadequate in any way.

His mother infrequently exploded in intense fits of anger; she didn’t have fits every day but often enough to really frighten Marcus.  He never felt fully secure during the times between her rages because he could never predict when she would erupt again without warning.  The threat of her anger always hung in the air even when she appeared to be calm.  His father’s feeble response to her fits of anger was to try to pacify his mother which turned out to be impossible.  His father’s tacit acceptance of his mother’s anger left Marcus thinking that her anger at him was justified; that he was responsible for his mother’s rage; that he was a very bad boy.  He imagined that his mother might not be angry, might actually be kind and caring, if only he was a better boy.  Marcus came to think that his mother’s anger was simply a natural and appropriate response to the obvious fact that he was a bad boy; and the intensity of his mother’s anger led him to think that he must be a very bad boy indeed.  He assumed that her anger was simply an acceptable way for a person to act, an acceptable way for others to treat him.

His father was often overwhelmed by his wife, by his children and by his work; he wasn’t really present for or supportive of Marcus (or anyone else but, as a child, Marcus couldn’t know that).  His father didn’t get angry at Marcus; neither was his father very interested in or involved with him.  Marcus interpreted his father’s lack of interest in him to mean that he wasn’t a good enough boy to merit his father’s time or caring; that he didn’t really matter much to his father.  Occasionally his father seemed to take an interest in Marcus but those moments seemed as random and unpredictable as his mother’s rages.

Marcus was a live wire, often bursting with energy and enthusiasm.  His parents didn’t have the energy or the interest to understand and meet the needs of their lively boy.  Thousands of experiences, large and small, with his parents firmly cemented into his brain that somethings he did were completely verboten and could irritate or enrage his parents: things like asking for help, singing too loudly, being silly and happy, expressing his ideas, or not being totally compliant.  He was quickly learning what was acceptable and what was unacceptable; he worked hard to repress his “unacceptable” behaviors.  Over his first seven years, he became much better at censoring himself but sometimes his bubbly nature surfaced despite him best efforts.

a child’s bleak takeaway

Like many children growing up in such a family, Marcus didn’t recognize that his family was emotionally impoverished, that he was living in an emotional desert where essential and nourishing love was scarce.  He had no sense that his family wasn’t as healthy as it could be; instead, he made sense of his situation by concluding that he, not his family, was deeply inadequate; he believed that he lacked that essential special quality which made a child loveable to their parents.  Of course he couldn’t articulate his worldview when he was a child, but he felt it solidly in his bones.  His very negative view of his self-worth become an unquestioned bedrock of how he saw himself and how others saw him as well; he was quite clear that he was not so great a boy; that he, not anyone else, contained the fatal flaw that made him ineligible for enjoying healthy loving connections with others.

finding a loophole out of the bleakness

Such a bleak worldview is too horrible for any child to bear.  Like many other children in similar straits, he latched on to a hope, a very faint hope, that his mother or father might love him if he could only become a better boy, a boy different from his natural self.  In that early childhood stage when magical thinking is quite active, he began to spin a fantasy based on small hopeful shreds from a few isolated positive experiences with his parents.  On all-too-rare occasions, his mother relaxed a bit when he helped out or when he tried to soothe her anger.  On other all-too-rare occasions, his father was mildly complimentary when he did well at school or in sports.

Marcus seized on these slim rays of hope and built a loophole into his worldview of being unlovable at his core, a loophole provided an escape from feeling completely unlovable. He came to believe that if he could be very helpful and solicitous to his mom, she might like him; he came to believe that if he could stand out or excel in some way, his father might like him.  This modus operandi worked occasionally, just enough to cement his belief in the loophole.  From these limited successes, he concluded that he had to be extremely accommodating of a person with strong negative emotions; that he had to be extremely exceptional to get anyone’s attention and to be appreciated.  He had to be nearly perfect to open this portal to being loved and appreciated.  He came to think that only amazing feats of accommodation or success mattered; smaller accomplishments did nothing at all to merit the affections of another person; and even a small mistake reset his stock to zero and he would have to start all over again.  The occasional rewards from this plan were enough to keep him virtually addicted to this way of acting, always hoping it would lead to the kind of connections with another person that he longed for.  This slim loophole preserved a small and misguided ray of hope that he might actually be loved but probably just for brief periods until the next eruption of anger at him.

Sidebar: Toddler Snapshot

Sidebar: Later Childhood Snapshot

God as a bedrock in one’s worldview

Marcus’ family regularly attended church.  His parents observed religious rituals mainly out of a sense of obligation to comply with church rules; they never really felt much delight in church services or community.  In contrast, as a child, Marcus really enjoyed the pageantry of church rituals.  In the process of spending time in church and Sunday school, he fully absorbed the idea of God.  When he was nine years old, he began participating in the services as an altar boy; several years later, he served as a lector.  He enjoyed these more active roles than the passive role of being a spectator in the congregation.

God became another bedrock in his worldview.  Unlike his parents, he saw God with a childlike sense of awe and wonder.  The idea of God’s love and kindness took root in his mind; it soothed his unmet need for being loved in a very real way that he couldn’t articulate when he was a child.

Sidebar: Second Grade Snapshot

Marcus always struggled with communicating the ideas in his mind, with organizing his thoughts quickly enough to express himself in a conversation.  As a result, he often rambled when he talked which made it hard for people to follow him and understand what he was thinking.  His anxiety about speaking in class only intensified his difficulty and his stammering whenever he was called on; but he did extremely well on written tests that didn’t require him to speak in front of the class.  He was good at playing all kinds of sports and much appreciated by classmates when they played games at recess.  Although he got some begrudging respect for his high grades and athletic ability, a deep shame still lingered, a sense that he wasn’t smart enough or good enough or special enough for people to really want him as a friend.

Sidebar: Fifth Grade Snapshot

He attended the same school for many years and he gradually got slightly better at expressing himself.  But years later he was still being mocked by classmates for his really disorganized way of talking from the earlier grades.  His classroom experiences added fuel to his long-longstanding negative self-talk and drowned out any new thoughts to the contrary: “I don’t trust that playing well at recess really changes what people think about me—they still think I’m really stupid, some kind of disgusting freak.”  His recess experiences barely budged the bedrocks of self-doubt that had settled in to form the semi-permanent landscape of his mind.

Bedrocks from his early life

Thoughts and feelings from his less-than-ideal family life seemed burned into Marcus’ heart and brain.  With only his young child’s mind to make sense of his emotionally-loaded experiences, he understandably never came to really trust that he mattered to anyone—not to his family, friends or teachers.  Based on scraps of evidence (true experiences which he then exaggerated), he came to believe that people just didn’t like him and they didn’t want to be around him very much.  He connected the dots of his experiences in a lopsided way: overly emphasizing the negative pieces and virtually excluding the positive pieces.  His distorted worldview became cemented as the bedrock worldview that formed his sense of self.  Despite his success in some areas, his bedrock sense of not being good enough didn’t get eroded at all; those bedrocks seemed impervious to new positive experiences.

Marcus had some wonderful traits: he took the responsibility of being the one who must change to get what he desired; he maintained hope that love and connection were still a real possibility despite much frustration; he believed that God was real even though his church experiences weren’t always very loving; he was curious and wanted to learn; he really enjoyed much of life.  He was amazingly resilient: despite all of his disappointments at home and in school, he still was curious and wanted to learn and he still craved being with people.

Marcus could be very enthusiastic about ideas but most of the time he didn’t express them for fear of looking foolish.  Occasionally, his excitement overwhelmed his caution and his words fell out in a happy but discombobulated way.  He vacillated between saying little because he of his discomfort to being so effusive that he had couldn’t stop himself from saying a lot usually in a very disorganized way.  He had some insightful big-picture ideas but they seldom amounted to much because he didn’t follow through with mastering the details associated with these big ideas.  Not acting on his ideas or not completing his pet projects left him feeling that he was barely competent to do most anything; feeling inadequate was a big anxiety for him because doing well is how he thought he might come to matter to others.

Marcus wanted to be connected with people who liked him and wanted to interact with him.  He fully invested himself in the bedrocks of his worldview which guided his efforts in how to make connections with others: by being really good at something and distinguishing himself with some talent; by being very accommodating (a people pleaser) so that others would like him and include him.  His plan for getting love was far from perfect but it was the only plan he had so he latched onto it with all his might, desperately hoping that following his self-written instruction manual for life would get what he craved most of all: someone shining a little ray of love his way.  He didn’t recognize that his worldview was based on his childhood magical thinking that excelling and accommodating would get him love, simplistic and wishful thinking that was not nearly wise enough to navigate the complexity of actual relationships.  When his plan didn’t pan out, he often doubled down on it, thinking: “Maybe I just need to work harder at executing this plan; surely that loophole leading to being included and loved will open up for me then.”  He clung to his worldview for many years even though it seldom turned out well.  It was the only worldview he knew.

Adult Life

Marcus was talented enough to do well in a technical role in factories that required mastery of sophisticated technology needed for the factory to run smoothly.  He came to really enjoy the complex problems that needed to be solved in his job.  He rose to positions of increasing responsibility for many years until his career stalled because of his inability to really trust the other people he needed to work with.  His Achilles heel was that he was very easily discouraged by the slightest resistance or disinterest when he presented his ideas to his workgroup; he became too emotionally overwhelmed when someone expressed reservations about his ideas making it hard to address their concerns and to rearticulate his ideas and re-present them again.  In reality, people not were closed off to his ideas; rather, he wasn’t presenting his ideas coherently and clearly answering people’s legitimate questions.  His experiences with workgroups were so emotionally loaded that, when they happened enough times, he felt totally defeated and stopped trying to express his ideas at work at all.

His feelings of being disregarded fed a very negative attitude at work.  Eventually his pissy ways of interacting with others led to losing his job despite his technical competence.  All the technical expertise in the world can’t compensate for being unable to communicate clearly and get along with others.  After losing his last job, he worked through a series of temporary contracts, jobs that paid well but required long commutes and provided little job security.

In many ways, Marcus had a “nice” and compliant personality; he often worked really hard at his job.  He was operating as if he had an unwritten contract with life, a contract that he had drafted unilaterally in the fantasy world of his mind, a contract that no one else had cosigned.  His contract boiled down to: if I solve hard problems and do my job very well, then I’ll be appreciated and even beloved.  His imagined contract shaped how he interacted with other people.  But no one else knew of this imagined contract, let alone had agreed to its terms and their obligation to embrace him when he made a big contribution.  Usually his co-workers didn’t express much appreciation or treat him as anyone special; their blasé response reinforced his lifelong belief that he could never measure up, that he could never be good enough to be worthy of inclusion or love.  In those low moments, he could become discouraged and depressed for days or weeks.  He vacillated between moments of hopefulness (maybe his contract with life would be finally honored this time) and moments of angry frustration when that didn’t happen.  Other people didn’t understand what was happening inside him and simply saw him as vacillating from being upbeat and cooperative to being down and uncooperative; his bouts of negative emotions kept others at a distance, his own actions sabotaging him from getting what he so dearly wanted.

Religion

As a teenager, Marcus had gradually become disillusioned with the ideas about God that his church taught.  He began to notice inconsistencies that he hadn’t seen before: that the ways members actually acted were nothing close to the behaviors and relationship that were described in Sunday sermons; that God would see him as a despicable sinner unless he confessed his allegiance to a certain denomination; that God was somehow satisfied or appeased by the grotesque killing of someone as good and holy as Jesus.  These depictions of God’s character didn’t seem right to Marcus, but he hadn’t yet developed another framework that more clearly reflected his intuitive grasp of God as being a very loving person.

He was especially put off by the big gap between what people proclaimed in church and how they actually treated one another.  His lingering sense of God as real and loving were contradicted by his experiences of being dismissed and shunned by many people who attended his church and professed to love God.   Eventually, he could no longer attend his childhood church in good conscience.

Although his big doubts about the church led to some small doubts about God, his bedrock belief in God never eroded.  Marcus doubted the church much more than he doubted the reality of God.  He simply didn’t think that God could be the kind of being portrayed by his church.  Marcus went on to explore other religious traditions but none of them really inspired the same kind of reverence for the divine that he once felt in his childhood church in his younger years.  Each of the other churches he attended acted as if they offered much better ways of understanding of God than other denominations but each of these churches seemed very similar to the church he already knew so well.

The religious organizations he explored didn’t satisfy him intellectually.  He still longed for God to be a part of his life in a palpable way: to feel God’s presence and to become pleasing to God.  He hoped that some religion or spiritual practice could still elicit and encourage that fervent longing for God again.  He still yearned to be close to a loving God whose goodness could inspire him in his own attempts at being a good person.

As a child, Marcus absorbed basic age-appropriate ideas about God so that God’s existence was simply an accepted fact to him.  As an adult, his understanding of God grew beyond his childhood views and he came to see God as someone who actually noticed him and cared about him; he came to see God as being much like a person with whom he could have a relationship.  He was able to distinguish the baby (the spiritual gems of his childhood religion) from the bathwater (the parts of religion that weren’t essential to devoting yourself to God) so he didn’t throw out both the baby and the bathwater.

Marriage

As a young man, Marcus had several romantic relationships but they were never very satisfying because he was operating from such a flawed worldview of how to connect intimately with another person.  He had become an inveterate people pleaser in the hopes that he could get a great deal of validation from his romantic partners.  Several times, he placed too much trust in a woman who was quite happy to get whatever she could from such an accommodating man but who had no desire to give very much in return.  Once he did the opposite: he didn’t trust a person who really cared about him and was actually capable of sustaining a healthy relationship in which both partners were generous with each other.  Although it didn’t make much sense logically, he was frightened when he came face-to-face with a real chance of having the very thing he wanted most of all: a healthy relationship.  But he didn’t have the insight to understand how special this woman was and what an excellent chance they had for a life-long loving relationship.  He didn’t have the healthy bedrock beliefs that would allow him to consider himself worthy of a such good person’s affection; he didn’t have the attachment template to trust that she would still be affectionate once she got to know him better.

Marcus eventually married a woman who initially seemed to really like him while they were dating and engaged.  But her positive regard for him didn’t last much longer than the wedding.  Her positive regard for him was directly connected to how subservient he was and how many material goodies he could provide for her.  Her expectations played right into his worldview: of course, he had to appease his spouse; of course, he had to provide many goodies to her if he ever wanted to be loved.  He earned a lot of money in his job and was able to provide a high level of financial security as well as some big-ticket luxuries she expected him to provide.

She was sometimes considerate and kind to him but those moments were fleeting; they happened less and less often the longer they were married.  She was quick to point out what she wanted but didn’t have as an indication of his inadequacies.  She was extremely reluctant to express appreciation for anything, even big things, he did to satisfy her wishes; saying something nice about him seemed like it was really painful for her.  She acted as if all that he did for her was simply meeting the bare minimum a husband was expected to do, as if everything he did was of minimal value.  No matter how much he provided materially, it was never enough to satisfy her, never enough to earn her love and warm affection.

His wife was a lawyer by training and disposition: she loved to interrogate him for the purpose of pointing out the errors of his thinking and the deficiencies of his personality.  Coming from her own far-from-ideal family, she had chosen to deal with her feelings of inadequacy by bringing other people down, an unhealthy and hurtful way of maintaining an illusion of her own superiority.  Thinking that he was working to strengthen marital communication, Marcus often tried to engage in these no-win conversations by responding to her questions which involved implicitly agreeing with her low opinion of him.

His good intentions in participating in her lawyer-like conversations never led to a better relationship; his wife’s intention was to never yield an inch; to never give an ounce of approval or appreciation in order to better retain her one-up position over him.  These interrogations disguised as conversations always left him feeling beaten down and humiliated.  At times when he reached his breaking point and couldn’t stand her negativity any longer, he would angrily lash out at her, sometimes in very obvious ways, sometimes in passive ways.  His wife then turned his understandably angry responses into the nth exhibit for the prosecution’s case that he was a very flawed and quite inferior person.

His wife was loath to ever acknowledge any of his accomplishments or achievements; she focused strictly on his flaws to the exclusion of any of his good qualities.  Instead of seeing his flaws as the normal imperfections that all people have, she collected and assembled them to “prove” that he was an inferior person which implied that he didn’t merit much respect or love.  Her near total disrespect for him was blatantly obvious to others but barely obvious to Marcus because he was so used to being treated as “less than” throughout his life.  Her disrespect was also dishonest: when he was not around, she liked to brag about him as if his accomplishments were actually hers rather than his; she made sure that he was never present when she bragged about him.

They had several children and he really enjoyed spending time with each one doing different things that matched with each child’s interests.  His wife seldom participated in these activities.  His wife seemed to enjoy pointing out how their children fell short: at school, at home, in their attitudes.  His wife insisted that she was the only one capable of helping one of their children who struggled in school.  But her “assistance” contained heavy doses of criticism, many sighs of disappointment, and almost no assurances or encouragement.  She treated their children much the same way as she treated Marcus: they mainly existed to make her look good and they needed her prodding to do that.

Marcus also really enjoyed spending time with friends and his extended family.  His wife didn’t like spending time with people outside their nuclear family unit, not even her own close relatives.  She usually created excuses why neither she, nor anyone else, should attend family gatherings.  She didn’t like the fact that Marcus enjoyed spending time with either his own family or her family.  Marcus had formed several circles of friends centered around his interests in sports and outdoor recreation; those friends considered him to be the hub that kept the group connected.  His wife really resented these friendships; she acted as if he was a very bad husband for wanting to spend time with those friends.  She herself restricted her socializing to serial friendships with one other woman, often a person who shared her bitter outlook; each of those relationships began with much emotional investment and then imploded under the stress from the friction typical of any friendship.  Despite all of her criticisms of him, his wife wanted Marcus at home as much as possible; he was her only real connection with another person.  What a mixed message he got from her: you are a very flawed and bad person—and don’t leave me because I want you here at home with me!

Sidebar: Adult Snapshot

Marcus had tried for years to meet his wife’s expectation that he provide her with an extravagant life style and that he talk with her at great length about his flaws.  When doing these things didn’t make their relationship any better, he vacillated between trying really hard to improve their relationship and not trying at all.  Ultimately, he gradually lost all hope for their relationship and lapsed into a resigned but sad withdrawal from his wife.

Relationships

His most constant companion, his wife, was actively undermining him in many ways: some clearly visible, others barely perceptible; all of them were very damaging to his self-respect.  She usually expressed a contempt for him; she almost never expressed any delight in him or his companionship.  He felt as if his coworkers automatically rejected his ideas.  He was pressured into spending less time with his circle of friends.  His life seemed filled with people who viewed him very negatively no matter how hard he tried. He was barely subsisting on this impoverished emotional diet consisting of much criticism and no appreciation.  Without being aware of it, he was still clinging to his cherished plan, based on a fantasy of a loophole for an unworthy person to be loved, although that plan wasn’t bringing him any closer to the loving relationships he desired so much.

