The Spiritual Journey: A Spiral Staircase to a Place Called Home

The month of September’s theme is the Spiritual Journey. BIG topic! It’s one of the topics closest to my heart. It’s an aspect of any of the work we do at COR. Even though we focus so much on emotional and mental healing—within ourselves and within all our relationships—we also always include the spiritual dimension. 

So what exactly is the spiritual journey? Where does it lead us?

After being a participant on that journey since I was about six years old and having witnessed and accompanied thousands of seeking souls, I realized it takes us to a place that we in reality never left: Home. 

The East and West have different names for this “Home.” The East calls it “Enlightenment” or “Self-realization” or “Awakening,” while the West calls it “Union with God” or reaching the “Unitive Stage,” or a state of “Oneness.” And there are many more names for it. 

I deeply explored both eastern and western spiritual modalities and in my opinion, it doesn’t so much matter what we call it. It all points us somewhere we long to be. We instinctively sense we are made for something good, true and beautiful. And something inside of us won’t let us settle for anything less than reaching our fullest human and spiritual potential.

The spiritual journey is not so much about achieving a certain state or getting anywhere on our own efforts, but much more about letting go into who and what we already are. Rather than any great success story from our side, it is a journey of opening our eyes to something that we’ve always known—something that has always been there, but we’ve been asleep to. It’s about awareness and realignment. 

For most of us, this journey it is not a straight shot to heaven, but a slow and gradual process. Like a spiral staircase on which we seem to come to the same difficult spots over and over again, we are invited to face those inner blockages to Grace from a deeper level of love and presence. Doing so gradually helps us realize what our true nature is.

And this spiraling journey is not easy or for the faint of heart. We need support and guidance! Our defenses and ego structure do not like the spiritual journey one bit, and we often resist it.

Instead, we find reasons to stay circling on the surface, dabbling in a little spirituality here and there. Or we even quit. That is because our ego knows it will eventually need to surrender, and it simply doesn’t trust that it is safe to do so. It doesn’t trust that we’ll survive without the defenses. Surrendering our little me to the “Great We” is a process where many of us, including me, kick and scream all the way. 

And yet through all my years of sticking to the journey, finally committing to a daily spiritual practice as well as other monthly and yearly practices, and through a lot of Grace, life did create a space inside me that can now hold everything with much more acceptance, tenderness, and spaciousness. Now I can hold our broken reality, a world where both the light and the shadow exists simultaneously, a world where nothing is ever “perfect.” I can hold my own humanity with all its fragility and the humanity of all of my brothers and sisters, and there is now so much more peace, love, and surrender to life as it is. It is not perfection by any means but a “lean in” to reality. I am so grateful to all my teachers along the way and to the wonderful opportunity to be a student in this school of love called life.

We look forward to sharing intimate aspects of our own spiritual journeys with you this month in these newsletters. And, as always, come participate or staff any of our workshops for a tangible experience of Grace in your own life.

How about you, my dear reader? What does the spiritual journey mean to you? Did you experience this kind of longing and followed it? What are your insights, breakthroughs, and challenges on the spiritual journey? We’d love to hear from you on our FB page!

With love,
Britta