The last few months I’ve been on a mission to stop going shallow. Whether it’s with my own writing (fantasy and equestrian fiction) or the work I’m doing with spiritual storytelling, I’m realizing more and more that when we put modalities into silos, for example talking about meditation and mindfulness for stress reduction without discussing everything else that’s causing us stress or impacting our ability to regulate our nervous system, it’s simply a shallow approach to what is a very complex situation — our embodied being.
I’m currently finishing my masters degree with a class in religion and public health. Each week the readings basically go something like this: There needs to be more research on the intersection of religion and public health, but neither discipline can speak the language of the other, and so the research spends a lot of time going over the same foundational ground to explain what each discipline means and basic definitions. These are walls. It’s a silo in which each discipline lives. We see this on display with the current political situation where there is a class of political scientist pundits and talk show hosts who seem to not be able to believe what is happening and are out of touch with what everyday individuals are facing and being wholly incapable of understanding their lived reality.
When you build walls, you are going shallow. You simply plow the same ground over and over again, until eventually all the nutrients are stripped from it and all meaning is lost. That is what’s happening, I believe, with the current discourse around “healing” and “wellness”, as if there is some benign “normal” to which everyone can aspire and anything that is outside that narrow boundary is maladaptive or needs fixed. That shallow worldview seems to miss the very obvious point that we are each individuals and it is the sum of our lived experience which shapes us into who we are.
Instead, if we look to a more inclusive view, one that honors each of our lived experiences and sees them as the unique manifestation of our being, we tear down walls. Our spirituality informs our health and our health informs our spirituality as well as many other things. Instead of lingering on a single note, our spiritual storytelling becomes an entire symphony of who we are and what we believe.
It is my goal to focus a holistic lens on our entire being. I want to tear down the walls that keep us from the various aspects of our lives so that we can work deeply and live freely. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that if you go shallow, you’re only building walls that keep you separated from your authentic self.
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