His Spiritual Embrace

During this long period of his unsatisfying marriage and frustrating work experiences, he had a profound spiritual experience.  After his children were born, Marcus began attending church again mainly because he wanted them to have some sense of God.  He attended Sunday services sporadically but he really enjoyed being a part of a small group at the church who read the spiritual classics together.  The group meetings often began with a formulaic religious prayer that meant much to others but little to him.  He didn’t get much from that part of their meetings but he willingly went along with it because he got so much from the discussions that followed.

One evening, a member began the meeting with a prayer of reverence for how Mary, the mother of Jesus, was completely obedient to following God’s will for her life even though she might be shunned by others or that much might be required of her.  Marcus wasn’t usually moved by devotions to Mary, but this time he was very moved by her full cooperation with God even when the road ahead was unclear.  He felt himself spontaneously offering his complete cooperation to God for God to do whatever God wanted in his life regardless of the cost or inconvenience to himself.

That night after the meeting when he went to bed, Marcus never went to sleep.  He stayed pleasantly awake and vividly felt himself wrapped in the loving arms of God, as if he were in a very intimate embrace with a very warm lover, his own personal Divine Lover.  No words were exchanged between them but he felt loved far more deeply than he had ever felt in his life.  For the first time, he felt absolutely sure of being loved, not just by anyone, but by a wonderful lover who had a pure love for him that would remain as they shared more and more.  Marcus was assured that this divine person dwelling within him was delighted to be his dear and constant companion. Surely, he must have some real worth and value; he couldn’t be totally despicable if he was the recipient of such rich and wonderful love from such an amazing partner. Despite not sleeping that night, he got out of bed the next morning full of energy and joy.

His spiritual experience of being embraced by his Divine Companion happened in his inner world without any visible signs an observer might see.  His new positive attitudes weren’t precipitated by a big shift in his external circumstances, such as being instantly popular or receiving a material windfall like winning a big lottery jackpot.

The impact

Marcus was completely bowled over by his amazing inner experience.  For weeks, he was deeply moved nearly every moment of the day by the positive feelings that lingered after that night of the embrace.  Joyful tears still flowed spontaneously several months later whenever he recalled what he felt that night, “the night he spent embraced in God’s loving arms.”  He was much happier than he had ever been, even happier than on his happiest days before the embrace; he felt as if joy was flowing from a spring within him that would never run dry.

He still keenly felt how his wife viewed him with contempt; that very intense reality wasn’t erased by his spiritual experience.  But his spiritual experience enabled him to see another view of himself: that he was very much treasured by a wonderful spiritual partner, a very real being who he could connect with in his inner world.  The discrepancy between these two totally opposite views of himself begged to be resolved: certainly, both of them could not be true.

He concluded that his old dismal view of himself and life was false; he felt deeply certain that his new positive view was the true and much more accurate sense of who he is.  In the clarity that flowed from the spiritual embrace, he resolved the incompatibility of his old views and his new views by making a full and finalized determination: "I will no longer live my life thinking so poorly of myself.  I will no longer be so resentful when people didn’t respond to me like I want them to; I will not succumb to anger and grief.  Instead, I will live assured by the love and companionship of my wonderful unseen spiritual companion.  And I will rise to the challenge of forging similarly joyful and loving connections with other people."

Marcus’ resolution of these two incompatible views was both philosophical and practical.  Philosophically, he changed how he understood himself, his relationship with God and the richness of God's personally reaching out to connect with him. Practically, he changed how acted in the world in many small ways; his resolution was not merely lip service to a new idea but fostered a new way of living.  His decision to adopt a new framework helped him understand God more clearly and feel God’s presence more deeply.  Changing his core framework, he replaced the distorted and immature bedrocks of his worldview with more accurate beliefs and far more wonderful bedrocks.  He had excavated his true heritage, his sense of who he really is: beloved by God.  His life now rested a new foundation made of far better bedrocks.

Spiritual Fruit

Marcus was so moved by his spiritual experience that he overcame his usual caution and told his wife and children about what he experienced.  They didn’t really get it.  His wife, as usual, had nothing positive to say and expressed no happiness for him.  His children didn’t really understand it but they were happy for him.

At the time of his spiritual experience, Marcus had been working as a contractor at one company and also interviewing for permanent positions at other companies that offered more security and required less commuting.  A few days after his spiritual experience, he had a second job interview for such a position, a job that he really wanted.  Normally, his self-defeating attitude would dominate his mind in such a situation and sabotage how he presented himself.  But today his mindset brimmed with self-respect after feeling so deeply loved.

At the interview, he was asked a question about a technical methodology that he wasn’t familiar with.  He responded as best he could and then he honestly said "I'm not familiar with this method but I feel sure that I could learn it and master it."  His honest response seemed to matter a great deal to Jonathan, one of the interviewers who would be his boss if he got the job.  Jonathan valued Marcus’ honesty more than whether he knew one correct answer or a certain technical skill; Marcus’ response clearly showed that he was open to, and capable of, learning.

Marcus' attitude during the interview was so influenced by his spiritual experience that it neutralized the impact of his many prior frustrating experiences.  He was comfortable expressing what he knew and comfortable acknowledging what was uncharted territory for him; he didn’t feel that he needed to be perfect in order to be a valuable member of a workgroup.  His self-respect remained solid even when his knowledge petered out.  His way of carrying himself spoke volumes about who he was as a person; and his character resonated with Jonathan, another person of high character.  Marcus’ deep, but largely unconscious, sense of having solid spiritual attachment changed him without a long and intensive effort on his part (such as the changes slowly made though the intensive effort of therapy or self-reflection).

After his spiritual experience, Marcus was able to more clearly grasp the wisdom in the books written by the spiritual torchbearers.  Marcus really wanted to share his experience with the book club at his church.  He wasn’t puffing himself up; he was manly hoping that they might have had similar experiences that would add some perspective to his. Although they could intellectually grasp the spiritual concepts presented in the books they read and discuss them at length, they couldn't comprehend an actual personal experience such as what Marcus had experienced.

One of informal leaders of the group, a very erudite person, had a very muted response as if to indicate that Marcus’ experience didn’t really have much spiritual depth.  Most of the other members fell in line with that perspective.  Although the group had accepted his comments prior to the spiritual embrace, from that point on, they became more critical of any thoughts or ideas he shared.  Despite a lack of affirmation from the group which he most expected would understand his experience, Marcus still trusted that his spiritual experience was real even if others didn’t resonate with it very much or if they tried to undermine his new sense of himself.  He really valued his profound experience no matter what others said; it hadn’t made him self-centered, entitled or self-absorbed.

One person in the book club was very moved by Marcus’ experience; it resonated with her as something quite wonderful and very real.  She recognized how well his experience overlapped with the core of what the spiritual torchbearers described.  She also saw how much he grew and blossomed after his experience.  She was very supportive of him outside of the group because she concluded that, as a whole, the group wouldn’t be able to appreciate the wonder and great value of his experience, especially the more erudite members.

Over the following weeks, his wife, as usual, tried to point out every weakness of his interpretation of his experience to demonstrate that it wasn’t valid.  But the seeds of doubt that she tried to sow never took root in his mind; Marcus was so certain of what he had felt first-hand that even her intensive interrogations didn’t sway his assured sense of truth.

After the night of the embrace, Marcus’ connections with his children became more consistent because he was no longer so overwhelmed by the unsatisfactory conversations with his wife.  He was much more joyful with his children.  After several weeks of seeing how warmly he was interacting with their children, his wife felt compelled to compliment him (an extremely rare thing for her to do) and she said that she noticed how he had really elevated his parenting game.

His new job was a fresh start for Marcus.  With a solid sense of self-respect, he was no longer so totally derailed by the typical friction of workplace interactions and the usual reluctance to accept anyone’s new ideas.  He was more resilient to criticism or feeling reflexively dismissed; he even began to see the initial resistance to his ideas as a way of improving, rather than abandoning, his original ideas.

Marcus was always a good friend to those in his circles of friends but his ability to connect with them became even richer after his night in God’s arms.  Friends began sharing their thoughts more deeply trusting that Marcus understood them sympathetically.  His inner experience of being so well loved by his Divine Companion bore fruit in how he lovingly engaged with people even though he didn’t share his spiritual experience with his friends because most were quite secular and would have no appreciation for his experience because they had no sense that God was real.

His new and vibrant trust in his Divine Companion was not diminished by the doubts of his family or the book club.  The inner fruits of a more hopeful and positive worldview were just too real which made it impossible for him to dismiss the reality of his spiritual experience.  The outer fruits of engaging in richer and warmer ways were also impossible to miss.  And he continued to bear the fruits of the spirit for many years afterwards.

Recovered Heritage

Marcus uncovered his spiritual heritage through his own first-hand experience which helped him see how precious he was to God.  His spiritual heritage had been there all along but it was so deeply covered by personal and religious landslides that it was virtually unavailable to him before that night of the divine embrace.  He was trying to get through life with an impoverished heritage that left him feeling alone and adrift in a sea of dismissive people with minimal connection with anyone; his sense of not mattering much to others was real but that sense of self wasn’t his full heritage; it wasn’t the full picture of who he really was.  After being embraced by his Divine Companion, he could appreciate his spiritual heritage in a very real in-his-bones way that enhanced his self-respect and reshaped his worldview.

Experiencing first-hand the loving personality of God changed all aspects of him: his thoughts, his feelings and his relationships with others.  In his thinking, he saw himself and his life from a whole new perspective; in his feelings, the motivating power of positive emotions energized him to pursue a larger life and weakened the downward pull of negative emotions; in his relationships, his attachment patter shifted from distrusting toa more confident secure attachment style making him more resilient to the ordinary frustrations of normal interactions between people.  All of these three changes flowed from knowing by experience that God dwelled within him as a divine person who considered Marcus quite worthy of love and wanted to elevate his life; this truth was always a part of his heritage but was buried by the society-wide and personal landslides of his life and was lost to him until he uncovered it and grasped it.

Although the vivid experience of being embraced by God didn’t happen again, Marcus continued to have other less vivid experiences that deepened his original assurance of being beloved by God.  These successive experiences—a few very prominent ones and many minor ones—built on each other and solidified the changes in him.  Years later, he had several more profound experiences of the divine embrace.  In between these experiences, he continued to feel the great beauty and goodness of God’s affection, care and guidance.  Each additional experience catalyzed another growth spurt; each experience washed away another part of the landslides that had covered parts of his spiritual heritage.  He continued to blossom more and became an even better companion to those he knew well and to those he met briefly.  Interestingly, many people liked his company as long as he played second fiddle; they disliked hearing his thinking, especially his ideas about how a person might find God in their inner world.

Uncovering his heritage (understanding more deeply who he was, especially who he was in God’s eyes and grasping just how dearly God loved him) didn’t happen randomly.  He was able to uncover it because, before the divine embrace, he delighted in God and desired a more heart-felt connection with God.  Such delight and desire begin with the bedrock view that God is real and is much like a person, although a perfect divine person; without that spiritual bedrock, holy delight and desire for God simply don’t make any sense.  After the embrace, he benefitted so much because he could accurately interpret what had happened; he continued to savor his spiritual experience despite the doubts of so many others.  He loved how his experiences revealed the nature of God’s relationship with him, a relationship that is available to anyone with a sincere desire to know God more deeply.

After the embrace, Marcus continued to pour his energy into nourishing his spirituality.  Attending his book club helped but only a bit; usually he found more spiritual sustenance in quietly letting the writings of the spiritual torchbearers slowly and deeply seep into him.  He felt as if the torchbearers understood exactly what he had learned in the night of the divine embrace when no words were spoken.  He enjoyed hearing about other people’s spiritual ideas and experiences but even such conversations didn’t lead to an ongoing mutually supportive friendship.  Even without a kindred spirit, he continued to trust the presence and actions of his Divine Companion.

Alternate Ending

Marcus’ story could have had a very different ending depending on how he interpreted and understood his spiritual experience.  He might have dismissed it as something pleasant but random that really didn’t have any deeper meaning, merely an enjoyable but hard-to-explain experience.  Or he might have been swayed by the doubts and dismissive tone of others when he told them what happened; he might have seen his experience as something bad from a religious perspective if religious people were critical of it.  Or he might have valued his experience but interpreted it through a framework of a rigid theological belief system that created a zealous but unfeeling spirit in him.

If he doubted the validity of what he experienced, the bedrocks of his deep but erroneous beliefs would have remained more or less in place while the more accurate bedrock beliefs remained buried.  The spiritual fruits of a so thoroughly misunderstood spiritual experience would likely have faded quickly; his relationships at home and at work would likely have quickly reverted back to their previous level.

The arc of his story, like your story, depends on your response to your own first-hand experiences: how you interpret them; if you seize new bedrocks as the foundation of your worldview; whether you make a finalized determination to see yourself and God in a new way that flows from your own first-hand experience.  The nourishing value of a wonderful spiritual experience can be diluted if you interpret it inaccurately; it can be lost altogether if you completely doubt that it had a deep and profound meaning.  The same spiritual experience can have many different impacts depending on your response to it.  It can continue to richly nourish you if you really appreciate how wonderful it was and grasp the truth and beauty which the new perspective birthed in you.

Teresa: A Long-ago Story

Over the past centuries, several hundred individuals uncovered the great human spiritual heritage in their own first-hand experiences of the presence of a Divine Companion in their inner world and then wrote about their experiences; certainly, many more people had similar experiences but didn’t leave a written record.  Each of these spiritual stories is very unique to the person who experienced a divine inner presence.  Specific details from one individual’s experiences may not be a part of everyone’s experiences.  The following life story is a composite pooled from the experiences of several spiritual torchbearers, especially Teresa of Avila.  The story is not a literal account of her life; it blends aspects of several other life stories in order to emphasize their spiritual common core of spiritual experiences and to deemphasize specific details of a certain person’s spiritual experience that may not be part of everyone’s experience and may actually be distractions from the common core that likely resonates with your own experience.

The Makah pooled many artifacts together to create a fuller picture of their culture than could be created from only a few isolated artifacts.  Pooling the life stories of several spiritual torchbearers can create a fuller picture of your spiritual heritage than a picture created by considering a just few isolated lives. The common core of spiritual experiences may help you see your spiritual heritage more clearly if you’ve lost sight of it under the landslides of life or in the din of your inner world.  Hopefully a pooled story helps you recover your own precious heritage and encourage you to cultivate your own spiritual connection with God.

Early Life with Family

Teresa lived centuries ago in Europe when people, if they were fortunate, earned just a bit more than what they needed for life’s necessities.  For many years, her family was one of those fortunate few which enabled her to become reasonably educated for her times.  But her family’s fortunes fluctuated much from year to year.  During a string of years of drought and unseasonably late spring frosts, their large garden didn’t produce much food and they barely got by.  Luxuries were non-existent during those lean years; at times, the necessities were barely there.  Epidemics of contagious diseases passed through the area where they lived twice; her infections left her with chronic physical health problems that affected her for the rest of her life.

Teresa was bright and curious; she was a sponge for learning everything she could.  She absorbed both clear thinking and superstitious beliefs of her times; practical knowledge and fairy tales; the wisdom of folklore and the nastiness of local gossip.  When she was young, she sometimes went overboard with magical thinking and could become very superstitious about small things.  As she grew into a young woman, her childish magical thinking gave way to a more mature and thoughtful way of understanding life.

Her personality was far from perfect: she sometimes argued intensely with her siblings; other parents in the neighborhood considered her too willful and thought that her parents should punish her more severely to tame her overly independent streak.  Fortunately her parents, who were fairly strict but not extremely so, didn’t give much credence to their neighbors’ suggestions to be more punitive in their discipline.

Her family was very religious and attended church regularly on Sundays and on weekdays whenever time permitted.  Everyone in the family fully accepted that God was quite real; the reality of God was beyond question for them.  They considered the church teachings as the ultimate word on the nature of God; they abided by the church’s rules and regulations.  Their acceptance of the church as the authoritative source of truth gave a sense of stability in their perspective on life.  Teresa was very moved by the majesty of church services; she felt a deep sense of reverence each time she entered her local church.  As a teenager, she often spent time alone in church.

Overall, Teresa was a happy and curious child who loved playing and exploring.  She felt warmly loved by her parents; the rough-and-tumble play with siblings and her health struggles prevented her from getting too full of herself.

Married Life

When she became a young adult, Teresa did what was expected of her and nearly all other women of her times: she married.  She wed a local tradesman.  Fortunately, they both had a genuine affection for each other.  They shared equally in the work needed to maintain their household.  Together she and her husband began slowly building a comfortable livelihood and eventually they could even begin to enjoy a sense of some simple material security.

Generally, they were both in good health and good spirits.  But when her medical symptoms flared up, he tenderly cared for her; and when he was hurt doing his very physical work, she cared for him.  Their relationship was well-balanced in that each of them could be a good caretaker for the other.

They were well-matched temperamentally and really enjoyed each other’s companionship.  He enjoyed her vivacious personality and intelligent insights; she treasured his loyalty and lively interests in many different things.  They were excited about life and the possibilities, even though limited, that it held for them.  They worked very hard yet they often laughed together.  They were very affectionate and readily expressed their love for one another.  They found it relatively easy to resolve the friction that inevitably arises whenever two people share their lives so closely.

She and her husband attended church regularly and they both had a devotion to God that went beyond church attendance.  She counted it a tremendous blessing to be able to talk with her husband about the spirituality budding in her heart.  Their deep conversations about their sense of God’s inner presence helped each of them grow spiritually.

Sidebar: Marriage Snapshot

Teresa continued her religious practices but her childhood sense of religious obligation gave way to a more mature delight and joy in feeling the presence of God during her personal prayer time.  Her spirituality was becoming less rigidly confined to institutional dogma (although she certainly appreciated the truth contained within it) and more rooted in what she personally experienced.  Her growing faith helped her through some extremely hard periods of material deprivation and episodes of poor health.

But the security and pleasures of her comfortable married life were shattered when her husband was killed in a construction accident several years into their marriage.  She suddenly lost both the treasured companionship she shared with her husband and her material means of existence.  She grieved deeply after he died; his absence left a huge vacuum in her life.

Convent Life

Teresa faced imminent destitution after her husband’s death.  She could have easily remarried because many men saw her as a wonderful partner but she knew she was unlikely find someone as well-suited for her as her husband was. Teresa applied to a local convent and was accepted as a novitiate.  She had always loved God and she was thrilled by the possibility of devoting her life to God.  She quickly felt at home in the convent: she loved reading the books on spirituality in the convent’s library that weren’t available anywhere else; she enjoyed the opportunity to devote herself to spiritual practices.  She liked the rhythm of the daily schedule with periods of prayer and worship interspersed between periods of work; she developed warm friendships with some of the nuns.

Like virtually everyone of that time, both people inside and outside the convent, she simply accepted that God was real.  Almost no one viewed God as a fantasy or an illusion conjured up by wishful thinking.  People in her town had many different views about God: some Christian, some Jewish and some Muslim ideas.  Each religion held different ideas about the nature or personality of God; each used different practices to incorporate these ideas into the everyday lives of their members.  But regardless of the specific details of their religion, most people believed in God in one fashion or another.  Teresa was devoted to her convent and loved the church’s liturgy and she also grew to appreciate the ideas and rituals of other religions as well.  She imagined that any sincere religious practice could help a person become more devoted to God, to become a a more cooperative partner to God in the unfolding of their life.

