The Prayer Cycle

In July of this year, I finished writing Half Mortal. I felt the wonder of that achievement. Then the sense of standing on a precipice swept over me. I was preparing to write the final installment of this “work” that I’ve devoted so many years of my life to. I wanted to move forward, but I also wanted to cherish the final stage of this particular journey. I paused, took a deep breath, and began listening to The Prayer Cycle each morning.

The Prayer Cycle is a nine-part contemporary choral symphony in twelve languages created by film and television composer, Jonathan Elias. I picked up the CD in London soon after its release and immediately fell in love with it.

Here’s a great 4-min clip of Elias discussing the creation of The Prayer Cycle.

And, here’s a video of the first movement, Mercy, featuring Alanis Morissette and Alif Keita singing in Hungarian and Swahili.

The eight other tracks are: Strength (German), Hope (French), Compassion (Latin), Grace (Italian), Innocence (French), Forgiveness (French), Benediction (German), and Faith (German).

I’d planned on listening to this particular choral/orchestral work as inspiration seed for War & Grace for quite some time, and was looking forward to whatever it might open up in me, creatively.

Not surprisingly, after a few mornings of absorbing it’s beauty, a deeper hunger that had seemingly slept soundly for years re-awakened. It soon became clear that I longed to return to the depths that had nourished and sustained me in my twenties.

Although what I experienced this summer was dramatically different than that trying time, I began to realize that I was spiritually depleted. I’d made a promise to myself to write War & Grace in an atmosphere of devotion, joy, and love. But I knew, in order to do that, I’d need to reorient myself at a deeper level.

Tricky stuff, that.

Earlier in the summer, I’d discovered Elephant Journal, an online magazine, and had enjoyed reading some of their articles. It was there I came across a video about 5 Pitfalls of Spiritual Awakening by Kiran, Mystic Girl in the City.

As I sat there that morning and listened to Kiran’s short talk, walls came down.

She was speaking directly to what I’d experienced those five years in my twenties, in a way I’d never heard anyone speak to it before. Back then, whenever I’d tried to share what I was going through, meds were most often suggested.

Because what I was feeling, the grief I was experiencing, was so intense.

I, however, steadfastly ignored the suggestion to medicate myself, just persisted in my blind stubbornness, and more and more, found myself spiraling inward on my own.

In the end, when almost everyone had fallen away, three unexpected but cherished companions remained. And with them, in a place where the sun ruled the skies, and the endless horizon of the desert fed my bereft spirit, dwelling in a city that sat on one of the most humble of international borders, I found that stable center.

Inside of me.

I came to call it my soul flame, that light that burns inside me, that light that burns inside us all, that flicker of divinity that we are free to nurture.

Flora fiddled with her kerchief. “Mortal bodies are dense. Much denser than the bodies of any creature in Faerie—or the enchanted world. If mortals don’t tend rather vigorously to their soul flame, their spirit and awareness gets dampened. Muddied,” she said. “They lose the ability to see clearly and make all sorts of regretful decisions. But when the body falls away in death, if the mortal’s soul flame has any strength at all, it survives."—Half Mortal, (Daughter of Light Book #2)

On Tuesday, I'll be addressing how "spiritual language" complicates things.

The Spiral Inward

I had my first spiritual shift when I was in my early twenties. After receiving some rather devastating news, the person I knew myself to be up to that point in my life simply fell away. It was abrupt, disorienting and disconcerting, like walls crashing down, and me left standing there, defenseless. When I turned out the lights and crawled into bed each night, a single blazing question haunted me: Why am I here on this planet?

I didn’t know. Nothing made sense anymore. The conveyor built of my lift had broken down. While my peers pursued careers, relationships, and began having children, creating families of their own, I would sit tongue-tied among them. Until I stopped sitting among them at all, because it was simply too uncomfortable for all of us.

I was being pulled more and more inward. But I had no idea about how to proceed. Even so, I applied a blunt stubbornness to this seeming anti-drive consuming me. I say anti-drive because it didn’t appear that I was being driven toward anything, I was only being driven away from everything that I’d thought was normal up to that point.

For the person who I’d been, very focused, very linear, the experience was disconcerting. Everything I’d believed myself to be, every image I’d envisioned for my future, the people who’d formed the core of my life, were gone. No longer available to me. Because an inward force was pulling me away from all that, toward what?

I hadn’t a clue.

