20 Dec Love and Attunement
In this module we saw how Daniel’s (2008) extending line involves engagement with the community, family, and work in the world, and that these areas of love, atunement, and collaboration might be portals into spirituality or extraordinary human experiences. Most of us have been taught to see spirituality as a lone pursuit with the highest manifestation being a celibate monk in a cave meditating endlessly, so to extend the definition is exciting.
We were invited to bring our awareness to a group activity or circle, and I shared about attending a life celebration event for someone in the L.A. writers’ community who had died. I could feel the warmth of community, but also its hierarchical and exclusive elements, which is much the reason why I’ve preferred solitary pursuits. However, certainly there was a lot of love shared there in the face of death, or the transpersonal, and a certain atunement among writers, most of us who toil with little to no recognition except among ourselves.
Lyla June Johnston (2020) shared a moving poem which could only be based in her loving, group-attuned culture. Shiela VanDerveer’s interview (class video, n.d.) was spellbinding. As a midwife, she talked about a baby’s birth process being a collaboration of deep listening to what the other persons (the baby and the mother) needs. It was also amazing how she views the baby as a complete partner in the process of birth, and that babies know exactly what they are doing and how to be born. The goal is an “undisturbed birth.” I find myself jealous of people who were fortunate enough to be welcomed into this world in such a conscious, loving way. I hope Ms. VanDerveer’s work can spread widely.
Brown (2017) reminded us that trees are all connected underground, and that nature teaches us relationship. We are socialized toward independence. She teaches that while the alpha individual and competitiveness exist all over nature, humans are the only species who compete when not necessary. She states, “Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual.” Practicing generosity is a means to build community through love and collaboration. Brown shares that the things she has had to do are 1) be seen, 2) be wrong, 3) accept my inner multitudes, 4) ask for, and receive, what I need.
Grof (2007) wrote about the Akashic Field, which was certainly a surprise to see in a scholarly paper. He talks about the “anomalous phenomena” that challenge the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm. Ervin Laszlo’s “theory of everything” is offered as a “connectivity hypothesis,” which is like the “psi-field” or Akashic Field. This has been posited as a holographic record of everything that has happened in the universe, and as a concept has previously only been studied in occult fields. It is wonderful when transpersonal psychology brings to modern day language concepts that have existed esoterically for centuries.
Daniel Siegal (2012) wrote about attachment which he states is an inborn system in the brain. Attachment theory of course comes from Bowlby and his concept of “the secure base.” Siegal expands this to teach that attachment relationships may serve to create the central foundation from which the mind develops. The minds of two people influence each other in ways we are not aware of. For full emotional communication, one person needs to allow the other to be influenced. (This goes along with the Gottman’s (2012) specifying that one of the major reasons heterosexual marriages fail is when the man will not accept influence from his wife.) Each person’s state both influences and is influenced by the other. Siegal points out that intimate relationships are a circular dance between what he calls engaged alignment and distanced autonomy, and that attachment norms are culture specific.
I personally experience tastes of the Divine most clearly in love and relationships, and yet have been brainwashed for so many years that spirituality does not consist of that that it is still an adjustment for me. “Real spirituality” is what is advocated by Wilber and the ascending line theorists, all the people I’ve been reading for decades. Plus the anti-body, anti-pleasure conditioning of the Christian church I grew up in – even though I rejected that when I was a teenager, it left remnants which one must always be on alert to squelch. I whole-heartedly embrace the participatory and postmodern transpersonal psychology with the contributions of feminism, yet it still feels a bit naughty as if we are transgressing the Law which says there is only ONE WAY.
© 2023 Catherine Auman
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