Throughout her life, Christian teachings and perspectives formed the foundation of how Teresa viewed life.  She loved the sacraments that she shared with her sisters in the church.  To this religious tradition framework she added her personal devotional time.  Over her years in the convent, her love of Jesus and God grew deeper as she harmonized this dual path of religious tradition and teachings with her personal experiences of spirituality.  Her growing sense of personal intimacy with God created a nearly insatiable appetite to really grasp God’s personality and to follow God’s wishes for her life.

The convent held an open house every Sunday afternoon when the nuns hosted people who came to visit and talk with them.  Most people came mainly to socialize in a secular vein; a few came seeking the counsel of the nuns regarding their personal lives.  Many visitors wanted to talk with Teresa: she was a wonderful conversationalist and clearly appreciated and sympathized with the circumstances many people faced.  Many were very attracted to her because she genuinely enjoyed spending time with each person; her joy was contagious and people often left feeling as if their own sense of joy was replenished.

Talking with Teresa made a person feel as if they were deeply known and warmly appreciated sensing that she saw them as someone who was quite wonderful, feeling as if they really mattered to another person who was quite wonderful.  Her warmth was disarming: people felt quite safe and assured that she wouldn’t ambush them with criticisms, that she wouldn’t look down on them even though they certainly had flaws.  The kindness of her voice drew people to her; spending time with her conveyed a sense that life offered the possibility of joy and beauty despite its intense pressures and hardships.

At first, Teresa was surprised by how people responded to her, surprised that anyone would be any more attracted to her than any other sister.  But the other nuns, seeing how visitors responded so warmly to her, really encouraged her to talk more with visitors.  The nuns had an ulterior motive: happier visitors contributed more financial support for the convent.  The nuns depended on the financial support of these weekend visitors, especially the generosity of the more well-to-do families in the area. People seemed happy to support the convent, happy to donate so that this wonderful woman wouldn’t be bereft of the basics of life.  They left feeling good about themselves for assisting such a charming person and her convent.

At first, Teresa didn’t think of herself as being particularly charming or special; in fact, she often wondered if her natural exuberance might be a wild trait that needed to be tamed or a naughtiness that needed to be excised.  But the nuns always ate better the week after their patrons spent time with Teresa, so naturally the nuns encouraged her to keep up her conversations with visitors.  As they praised her abilities, slowly and almost imperceptibly, her charisma led to being prideful in her special position among the nuns.

She had absorbed the well-intentioned ideas that her sister nuns served up so abundantly.  After all, wasn’t it right to dedicate her talents for conversation to the convent, to the work of God?  And didn’t God give her this talent of communicating in the first place?  She became settled in her mind: charming the weekend visitors in the parlor was a good and godly thing.  But her ego slowly became puffed up by the appreciative comments of visitors; she became quite attached to her superpower of connecting with people; she began to think of her ability as her own possession, not a God-given endowment.  Her life was still very godly in many ways: in her prayer life and her genuine affection for other people.  But an unsaintly urge was growing within her: a desire for ever more acclaim from others and even more popularity with visitors and her sister nuns.

Her Spiritual Embrace

Precipitating Circumstances

Life seemed to finally be settling into a good routine for Teresa after she had been in the convent for several years; she could easily be completely content for this life to continue indefinitely.  But smooth times never lasted long for Teresa: not as a child, not as a young wife and not now as a nun.  Physical symptoms from her childhood diseases returned and intensified; her health deteriorated to the point where she couldn’t participate in even the simplest activities in the convent.  She was too exhausted to be a charming host to the convent’s visitors; she was no longer the social butterfly who could help secure more donations.  Several times her symptoms became so intense that it wasn’t clear whether she would live to the next day.  Her fervent dreams and treasured hopes for a productive life as a nun were just as thoroughly dashed as her hopes for a happy married life were dashed.

Her sadness over losing her status of being the valued social darling of the convent revealed to her how much her pride over a good thing had morphed into unhealthy sense of self-importance.  She had changed so slowly and gradually that she hadn’t noticed how her core values had drifted.  In rationalizing that she was serving God in her hostess role by helping the convent, her role of being a superstar became a mainstay, an essential bedrock, of how she saw her worth.  Stripped of this bedrock by her sickness, she was left with the core of who she was: a woman who loved God in her heart, who had no special value in her church or convent and who was now a burden to others.

She had drifted away from loving God in the simple unambivalent way she did before she entered the convent; her attachment to her sense of specialness in the world had slowly crept into her pure love of God.  Upon seeing her inner life so clearly, she was appalled for the pain she felt she had inflicted on God with her self-centeredness.  She was deeply sad imagining how much God must hurt when, after loving a person so greatly and generously, that person holds other things, such as their popularity, as more precious than the companionship of God.  She imagined God’s pain as akin to the pain of a wonderful lover who was tossed aside by their beloved for a passing attraction to another suitor who would eventually be revealed as being a far less worthy and much less loving partner than her Divine Companion.

Having seen herself more clearly, and not liking what she saw herself becoming, Teresa shifted.  She resolved any remaining ambivalence about what mattered most to her: pleasing God meant far more to her than pleasing herself or being pleasing to others and being popular with them.  Her values changed dramatically: worldly acclaim and the approval of others became nearly meaningless to her; her special role in the convent now felt absolutely trivial; previously attachment to being special in that way evaporated.  She had a renewed enthusiasm for worshipping God, telling God how wonderful God appeared to her.  She was more than willing, she greatly craved, that God do whatever God wanted with her and her life.  She wanted God to rule unchallenged in her inner world; together, they would shape her life to be pleasing and useful to God.

The Embrace

In a moment of deeply and prayerfully giving herself over to God, Teresa felt flooded by a warm and loving intimacy with God, feeling God drawing very close to her in a very personal one-on-one intimacy of sharing everything.  She felt as if she was being held in the arms of her Beloved and intense waves of love flowed into her heart, into all the crevices of her mind.  She knew in her bones, without the need of extensive reflection or theological theories, that she was dearly beloved by God, by God who now felt so personally close to her as if God was a Divine Companion dwelling very closely with her in her heart, mind and soul.

Teresa felt tremendous joy in this deeply moving spiritual embrace, as if she had received the lavish attention and affection of a perfect lover who was exquisitely attuned to her deepest desires.  She had been fairly happy at times in her life before this but, after experiencing the intimate embrace of her Beloved, she practically radiated an even deeper joy although she still faced many challenging circumstances.  She knew and felt a joy beyond description when she felt wrapped in the divine arms of her Beloved.  This newly blossoming relationship became far more precious to her than anything else and completely commanded all the devotion of her heart; she would gladly give up anything that interfered with this wonderful relationship.

In human-human relationships, you often need to experience long periods of faithfulness with your partner before you can really know and trust that your partner will be consistently loving and loyal in the long run.  But in her human-divine relationship, Teresa knew instantly that her Divine Companion was much more loving than any other human affection she might ever experience; that her Divine Companion was loyal beyond any doubt; that her Divine Companion deserved her complete trust.  She knew that her Divine Companion’s love would endure for her entire life; even more, she felt quite sure that this love would endure beyond her life on Earth.

In the moments of this spiritual embrace, Teresa’s new perspective (elevating God far above all else in her life and fully cooperating with God no matter what the personal cost to her) became the firm bedrock of her life.  She enshrined her Beloved in the place of honor reserved for the One who she revered as more beautiful than all other beings.  She made a pledge in her heart, as if she were taking a solemn wedding vow, to be a better partner to the intimate God dwelling within her.  In these moments of deep love for God, she experienced God as her Beloved partner, as a dear friend with whom she could share everything in her inner world.  She felt that God was giving her everything she needed, giving so abundantly that she was receiving far more than she could possibly assimilate.  Her names for this personal presence of God, including her Beloved and her Divine Companion, emphasize the intimacy of her relationhip.

Teresa had developed some spiritual clarity over her years in the convent by studying the books available in the convent library but the spiritual insight from the embrace of her Divine Companion made all of her previous spiritual understanding pale in comparison.  Her previous understanding of God wasn’t false but it was merely a first step to a fuller grasp of God’s lovely personality which she now knew through her actual relationship with God. From that point forward, she now felt much less need for theological explanations about the nature of God; she knew in her bones, in a way that went beyond intellectual concepts, the great beauty and wonder of God.  She saw God as a near and dear partner who inhabits a person’s inner world as well as also inhabiting the vast expanses of the universe.  She experienced firsthand how much God wanted to personally partner with each person as a Divine Companion indwelling their inner world who hoping to be welcomed into their heart and mind by each person.

Spiritual Fruit

Less anxiety and worry

Spirituality, Teresa grew by leaps and bound after her first experience of being embraced by her Divine Companion.  Her outward circumstances (her health and her material lot in life) didn’t change but that mattered little to her because she now felt so abundantly loved by God in her inner world.  Of course, she was still faced these same issues: the precarious finances of the convent and concerns about feeding the nuns; how nuns got along with each other (or didn’t get along and had friction amongst them); the practical operation of the convent.  But her anxiety over these issues seemed to vanish into thin air; she simply trusted that, guided by God, things would work out.  No longer sapped by the anxiety that these issues previously provoked, she was less mentally exhausted and she became a far better at addressing these issues; she became adept at developing very creative and effective ways to address these issues.

Self-respect: humility and reverence

Her new mindset—deep humility about herself and great reverence for God—instilled an unshakeable self-respect for herself.  She must be a precious person because such a perfect divine lover was so devoted to her; this sense of being desired by God created a profound gratitude without any sense of personal pride. Knowing that her active participation in this relationship was critical to its vitality motivated her to become the best possible partner for her Divine Companion.  She didn’t feel that she was particularly better than anyone else because she knew that every other person had their own Divine Companion and was equally as precious to their Divine Companion.

More tolerance for health problems

Her health problems didn’t improve much after the embrace with her Divine Companion but Teresa had far more endurance in living with unrelenting symptoms.  She still felt the pain and limitations of her medical conditions but they no longer seemed unbearable.  For no discernable medical reason, she seemed to have much more physical energy after her first embrace.

Warmer relationships

Having felt God’s warmth so vividly, Teresa grew even warmer even more than she was before the embrace.  Her conversations were now enriched by a self-forgetful disposition that allowed her to more fully focus on others.  Feeling what others were experiencing enabled her to see them with a rich and deep empathy.  They felt more seen and appreciated than they ever had before.  Having been so fully loved by her Divine Companion despite her flaws, she found it easy to love all kinds of people regardless of their flaws or limitations.  Having experienced first-hand how dearly God loved each individual, she could offer assurance to others that they were dearly loved by God.  Knowing how much her Divine Companion sought her, she could assure another person that their Divine Companion really longed to partner with them more fully.

Time with Teresa sometimes catalyzed another person’s spiritual growth spurt.  She remained humble whenever that happened, certain that any benefit to others certainly flowed directly from God to that person; she at no point considered herself to be a guru-like superior or a flawless representative of God.  She had a profound trust that the greatness of God could elevate even a far-from-perfect person to live as God wanted; that God’s grace could deepen the connection between two people to a much more collaborative connection than they could on their own resources.

As might be expected in any large group of people living in close quarters, one or two stood out as being particularly irritating.  Yet Teresa treated even those people with such great respect that one very irritating nun actually thought that she was Teresa’s favorite nun of all the nuns in the convent!  Teresa valued all nuns as equally sacred to God regardless of their talents or quirks; she believed that the Divine Companion dwelling within each nun was irrefutable proof of their great value in God’s eyes.  Teresa’s compassion for each person flowed from a perspective that was based on her first-hand experience of being divinely loved, not from a humanly derived perspective of valuing a person based on how pleasant or useful they were.

Deeper spiritual insight and understanding

The sacraments of the church were spiritual touchstones for Teresa: she felt very close to Jesus when receiving Communion or kneeling in prayer in a silent chapel.  Her deep reverence during sacramental rites were, for her, one way of opening the inner doorway leading to her Divine Companion.  Many hundreds of others also came to the same Communion table as she did but they were not in the least spiritually moved.  Sacraments and sacred rituals can be a springboard for spiritual deepening when a person has a genuine spiritual desire like Teresa’s but they may be nearly meaningless without that spirituality purity of heart.

Each person has a distinctive personality. You might know something about a co-worker if you read their resume; or a client if you read their psychological evaluation; or teammate if you read their sports statistics and performance in the 40-yard dash.  That kind of knowledge about a person is relatively superficial.  You really only know your co-worker after working together; you really only know your client after talking in depth about their experiences; you really only know your teammate after playing together.

Just as each person has a distinctive personality, God has a distinctive personality.  The theology of her church gave Teresa a sense of God-as-a-person through sacred texts, sacraments and teachings.  But God only really came alive to her when she deepened her relationship with her Divine Companion in her inner world.  She knew something of God from theology before but she only really came to grasp God’s personality through their one-on-one relationship.  Her initial experience of God was helpful but seemed superficial after she had the much richer experience of the human-divine relationship in her inner world.

Each person has a certain style of forging relationships and engaging with people; for example, some connect warmly while others are more distant and aloof; some people reach out while others wait for someone else to initiate a connection.  You come to know a person style of connecting when you spend time with them.  In the same way, God has a style of relating and engaging: with warmth, love, support and such a strong desire to collaborate in your life that God reaches out graciously to each individual.  Far from being indifferent or unapproachable, God desires very much to draw close to a person and will do whatever possible to extend the invitation to intimacy while also respecting a person’s choice to decline that invitation.  You come to know God’s style of connecting when you spend time in relationship with God, in moments of sweet intimacy.

Sidebar: Snapshot After the Embrace

Ongoing divine embrace

Her first spiritual experience of intimacy with God completely captivated Teresa: feeling the divine presence so closely revealed to her the great beauty of God’s character, a revelation that only intensified her desire for God.  She felt how God intensely desired to draw very close to her and grace her with far more warmth than the even most ardent affections of a wonderful human lover.  She heard God’s love song in her soul, a melody rich with the harmony of the many notes of love: of closeness and also roominess; of an invitation offered with high hopes that she would accept it and also complete permission to decline it with no harsh blowback; of intense devotion to her along with full freedom for her to choose her own level of investment in the human-divine relationship; of being rooted to a solid foundation and also having a launching pad to blossom; of being fully partnered to a dependable lover and also fully becoming her own self.

Naturally, she loved the ecstasy of the loving embrace.  This spiritual love was so wonderful that she was willing to make any sacrifice necessary, to accept any suffering, to exert any effort required to feel the embrace of her Divine Companion again.  But she equally welcomed participating in everything intimacy involves; she wanted to experience all parts of God.  She felt God’s “pain” as the pain of a rejected lover who was not able to bond with their beloved, as if God was “suffering” from the pangs of unrequited love.  Contemplating God’s pain overwhelmed her: that such a perfect lover as God became so humble and offered a pure and wonderful love to a far-from-perfect beloved who then dismissed and didn’t appreciate the perfect lover.  She didn’t want God to be alone in that terrible pain of being so thoughtlessly spurned.

Teresa was really moved that God, who is all powerful and could have certainly avoided suffering, instead choose to dwell on Earth as a regular person, Jesus, and endure all the unpleasant experiences that human life entails.  In her empathy for Jesus, she wanted to experience everything he did: the very difficult aspects of his life as well as the triumphant aspects.  She wanted more to share Jesus’ suffering parts than to share in the glorious and joyous parts.  Not wanting Jesus to suffer alone, she wanted to bear his sufferings as much as she could.  Her willingness to accept suffering seemed to be a powerful choice that opened wide the channel which connected her with her Divine Companion.

Teresa often felt divine love flow so fully into her that she become totally assured of God’s unquestionably loyal love; she developed a very secure attachment with God who dwelled with her in her inner world as a wonderful companion.  She desired both to receive God’s love and to reciprocate that beautiful divine love with her human love that modeled on God’s love as closely as she possibly could.  She wanted her relationship with her Divine Companion to be a two-way flow of love; she couldn’t stand the idea of a one-way flow of love only from God to her.

She was totally smitten by her Divine Companion; she saw her Divine Companion as the most wonderful being in the entire universe.  She wanted more connection, more dates, more moments of profound intimacy with her Beloved; she wanted full betrothal with God, to continually share the deep intimacy of two fully committed partners.  She believed that such deepening came as the result of her being more whole-heartedly committed to and available to her Divine Companion.  As she became more devoted to her Divine Companion, she received what she desired with her whole heart: vivid periods of close communion with her Divine Companion.  She found what she loved above all else: a vibrant human-divine coupling.

Alternate Ending

Imagine if Teresa had disregarded her personal spiritual experiences because of the misguided opinions of less spiritual priests and she stopped perusing intimacy with her Divine Companion.  She likely would never have shared her experiences as widely or written about them to help others make sense of their inner life.

Or imagine if Teresa had been widely recognized during her life as wise and saintly by the higher-ups in the Church.  Perhaps the human egoistic attraction to having widespread acclaim might have contaminated her pure desire for her Divine Companion.  We are fortunate that we never found out what might have happened in these alternate scenarios of what happened after she experienced the embrace of her Divine Companion!

Gems of your Spiritual Inheritance

Some elements are common to the spiritual stories of Marcus and Teresa, stories pooled from the experiences many others.  These common elements are the gems of your spiritual inheritance that can help you come to know your Divine Companion.  These gems illuminate your inner world especially your less obvious spiritual nature which enables to nurture the human-divine connection with your Divine Companion.

Theology or psychology neither prove or disprove the validity of these gems, core elements common to many spiritual experiences.  But the common elements are consistent with the heart of Jesus’ teachings, such as the two great commandments (actually two wonderful invitations to love God and love other people); his teachings about the inner kin-dom (the rich inner world where God knocks at the door of your heart); his parables that illuminate the loving and caring personality of God.  The common elements derived from individual spiritual experiences may help deepen your understanding of Jesus’ teachings from a purely intellectual level of either accepting or denying the existence of God to a more heart-felt intimacy with God.

These common elements don’t contradict the principles of modern psychology, such as attachment, the various kinds of intelligences, or cognitive processes.  But many secular psychological principles can be valuably applied to cultivating your spiritual life because spirituality is a plant that grows in the soul of your psychological mind.  Both theology and psychology can be helpful starting points for your spiritual journey and then helpful as cultivate your spiritual growth.  Your own experience is the best test of the validity of these common core elements of spirituality: does applying them to your own life help you feel more connected to God, to become kinder and to sense that your life matters?

The core elements, or gems, of your spiritual inheritance include:

inner qualities you can cultivate to facilitate spiritual deepening;

outer events that accelerate spiritual deepening;

recognizing the personality of your Divine Companion;

and ways to continue cultivating your relationship with your Divine Companion.

