Chapter 19: Being Spiritual – Searching for God

I think I have been searching all my life for God.

I hadn’t actually realised this until I was in a room in an ashram in Rishikesh in northern India. Martin and I were visiting the area because steam trains were still running there. While Martin went off to look at the train sheds, I went to spend a day at an ashram. The small room was crowded. Some people were locals, some were tourists, some were backpackers and some were spiritual seekers. All were sitting cross-legged on the floor, except me. I’ve never been able to sit like that, so I sat with my knees to one side trying to scrunch myself up so I could balance uncomfortably and look peaceful at the same time. We waited for a long time. Then he came in. A large man with orange robes and an angry face. He picked on individuals and shouted at them. I vowed to keep my head down and say nothing.

Right at the end, he turned to me and pointed and said in English, “And you! What is your question?”

As he had been picking on people randomly, I had thought of a question in case he turned his attention to me. I looked at him and said, “I’ve read a lot about living in the present moment but I have a business to run and people are depending on me for their livelihoods. How can I live in the present when I have to be planning six and 12 months ahead to secure their jobs?”

He looked hard at me and said, “Why do you wait until now to ask such a question?”

I didn’t reply.

He went on, “And anyway, that’s not the question you really want to ask. What you really want to know is where has God gone in your life. Isn’t it?” he shouted. I realised he was right.

Once I had left the Catholic Church, I had embarked on my spiritual search with enthusiasm.

I was rejecting the organisation of the Church, not God, and so I needed to look outside the confines of religion. Even so, I doubted my own credentials as a ‘spiritual’ person. I didn’t see angels (and still don’t); I don’t see auras around people; I’m not psychic; I don’t hear things; I don’t see into the future. Everything I read that ‘spiritual people’ could do – I couldn’t. In addition, all the stories I read about people who had transformed their lives and were enlightened, or at least on the way to it, had all come from terrible childhoods and backgrounds. I’ve had a charmed life and thought I just hadn’t had a hard enough life to transform into anything. Still, I began my search.

The spiritual path is long and winding – and messy. There is no one path anyway. There are multiple paths each one with many potholes and dead ends. At the beginning of my search, I tried many paths and committed to each one wholeheartedly – for a while. It’s a bit like when a new baby latches onto its mother’s breast and eagerly sucks for her milk – for its food. I would latch onto whatever spiritual idea had taken my attention and imagination and greedily devoured each new idea to feed my spiritual hunger.

Maybe this chapter should be called ‘Becoming Spiritual’ not ‘Being Spiritual’ because we are always ‘becoming’. There is no end point in the spiritual journey. So, rather than list all the various courses I attended in my search, I will just talk about the particular learnings that impacted my beliefs, my thoughts and behaviour and led me to this point – led me to being the spiritual person I believe I am now.

I left the Church when I found A Course in Miracles. ACIM is a philosophy, supposedly dictated by Christ to an American woman, Helen Schucman, which is meant to re-interpret Jesus’ teachings and provide a path for living from love and forgiveness. The ‘miracle’ is a change in your perception about the person or situation in front of you. You change your glasses, as it were, and you see something different. I started doing the daily lessons and tested out the theory on how I was seeing my mother. It worked and I stopped being so stressed by her. The ACIM mantras of, ‘I could see something else instead of this,’ and, ‘I could see peace instead of this,’ helped me to continually refocus my thoughts. As did the years’ worth of daily lessons which I did twice, a number of years apart.

Of course, it wasn’t long before the shadows appeared!

They were right there in all my judgments. I found some of the ACIM followers I came across overtly ‘spiritual’ – peaceful smiles, no money, working in alternative therapies. They irritated me. And some of them were interested in nothing more than philosophising.

The time I was at Rishikesh, a woman who had been sitting next to me (who the guru had also shouted at) suggested we have a coffee so we chatted about what we were doing in India. She had already been there for three months visiting various ashrams in her spiritual quest. She suggested we cross the Ganges and see a Western woman who was ‘enlightened’ and popular with Western seekers. It was hot and dusty and the room was crowded with predominantly young people wearing the spiritual-seeker garb of the day – shorts, sandals, braided hair, bearded, long skirts – footwear easy to walk in and clothes easy to keep cool in.

The female guru was very late (of course) so we had to sit on the floor for quite a while waiting for her. There were no windows in this shack but the air that wafted in was hot and stifling. I don’t remember the guru’s name. She was tall, with long, straight, very blond hair wearing long white robes and a permanent smile on her face. We were invited to ask questions. One guy asked a question I didn’t even understand. I looked at him and thought, You poor tortured soul trying to get your head around all this. Just live fully and love as much as you can. I was starting to get annoyed by her ‘enlightened’ words. Someone asked her what she did about eating and sleeping.

