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Integral Spirituality "Almost everyone who undertakes a true spiritual path will discover that a profound personal healing is a necessary part of his or her spiritual process. When this need is acknowledged, spiritual practice can be directed to bring such healing to body, heart, and mind. This is not a new notion. Since ancient times, spiritual practice has been described as a process of healing. The Buddha and Jesus were both known as healers of the body, as well as great physicians of the spirit."
An integral spiritual path is one that acknowledges our need for transformation at all levels of our being, body, mind, soul, and spirit. It is a path that incorporates practices aimed at liberating our whole being. Unfortunately few religions provide a deeply integral path. In the West many spiritual aspirants are left to their own initiatives when it comes to engaging in an integral spiritual path. This leads to mixing and matching among various traditions in an attempt to create a custom path. While this is admirable, it can also be detrimental if the assemblage of practices is not well matched. It can also be problematic if the practices, particularly the more spiritual, are haphazardly practiced. The spiritual practices of many wisdom traditions are intentionally arranged to benefit the practitioner's ongoing transformation. Like training the body, the most difficult exercises are left for when the student has gained sufficient experience, endurance, and insight. For many contemporary seekers, the Hindu path of Yoga can be relatively integral, combining as it does practices for the body, study of the Vedic texts, and meditation, however it does not give much weight to psychological integration as it is focused on the dissolution of the ego-self. Contemporary spiritual seekers can also turn to Michael Murphy and George Leonard's Integral Transformative Practice as described in their book The Life We Are Given. They outline a daily practice that can be followed with relative ease by the average person and which has no religious bias. Personally I believe that the best integral path is explored from within an existing tradition while making use of other tradition's teachings and practices and taking advantage of modern depth psychology. For instance, a Christian might go back and begin reading the classic texts of Christian mystics, such as the Dark Night of the Soul by, St. John of the Cross, Walter Hilton's The Stairway of Perfection, the anonymous The Cloud of Unknowing, and the writings of St. Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, and Meister Eckhart, among others. They could study the Orthodox tradition of Theosis, or union with God. They could then combine this with a daily meditative practice, possibly focusing on the famous Jesus prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. " Their practice could also focus on saying blessings for humanity, or prayers for an end to the suffering of others. They might find it helpful to read and engage in the exercises and meditations found in A Course In Miracles. They might then continue their spiritual practice by exploring other religious teachings, such as Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta and taking practices from them that they feel comfortable with. Added to this would be a regular practice of psychological integration, of therapy or some introspective practice. They could then round out their path by maintaining a healthy diet and a daily regimen of exercise for their body. Of course it would also be recommended that they find a teacher of some sort to help guide them, and some manner of community that they could take solace in. Obviously
such an integral path, with clearly mystical or spiritual practices,
isn't what is being offered in most churches in the West. If we are
to have any hope of a real spiritual revival we should change that.
While we can create a religious revival by returning to the scripture,
we cannot create a spiritual revival without putting scripture into
practice. Jew, Christian, and Muslim alike, must recapture their lost
and maligned mystic heritages and revitalize them in order to foster
a true spiritual revival. Mysticism, the personal experience of the
Divine, is at the heart of spirituality, and must be rescued from its
current obscurity if we are to have any hope of rescuing religion from
its clash with Modernity. The quickest path to this elusive pot of gold
is not a multi-colored rainbow of practices mixed from New Age sources
and ancient texts, but an honest infusion of Divine realization into
the life and teachings of Modern Western religions. Eastern religions
on the other hand can take from the West the introspective practices
of Modern psychology. The transcendence of the ego-self, the ultimate
goal of spiritual and mystic paths, is assisted by the possession of
a healthy and integrated ego-self. Ignoring this fact can lead to more
problems than prophets. An ego-self that is not healthy, repressing
one aspect or another, will not function any better after a mystic experience.
We never lose our ego-self, we only transcend it. An unhealthy ego-self
before transcendence can remain just as unhealthy after transcendence.
Thus we see the many problems with spiritual guides who have had deep
realizations yet still behave in a less than spiritual manner. Only
an integral spiritual path, grounded in an Integral worldview, giving
equal weight to body, mind, soul and Spirit, will escape these concerns
and provide a path toward the liberation of humanity, person by person,
religion by religion, until all are free to experience the Divine directly
in their own hearts.
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