Qualities of your Inner World that Enable Spiritual Deepening

Core element: Seeing your spiritual nature as well as your human nature

A clear sense of your inner world helps you see the arena where you meet your Divine Companion

Spiritual deepening often begins with reflecting on the structure of your inner world and the processes that operate there.  Spiritual growth is more difficult without enough reflection to recognize your bedrock beliefs; or if you are oblivious to how your inner workings are shaping your life.  Spiritual growth is also difficult without enough reflection to see that your inner world contains a pathway leading to your Divine Companion.  Knowing both your human and spiritual aspects helps you appreciate how your inner world can be a very vibrant and richly creative place.

Core Element: Seeing the bedrocks of your worldview

Spiritual growth begins with understanding the power of the bedrock views you currently hold that shape your relationships with other people.  Your bedrocks are likely a mix of toxic beliefs from harsh experiences and beautifully inspiring beliefs from healthy experiences.  Spiritual growth is inhibited when you aren’t aware of your bedrock beliefs and how powerfully they shape your life.  Spiritual growth is catalyzed when you have a sense that you can actively select which bedrocks on which to build the foundation of your worldview; spirituality is catalyzed when you can reflect on your current bedrock beliefs and intentionally replace toxic bedrocks with better bedrocks.

toxic, seemingly permanent, bedrocks (that you are unworthy of love; that God is distant from you, indifferent to you)

No one has a perfect life completely free of difficulties, challenges and limitations.  Marcus had intense self-loathing stemming from his far-from-ideal childhood; his very negative view of himself felt as if it was absolutely true and immutably etched into his brain; his negative self-concept felt like the core of his identity that was so central to him that could never be questioned or changed.  His views of himself seemed to be the full story of who he was; his views were firmly attached to these negative bedrocks.

Many of the spiritual torchbearers also faced great personal difficulties throughout their lives: their most fervent dreams crashed; they felt as if they were second-class citizens in their religious organization; they may have felt that no one really appreciated their ideas for living in ways that are more faithful to God’s ways; they sometimes lost family, material security or their own health.  They experienced intense inner conflicts.  They often questioned their experiences and struggled to understand them.  They had few peers with whom they could share their thoughts and experiences so they often felt quite alone and isolated.  Some were consumed by spiritual doubts for long periods before resolving their uncertainties.  Each spiritual torchbearer had their own share of toxic bedrocks to contend with.

Harsh early experiences, often in your family, usually live on long past childhood in enduring distorted bedrock beliefs about yourself and how to forge healthy loving relationships with others.  You likely hold onto these bedrocks with great tenacity believing that they give you an essential grasp on life; even when your situation has changed dramatically from your childhood, you may continue using old bedrock beliefs to your shape your sense of who you are and whether others see you as a worthwhile person.  You might think that there’s no need to modify these beliefs.  Much toxic fruit in your life grows on negative bedrock beliefs that formed in imperfect early relationships.  Marcus believed that he was a despicable person who didn’t deserve much consideration from others; he ended up in a very unloving marriage.  Perhaps you also experience the toxic effects of believing that you are not enough, not competent enough, not worthy enough, not deserving of being well loved.

positive bedrock (helpful beliefs about life; wise value that motivate your better efforts)

But Marcus also had positive bedrocks: he liked playing with other kids; he was usually forgiving when others taunted him as if he had a poor memory for their slights; he liked activities that involved the comradery of playing on a team; he had a good mind and loved to learn.  Although his parents and teachers were basically clueless about his strengths and or how to help him with his struggles, his early life was reasonably stable although not tremendously supportive.

Teresa and the spiritual torchbearers also had helpful bedrock beliefs as well as unhelpful bedrock beliefs.  Many were socially vibrant people who could connect well with others; most were highly motivated to live a meaningful life and contribute to the well-being of others; many seemed to have a sense of purpose despite having limited power or lowly social status.  These positive bedrocks enable them to live full lives despite the limitations of their times and circumstances.

Perhaps you have positive bedrock beliefs mixed among your negative bedrock beliefs: a persistent sense that there’s more to you than your limitations which interfere with reaching your dreams; that relationships can be more engaging and meaningful than your current ones are; that your life has a deeper meaning than you haven’t articulated yet.  Perhaps you have a persistent sense of living a better and larger life that sparks a hope within you despite harsh circumstances around you that may sow doubts in your mind.  Such positive bedrocks can prevent your negative bedrocks from dominating your mind and pulling you into an utterly black and despairing sense that life is totally bleak and hopeless.

Adjusting your mixed bag of bedrocks

Your initial bedrock beliefs, both negative and positive, are long-lasting; they persist and shape your life with no effort or understanding on your part.  Often the negative bedrocks dominate your inner life and the positive bedrocks are pushed to the background of your awareness.  Perhaps, like Marcus, unbeknownst to you, your negative views which seem to be the whole story of you are really just a fraction of the complete picture of who you really are.  With understanding and effort, you can shift the balance of your bedrock beliefs so that the more positive bedrocks of your worldview eclipse your negative views enabling you to build the rest of your life on a better foundation.  Making this essential choice of which bedrocks are your foundation begins with self-reflection so you can recognize which bedrocks are shaping your core views and which bedrocks offer the possibility of a better life.

Everyone, even the torchbearers, began life with a mixture of quite unhelpful views (negative bedrock views that limited them and later required correcting and healing) as well as helpful views (positive bedrock beliefs that helped them survive and flourish).  They didn’t grow by being oblivious of their bedrock beliefs or repressing their negative feelings; they recognized them for what they were while also being very aware of their blessings and positive experiences.

Core Element: Personas inhabiting your inner world

Personas personalize bedrock beliefs

Another metaphor for your inner world (rather than the bedrocks metaphor) is that your inner world is home to a handful of personas who embody your specific bedrock beliefs, values and longings.  Each persona has a distinctive personality and can be recognized by how they “talk” in your inner conversation.  Like friends who have unique personalities, each persona has signature characteristics, an inner persona may be loud and confident or quiet and unsure; bold and adventurous or timid and cautious; rationale and analytical or creative and artistic; a good talker but not a good listener or all-round conversationalist.

One persona may be a shallow thinker who embodies your more primitive bedrock beliefs; another persona may try to act like a field marshal who tells everyone what to do; another persona may serve as an archivist in a museum who makes sure that you don’t forget important experiences. often painful experiences that you might want to keep buried.  Personalizing your bedrock worldviews as personas may make them become more alive and meaningful.  The persona metaphor unlocks the possibility of having productive conversations with your various parts to resolve conflicting feelings.

Marcus imagined his inner critic as a very severe persona, an inner Javert who relentlessly hounded him about his deficiencies.  He later imagined another persona as a very supportive Coach who saw Marcus very positively.  Marcus grew as he became a very active inner moderator between personas with polarized views of him and life.

Spiritual growth can be difficult if you think that your inner world is simply a smear of sameness; such a view can become an obstacle, not a path, to finding your Divine Companion.  Instead, thinking that your inner world is inhabited personas (rather than being home only to a single homogenous “you”) opens you to the possibility of engaging in inner dialogues with your various personas and eventually having an inner dialogue with your Divine Companion.  Your spirituality is enhanced if you consider your inner world as teeming with various personas who need your assistance in harmonizing their differences.

Core Element: Your capability for remaking your inner world

the responsibilities of your Inner Moderator

Your inner world is also home to a “person” quite distinct from your personas: an Inner Moderator who is responsible for supervising and harmonizing your various personas.  Your Inner Moderator is like the mayor of a small town or the director of a play.  A mayor has responsibility for the large aspects (like the overall plans for growth and development) and the many small details (like making sure the trash is picked up) of a town.  A director has responsibility for the large aspects (like the overall interpretation of the script) and the many small details (like lighting and set design) of a play.  In the same way, your Inner Moderator has responsibility for the large aspects (like determining your deepest values and establishing your attitudes towards life) and the many small details (like ensuring that you maintain the daily discipline of seeking what you value) of your life.

Psychologists recognize the critical role of your mind’s central functions (the responsibilities of your Inner Moderator) but also find this part of your mind hard to define.  Many individuals also find their Inner Moderator to be elusive and hard to garsp.  Yet this “person” in your inner world is central to your ability to have a meaningful life and healthy relationships.  Like a mayor or a director, your Inner Moderator may be a weak or vibrant leader in establishing better values which will then set your life in a better trajectory.  Simply being aware of your amazing capability for renovating your inner world (having an Inner Moderator) may help you start using this endowment more fully.

Your inner world—its bedrocks, personas, mindsets, attachment patters, values and longings—aren’t set in stone.  You can revise and remake all of these elements of your inner world.  This inner renovating capability is an essential part of your inner world that is easily missed.  If your Inner Monitor doesn’t perform this essential duty, your less mature personas will usurp that role; usually, they’ll have some small successes but overall they will make a hot mess of your life.  A wise and active Inner Monitor can make your inner world a vibrant and richly creative place where you shape your character and determine the arc of your life.

Perhaps the most essential responsibility of your Inner Monitor is arranging your values: making decisions about whether Choice A or Choice B matters more to you.  Teresa, who grew up with great respect for the higher-ups in her religion, could have chosen to seek the approval of her religious superiors over trusting her own first-hand spiritual experiences.  Marcus, who grew up with a sense of inferiority and being one-down in relationships, could have accepted the status quo of his relationships and tamped down his desire to form warmer connections with others.  Many people, who struggle with having enough material security, could choose to pursue ever more lavish material goodies over seeking to also help and comfort others.

Core Element: A growth mindset

Your sense of learning vs. being complacent with your current understanding

Marcus was a curious boy who grew into a very intellectually active man.  He liked exploring new topics and concepts.  Often learning about one concept led to learning about another concept.  He enjoyed learning for its own sake; he liked getting to know and explore new topics; he wasn’t satisfied with a superficial understanding of a concept.  He wanted to grasp ideas deeply and then apply them in in new and creative ways to the practical matters at hand.  His growth mindset (rather than a fixed mindset which is content and complacent with a person’s current level of knowledge and understanding) helped him do well in school despite his struggles with attention and speaking; his growth mindset also helped him excel in his technical career.  Even more importantly, his growth mindset enabled him to grow as a human being; to develop a better psychological understanding of himself that would have been impossible without a growth mindset (a curiosity to understand himself and relationships, as well as concrete things, more deeply).

The spiritual torchbearers also had a voracious appetite for developing an ever deeper understanding of people, life and God.  They knew the doctrines of the church of their childhood but they weren’t satisfied with ending their understanding of God there.  They wanted to know more of God; they wanted to know God in a personal way, much as you might want to know more about a person than what is in their resume or on their Wikipedia page.  They found that a personal one-on-one relationship with God was a very rich and fruitful path to having a quantum leap in how deeply they understood God.

A growth mindset, a hunger to know more, seems an essential prerequisite to spiritual growth.  The opposite, a fixed mindset, is being content and complacent with what you already know so that you have minimal enthusiasm or energy for further exploration, spiritual or otherwise.

Core Element: Your attachment style with other people

Your template for engaging with another person

Most people have a longing for belonging, a strong desire to be connected with other people.  For each person, this longing for connection takes a unique shape called their attachment style.  Your attachment style includes your own default level of trust for, or mistrust of, another person you have just met.  Perhaps your attachment setpoint is a strong preference for predictable but not deeply connected relationship, such as being a member of a group that plays cards but doesn’t really talk about what is happening the members’ loves. Your attachment style also includes how you establish intimacy with healthy people and set boundaries with unhealthy people.  Perhaps your attachment style tends towards being a people-pleasing doormat who lets others walk all over you; or being the domineering one who insists on having things their way and ignores the wishes of others; or vacillating wildly between engaging and withdrawing because you have grave doubts about the trustworthiness of another person.

Your attachment style affects your relationships in your outer world with other people.  Your attachment style also affects relationships in your inner world with both your personas (your psyche) and with the Divine Companion who dwells within you.  Often attachment style is global and determines your level of trust or distrust in all your relationships with people, personas and God.

Longing for belonging with others

Being other-oriented—being concerned about others—seems to be another crucial ingredient for spiritual growth.  Marcus really cared about people: he wanted to know what they were thinking; he was concerned about how they were feeling.  He really wanted to connect with others, to have a loving marriage, to be an involved and attuned father, to build a sense of comradery with friends, to collaborate with coworkers and create solutions blending the contributions of everyone.  He had a bedrock sense that good relationships were possible and he really wanted to have good connections with other people.  A persistent hope grew from his bedrock sense of how good relationships could be; like weeds refusing to be eradicated, he still dreamed of better connections even when many of his connections fell far short of what he imagined was possible.  As a child, he was tormented by an aunt who thought she was helping Marcus by toughening him up by ridiculing him; many of his classmates mocked Marcus for his way of talking; his wife held great contempt for him; coworkers didn’t appreciate his contributions on their first hearing.  Even with all of these frustrating experiences, he didn’t lose hope and become permanently withdrawn.  His persistent hope was a positive bedrock that keep him reaching out for the connections he imagined and desired.

Flexibility: Trusting people appropriately

Ideally, your attachment style is flexible enabling you to trust healthy people and draw close to them while also enabling you to recognize unhealthy people and use appropriate boundaries to protect yourself.  Teresa wanted to draw close to kindred spirits who could encourage each other; she also wanted to maintain a respectful distance from higher-ups so she wasn’t infected with their thinking while not antagonizing them and getting into unnecessary battles.  Marcus wanted to be close to his children so that he could enjoy their company and nourish them; he also wanted less intense engagement with his wife so he wasn’t infected with her negative views of him while also not antagonizing her and making the family atmosphere any worse.

Frustration tolerance: Remaining connected through inevitable frustrations in relationships

Perhaps you really want deeper connections: a desire to be an active participant in a relationship in which each person contributes and collaborates, in which each person listens and accepts ideas from the other, in which each person receives and gives affection, in which each person matters a great deal to the other person.  Perhaps such deep desire is accompanied by deep frustration if you’ve haven’t had the kind of relationships you imagine and desire.  A big gap between the relationships you desire and your current relationships can be very frustrating.  Being able to tolerate (some hopefully) temporary frustration is essential for cultivating better connections; without some frustration tolerance, your desire for better relationships may succumb to hopelessness leading you to not try to connect more deeply.

A downside of Marcus’ high hopes for connection was being vulnerable to becoming depressed when he couldn’t forge the deep connections he wanted with his wife, with his friends or with coworkers.  His depression was easily triggered when his ideas were ignored or not appreciated.  Then his withdrawal and anger would sabotage his work situation and his family life because he became ambivalent: vacillating between reaching out to a person but not fully committing himself to a connection with that person so he could pull back rapidly if they rejected him.

Before his spiritual embrace, Marcus had little tolerance for the ordinary friction which is part of even healthy relationships.  He became half-hearted in his attempts to connect with others which prevented him from forming richer connections because they require a whole-hearted commitment; a half-hearted commitment from either person isn’t enough to form and sustain a deeper connection between two people.  The spiritual embrace resolved his ambivalence and he was then able to fully engage with people even when the inevitable friction occurred.

Core Element: The God of Highest Heaven also dwells within you

The spiritual torchbearers’ sense of God as a person usually started with basic ideas that they absorbed from their religion.  Religious teachings usually presented God as living in a heavenly place far from Earth and the lives of everyday people.  This view of God was like a trailhead for the spiritual torchbearers: these second-hand concepts of God took them to where they could begin their own first-hand discovery of God where they experienced that the same God of Highest Heaven also dwelled within them, in the intimacy of their inner world.  The spiritual torchbearers experienced God as a person much more than as an impersonal force.  Knowing God as a person meant that they could form a person-to-person relationship with God; it’s impossible to have the same kind of meaningful relationship with an abstract idea or an impersonal force.

They came to personally know God through the close association of that inner relationship.  The spiritual torchbearers often had names for the God dwelling within them which reflected the intimate and loving connection they shared: Teresa often used the name Beloved; Teresa and others also used the name Divine Companion to designate the close love and support they shared.

You can learn somethings, like music, in mainly abstract ways by listening to music or reading music appreciation essays.  But you learn music in a deeper way when you really immerse yourself in music by learning to play a musical instrument or singing in a choir.  You know a subject far better through active participation rather than only passively reading about it.  And you know a person—human or divine—far better when you spend time together, dialogue and cooperate on joint projects rather than when you passively read about that person.

Core Element: Your spiritual attachment style

Longing for belonging with God, a hunger for more intimate connection with God

Longing is wanting something or someone so much that you are willing to put in much effort and, if necessary, endure some deprivation or suffering, in order to be close with that person.  Longing is wanting the fullest possible experience of another person: their personality, their dreams, their ideals and their struggles.  Any thriving relationship requires a strong longing to know another, to share with another and to cooperate with another.  A relationship won’t thrive if you only have a lukewarm desire to know another person or spend time with them.  Having once tasted the goodness of God, a burning desire intensified within them to know God more intimately and to spend more time together.

The spiritual torchbearers experienced a fuller relationship with their Divine Companion when their desire for God rose far above all their other desires as if their whole soul was saying to their Divine Companion: “Please let me be with you; I need you so much right now; nothing else matters to me like you do.”  As if they desired their Divine Companion with their whole heart and beseeched their Divine Companion: “Please, will you come and be with me because I am bereft without you.”  Above all other things, they wanted that precious human-divine companionship; their turning towards God, their seeking God, wasn’t diluted by any other secondary wishes for a plush or easy life that God might give them.  They simply had a pure desire for God’s company undiluted with any ulterior motives for material goodies from God; they just wanted to experience God’s beautiful spiritual presence; they were very willing to forgo any worldly comforts as long as they could experience the divine embrace.

Trusting God

Any thriving relationship requires a deep trust in the other person, a trust that they will be good to you.  A relationship won’t thrive if you can’t trust that the other person won’t treat you with respect and consideration.  Trust is the foundation of a secure attachment with another person.  The spiritual torchbearers’ relationship with God grew because they completely trusted that God is very good, that God cared for them personally, that God would treat them with much kindness, perhaps even more than they “deserved” based on their own merits.  In the language of psychology, they formed a secure attachment to an attuned and loving God; their trusting attachment to God created their safe base, a solid bedrock foundation for their lives and for connecting more warmly with others.

Experiencing the divine embrace often involves turning to God in your inner world like a trusting child turns to their parent in a moment of need or delight.  A frightened child might confidently crawl into a parent’s bed at night when they are afraid, certain that their parent is strong enough to provide a safe haven and kind enough to provide a warm embrace.  A delighted child may rush to show their parents what they have done or discovered.  A securely attached child completely trusts their parent, fully certain that they will respond to them with concern and loving support and interest.

Marcus’ adult spiritual experience had wonderful child-like qualities, much like a boy reaching out to another child and asked “Can I see what you are doing?  That looks really cool!”  Such an attitude flows from a great desire to know what the other (another child or God) is doing; it includes a high respect for the other (another child or God); it comes from valuing the other as good and interesting; it involves trusting that the other (another child or God) will be good to you and will be kind in how they treat you.  Marcus’ attitude in reaching out to God, in opening up to God was much like a child’s pure desire: plain and direct, a totally sincere interest in getting to know and feel God more deeply.