She answered slowly, moving her head from side to side and looking kindly at the questioner,  “I eat when my body is hungry and sleep when my body is tired.”

I was incensed. I thought to myself, That’s all very well while you live here and have food brought to you every day and someone to lead you to where you sleep. But I am meeting my Marks and Spencer’s client in London next week and if I say at 3pm in the middle of a meeting, ‘My body is tired. I will sleep now,’ I will never get any work from them again!” At the end of her session people were invited to come and bow at her feet. I didn’t go. I already saw myself as superior to these ACIM groupies. I didn’t see my own shadows. I was too self-absorbed.

I became torn between thinking I was doing okay to having an obsession about being better.

I become a self-development junkie. I read every spiritual book I could find and was continually on the look-out for courses I could do. There was a developing interest among spiritual seekers in all the ‘New Age’ ideas – crystals, tarot cards, angels and especially, positive thinking.

I attended a five-day training based on Louise Hay’s philosophy of positive thinking and the importance of affirmations. She was seen as the American ‘queen’ of positive thinking. For months I would mouth her positive affirmations waiting for my life to change. But the more I looked into it, the more I realised that what most people wanted was more money, a better job, a half-decent relationship. All things that are outside of ourselves. When I came across The Secret, many years later, that was about more of the same. Surely spirituality was about more than chasing external happiness? And suppose what I wanted was not what my soul needed? How would I know? I remained confused. It would be later when I would really be able to understand the importance of the clarity of the mind where our thoughts are created.

At some point I studied HeartMath – an organisation and system, focusing on the power on the heart. I also became a Reiki master practitioner. I attended a 10-day training by a woman called Byron Katie. Her ‘work’ is about meeting our thoughts with understanding, so that our stressful thoughts fall away. She says that all stress is caused by how we think about things – not about what happens but about what we think about what happens. She poses four simple questions which you answer in relation to a stressful thought (e.g., If I die my kids will never get over it; he doesn’t love me; my needs are always last to be considered).

The questions are:

• Is it true?
• Can you absolutely know it isn’t true?
• How do you react when you believe that thought?
• Who would you be/ how would you relate to this person/ situation if you didn’t believe that thought?

Then you have to turn that thought around in three different ways and find three examples where the opposite could be true. Once the brain has realised that the opposite could also be true it’s hard to hold onto the original stressful thought. It’s a very powerful process. This re-enforced my earlier ACIM studies about the importance of clear thinking.

Some courses I did were short – a weekend or a week. The longest trainings I completed were my interfaith two-year training and the one-year Postgraduate Certificate in Spiritual Development and Facilitation at the University of Surrey.

All of them were different approaches, giving different tools to get to the same end.

Love and kindness was always the start and the end point. The Beatles said it first, ‘All You Need Is Love.’ I was spending a lot of money coming to that realisation.

Everything I was learning I was fitting together in a giant road map of how I could live my life. I had ‘messages’ from time to time that I didn’t need to try so hard. One was when I went to Brazil over 25 years ago to learn the art of spiritual massage. There was a weekly meeting with a Brazilian priest who channelled a famous Brazilian saint. He sat on the floor and spoke in a different voice and his facial features changed. The hut was dark and lit with candles. At the beginning of the session, he picked up a candle and dropped some candle wax on his hand. It was black.

“See this,” he said. “This is all the shit in this room that I have to see and you have to get rid of it.”

Our little group were huddled together near the back. One by one he called the local people forward. They stood in front of him and he laid into them verbally.  Do gurus always do this? I wondered. There was an interpreter sitting beside him who translated what he was saying to us English-speaking folk. Of course, we didn’t speak or ask questions. Then, right at the end, he pointed to me and said, “You, come here!”

I cringed. It reminded me of the time in India. I stood in front of him.

“Are you afraid?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

“You don’t need to be,” he said. “Do you live on an island?”

I said I lived in England.

He said, “Well, that’s an island isn’t it?”

Everyone laughed.

I felt excruciatingly uncomfortable.

Then he picked up a candle again and dropped some wax on his hand. The wax stayed white.

“See this?” he said, “This is from you. You are a good person. You never need fear anything. You will always be protected by the Druids. Now take your seat.”

I didn’t know anything about the Druids but I did feel protected. I realised I always had.

