Jeff Brown: Contrasting Grounded Spirituality With Patriarchal Spirituality

Deep gratitude once again to Jeff Brown. I’ve been lacking a depth of language and framing for all of this that Jeff so beautifully weave into focus. Deep bow.

Like many of us, family trauma combined with wounding cultural messages left me deeply disassociated, addicted, instinct injured, and wandering into experiences which perpetuated my fragmented hurting heart rather than my healing into greater wholeness.

I once thought Eckhart Tolle was amazing. I tried to share him with everyone, including my oldest son who was wise enough to say no thanks. One of my spiritual friends turned me onto David Hawkins.... although I should have had more red flags go up when he muscle tested himself to be at the same level of enlightenment as Jesus. I tried on The Secret, which didn’t work out so well. I could go on.

Gratefully, after many years of exploring and trying on so much that was not helpful, I’ve found my way through and out of much of the fog and the fragmentation that so much of the New Age teachings perpetuate.

Specifically through just recently discovering the work of Jeff Brown I’m now feeling greater clarity and strength about the need to speak out and share the truth of how trying to just rise above ourselves only increases our disassociation, illusions, and suffering — and while also sending ripples outward which harm our families, communities, nation, and world.

What Jeff speaks to has been like finding more pieces to the mosaic that empowers myself and others to dissolve more of our disassociated fragmented selves and integrate this experiential consciousness into greater wholeness. I’m just so grateful. Thank you. Molly

 

By Jeff Brown

 

Patriarchal Spirituality: Those ungrounded and inhumane "spiritual" models that have been fostered by emotionally armored, self-avoidant men.

These models share some or all of the following beliefs:

* the ego is the enemy of a spiritual life

* the "monkey mind" is the cause of suffering

* your feelings are an illusion

* your personal identifications and stories are necessarily false

* witnessing your pain transforms it

* your body is a spiritually bankrupt toxic quagmire

* the only real consciousness is an "absolute" and "transcendent" one

* stillness and silence are THE path

* isolation is the best way to access "higher states"

* there is no "self"

* meditation is THE royal road to enlightenment

* enlightenment actually exists

* formlessness over form

* the ultimate path is upward and vertical

* real spirituality exists independent of our humanness

In fact, most of the above is a blatant lie. Here are more accurate hypotheses about the nature of human life:

* A healthy ego is beautifully essential to healthy functioning

* The monkey mind is fed by the monkey heart (the unresolved emotional body)

* Many of our identities and stories are fundamental to who we are, where we have been, why we are here

* Healing your pain transforms it; watching it is only a preliminary step

* Our bodies are our spiritual temples

* The only "real" consciousness is one that integrates all that we are and all that this is

* Stillness and silence are only one path; many people prefer movement and sound

* There is no "higher" state (we aren’t birds). But connection may be the best way to access deepened states

* There is a magnificent self; the work is to align it with your sacred purpose, not to deny it altogether

* Meditation is not THE royal road; it’s one road, and it is not any more effective than embodied movement and emotional release as a clarification and transformation tool

* Enlightenment does not exist; enrealment does. (Be real now.) And it’s a relative experience, changing form as we and this changes form

* We are form, and we are here to in-form our humanness

* If there is an "ultimate path," it's downward (rooted) and horizontal

* There is no distinction between our spirituality and our humanness

The wool has been pulled over our eyes. Men who were too unhealthy egoically to admit that they couldn’t deal with their humanness, their feelings, their trauma, had to find a system that smoke-screened their avoidance. They found it. It’s called "Enlightenment." It’s also called "Spiritual Mastery." And it usually involves leaving the world, in one form or another. This way, they can convince themselves and others that they have mastered the one true path.

In fact, Enlightenment is just a construct that is intended to avoid the multi-aspected nature of reality. In fact, they are mastering nothing. They are merely fleeing their fragmentation, their confusion, and the fact that they don't know how to find their center in the heart of the world. Don't be fooled. They know less about reality than day to day people. They know less about reality than those who live from their hearts. They are camouflaging their unresolved trauma below a 'realization mask.'

What we need now are models that lead us back into our hearts, into relatedness, into a deep and reverential regard for the self. Those models may invite us to detach in an effort to see ourselves through a different lens, but they will not leave us out there, floating into the eternal emptiness and calling that a life.

Detachment is a tool; it’s NOT a life.

The models we need will then invite us back into our bodies, back into our hearts, and back into relatedness with each other. (No more "enlightened" masters sitting in caves while the women of the village bring them food. If you can’t find your transformation in the village, you haven’t found shit). The new models will invite us to integrate what we find "out there" with who we are "in here." They will invite us to embody the now, rather than to pretend we have found it in the heart of our dissociation.

It’s time to co-create spiritual models that begin, and end, within our wondrous humanness.

It’s not "out there," dear friends. It’s right here, inside these aging body temples.

(This perspective reflects some part of the message at the heart of 'Grounded Spirituality'. That book both deconstructs and calls out patriarchal spirituality & the new cage movement, and plants seeds for the new models we need. I am working diligently on the crafting of one of those models now, and I encourage anyone interested, to craft their model to bring to the world. It is one thing to critically review what we have been calling spirituality for centuries. It is quite another to help us to find a new way. I have focused my attention in both directions, for years. And it would be wonderful if developing new spiritualities became a point of focus for many, so that we can save this bloodied species.)

 

Please go here for more information on Jeff Brown

— his books, his journey, and his work:

https://jeffbrown.co/