The tone of your turning to God in your inner world may be like the tender attitude of a devoted lover turning towards their beloved in a moment of pure desire.  A lover sees their partner’s character as quite beautiful and worthy of their unquestioned devotion.  A lover doesn’t doubt the goodness of their beloved and is ready to happily accompany their beloved through any situations that they might face, no matter how difficult or challenging they may be.  Leaving their beloved is completely out of the question for a person in love no matter what the circumstances their devotion may led them into.

Teresa’s turning to God often felt like the burning desire of a lover for her Beloved: the one she adored above all others, the one she fully trusted with her heart and her well-being.  She felt an intense, nearly all-consuming, desire to be close to her Divine Companion who she saw as infinitely beautiful.  Her desire reflected great trust in the views and plans of her Beloved even when she couldn’t grasp them.  Like a lover who is smitten by her Beloved, she gave to Divine Companion her complete and total devotion; she was willing to take on any burdens that might enhance her closeness with her Beloved.  She could offer herself so fully because, like a child who fully trusts their parent even though they don’t really understand all that their parent thinks, she fully trusted the goodness of God even though she could hardly fathom the full depths of God’s understanding and insights.

The simple and sure trust of a child seems to be the necessary first step to begin your personal relationship with God; that first step is trusting that God is good and wise and strong and will respond to you with love and caring and guidance and attention.  Your initial contribution to the human-divine relationship is simply trusting God and wanting to connect with God more: that is enough to experience the first embrace of your Divine Companion.  God starts the relationship and seems to reward even a small human contribution to this budding relationship with an amazingly generous divine contribution: a warm welcome to a person who is just learning how to partner with God.

Trust grows in steps repeated over time: you trust God a little and you experience God’s goodness; and then you feel ready to trust a bit more.  As their trust in God grew deeper, the spiritual torchbearers could more readily enter into the divine embrace and experience the personality of God even further; each additional deposit of trust enabled their relationship to flourish more.  And they allowed their Divine Companion to enhance their inner world more and more.

The spiritual torchbearers came to know God more deeply through cultivating a vibrant relationship with God, by welcoming God as a dear friend rather than dallying with God as a casual acquaintance.  They shared all of their inner world with God; they actively cooperated with their Divine Companion and, in the process, God’s lovely personality come alive for them.

Tolerance for facing hard work and tough times

The spiritual torchbearers longed for spiritual intimacy even though it usually required some major inner work and letting go of things that were previously precious to them or embracing service work that was previously distasteful to them.  They didn’t begrudge the effort and sacrifice required; rather, they welcomed them as if they sensed that they were strengthening their spiritual muscles by applying themselves vigorously; as if they were delighted to be developing a character that was pleasing to and hospitable for their Divine Companion.  They seemed to sense that how far their Divine Companion could reach into the inner world was determined by a person’s character and willingness to exert themselves for a worthy cause; that their Divine Companion’s ability to reach them was limited when their character was underdeveloped and stagnant; that the divine reach was better able to touch a person deeply when their spiritual character was vibrant and growing.

Teresa’s longing for God wasn’t weakened because their relationship involved facing pain or tough issues.  She longed for God much like a parent who really wants to be with their child when their child is jubilant as well as when they are suffering so they never felt abandoned or orphaned.  She believed that bearing her own sufferings and harsh treatment graciously was a part of loving her Divine Companion; that accepting suffering was a part of a full and unrestricted relationship with God.  She certainly wasn’t expecting a bliss-only spiritual path through life with immediate satisfaction of her desired goals.

Your attachment style affects all relationships

Your attachment style shapes all of your relationships: your outer relationships with other people and your inner relationships with your personas and your Divine Companion.  If you deeply trust your Divine Companion, you may easily trust other people (while also maintaining wise boundaries when appropriate).  Becoming more securely attached to God enables you to engage more warmly with other people.  Or the process may work in reverse: insecure attachments with people in your life experiences can hinder your inner relationship with the God.  If you haven’t met and bonded with trustworthy people, you may struggle to trust your Divine Companion who you have yet to meet and really know.

A secure human-divine attachment lifts your relationships with others

Teresa’s divine embrace deepened her sense of how securely she was held in God’s arms.  Once she was even more assured of her secure attachment to God, she devoted herself to lifting others up: lifting them above the anxieties that captured them or the sense of helplessness or meaninglessness that paralyzed them.  She really wanted others to experience the freedom that you earn once trust wins out over anxiety; the invigoration that results when a sense of purpose wins out over meaninglessness; and the great joy of experiencing the warm and wonderful divine love which dispels the deepest sense of loneliness and isolation.  She wasn’t motivated in the least by the desire for worldly acclaim; she continued her work despite being targeted for her ideas and persecuted by her church hierarchy.  She simply wanted others to have that same wonderful experience of being fully assured of God’s support and partnership.  Her profound inner experiences didn’t lead her to retreat into her inner world so that she might greedily enjoy more moments of personal peace and assurance; rather her profound inner experiences propelled her into the outer world to connect with others and lead them to experience God in the same way.

Marcus’ strong desire for connection included both connecting with God as well as connecting with people.  His religious training helped him think of God as a someone quite real but those ideas alone didn’t satisfy his longing for closeness with God.  He enjoyed learning about God but even more he wanted to experience what it’s like to spend time with God sharing affection, thoughts and perhaps even undertaking a joint project.  Marcus wanted to know God in that deeper way that only comes from intimacy and collaboration.

Your attachment style limits intimacy with your Divine Companion

Your attachment style shapes all of your relationships: your outer relationships with other people and your inner relationships with your personas and your Divine Companion.  Insecure attachments with people in your life experiences can hinder your inner relationship with the God.  If you haven’t met and bonded with trustworthy people, you may struggle to trust your Divine Companion who you have yet to meet and really know.

Improving your attachment style

Setting and revising your attachment style is another oner of the essential roles of your Inner Moderator.  Developing a secure attachment with God may require revising your attachment style if, based on less-than-perfect experiences with other people, you have difficulty trusting that the other person in a close relationship will treat you well.  Perhaps you have some sense or hope that there’s something more to relationships that you have yet to experience; a sense that something wonderful awaits you amidst the harshness and limitations of life; that Someone More lives in your inner world and the possibility of a superb human-divine relationship awaits you.  Perhaps such glimmers of hope are enough to encourage you to take a few tentative and trust that God will be good to you.

The “Principles for Shaping a Spiritual Practice” section at the end of this booklet may help you revise your attachment style to be more accommodating of your Divine Companion.

Accelerating Circumstances

No one lives in a vacuum.  Events in your outer world, such as experiencing traumatic circumstances or having a spiritual encourager, often play a significant role in accelerating finding your Divine Companion and precipitating your experience of being embraced by your Divine Companion.

Core Element: Post-traumatic spiritual deepening

Feeling embraced by God sometimes comes on the heels of a harsh experience.  Unfortunately, not every harsh experience leads to feeling embraced by God.  Feeling embraced as the result of trauma appear to be rare but it probably isn’t random: the personality characteristics (qualities of your inner world) discussed in the previous section may increase the likelihood of spiritual deepening after trauma or harsh experiences.

Traumas and extremely hard experiences almost always overwhelm a person when they happen and for several weeks or months after the trying circumstances have passed.  For many people, the effects of extreme hardships continue much longer and may overwhelm them for many years after the hardship is long over.  For others (perhaps only a blessed few), several months of intense struggling and feeling overwhelmed gives way to a period of significant growth and deepening.  Post-traumatic spiritual deepening may be more likely when you emotionally process your hard experiences and then use those lessons to revise or remove negative and distorted views so that they are no longer continue to shape your life in adverse ways.  Post-traumatic spiritual deepening may be harder if the trauma reinforces earlier traumas that you haven’t processed yet.

A lev bazar (a tender heart)

Rabbe Nachman of Breslov (Hasidic teacher who founded the lev bazar movement) had a saying: “there’s nothing so whole as a heart that has been broken.”  His saying suggests that a heartbreaking experience can leave a person with a heart broken-open and hopeful rather than leave a person with a heart permanently destroyed, hardened and depressed.  A broken-open heart that has known its own suffering can have more empathy another person’s suffering; a broken-open heart is softened and receptive, ready for a deeper connection with another person; a broken-open heart is softened and more receptive to God’s infusions and uplift; a broken-open heart still reaches out to another while accepting the very real fact that the other person may reject the hand you extend to them; a broken-open heart is available to God for doing God’s work of loving, caring and serving.  A heart broken by the world may become like soft ground plowed by a hard implement which is now ready to receive God’s seeds; the loose soil of a broken-open heart is fertile ground for germinating divinely planted seeds.

If your heart has been broken open because you were abandoned when you reached for connection, your desire for love and connection might grow even stronger because you feel its absence so acutely.  A trauma-softened heart may be more attuned to others and have a deeper compassion for them; it may be more receptive and hospitable to the indwelling God who longs to participate in your inner world, to heal the wounds of your heart and to uplift your life; the hardship-softened soil of a broken-open heart and mind helps germinate the seed-like divine blessings bestowed by your Divine Companion.

After an extremely hard experience, you might understandably harden your heart to defend against experiencing any more pain; to try to get some reprieve from intense negative feelings that seem too hard to bear; to protect against getting too involved with untrustworthy others who might hurt you like others have been hurt before.  A hardened heart engages with others coolly, keeping them at a distance and putting strict limits on how much you will reveal about yourself and how much you will accept in exchange from them.  A hardened heart offers a bit of protection from being wounded again but it also blocks you from receiving the spiritual balm that would heal the wounds of your heart.  A heart that has turned to stone walls itself off from both good and bad; it walls itself off from enemies and from God, the God who wants to move into your inner world and live life together.

From a commonsense view, you wouldn’t welcome an extreme hardship or the trauma of being isolated.  But harsh times can seldom be completely avoided in life.  Knowing that such times might soften your heart may help you use those painful experiences as a springboard for personal and spiritual growth.  What a silver lining: that the very things which can harden a heart can also soften a heart making it receptive to God’s overtures to share intimately.

Core Element: Nontraumatic Precipitating Events

A Persistent Longing for God

The experience of being personally embraced by God doesn’t require first experiencing trauma.  Instead, you may have had a deep desire and longing for God for as long as you can remember; you may have tried to understand God more with diligent devotion.  Your consistent longing and persistent efforts may be the precipitating circumstances that lead to your experience of the divine embrace.

The Encouragement of a Spiritual Friend

Or you may have been encouraged by a spiritually nourishing friend whom you deeply respect and who assures you that you too can feel the embrace of your own personal Divine Companion who is right now dwelling in your inner world and longing for you.  Such a spiritual friend, like a spiritual midwife, can only assist you while you do what only you can do: give birth to a personal connection with God with your wholehearted holy trust and desire.

Experiencing God’s Embrace

Core Element: Feeling personally embraced by God

A first-hand spiritual experience nearly always involves feeling personally loved by God; feeling warmly embraced by God who dwells within you; having a profound sense of securely attachment to a wonderful person; knowing that you belong to Someone Larger and Wonderful who really wants you, rather than feeling like an orphan who no one claims as theirs, who no one wants to be with; feeling certain that you are treasured and desired by a wonderful lover; sensing that you really matter to God rather than being an unpleasant obligation who God must bear; being assured that you have a place in the larger order of things where your contributions are needed and appreciated; grasping that you have extensive endowments beyond your current set of human capabilities that you know now; discovering that you have a not-immediately-obvious web of spiritual support even though so many people in your life may be unsupportive, oblivious of you or indifferent to you.

Quickly and more fully understanding love

People often need to get coaching or therapy and put in the significant effort necessary to develop the abilities needed to sustain a loving and intimate partnership.  A single experience of the divine embrace may very quickly produce a major boost in your ability to have loving relationships than long periods of coaching and much effort.  The divine embrace often immediately elevates a person’s ability to love as if, having experienced being so well loved, a person can now more easily attune to another person and care compassionately for them.

Quickly seeing more clearly, understanding more deeply

Much learning and growth requires disciplined effort and methodical study to master a skill, to acquire a storehouse of knowledge or to develop personal insight.  A different kind of learning or growth often happens when you experience the inner embrace of the divine: with far less effort and time, you may have a quantum leap in understanding what previously eluded you. Even without perceiving an actual exchange of spoken words in your inner world, you may really grasp the lovely character of God and the divine purpose of your life.

In the teacher-student relationship of the outer world, words are usually an essential part of learning; but, in the human-divine relationship, much may be taught without the words which are so necessary in human-human relationships.  After the divine embrace, you may have a keener appreciation of spiritual truth no matter what form it is presented in.  You may be more gracious and more interested in affirming the good that you see in other’s religious or spiritual thinking rather than pointing out the deficiencies you see in another person’s ideas.

Devotion to something larger than themselves

The pressing demands of your life may rivet your attention to a narrow set of material concerns, to seeing issues from a short-term, small-picture perspective.  The experience of the divine embrace often shifts your attention from material-only concerns to spiritual concerns and helps you see issues from a long-term, big-picture perspective, to see what matters both now in the short term and what will continue to matter in the long term.  That larger perspective often creates a dedication to a project involving issues larger than yourself and your personal needs and wants.  After the experience of the divine embrace, many people embark on a significant project that they could never imagine they could accomplish before the embrace.

When inner bulldozing is required to prepare the soil of a haughty mind

People who have been traumatized in the outer world seem to experience God in their inner world as being exquisitely tender and kind, as if God would never heap additional trauma on person who has already been traumatized and is still overwhelmed by trauma.  But other people, perhaps those who feel smug and quite full of themselves, may initially experience God as a bulldozer who is doing painful inner renovation work that is necessary to pave the way for a more intimate relationship with God.  The God-as-bulldozer experience may be quite rare because such intensive remodeling is more likely needed for a haughty person and such people rarely sincerely seek God.  Haughtiness and arrogance are toxic to a sense of humility: that another person can be much better than you.  Many torchbearers describe humility—having reverence for God as far more wonderful than you—as virtually essential to experiencing the embrace of God.

A strong sense of being wonderfully supported by God in the outer world

Some people may experience spirituality mainly as episodes in their outer world in which God seems to be actively supporting the spiritual aspects of their life.  These episodes aren’t simply times when things work out conveniently and serendipitously; these episodes often involve caring deeply for those who are forgotten and neglected by most of society.  These episodes strengthen a person’s trust that God is working alongside them in their lives and assure them of God’s presence and assistance in their personal circumstances, as if they are supported by an abundance of spiritual resources that support their unselfish endeavors.  These times of being supported aren’t about getting more material comforts; in fact, many times they involve undertaking very challenging work that a person previously considered too difficult, too personally repugnant or too beneath them.

Core Element: Bearing spiritual fruits

Experiencing the divine embrace really changes people in wonderful ways.  Experiencing that God actually dwells within you and knowing how much God longs to be close to you usually leads to a personal blossoming.  Feeling deeply assured of how much God cares for you usually leads to bearing more spiritual fruit.  The presence of these fruits is one way of assessing the genuineness of your experience.  Being largely unchanged after an experience which a person labels as a “spiritual” experience may indicate that the experience was a wonderful, but mainly human, experience that was unrelated to intimacy with God.

Spiritual fruit usually appears in both your inner and outer worlds.  Inner spiritual fruits are feeling less burdened by self-doubts and buoyed by a deeper self-respect; being less impacted by the fallout from your traumas; being less concerned with psychological issues that have tormented you and hindered you for many years; feeling more joyful despite tough times.

Outer spiritual fruits are how you conduct your life, especially how you interact with other people.  The most prominent outer spiritual fruit is engaging more lovingly and kindly with another person.  Increased caring and concern for another person may perhaps be the most reliable sign of a genuine inner spiritual experience.  Outer spiritual fruits are being more compassionate towards others especially those who many people judge as inferior and undeserving; actively reaching out to make connections rather than passively waiting for another to initiate a connection; increased kindness and tenderness; becoming more other-centered rather than being mainly self-centered (becoming more concerned with others than yourself).

After his spiritual experience, Marcus blossomed internally in ways that couldn’t be seen as directly as the outer fruits can be.  Feeling assured of God’s love in his vivid vision of being warmly embraced, his self-respect profoundly deepened.  His self-loathing almost totally vanished; he developed a simple but nearly unshakeable sense of self-respect, a sense that, although he was far from perfect, he was good enough to participate in the human-divine partnership and in the game of life.

Prior to experiencing the inner embrace, Marcus was often haunted by a sense that people didn’t care much about him or what he thought.  In his inner world, he often overamplified a minor blasé response into a total dismissal of him and everything he thought; nursing and indulging those feelings led to feeling totally helpless and a sense of being worthless.  His spiritual experience was like an antidote to his feelings of futility and loneliness; once those feelings were neutralized, optimism and hope blossomed in his inner world.

After his spiritual experience, Marcus also blossomed externally in ways that could be clearly seen by those who spent time with him.  As his anxiety was tremendously lessened, he was emboldened to interact with people with hope rather than fear.  He had much greater tolerance for being dismissed by indifferent people; he was now much less easily triggered into withdrawing or becoming passively aggressive when he felt unappreciated.  His blossoming was clear in how he interacted with a person.  His increased assurance of being loved and supported enabled him to remain positive and connected when people were not supportive or were slow to warm up to his ideas.

The fruits from the divine embrace have a long shelf life, often lasting for at least several years.  Marcus’ new inner poise continued for years after being held in the grip of his negative view of himself for many decades.  His new-found resilience in his interactions with others also lasted for years despite the fact that his outer circumstances changed very little.  Despite his family’s doubts, Marcus maintained his interpretation of his spiritual experience; his steadfastness was helped by having one friend who recognized and appreciated the truth of his experience.  Marcus’ sense of spiritual assurance dimmed at times over the following months and years but his assurance never came close to being extinguished.  He persevered in trusting God, in trusting in the goodness and loveliness of God’s personality.  His revised core beliefs that once rested on toxic bedrock came to rest on the new and better bedrocks excavated by his spiritual experience from the landslides that had obscured them.  It was as if the embrace was the storm that washed away the landslides that had covered his rich spiritual heritage.  The trajectory of his life continued for many years to be shaped by the spiritual embrace of his Divine Companion in wonderful ways; his changes were not a flash in the pan.

Core Element: Your framework for interpreting your experience

Because the experience of being embraced by your Divine Companion is so unique and different from most other human experiences, you might understandably question whether it was real; you may wonder if it was merely a wishful fantasy or even an unhealthy delusion because it was so different from your ordinary experiences.  If you can’t make sense of your experience, you might chalk it up as nothing more than a random and wonderful, but purely human, experience.

When you share your experience with others, you may likely find that almost no one can comprehend it and so they are likely to ridicule or dismiss it.  Their lack of understanding may lead you to doubt how meaningful your own experience is.  A clergy person affiliated with a religious organization may actively try to persuade you that your inner experiences are actually spiritually harmful.  Or they may try to force-fit their religious interpretation onto your personal spiritual experience; if you adopt their interpretation, you may lose some of the authenticity and value of your experience by seeing it through a limited intellectual lens.