That feeling of security and protection has always been with me to some degree. This became one of my core principles – trust. Trust that I am okay. Trust that things will ultimately work out okay. Trust that the Universe really is a kind place, as Einstein said, and I will be given what I need. One of the ACIM mantras that sustained me throughout my marriage break up was, ‘You’re in the right place and you’re right on time’. That trust would be shaken at times but would always be under the surface waiting for me to remember it.

I must have become a total bore talking about the things I was learning and reading – preaching to whomever would listen. I had another sign that I needn’t keep trying so hard when my consulting company Domino was at its height. I used to employ a woman called Gill on a contract basis to write articles for our Domino newsletter. She was a radical feminist who had no truck with anything to do with spirituality. I had given her an article to write on spirituality in organisations and gave her some resources she could use. I knew I would get the most objective viewpoint from her.

One Saturday, I got a phone message from my daughter, “Gill Taylor wants you to ring her.” This was unusual. She never required any help, and anyway, it was Saturday evening. I phoned her.

She said, “Are you sitting down?”

I sat.

She continued, “I was on the train coming back from London and planning this article for you when I heard a voice. I didn’t see anyone, but I definitely heard a voice.”

This was completely unlike Gill. She continued, “The voice said, ‘Tell Geraldine she doesn’t need to read any more books. She knows everything she needs to know. She just has to listen to her heart’.”

There was a pause and she said, “I don’t know if that means anything to you but there it is.”

It did mean something to me and I had goose bumps. It was around the time that a friend had come to visit and put a book on the kitchen table in a brown paper bag.

“I’ve brought you a book,” she said. Then, as I pounced on it, she added, “And it’s not a bloody self-development one!”

I finally stopped reading self-development books for a good while after this and started to listen to my inner voice – the one I had never really trusted.

Finally, I found esotericism through the books of Alice Bailey. She was a woman who was born in Manchester and lived in the US as a writer and teacher. She died in 1949. The texts were dictated to her by a Tibetan master. As I studied it I saw that it was complete system of spiritual evolution related to the whole Universe. I could see where everything fit into it – Jesus, the Buddha, all the teachers and masters. It’s a simple philosophy about integrating the body, the emotions and the mind (referred to as the ‘personality’) in order to infuse with the soul, so the personality can become a tool of the soul. By this time, I had been on a spiritual path for about 15 years. Now, everything fell into place. It’s not about taking ourselves away from our lives to experience peace. It’s about getting the right balance between being and doing and between contemplation and action. And all of this in order that we can serve. Spirituality is not an academic activity, it’s a lived experience.

Now, I wonder about that term ‘spiritual development’. What does development look like in this context? Maybe ‘development’ is an odd word to use. Development implies ‘from this to that’, an increasing of something – from a lesser to a greater. But suppose that we already are the greater and that what we need to do is to remove the barriers to our realisation of this? One of those barriers is the seeking of happiness. Now, instead of seeking happiness, I try to live from joy. Joy is the energy of the soul. It’s our birthright. The good news is that we already have it – it is already within us but we’ve covered it with blockages that we attach to. Joy is our foundation – it is not a feeling (feelings, including happiness, are fleeting) but a deep knowing of the truth about us – about all of us.      

Joy is there underneath all the ebbs and flows of life. We can be in pain and still experience joy; we can hate our present circumstances, and still experience joy. Because all pain is in the world of the ego and we want to be in the world of soul, where pain does not exist.

Joy is our foundation for life.

I see it like a huge slab of concrete that we stand on to survey our life and beyond. If we lose our balance and fall off it we can’t see so far – we can’t see the panoramic view. The turbulence that might be happening around us doesn’t affect our joy. It creates little specks of dirt on the concrete slab that we need to clean off – it can never destroy the slab itself. And happiness becomes irrelevant.

We need to lose our attachments, like our attachment to finding happiness. I once only thought of attachments in terms of material possessions. But then I had my identity crises and realised that I had an attachment to being a mother and an attachment to being a consultant.

When my daughter and I became estranged I was distraught. Losing my attachment to being a great mother was the first one I saw. Then I became attached to her pain. I was heartbroken because of the pain she was in. I had to let her have her pain and not make it mine (not the same as reflecting on my responsibility in helping to cause her pain). Friends said that she would come around. That it would be okay, so I became attached to that idea. Then I realised that even if we never really spoke again and even if we never had a good relationship again, that had to be okay too. I would still love her and keep my heart open to her. It must have been nearly two years before I could think about what happened without crying. But bit by bit, I dropped any attachments to an outcome I wanted. I would accept whatever the reality was now and would be in the future. That’s one of the core messages of Byron Katie too. Her most famous book is called, Loving What Is. When we fight with reality we lose, 100% of the time.