At that time, I experimented with returning to the religion of my youth. However, once again, it didn’t take. I floundered through 12 step groups, astrology readings, consciousness raising groups, psychotherapy, depth psychology, new age philosophies, yoga, varieties of bodywork … whatever held out some hope of helping me restore a stable center. Because, really, that’s what I was searching for. Born from sheer desperation, rather than any quality of saintliness or desire to be “spiritual”, I was seeking a stabilizing force.

At the core of that journey was a deep grieving for the loss of the relationship with my mother. The woman who’d taught me to pray at night:

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

My mother and her family were steeped in religion. My father and his family were not. I was always blessed with seeing the merits of both arguments: The one for God; and the one for faith being only a fantastical pursuit which, in the end, would yield nothing.

That inner conflict has always set me at odds with organized religion. On the one hand, I’ve had my own personal experience of the divine (thus, ordinary mystic) but I’ve always found the attitudes of organized religion to be onerous, whether it’s been the use of guilt and/or fear as primary persuaders or the hypocrisy and hunger-for-power of its all-too-human practitioners.

The religious/spiritual landscape more often than not has left me feeling turned-off. Yet I’ve never been able to suppress this yearning, this hunger, completely. And I’m most centered, joyful and productive when I’m engaged with THAT THING, call it whatever you like. In my heart, and in my head, and in my writing, I call it many names: God, the divine, that energy, the infinite, THAT THING.

And yet, I tend to wander off the path.

About five years after my initial shift, I began to re-engage with the external world. The experience of the divine, my connection with THAT THING, eased from the center of my life to the periphery. It never went away completely, but nor did it consume me as it had for those first five years. My life unfolded, and it seemed that the “inner gold” I’d mined in those precious five years, kept me going for over two decades. I no longer searched for a spiritual home. And since I’ve never had faith in spiritual teachers—there are just too many horror stories of students being led astray and/or abused by all too human gurus and/or priests—I was content to muddle along my way, mostly on my own.

And then … (Come back for The Prayer Cycle on Friday!)

On Writing War & Grace: A Plot Twist for Melia?!?!?

Is Being Spiritual Being Weird?

I made the changes to my social media accounts and website to prepare for the Sunburned blog series on the evening of October 12, 2015. That morning, I realized a new moon was pending, so I searched Youtube for some insight. Astrology often gets a bad rap, and I’m not here to defend it’s limitations, but “on earth as it is in heaven” [the lord’s prayer, christian], “as above, so below” [hermes trismegistus, pagan] … a little spiritual riffing there, hehe … so, on occasion I enjoy listening to the astrological mystics.

And that morning, I stumbled upon this crazy, weird, and completely wonderful video created by Timothy Halloran of Rasa Lila Healing [rasa-lila roughly translates to "the dance of divine love”, hindu], which I’ve embedded below. And as I watched the video with a huge grin on my face—for sure—I thought yes … Yes … YES!

Because, unless you’ve been super busy and/or massively overwhelmed you’ve probably noticed “the times they are a changing” [bob dylan, singer/songwriter].

What was it about this video, on that morning, that so enchanted me?

Well, if I had to narrow it down to a single quality, it would have to be it’s exuberant weirdness! And if there’s one word I’ve fallen back on to describe myself again and again throughout my life it’s: weird. So … I felt a really special kinship with Timothy’s passionate call to embody [I’ll be creating a glossary with my current definition of spiritual terms along the way, soon …] our own special brand of weirdness, because …

"the uniqueness that makes us totally weird is our individual brilliance and we cannot suppress any of that if we truly want to live in harmonious relationships”

I totally concur with this point of view, and it was awesome to connect with such an impassioned expression of it on the day I embarked on a new endeavor … which might be considered: kind of weird!

Other issues Timothy addresses as he walks us through the astrological aspects occurring in the skies are: equality, the divine feminine and masculine principles, our need to listen to others’ points of view to evolve, and what it’s like to live on the edge of profound change.

In the end, he touches on another concept that is near and dear to my heart: Bridging. He addresses bridging on two levels: within the individual—the bridging of our highest spiritual ideals with our mundane, “selfish” desires; and within community—the bridging of the “unique autonomous individual, doing my thing in the world, and my thing that I’m doing in the world is simultaneously contributing to the benefitting of others”

This video is such a great share for kicking off Sunburned, because the essence of what I believe spirituality is:

“By giving my uniqueness I create harmony in the world”

Allow that to settle deep within you.

More Astrological Forecasts from Timothy

RasaLilaHealing

Thank you, Timothy for helping me kick off this series. Everyone else, take a 30-minute break and enjoy the dance of Rasa-Lila’s vibrant cosmic perspective yourself. I'll be back on Friday.