If you are very fortunate, you may encounter one person who understands and values your experience of the inner spiritual embrace.  In the absence of someone who understands your experience, the life stories of the spiritual torchbearers may help you make sense of your own experience.  The framework described in this little book is based on the accounts of some unheralded people in modern times and spiritual torchbearers from over the centuries who, although unrecognized in their own times, are now considered to be spiritual giants who have much to teach you.  This framework, developed from pooling multiple personal spiritual experiences, may help make sense of your own spiritual experiences and compensate for the distorted interpretations suggested by people who never experienced the divine embrace themselves.

Seeing and understanding your experience accurately helps you benefit from that experience and avoid unwanted side-effects.  People who see their experience through a distorting framework are vulnerable to acting in bizarre ways that do not help them or serve anyone else.  For example, they may develop an egotistical sense that they are more enlightened than others and then they are prone to tone-deaf proselytizing.   They may become overzealous and go on and on at length about their beliefs in ways that don’t land well with a person who hears it; they may be vulnerable to puffing themselves up which hurts their human-divine partnership and offers little help to anyone else.

One Example

An accomplished middle-aged man struggled with alcohol addiction for many years; like many, he used alcohol to numb the deep emotional pain of being disconnected with others.  Despite drinking large amounts of alcohol, he found only fleeting relief; he was also hurting the people close to him and embarrassing himself professionally.  In a moment of great pain, feeling lost and deeply alone, he reached out to God and begged for help.  In that moment, his emotional pain was instantly and tremendously relieved as he experienced that Someone had a greater-than-human love and concern for him.  Afterwards, he was easily able to stop using alcohol because his emotional pain was so greatly relieved.  His spiritual experience was very wonderful, far beyond anything he had experienced before.  But he had no framework for understanding his own experience.

Before he reached out to God, he wasn’t religious at all; he actually mocked religious people as suckers who fell for a fantasy story.  Some of his friends and family members were fundamental Christians who interpreted the Bible literally.  They were very happy for him when he reached out to God; they were quite sure of what had happened to him.  Their theologically-based explanation satisfied his need to make sense of his experience.  Adopting that explanation also meant adopting the theology of his friends.  Although he was an accomplished scientist, he renounced his decades of scientific research and understanding because his views differed from this church’s literal Biblical explanations of the natural world.

As he absorbed their theology and interpretations, he came to value the group’s religious dogma above his own personal experience.  He gradually lost touch with his own experience and felt little need to cultivate his inner world.  He stayed sober but he wasn’t particularly warm to another person or appreciative of how God works in a person’s inner world.  The framework he adopted meant that he gradually lost much of the value of his own precious experience of being embraced by God.

Another Example

Another person was a devout Christian and committed member of her church organization.  Her powerful hunger to know God better wasn’t fully satisfied by the teachings and practices of her church.  She prayed fervently and often; during some of her prayers, she felt that she was embraced by a divine partner in a tremendously personal and loving way.  She talked with the elders in her church to better understand what she was experiencing.  Her elders were well schooled in theology but never had any inner experience even remotely like hers.  Perhaps out of pride or jealousy, they questioned whether her inner experiences were spiritual at all and insinuated that perhaps she was unstable and overly emotional; they even suggested that she might be under the influence of demonic forces.  She pondered all of this—her experiences, her doubts, their critical interpretations—and, after much soul searching, she ignored their opinions and interpreted her experiences as a genuine spiritual relationship with God in her inner world.

Part of her assurance stemmed from the good fruit that she bore after her inner experiences: her compassion for others deepened and she delighted in serving others; she had clearer insights into practical matters which helped her craft solutions to thorny issues; she could assist others in deepening their own spirituality.  She concluded that she couldn’t bear such good fruit unless God (not the Devil) was uplifting and enhancing her personality.  Many elders of the church continued to be suspicious of her experiences but she was no longer swayed by their doubts because their opinions were at such odds with what was actually happening in her life.

Your spiritual framework will shape how you understand your inner experience of being embraced by your Divine Companion.  If your framework (your understanding of God and the workings of your inner world) is fairly accurate, your experience will likely bear better spiritual fruit: inner security and outer graciousness.  But if your framework is short-sighted or is riddled with errors, your distorted understanding of your experience will limit how much it can uplift your life and spirit.

Sometimes the opposite happens: a person has a wonderful purely human experience that doesn’t involve God in any way.  Their experience is so wonderful and quite distinct from their usual day-to-day experiences that they need a superlative adjective to indicate how wonderful it was; they label their experience “spiritual” to indicate how special it was.  Although such peak human experiences feel very wonderful, they have almost nothing to do with God and so they bear little or no spiritual fruit.  Instead, elevating such human experiences may contribute to that person becoming overly self-important, coldly erudite or lacking in holy joy; they may become smugly satisfied with themselves thinking that they are quite advanced to have attained wonderful esoteric knowledge; they lose their growth mindset because they think that they have reached the summit of human development; they may be vulnerable to repeating their story over and over as a static thing that boosts their self-esteem but never leads to further growth or deepened intimacy.

Cultivating your Bond with your Divine Companion

Core Element: A regular practice for maintain the human-divine relationship

Spiritual fruit has a long shelf life but not an indefinite shelf life.  Spiritual fruit freshly harvested from a well-cultivated relationship with your Divine Companion continues to abundantly nourish you; spiritual fruit from a long-ago inner embrace that hasn’t been cultivated will likely provide gradually declining nourishment.  Recalling the memory of a long-ago inner embrace can help you understand your inner world but trying to hold onto that moment (rather than trying to cultivate ongoing spiritual intimacy) may eventually result in bearing bland or even toxic fruit (fruit that is more self-centered rather than other-centered).  Imagine someone whose growth stopped after one spiritual experience yet considers themselves as being quite special.  They wear their spiritual experience with an air of superiority as a badge of their unique achievement; they may relish retelling their experience to listeners over and over but their motive is mainly to elevate themselves in the eyes of others rather than to encourage another person that they too can have a similar experience, that God is waiting within them to embrace them too.

The experience of being embraced by your Divine Companion usually feels like the most wonderful experience of your entire life by far.  Such a wonderful experience might lead you to erroneously feel as if you have reached the spiritual summit of life with the inaccurate implication that you have no need for further spiritual growth; that incorrect view leads to spiritual calcification, a deadening of your spiritual vitality.  The first experience of the divine embrace is more like a trailhead: you have reached the beginning of a path that has no end; a path that leads to much more spiritual growth than you can even imagine after this first growth spurt on the spiritual path, after having your first experience of being embraced by God.

The divine embrace is a relationship that has virtually no upper limit to intimacy and collaboration; you can always take your human-divine relationship to ever higher level of trust and cooperation.  What a travesty to treat your first experience of that dynamic relationship as if you have reached its upper limit when, in reality, you have barely scratched the surface of what the human-divine relationship is capable of becoming.  Continually cultivating your relationship with your Divine Companion is essential to keeping your spirituality alive and vibrant; setting up permanent residence at the trailhead of your first spiritual experience hoping you might receive another lightning bolt from heaven at the same spot will deprive you of the spiritual infusions which are only found further down the path.  Staying at the trailhead too long could eventually lead to spiritual decay and death.

The spiritual channel connecting you with your Divine Companion requires your desire and efforts to keep it open and receptive.  In the background of your inner world, often unperceived by you, God is also working to keep that channel open as well.  Spiritual experiences suggest that God’s level of effort in keeping open that connecting channel is yoked with your level of effort to open that channel: God can’t work any harder than you do in maintaining the spiritual channel that connects you.  Imagine the opposite: that God worked harder than you in opening the channel into your inner world.  That would be like a stalker who works really hard to worm themselves into your life when you had no interest in having them be a part of your life.  Apparently, although God really desires intimacy with you, God doesn’t want the false intimacy that might be achieved by the one-sided efforts of one person in the relationship.

The experience of being embraced by your Divine Companion is often kept living and vibrant with some kind of spiritual practice: some specific way(s) of nourishing your connection with your Divine Companion.  Your experience of being embraced by your Divine Companion is like a wonderful seed that can grow into an even more wonderful plant; spiritual cultivation is the practical ways that you can help that seed (your initial experience of being embraced and loved by God) germinate and then grow into a larger and vibrant plant (your fuller cooperation with your Divine Companion as an active partner).

Spiritual cultivation is not exclusively an inner-world endeavor: it also involves seeking out opportunities to serve others in the outer world.  The outer aspects of the spiritual path may involve listening to another person more deeply; doing simple acts of kindness to soothe another person’s lonely heart; or undertaking a project to meet the unmet needs of others who have been ignored by society.

Spiritual cultivation is like a divine two-step dance that balances inner cultivation with outward service, a dance that harmonizes personal spiritual practices in the inner world with loving service in the outer world.  Spiritual cultivation involving only inner practices may feed an excessive preoccupation with yourself; spiritual cultivation involving only service work makes you vulnerable to burnout as you struggle, spiritually malnourished, to reach lofty ideals relying only on your human strengths which, no matter how well developed they are, will eventually be exhausted and insufficient for a truly lofty goal.

Spiritual cultivation may involve friendships with kindred spirits as well as your individual efforts.  People have found it extremely helpful to have at least one simpatico spiritual friend who can affirm their experience as a valid spiritual experience so they don’t succumb to doubts about their precious experience.  Such a friend may be especially valuable if together you both come to better understand the inner processes that nourish your bond with your Divine Companion.

Your Heritage in a Nutshell

1) A wonderful companion dwells within you and longs to partner with you.

2) Your inner world is richly endowed with every capability needed to bond with your Divine Companion.

3) As you become more fully engaged to your divine inner partner, you are more able to live a more meaningful life, to be a more faithful partner to God and to serve others more graciously.

All too often people have no idea of the great heritage they have: they are oblivious of their wonderful partner and their personal endowments (their capabilities) atrophy because they are so seldom used.  What an amazing shift can happen when they sense their wonderful divine partner is dwelling within them and they begin using their endowments to strengthen their human-divine bond.

Your Own Larger Story

The Makah story is about uncovering a group’s buried heritage.  The experiences of Marcus and Teresa are stories of uncovering a personal heritage buried under a combination of society-wide and personal landslides.  The stories of Marcus and Teresa are told in hopes that they will act as a springboard for you to uncover your own spiritual endowments; to nourish a sense that you too can uncover the valuable heritage contained within yourself; to give you hope that you too can experience the spiritual embrace; to encourage you to cultivate your inner world so it is hospitable for your Divine Companion who longs to wrap you in the warm arms of the divine embrace.

The value of their stories is limited if you only passively read them as a bystander. Their stories become much more valuable if they inspire you to look more deeply into your own inner world: to see the current bedrocks of your core beliefs and consider other possible bedrocks; to expand your map of your inner world to include your human and spiritual capabilities; to appreciate your inner spiritual endowments which enable you to form and nurture a vibrant relationship with your own Divine Companion.

If you haven’t yet felt the embrace of your Divine Companion, Marcus and Teresa’s stories might encourage you to seek it, to take a leap of faith and trust that your Divine Companion is a very real part of you, not an abstract notion.  Perhaps their experiences ignite your spiritual enthusiasm to explore your own inner world and cultivate an atmosphere conducive to the participation of your Divine Companion.  Your spiritual heritage may sound wonderful on paper, but it becomes far more wonderful when you actually experience it first-hand in your own life.  Just as others have found, recovering your full heritage gives you a more accurate and fuller sense of who you really are.

If you have already felt the embrace of your Divine Companion, Marcus and Teresa’s stories might help clarify your experiences if you are still trying to make sense of them.  Their stories may help you better understand how God can dwell within you; how relationships in your inner world work; how you can develop your own creative cultivation methods for deepening the human-divine relationship.

Sidebar: Suggestions for recovering your heritage

Perhaps something in Marcus or Teresa’s stories resonated with an experience in your own life: perhaps a moment of intense opening or growth; or a passion for beauty; or rising up after being knocked down hard by trauma; or finding a much better perspective that helped you understand life better; or being encouraged by a good friend who spurred your spiritual growth.  Perhaps their stories gave you ideas about what you might do with your own life.  Perhaps their experiences are fuller than yours and they confirm that your dreams of what you can achieve.  Perhaps their stories opened your eyes to possibilities for your own life that you had never even imagined before hearing their experiences.

Trace the arc of your life so far.  Consider the arc of your life up to this point: key turning points in your life, core choices, critical decisions, influential relationships.  Your life is not a fossilized thing like an ancient and dead thing preserved in a museum under protective glass disconnected from the living world.  Your heritage encourages you to envision what heights you might scale in the time that remains for you in this life.  Imagine how the arc of your life story might continue; imagine forks in the road of life that you have yet to encounter and how your choices at those critical forks could lead to new possibilities.  Imagine how you could make the most of your spiritual as well as human capabilities on that new trajectory.  Perhaps you will steadily cultivate your relationship with your Divine Companion.  Or perhaps you blossom a bit because of the infusions you’ve received from your Divine Companion but become attached to your improved standing with others; and in the process, your Divine Companion takes a backseat to your new infatuation with how others see you.  Considering the many possibilities that lie before you may help you make the wisest decisions when you come to major forks in the road of life, decisions that will enable you to make the most of the possibilities inherent in being alive on this planet, in being a person with such a rich spiritual heritage.

Principles for Shaping a Spiritual Practice

A framework for understanding the happenings and life of your inner world emerges from Marcus and Teresa’s stories: a view of your inner world that includes the spiritual capabilities which enable you to partner with the divine perfect lover who accompanies you through this life.  Spiritual practices can make this intellectual framework come alive and help you to more fully experience your Divine Companion, to more fully feel the actual presence of an inner lover and partner who is devoted to you and cares for you very much.  Without a spiritual practice that nourishes your spiritual receptivity and reverence and commitment, intellectually knowing the framework of your inner life can only take you so far.

The goal of a spiritual practice is to cultivate your relationship with your Divine Companion, to become a more reciprocating lover to your Divine Companion and to become a more cooperative collaborator with your Divine Companion.  Many spiritual practices, such as various forms of contemplative prayer, define the specific techniques involved in great detail.  In contrast, the principles outlined here describe generalities, such as inner attitudes and inner dialogue, and leave the specific techniques undefined so that you can creatively design the specific details of the practice so it is best suited to you.  Your spiritual attitudes, core determinations, motives (values) and ongoing sharing (inner dialogue) may be even more important than the particular details of your preferred practice.  What a shame it would be to perfect your spiritual technique while your spiritual attitude languishes.

Cultivating your Spiritual Attitude

Imagine how different your attitude is when you visit with a friend you really value compared to your attitude when you must spend time with someone you really dislike.  The spiritual torchbearers’ experiences suggest that your inner atmosphere, your spiritual attitudes, can be either a bottleneck that restricts intimacy with your Divine Companion or a catalyst that deepens that intimacy.  A helpful spiritual practice may simply be cultivating a warm attitude that welcomes your Divine Companion into your inner world, cultivating a reverent heart that is devoted to loving and serving God.

Spiritual attitudes are the hospitality that you extend to your Divine Companion: how well your inner world resonates with your Divine Companion’s ways and values so that your Divine Companion feels at home within you.  Spiritual hospitality—preparing your inner world—is much like preparing your home to meet the needs of someone who comes to stay with you in your home.  An inner world largely preoccupied with amassing worldly pleasures, fantasies of revenge or addictive pursuits creates an atmosphere repellant to your Divine Companion; such attitudes are barriers that limit your Divine Companion’s involvement in your life.  An inner world colored by a deep appreciation of God and God’s ways creates an atmosphere pleasing and hospitable to your Divine Companion; an inner world with reverent attitudes creates a better opening for your Divine Companion to participate in all aspects of your life.

Sidebar: Inner Attitudes

Spiritual Naming and Claiming

Spiritual naming and claiming refers to your thoughtful and determined response to the major questions you encounter at the major forks in the road of your life.

minor and major forks in human relationships

In a relationship, you have many relatively minor decisions to make: will you do what you want to do or what your partner wants to do: go for a walk together or relax inside reading together? take a vacation or use that time and money for house projects?  These relatively minor decisions involve considering both partner’s wishes but any one minor decision usually won’t determine the fate of the relationship.  Such decisions are like a minor fork in the road of life.  Ideally, your relationship will be healthy on regardless of what you decide about relatively minor choices.

On momentous occasions, you may face a major fork-in-the-road decision about whether you will stay in a relationship or leave it.  At the beginning of a new relationship, your choice to stay or go reflects your sense of the compatibility of a new person.  When a long-term relationship is called into question, your choice to stay or go reflects your sense of the partnership’s potential for intimacy and collaboration in the future.  Compared to relatively minor decisions, these major decisions involve making a deep and finalized determination; these major decisions require much thinking about the relationship; one such major decision determines the fate of the relationship.  These decisions are like a major fork in the road of life.  Your relationship will either continue on and get better, stay as it is or end depending on the determination you make on this core issue.

Without making a deeply considered determination about your relationship at a major turning point, you will simply drift along with whatever is convenient or less effortful rather than actively steering the overall direction of your life based on your deeper values; or you may resign yourself to having the kind of relationship dictated by your partner even if it isn’t healthy for you or what you desire.

minor and major forks in your spirituality

You may often face relatively minor spiritual decisions, such as the specific details of a liturgy this coming weekend.  Such decisions are like a minor fork in the road of life.  Ideally, your spiritual life will continue on regardless of what you decide about these relatively minor choices.

You also face major choices regarding the core issues of your spiritual life: How do you see God’s personality?  How much do you really want to open yourself to God’s presence and action?  Will you allow God to change how you engage with other people?  Compared to relatively minor liturgical decisions, these major spiritual choices involve making a deep and finalized determination; these decisions require much thinking about God; these major decisions will affect how vibrant your relationship with your Divine Companion will be.  These decisions are like a major fork in the road of life where you choose one view of God over another view of God.  Your spiritual vibrance will either improve, stagnate or fade depending on the wisdom of the spiritual determinations you make.

Spiritual naming and claiming refers to your deep and considered determination on core issues, your thoughtful and final answer to central questions about your relationship with God and what makes your life meaningful and precious.  Without making a deeply considered determination about these issues, you will simply drift through life, possibly following the religious ideas of others, rather than actively steering the overall direction of your personal spiritual life.

A possibility for a specific practice related to finalized determinations might be to dedicate time to considering or reconsidering your core bedrock spiritual beliefs: whether you claim and use the spiritual endowments of your inner world; whether God reaches out to each person for a one-on-one connection; whether you trust that a divine person awaits within you and is longing to be your intimate partner; whether you trust that God will look at you with a tender gaze, or speak to you in gentle tones or reach out to you with a comforting touch.  Making a finalized determination that these views are true may help resolve the natural ambivalence that often paralyzes the human mind.  Finalizing your determinations may help you make the most of all your human endowments and motivate you to reciprocate the love that God has lavishly bestowed on you.

