The work I do is spiritual care. Make no mistake about it. Though I talk about grief, the wild, our stories, nature, our planet, yoga, meditation, and talk less frequently about spirituality (which as a reminder, I’m referring to a connection to something larger than ourselves), I am talking about spirituality when I talk about all of it. Not to equate any or even all of that with spirituality, but rather, to help guide you to move from the stories and the thoughts you may have carried throughout your life to something larger than them. My goal is to help you move into your body, to move thoughts and feelings through the body, processing them, understanding their roots and their branches, before connecting with the communities around you. A human community. A wild community. The global community.
We need to stop thinking of spirituality as something religious, because the two are very different concepts. Only one involves any thought of a larger being (or group of beings), and whether you believe in the god, the goddess, Brahma, a pantheon of deities, or none at all, you can still connect with the world around you both human and non-human.
So the first thing we need to do is both center and uncenter ourselves and humans as a species.
Do you think I’m talking in riddles? I’m not, not really anyway. Just perhaps broadening your concept of how we view the world and what weight and authority we give certain experiences over others.
One of the first thing you realize when you begin to work with spiritual care is that everyone, every being, is the authority on their lived experience, and we must believe that lived experience above all else, before we can we do anything else. When we believe someone’s lived experience we uncenter our own lived experience and we center the other person’s lived experience. If we are looking at the companion animals in our lives trying to make decisions for them, then we center their lived experiences the best we can understand them, and we set aside our own thoughts and feelings about their experience, and believe that every single thing they experience is worthy of discussion and consideration. We do not believe that one experience is better or more evolved than another. They both are simply experiences, and both deserve respect and consideration.
This is a topic I hope to talk more about in the coming weeks and months, because how we perceive others’ experiences says a lot about how we view our own. In the meantime, know that spiritual care is personal care, and in order to do it right we must know when to center ourselves and the human experience and when not to, and that is a topic for the next blog.
