Repost from Jeff Brown
Author of Grounded Spirituality:
“They didn’t go to sit in the meditation cave to enlighten their consciousness. They went there to bypass their issues with the world. They didn’t turn to silence to extinguish the monkey mind. They turned to silence to turn down the volume on their pain (the monkey heart). They didn’t nestle into stillness because it’s THE royal road to the kingdom of God. They nestled into silence because noise ignited their traumas.
They didn’t tame the ego because the ego is the enemy of the sacred. They tamed it because it confronted them with their unresolved humanness. They didn’t purify the body because the body is something less than Divine. They purified the body in an effort to escape their toxicity. They didn’t strive for transcendence because there is anything up there for us. They strove for transcendence because they lacked the courage to live on Mother Earth.
They didn’t seek formlessness because it is our most awakened state. They sought formlessness because their form hurt too much. They didn’t master non-attachment because it is the primary path to self-realization. They mastered non-attachment so they could sidestep the challenges of human relationship. They didn’t shame anger, because anger is a sub-standard emotion. They shamed anger because it triggers their unacknowledged rage. They didn’t shun non-judgment because all judgments are bad. They shunned non-judgment so they could get away with doing anything they wanted.
Friends, we have been fooled for centuries. The patriarchy went to a lot of trouble to camouflage and cloak their personal issues. A whole spiritual world was birthed from their self-avoidance. And it is now time to call it out. It is now time to bury patriarchal spirituality in a graveyard of its own making, and to co-create a spirituality that is grounded in our humanness, our bodies, our feelings, our relationships with each other and Mother Earth. It’s the only way we can save our species.”