Inner Dialogue

shifting from unrelenting monologue to an eagerly receptive dialogue

Many people are aware of their ongoing inner self-talk, often a virtually round-the-clock narration in their inner world.  Their inner chatter may be so nearly continuous that it fades into the background and they are barely aware of it unless they pause to pay attention and really notice it.  Perhaps your self-talk is repetitive and thoughtless and isn’t particularly insightful; it may obsess over details and miss the big picture; or it may not distinguish between accurate and inaccurate ideas.  Perhaps your self-talk isn’t really your own talk but mainly a parrot-like repetition of other people’s ideas.  Your self-talk may be an immature monologue with little room for anyone else to participate or contribute.

An inner dialogue spiritual practice is a way to tame your default monologue self-talk and open it up into a dialogue between you and your Divine Companion.  The human-divine conversation will be quite different from a human-persona “conversation” because it doesn’t rely so heavily on spoken words or thoughts.  Instead, the human-divine dialogue may be more a sharing of attitudes, longings and values; it may be mainly a sharing of affection between you and your Divine Companion.

Fostering an inner dialogue practice only makes sense if you first have solidly determined that a Divine Companion really does live within you.  If you have named and claimed your Divine Companion, you might implement a spiritual dialogue practice the same way you would cultivate a more meaningful engagement with someone you respect:

cultivate a mindset that honors and reveres your Divine Companion;

appreciate how much the spiritual infusions from your Divine Companion enrich you;

welcome your Divine Companion with warm and genuine praise, with sincere worship;

with an attitude of “How Great Thou Art;”

alternate expressivity (praise, worship and gratitude) with receptivity;

clearing room in your mind for your Divine Companion’s infusions to take root in your inner world.

Perhaps you might say your part of the conversation with your Divine Companion aloud to make this inner dialogue more concrete; perhaps you might imagine your Divine Companion’s parts of the conversation as being personally and specifically addressed to you, as if your Divine Companion is speaking directly to you and saying “your name, please trust me and trust how much I treasure you.”

Companioning Prayer

In the 1970s, William Menninger, Basil Pennington and Thomas Keating began teaching the Christian tradition of contemplative prayer, a practice that was not well known or widely practiced at that time.  Their version of contemplative prayer, Centering Prayer, is to sit quietly with the intention to welcome the presence and action of God within you.  It uses the same mechanics of many contemplative prayer practices:

it begins with the intention of welcoming the presence and action of God;

you cultivate a reverent and gentle inner tone during this time;

a 20-minute sit (twice day) is recommended;

you might help maintain this mindset with closed eyes and deep breathing;

you gently re-center your mind when it drifts;

Paraphrasing the Centering Prayer intention for Companioning Prayer, you could begin a period of prayer time with calling to mind your intention: “I welcome my Divine Companion into my inner world; I welcome my Divine Companion to change me in whatever ways my Divine Companion desires.” Ideally, your mental tone is warm and welcoming, trusting that all will be well with your soul as you draw closer to your Divine Companion even in the midst of much earthly turmoil.

You might begin your Companioning Prayer time by appreciatively reflecting on how God has endowed you with all the capabilities needed to begin and cultivate an intimate inner companionship with your Divine Companion.  Fully appreciating al that you have been given may deepen your devotion so that you are more loyal to your Divine Companion and more willing to follow your Divine Companion’s leadings.

Some variations of contemplative prayer practices may use some grounding techniques to disengage your mind’s usual chatter; or some yoga-like stretches or spiritual dance movements to involve the body; or perhaps praying during a slow meditative walk.

Centering Prayer is usually a twenty-minute period in which you use a sacred word to help you gently disengage from passing thoughts.  You might adapt that technique by choosing a personally meaningful name for your Divine Companion and use that name as your sacred word to re-center your mind when it drifts and bring your attention/intention back to your Divine Companion.  A personally meaningful name may help solidify that this time is dedicated to your relationship with your Divine Companion.

A spiritual warm-up may help you enter into a prayerful frame of mind for this practice: perhaps you might listen to a hymn with either sung lyrics or vocalized tones; look at or touch the beauty of nature or sacred art; look at your own spiritual crest which identifies your spiritual values; use body poses and movements that have a sacred meaning to you; you might sit in a simple space you’ve made and dedicated to spiritual cultivation.  These external physical touchstones—which involve hearing, seeing, touching, postures, your environment—may help you more readily and fully enter a spiritual frame of mind.  You can experiment with these kinds of external things to see if they help you orient your inner mind into a spiritual vein.

A verbal warm-up prayer may help you begin silent prayer time with a reverent frame of mind.  Perhaps a prayer such as:

“I am not alone, not by far; rather, I have the best possible companion, a divine friend, who dwells within me and wants to share my life: its burdens and opportunities with me; who wants me to never have the awful feeling of being alone.”

“In this prayer time, this short time completely dedicated to being with the God Within me, I want to do everything I can to alleviate any feeling that my Divine Companion might have of feeling alone and unwanted by the one (me!) the Companion loves so dearly.  I want to reciprocate the consideration my Divine Companion has so generously given me.”

Your life, your one precious life, is precious because it contains the opportunity to bond with your Divine Companion.

Or perhaps you might use a query as a warm-up for the Companioning Prayer:

How is my relationship with my Divine Companion (who is a perfect partner and is never the bottleneck in the vibrancy of our relationship)?

In what ways have I been attuned to my Divine Companion?

In what ways have I failed to recognize and appreciate my Divine Companion?

In what ways can I be a better companion tomorrow by minimizing the ways I tend to fall short and maximizing the ways that welcome and include my Divine Companion?

You might imagine your “consent to God’s actions in your inner world” in concrete ways.  Your brain has some glitches:

your ego never wants to relinquish the wheel;

your baser desires may still crave excessive amounts of worldly pleasures;

your brain can easily become enthralled to unreasoned fears; your field of view can get quite narrow if you don’t put in the effort to zoom out and look for the big picture, the deeper meaning of life.

These glitches of the human wiring, when unchecked, are so at odds with the character of God that they essentially banish God from dwelling in your inner world in any meaningful way.  These glitches of the brain can be helpful in some rare circumstances; they aren’t evil unless they grow so large that they dominate your inner life, directing your choices into baser pursuits that make your inner world repulsive to God because it has taken on such a coarse mentality.  If your brain has succumbed to these glitches, prayer time can be an opportunity to ask for your Divine Companion’s help to tame these primitive human tendencies so that they are your servant not your master.

If prayer time deepens your consent and cultivation, a holy delight can bloom in your inner world, a delight that flows from being loved by a divine parent and a perfect lover.  This holy delight flows from belonging to and belonging with such a wonderful companion: “This relationship is where I really belong!  I am really betrothed to a perfect lover!”

Guided Inner Dialogue/Prayer

Guided meditation is a blend of spoken words and silence: brief snippets of the thoughts of a spiritual torchbearer gently interspersed with quiet periods.  The goal of a guided meditation is to allow the spiritual torchbearers’ thoughts and encouragement to seep into your inner world where they may help you tap into the spiritual endowments of your mind when other concerns are working to drag you away from your spirituality.  The spoken words of a guided meditation are meant to be seeds that are absorbed in the soil of your mind and then germinate into your personal variation of the seeds.

A guided meditation might help if your self-talk is stuck in a rut in which an idea, often an unhelpful idea, repeats itself endlessly; if your self-talk seems permanently stuck in monologue mode that leaves little room for the infusions of your Divine Companion; if it’s hard to enter a reverent mindset because of pressing problems you face.  If so, imagining that snippets of a spiritual torchbearer’s perspective are being personally spoken to you might help you escape the clutches of an entrenched monologue that has been hijacked by anxiety, dread, fear, hopeless, resentment or other negative thoughts and emotions; it may help you shift from monologue mode to an inner dialogue with your Divine Companion.  The goal of a guided meditation is to nudge your inner conversation from a focus on worldly-only or psychological-only matters to a more spiritually receptive conversation that can have a full dialogue which seeks and welcomes your Divine Companion’s contributions.

Daily Journaling

Spiritual journaling is a practice that imagines you are writing letters to and receiving letters from your Divine Companion.  You write in one color ink for what you say to your Divine Companion in this written dialogue; and you write in another color ink for what you imagine your Divine Companion might say in response to what you wrote.  This spiritual practice, similar to the Daily Pages exercise described by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way, is a form of spontaneous writing which is done with minimal filtering and no concern for punctuation, spelling and grammar.  Instead, the only concern of this practice is expressing your genuine thoughts and feelings like a child might spill their thoughts to a parent after a day at school.  This spiritual exercise switches Julia’s focus from nourishing your artistic capabilities to nourishing your spiritual capabilities; from cultivating your Inner Artist to cultivating your soul and its ability to connect with God.

Of course, what you write as the thoughts of God are simply your idea of what God might say to you.  Sometimes, your version of God’s part of the conversation might be wildly off base.  The idea of this spiritual practice is not to claim you have received direct insights from God; the goal is only to open your mind and be receptive to the infusions of God which most often don’t involve any words at all.  You may find inspiration and better insight from this exercise but you would be wise to avoid declaring that what you have written are God’s actual words.

Julia Cameron also suggested having occasional play dates, cultural enrichment activities that nourish your Inner Artist, such as treating yourself to art materials or a visit to a museum.  In the same spirit, you might consider occasional play dates, spiritual enrichment activities that nourish your soul.  For example, you might treat yourself to buying a spiritual classic book or taking a pilgrimage or retreat (or perhaps a prayerful afternoon walk if you don’t have time for a week-long retreat or a long traditional pilgrimage).

Spiritual Souvenirs: Making the Memory of your Spiritual Embrace Accessible

The word souvenir is borrowed from French; its etymology suggests something concrete that helps summon a lovely experience you’ve had lest you forget the feeling of your own experience.  The word suggests having more than a simply intellectual recall but rather fully re-experiencing an interaction in a clear and vibrant way that is as close to the original experience as possible.  A spiritual souvenir is something (a writing, drawing, poem, song, sacred object, etc.) that returns you to the moment when you felt the sweet warmth of the divine embrace; that brings into your soul, heart and mind the great beauty of that experience as vividly as possible.

Immediately after experiencing the divine embrace, you may feel “This experience of being divinely embraced is so wonderful and profound that I am sure it is burned into my mind forever and I’ll never forget it.” But even the most vivid experiences fade over time in the human brain and then they may lose their transforming effects on your worldview; then you are at risk for drifting back into your former ways of seeing, living and connecting.  A glitch in the human mental software is that even profound experiences can fade from memory or become distorted without your focused efforts to accurately and fully preserve them.

Suggestions for making your spiritual souvenir

Spiritual souvenirs are meant to preserve your experience in your mind to assure you that God’s embrace is quite possible for you in this life; that the divine embrace is a real possibility, not a fantasy.  The spiritual souvenir practice could backfire if you become so obsessed with your past experiences that you venerate prior specific experiences until they become a crystallized relic that no longer supports a living and vibrant relationship with your Divine Companion.

Spiritual Crest

Some clans or families have a crest, an image that represents their core family values.  You might make your personal spiritual crest, an image that represents your core spiritual values.  The crest might be a drawing or a physical object.  The crest might have a symbol for your favorite metaphor for God or something that represents your most meaningful experience of God.

Your spiritual crest might be something that you can share with others to articulate your spirituality; sharing spiritual crests among friends may help you appreciate the spiritual gifts and perspectives of others.

Spiritual Scrapbook

You may have a variety of experiences in the outer world that hint at the spiritual aspect of life, hints that might be easily overlooked and forgotten if you don’t notice them and then remember them.  Perhaps someone says something that prompts you to see a situation from a different perspective; perhaps cultivating a relationship with someone hints at ways to cultivate a deeper relationship with both another person and with your Divine Companion; perhaps a spiritual classic from centuries ago seems to express what you have felt but have struggled to articulate; perhaps an observation made while gardening or hiking becomes a metaphor for a spiritual concept that’s otherwise hard to put into words; perhaps a poem helps you see the deeper meaning of life that may have been obscured by the many pressing minutiae of the day.

Collecting these helpful experiences into some kind of scrapbook (concrete or virtual) may help you on days when you need a spiritual reminder or pick-me-up.  Your scrapbook may be something that you can share with others to articulate your worldview; sharing spiritual scrapbooks with others may help you appreciate the spiritual gifts and perspectives of others.

Caveats

Even a wonderful spiritual practice that works for many people won’t work for every single person who earnestly tries it.  Just as the recommendation “must go dancing on Friday evenings” may be a great relationship-enhancing practice for many couples, that specific activity isn’t a panacea that improves the relationship of every couple who tries it.  Rigidly adhering to a specific prescription may even backfire and may make some relationships worse.  Universal prescriptions for spiritual practices disregard the many differences among people.  Strict adherence to a very specific practice isn’t likely to be the best way of spiritual cultivation for everyone.

A spiritual practice is more likely to be helpful when you individualize it, when you make it yours, by applying basic principles to adapt specific practices to your individual temperament and unique needs.  Some basic principles that may help you in forming a spiritual practice:

responding to your Divine Companion’s bids for your attention;

asking your Divine Companion for help to grow (not asking that life be made easier for you);

responding to your Divine Companion’s requests for your help;

becoming comfortable expressing yourself authentically to your Divine Companion (not putting on exalted airs);

being comfortable with the vulnerability of allowing your Divine Companion to set the agenda for your life;

learning and growing based on your experiences with your Divine Companion.

The goal of a spiritual practice is always to enhance your connection with your Divine Companion and to keep your relationship alive and vibrant.  Anything that does that will help you grow spiritually.

Sidebars

Theology (groups) and spirituality (individuals)

Religious organizations often focus on God’s relationship to the entire world and key moments in the history of that relationship.  They may see the grand arc of the world’s history from the perspective that Jesus reconciled all of humanity with God at the moment of his death on the cross.  The emphasis of this perspective is the one-to-many relationship between God and all of humanity.

The spiritual torchbearers usually focus on God’s relationship to each individual, a relationship that occurs in the inner world of each person.  They see each person’s life from the perspective that God is ever-present within that person who can deepen the human-divine relationship by their consecrated decisions or neglect that relationship by their indecision.  The emphasis of this perspective is the one-to-one relationship between God and each person who desires to align themselves with God.

Both religious organizations and the individual spiritual torchbearers are concerned with God’s relationship with people.  Many spiritual torchbearers appreciated the gems in the teachings of religious organizations.  In sharp contrast, higher-ups in religious organizations seldom appreciated the ideas of spiritual torchbearers; higher-ups were usually very suspicious of the torchbearers they encountered.  Many higher-ups strongly preferred the doctrines of their anointed theologians which were taught by their ordained ministers over the personal experiences of untrained individuals.  Sometimes, the religious higher-ups even told the spiritual torchbearers that their experiences were imaginary or outright evil.  Some torchbearers were viciously persecuted by powerful people in their religion’s hierarchy, perhaps because the higher-up’s souls were cold and they felt threatened by the torchbearers’ personal intimacy with God.  After first being persecuted and condemned by their own churches while alive, their churches sometimes venerated a spiritual torchbearer as very holy person after they died.  Even then, religious organizations may not make full use of the spiritual legacies of even their own spiritual torchbearers which they have posthumously venerated.  Religious organizations may make it difficult to uncover the spiritual wisdom of their own torchbearers; so it’s if the torchbearers’ wisdom is covered by a religious landslide.

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Spirituality is not anti-science, anti-psychology, anti-religion

If you reach out to a psychotherapist, very few will be interested in integrating spirituality into their psychological model of human nature.  If you reach out to a pastor, very few will be interested in integrating psychological concepts into their theological model of human nature.  The pervasive disinterest in integration is so pervasive that it may seem that religion and psychology are at odds with each other, even at war with each other.

The torchbearers aren’t hoping to drown out the voice of science (associated with secular landslides) or religious traditions (associated with religious landslides).  The torchbearers aren’t anti-science: they appreciate it and the better standard of living we have because of it.  The torchbearers aren’t anti-psychology: they appreciate it and the better understanding of themselves and others we have because of it.  The torchbearers aren’t anti-religion: they appreciate it and the preserved concepts we have of God because of it.  The spiritual torchbearers value science, psychology and religion; they wanted to weave these complementary threads together.  And they also wanted to add in the threads of the spirituality that exists in the inner world.

Their sense of human nature is consistent with much of psychological understanding although they would add that you also have a spiritual nature as well as your purely human psychological nature.  The spiritual torchbearers’ sense of God is consistent with the heart of religious wisdom although it emphasizes your personal connection with God.  The spiritual torchbearers would welcome harmonizing scientific knowledge with spiritual traditions and would encourage integrating psychological understanding with first-hand spiritual experience.  They aren’t waging war on those perspectives; instead, they would welcome a peaceful cooperation and collaboration among them.

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Suggestions for making your spiritual souvenir

1) Make a souvenir that describes your thoughts and what you felt during your experience; the decisions, events and circumstances that came before your spiritual experience and may have precipitated it; the spiritual fruits that happened after your experience.  The souvenir could be a story or a poem that you write or speak and record; visual images that you draw; a sacred object that you make to commemorate the experience; a song you write or an existing song that you write new lyrics for; a set of body movements that you choreograph which express what you felt in your experience (like a spiritual dance or set of asanas).  The exact form of your souvenir matters less than its ability to involve all aspects of your inner world—your heart, mind and soul—so that you enter into your spiritual experience once again.

2) Make a very clear determination in your mind about what happened: that your spiritual experience was quite real and not just a figment of your imagination or wishful but distorted thinking.  Don't be swayed by doubts that may come from others who have never felt the divine embrace; have confidence in the validity of your experience despite how different it was from all your other experiences.

3) Clearly value your inner first-hand sense of being loved by your Divine Companion so that you fully appreciate the precious human-divine bond as the most valuable aspect of your life; fully appreciate how wonderful your experience was to prevent the error of considering it to just be a wonderful experience without much meaning.  Making these clear determinations protects against a fading appreciation of the divine embrace as the amazing and true experience that it was.

4) Clearly make the connection between your inner experience and the spiritual fruits that you bore afterwards; be very clear that a first-hand experience of feeling precious to God enhances what you can do with your endowments before experiencing the divine embrace.

5) Use your souvenir(s) often to make your experience easily retrievable and to keep your transformed mindset alive and vibrant.  Tell God often how grateful you are that God reached across the great distance between Creator and creature so that you would know how much you matter to God, so that any sense you had of being orphaned is relieved.  Be grateful like a delighted child who pours out, without inhibition, their heartfelt gratitude for all that a parent has given them.

6) Trust that you might experience the divine embrace again; prepare yourself for another embrace by cultivating a receptive mindset, softening your mental soil so it is prepared to receive spiritual seeds; by strengthening and purifying your holy desire so it is stronger than your material desires for ease, affluence and influencer; by delighting in getting to know more of God’s lovely character in many different ways.