And now I see what ‘living in the now’ really means, it means nothing more than accepting the reality in front of us.

My spiritual activities now consist of accessing joy though stillness, through connection with others and with nature, through gratitude for everything in my life, through acceptance of whatever is happening, through finding the gift in every painful situation we are in. It is my quickest route out of pain.

A few years ago, I lost a lot of money that I had saved. I had made a bad investment in a business which was mismanaged and which folded. I lost it all. And the gift? There were two gifts actually: The first gift was realising that if I took 25% of my private pension, which was tax free, and added in all the little policies I had bought along the way, the total was just about what I still owed on my mortgage. I paid it off. Even if I never worked again, I could sit in my house, drive my paid-for car and just have to find the money for heating and food. The second gift was the realisation that the bad investment was the second time in my life I had invested significant sums of money for no other purpose than to make money. It seems that others can do that. I can’t. I didn’t get the message after the first loss. I got it after the second!

Also I have stopped measuring my own progress against the supposed progress of others, as if it is some sort if spiritual competition. I reflect, yes, but monitor, no.

We actually have no idea where we are in our spiritual evolutionary process.

The reality is that wherever we think we are, we are probably much further back! We can monitor our human progress but best to leave our spiritual progress to the soul to handle!

The personal experience that has had the most impact on me happened almost 25 years ago. I had often thought about the notion of surrender as being important as a spiritual quality. But I had always avoided surrendering to ‘God’s will’ in case ‘He’ asked me to do something I didn’t want to do – suppose ‘He’ wanted me to give all my possessions away, or leave my job or worse still, leave my marriage. I shuddered at the thought of it. But then my marriage started to break up and I struggled for years, wondering what to do. It was painful and I found myself becoming more and more weary with the struggle of it all.

With the pain of my ending marriage increasing not decreasing, I found myself on a beach in Mexico, sitting on a rock, waves rolling in, watching a beautiful sunset and I realised I wasn’t handling things well. I couldn’t trust myself anymore. I had made some decisions which had had terrible consequences. I had recently read Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walschand in one part the author had said to God that he had done everything God had wanted yet he still didn’t have a decent relationship and he still had no money. God had replied that he hadn’t actually done much at all. He had dabbled in this and dabbled in that, but he had never really surrendered to God. It hit me forcefully. Oh my God, that was me. I decided to start my own conversation with God. I remember saying out loud, “Okay, God. I am so tired. I can’t fight you anymore. I’ll let you in. Whatever you want, it’s done. Take me, I’m yours and I will do whatever you want.” I felt something move inside me and what seemed like a huge stone came right out of my chest and rose up. The most incredible peace descended on me. I felt incredibly light. I was in total awe about what had happened. And in that same moment, I knew my marriage of 25 years was finally over. I felt no fear at all, just total trust that I would be okay. A trust that has always been in me and which was strengthened in Brazil but which had waned with the pain of my marriage break up. The trust finally took root in me on that beach in Mexico and it has never left me since.

What is surrender then? Maybe it’s the answer to the call to give ourselves to something larger than ourselves and to become what we were meant to become, instead of being a prisoner tied up with the chains of our past decisions.

What was I surrendering to? I wasn’t sure. I just knew that relying on myself wasn’t working.

I think that surrender is not to a disconnected God but to my lived life as expressing my ‘soul essence’.

I am already part of the wholeness that is God, is my Higher Self, is my soul, is consciousness, is love. It is my future here in this present moment, which I am co-creating minute by minute. I am already ‘it’ – but I had forgotten. My spiritual journey is actually a journey back – back home. We can gain an understanding of wholeness, of our soul, through reading about it and talking about it but there can be no real experience of wholeness unless we surrender and feel the soul connection.

I felt the connection that day on the beach in Mexico when I surrendered and put my Higher Self in charge. That’s when I realised that surrender isn’t about giving up something – it’s about making a positive choice to cooperate with Soul.

That is how I want to live my life – trusting and without fear.

Photo

Interfaith symbols some of which are on my stole.

Questions For Reflection

Would you describe yourself as ‘spiritual’? Why or why not? What core beliefs guide your life? Have your beliefs changed over the years? How? Do you have a spiritual practice to sustain you? What is it?

A Blessing While You Reflect

“May you recognise in your life the presence,

Power and light of your soul.

May you realise that you are never alone,

That your soul in its brightness and belonging

Connects you immediately with the rhythm of the universe.

May you realise that the shape of your soul is unique,

That you have a special destiny here,

That behind the facade of your life

There is something beautiful and eternal happening.”

From John O’Donohue: Benedictus