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Inner Attitudes

The spiritual torchbearers suggest that cultivating certain attitudes helps take your relationship with your Divine Companion to “the next level” of deeper intimacy and fuller collaboration:

reverence (deeply appreciating the beauty and goodness of God’s personality);

humility (yes, you are wonderful and God is far more wonderful than you);

holy desire to glimpse more of the traits of God (elevating closeness to God to your highest value);

trust in the goodness of God, especially when God’s ways differ from what you want;

desire to develop the traits of God in yourself as best as you can;

desire to serve spiritually: to assist in moving God’s plans forward and to serve another person;

self-respect for yourself because you have been given the precious gift of human-divine partnership;

profound gratitude for the precious partner who accompanies you;

affiliation (desire be close with God and others) and affection for people.

Your inner attitudes will shape how you respond to God’s offer to partner together in this one precious life.  These attitudes are a foundation for a deepening spiritual intimacy; without these attitudes, even the most faithfully executed spiritual technique may not be very spiritually fruitful.

Notice how many of these attitudes reflect what you value the most and revolve around what you most desire.  Cultivating these attitudes overlaps a great deal with purifying and deepening your values.  Elevating spiritual desires is likely to be more helpful than trying to repress lesser materialistic or selfish desires which are so common in our human nature; repressed lower desires are likely to resurface very intensely in a stressful moment when you don’t have enough energy to keep to repressing them.  Cultivating spiritual values is not an exercise in dodging the realities of life: your human nature and how your lower desires respond to the pulls of the world; the goal of spiritual cultivation is to tame your human parts and allow the spirit to redirect that energy into wiser pursuits, not to banish or exclude them.  Cultivating spiritual values is not meant to be a rationale for avoiding the harshness of life, such as devaluing appropriate medical treatments or the necessity of wise political action; a well-cultivated inner spiritual life may help you accomplish more when you use the medical or political tools available to you.

A possibility for a specific practice to cultivate your spiritual attitudes might be to, each day, take one of these attitudes listed above and reflect on it several times throughout the day as if you are marinating your mind in that particular attitude; you might use your higher imagination to envision how you might deepen this attitude in your own personal way.

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Marcus: Toddler Snapshot

When Marcus was a toddler, he loved playing on the floor with whatever was at hand: with some blocks or stuffed animals, with crayons and paper, or with odds and ends from the kitchen.  He was delighted by seeing shapes form on paper when he drawing; by the tactile feel of blocks and seeing them form towers and buildings; by hearing the sounds of banging kitchen pans together in a random rhythm.  His play brought him great delight—a delight that felt as if it would be even better if he could share it.  So he called out to his mom to come and see what he was doing; but she didn’t answer.  So he went over to her and tried to tug her over to where he was playing.  Instead of sharing his delight, his overwhelmed mom snapped at him for bothering her.

Now his delight in his little world turned to shame about his little self: he must be really bad if his mom thought that even these great things that he loved were actually such bad things that they weren’t worth even a minute of her time.  Shame flooded him and washed away his delight.  Perhaps her reaction meant that he was really bad and not lovable: if he didn’t deserve her attention then he must not deserve her love.  Afterall, aren’t attention and love closely linked?  You easily and gladly pay close attention to what you dearly love.

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Marcus: Later Childhood Snapshot

One afternoon when Marcus was about five years old, his mom was lying on the sofa for a long time, not asleep but staring blankly and saying nothing.  He had a sense that she wasn’t feeling very good.  So he tried giving her what he would like when he felt sad: he brought her a cup of milk and patted her head.  His efforts were a bit sloppy with some spills along the way and a bit clumsy when he patted her, but she smiled at him in appreciation.  He felt like a big boy who could finally elicit a positive response from his mother.

This experience was like making a really big discovery; without being aware of what he was doing, he tried to connect the dots so he could fully grasp what had just happened.  He concluded that being aware of another person’s needs and tending to them is how you get someone to smile at you, to “get” someone to love you, to appreciate your company rather than dislike it or detest it.  He felt like he had just decoded a rally big mystery!  He tried repeating this pattern many times but he got mixed results: sometimes his mom smiled in appreciation; other times, she seemed annoyed or she got outright angry at him.  But his plan worked often enough that he doubled down on his worldview that being accommodating is how you elicit love from someone.

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Marcus: Second Grade Snapshot

Marcus always struggled with expressing himself, with organizing his thoughts quickly enough; as a result, he often rambled when he talked which made it hard for people to follow his thinking.  He was self-conscious; he stumbled and stammered a lot when his teacher called on him in the first week of school in second grade.  The classroom got really quiet and everything seemed to disappear from his view except for everyone turning to look at whoever it was who couldn’t piece together their thoughts into a simple sentence.  Their shocked stares seem to be saying: “Oh, will you look at that: There’s a freak was in our midst!”  Waves of coldness swept over him and the nasty metal taste of fear filled his mouth; he could hear his pulse pounding in his ears for what felt like an eternity.  Time seemed to slow down and he felt that he would be stuck in this never-ending moment forever while a roomful of mocking eyes stared at him as if he were someone stupid to be avoided at all costs.

During recess later that day, several boys mocked him the entire time by imitating how he stammered when he tried to answer in class.  He was mortified: instead of doing something wonderful (the thing that would earn him love and inclusion), he somehow did the exact opposite; he did something really embarrassing.  He got a ton of ridicule for that which, in his mind, confirmed his idea that you have to be nearly perfect if you want to be liked or loved; that making even one a mistake brings the opposite of love: being shunned and seen as stupid, not even average, but far below average.  The insults he heard at lunch echoed as vivid thoughts in his mind long after the school day was over.  He often thought: “Oh, I wish I could get so small that no one could see me!  If only I could disappear!”  “This is so frustrating: I know the answer—it’s crystal clear to me—but I can’t get it out.”  “I feel so stupid—like a retard.”  These thoughts were added to the quite similar thoughts he acquired from his family.

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Marcus: Fifth Grade Snapshot

Marcus and the kids in his class always played some kind of game at recess, usually tag, football, or basketball.  Naturally athletic, he was good at playing sports.  During this precious reprieve from the classroom, kids forgot about his stammering and were happy to have him on their team.  On this particular day, as he often did, he was helping his team do well.  He really enjoyed the feel of the ball smacking into his hands, the wind as he ran, the warm sun on his skin, his teammates clapping their hands on his back.  He enjoyed getting some love for playing well instead of ridicule for his struggling to talk in the classroom.

Best of all, Marcus got what he had been wanting all along: to be included and connected with others; to be able to do something that others needed; to have others value him; to be a part of a team pulling together to do something that none could do on their own.  Wonderful thoughts ran through his mind: “I did it!  I did something that they liked!  I did something so well that they liked me!”  “I like this—I really like this—I want a lot more of this.”  All too soon recess was over and then he had to return to the dreaded classroom.

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Marcus: Adult Snapshot

Marcus was having a very tough day, a really terrible day.  At work, he was enthused about an idea (a very good idea as it later turned out) for how to address a difficult problem the factory was struggling with.  Excitedly, he told his group about it although, as usual, his idea wasn’t well organized or well expressed.  And his group dismissed his idea, as is typical when people first hear a new idea.  He was crushed to have his idea dismissed once again.  This latest experience, rolled in with all his previous frustration, was his last straw and he angrily withdrew into a passively-aggressive stance.  He felt thwarted by co-workers who didn’t meet him halfway.

When Marcus came home, his wife bombarded him with questions; he felt as if he was being interrogated by a hostile lawyer who, like a hound dog trying to gets its prey, was trying really hard to unearth a trail of evidence that would strengthen her prosecution of him.  He really tried to engage in their conversation, thinking that good communication is essential to a healthy marriage, but not realizing that maintaining this kind of communication was extremely toxic to a loving relationship.  He tried to nudge their discussion in a productive direction but his wife had no interest in creating a loving atmosphere.  Eventually, when he snapped at her in frustration, a smile of satisfaction crept across her face: she achieved her goal of “proving” how bad he was.  He went off to be by himself; he wasn’t even available to his children on nights like this one.

As days like this repeated themselves, his negative feelings intensified.  He thought he was hiding his feelings pretty well (he wasn’t); his negative attitude seeped out as sulking and, sensing it, people withdrew from him even further.  He felt even more isolated and unappreciated.  He pulled back his energy and investment and his work situation spiraled downward.  The work that once delighted him was quickly becoming a detestable and nearly unbearable chore.  His marriage felt much the same when his buttons were so expertly pushed by his wife who wanted a punching bag much more than an equal partner.

Initially, he usually rebounded after a few days to his basically hopeful and engaged self.  But as these experiences repeated and accumulated over the years, he took longer to recover and he rebounded less and less energetically.  He still appreciated the occasional rays of beauty in his life and he really enjoyed the feeling of belonging when he spent time with friends.

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Teresa: Marriage Snapshot

Every morning Teresa and her husband began their daily routine with praying together: a combination of spoken prayer and silent prayer.  Sometimes Teresa would tell him what she felt during her prayers; talking through her experiences helped her understand and appreciate them even more.

Teresa was excellent at gardening and preserving food; she grew enough food for themselves and extra to sell or barter in town.  Her husband was skilled in working with wood, stone and metal; he was able to design and build many kinds of small building projects.  Both of their responsibilities brought them into contact with a wide range of personalities.  They stayed informed of local news from the people in their town and learned about larger trends in thinking from the travelers passing through their town.  Each evening, they told each other what happened and who they met during their days.  They shared the new ideas that were circulating in the larger cities.

Teresa and her husband were good storytellers.  They often told stories together, alternating their voices to make their stories come vividly alive; they helped each other craft stories so that they hinted at a meaning that went deeper than the simple events they were recounting.  Their stories sympathetically, and sometimes humorously, described the endearing and frustrating aspects of human nature.  Their neighbors really enjoyed visiting them and listening to them tell stories together.

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Teresa: Snapshot After the Embrace

Sharing with nuns

Teresa was ecstatic over experiencing the embrace of her Divine Companion.  She thought her experiences weren’t particularly exceptional.  Quite the opposite: she felt quite that each nun in the convent could also experience the same wonderful presence of God and she wanted everyone to experience the spiritual bliss and love she had found.  She poured herself into teaching others about their inner world as the place where they could encounter their own Divine Companion.  She used metaphors of familiar things to articulate the atmosphere of different parts of the inner world; she described inner attitudes that cultivate intimacy with the Divine Companion; she tried to organize convent life in ways that supported spiritual growth rather than inhibit it; she developed spiritual practices to help open a person’s heart to trust God more fully.  She was willing to try anything that might help lead a person into a closer relationship with the God who dwells within as their personal Divine Companion.

Although most nuns appreciated Teresa for her ability to inspire visitors to contribute to the convent, most of the nuns were essentially indifferent about her spiritual ideas.  Very few of her sister nuns shared her spiritual sincerity, her genuine affection for God.  They had almost no interest in what she was experiencing in her prayer life despite her enthusiasm and her accessible way of explaining the inner spiritual life.

Many nuns became nuns for non-spiritual reasons: convent life offered more security than any other option available to them; they enjoyed the status of being a nun in that time when religion was widely respected; they were attracted to the possibility of rising in the ranks of the convent and holding position of power within their order.  Some of these nuns were hardhearted and caustic to Teresa after her experience of being embraced by her Divine Companion because, in their minds, she threatened to outshine them.  They tried to sow seeds of doubt in her about her experiences.

Navigating the resistance from her religious organization

Before long, local priests heard of Teresa’s charisma and came to meet her and discuss her ideas about spirituality.  As a woman, she was regarded as a second-class member of her church; most priests regarded her ideas as the simplistic musings of an unsophisticated soul or the exaggerated overly emotional feelings of a woman.  Priests, who only knew God through religious dogma, couldn’t grasp her felt sense of God.  They were very suspicious and even suggested that her experiences were actually evil rather than holy.  Initially, that feedback created shadows of doubt in Teresa’s mind.  But the priests’ lack of insight and compassion quickly became quite clear; their attitudes reflected none of the personality of God that she was coming to know better and better.  Any remaining shadows of doubt in her mind disappeared in the clear light shed by her profound experiences.  It took much courage and unwavering loyalty to sustain herself on such a lonely spiritual path when religious authorities couldn’t understand her and seemed determined to undermine her.

In her heart, Teresa knew that her experiences harmonized with what Jesus taught; she felt no conflict between her personal experiences of the inner presence of God and the Jesus depicted in the Gospels.  Motivated by a desire to prove her wrong, some priests asked her to write down her experiences and her thoughts so they had evidence to persecute her.  Having no desire to antagonize the priests, she became adept at code switching: modifying her language so she didn’t upset or threaten the religious authorities who deigned to sit in judgment over her.

Teresa was never interested in winning a theological showdown with the priests over what constitutes correct doctrine.  She was wholly concerned with living a life pleasing to God; she was quite indifferent to the contents of the church’s policy statements.  She used the required writing assignment as an opportunity to articulate how the inner world can be cultivated to be hospitable to one’s Divine Companion.  Her writings helped those who wanted to draw closer to God and, at the same time, enabled her to avoid being punished by the church.  Hundreds of years later, her writings continue to help devout souls find intimacy with God.

Teresa was fully devoted to her church but not to maintaining the church’s business-as-usual ways.  She appreciated the deeper insights of her religious heritage that brought her to the trailhead of spiritual intimacy but she was not obsessed with the minor theological points.  She had no qualms with submitting to the authority of wise superiors but she never felt bound by those traditions which seemed out-of-step with common sense or spiritual principles.  Teresa envisioned the spiritual path as beginning in the framework provided by the church but then extending further into the first-hand experience of intimacy with each person’s Divine Companion.  She balanced a respect for the wisdom of religious heritage with a feisty desire to know God more intimately.

Leaving the church because of this friction with many priests was simply out of the question for her.  But simply being quiet and keeping her experiences to herself wasn’t really an option for her either because she had a burning desire that others would have that same wonderful experience.  Teresa had such a love of spiritual adventure that she remained powerfully drawn to spiritual deepening despite the lack of support from nuns and church elders.  She became adept at sidestepping pointless confrontations with superiors who were clearly more attached to their own ease or status than to seeking God.  She devoted herself to reshaping one small corner of the church to align with God’s invitation to intimacy: helping any interested individual cultivate their own vibrant personal intimacy with God.  She tried to implement changes graciously in ways that respected the others involved.  Her longest-lived changes were those which she made gradually.  Teresa was a bright light in her convent despite attempts to cover her brilliance.

Buoyed by kindred spirits

Not all of the priests were dismissive; two stood out from the group.  They listened to Teresa with an open mind; they heard her with an open heart; they appreciated the fruits of the spirit that she bore; they trusted her sincerity.  They were convinced that her spiritual experiences were genuine divine gifts, not humanly contrived ideas or fantasies.  They assured her that her experiences were not evil at all.  She was tremendously helped by the support of two people who could affirm the spiritual goodness of her experiences.  She formed a close partnership with these priests, spiritual friends who helped her progress on the spiritual path.  Teresa found that having just one kindred soul was a wonderful boost to her soul; two kindred souls was a great bounty of blessing and support.

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Recovering your full heritage

Recovering the Makah’s lost heritage required a lot of effort; recovering your own lost heritage requires your personal investment and effort to excavate parts of your inner world that may be covered and unfamiliar to you.  Some concrete pieces may help you understand your inner world and recover your full human-plus-spiritual heritage.

1) adopting a reflective mindset

--pause, notice and reflect on the workings of your inner world

--get a sense of your inner tone and any looping self-talk

--get a sense of how active your Decider-in-Chief is (or isn’t)

Your inner world is a very active place.  Much occurs there that shapes your life but, without reflecting, you can be unaware of you own inner operations: attachment style, growth mindset, fears, repression of dreams/ideals, whether one persona is dominating your inner world, whether some are personas intimidated and silenced.

2) discerning beliefs and values

--distinguish your accurate beliefs from your distorted ones

You may be living operating on beliefs which you never articulated to yourself or ever considered in much depth.  Perhaps you considered one thing about yourself to be absolutely true; perhaps you believed that you had a core deficiency which will always limit what you might aspire to and achieve in your life.  You might discover that this unquestioned story wasn’t really true at all but the distorted beliefs of others that you absorbed without noticing.  The human mind loves to cling to its preferred narrative (“That’s my story and I’m sticking to it”) even when the narrative isn’t very accurate or helpful.

--distinguish what is really valuable and helpful to you in the long run from what only appears to be valuable in this moment;

You may have adopted values without realizing it or evaluating them very thoroughly.  Get clear on what attracts you and motivates you; get clear on what scares you and limits you.

Your life never needs to remain on its original bedrocks. You can continue remodeling your foundation as long as you are alive: unanchoring your worldview from unhelpful bedrocks and then anchoring your worldview on better, more helpful bedrocks:

3) releasing your grip on lesser bedrock beliefs

modifying beliefs that aren’t accurate

decreasing your reliance on those things that have little value from a bigger perspective

4) replacing lesser bedrock beliefs with better bedrock beliefs

devoting yourself to what is good, true and beautiful with all your heart, mind and soul

cultivating a mindset consistent with these better beliefs

making definitive decisions, final determinations about what is true and what is not

enshrining your deeper insights and elevate your higher values

developing your wonderful spiritual endowments, make your spiritual muscles stronger

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Recovering a Heritage

The Makah

The Spiritual Torchbearers

Your Great Spiritual Heritage

Marcus: A Modern Story

Early Life

Bedrocks from his early life

Adult Life

Marriage

His Spiritual Embrace

Spiritual Fruit

Recovered Heritage

Alternate Ending

Teresa: A Long-ago Story

Early Life with Family

Married Life

Convent Life

Her Spiritual Embrace

Spiritual Fruit

Ongoing divine embrace

Alternate Ending

Gems of your Spiritual Inheritance

Qualities of your Inner World that Enable Spiritual Deepening

Core element: Seeing your spiritual nature as well as your human nature

Core Element: Seeing the bedrocks of your worldview

Core Element: Personas inhabiting your inner world

Core Element: Your capability for remaking your inner world

Core Element: A growth mindset

Core Element: Your attachment style with other people

Core Element: The God of Highest Heaven also dwells within you

Core Element: Your spiritual attachment style

Accelerating Circumstances

Core Element: Post-traumatic spiritual deepening

Core Element: Nontraumatic Precipitating Events

Experiencing God’s Embrace

Core Element: Feeling personally embraced by God

Core Element: Bearing spiritual fruits

Core Element: Your framework for interpreting your experience

Cultivating your Bond with your Divine Companion

Core Element: A regular practice for maintain the human-divine relationship

Your Heritage in a Nutshell

Your Own Larger Story

Principles for Shaping a Spiritual Practice

Cultivating your Spiritual Attitude

Spiritual Naming and Claiming

Inner Dialogue

Companioning Prayer

Guided Inner Dialogue/Prayer

Daily Journaling

Spiritual Souvenirs: Making the Memory of your Spiritual Embrace Accessible

Spiritual Crest

Spiritual Scrapbook

Caveats

Sidebars

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