Discovering Jeff Brown and his work has been empowering, affirming, and clarifying. It’s given me additional language for what I’ve long been discovering on my spiritual journey and helped me to connect more dots of the pieces of the mosaic of my life and how all of this is connected to what is happening in our world. Understanding the individual and collective impact of patriarchal spirituality while integrating a grounded spirituality leads us away from disassociation, separation, and fear and into deepening wholeness, truth, empathy and compassion, wisdom and love — all human qualities which our world hungers for and which are so deeply needed. — Molly
"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
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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
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The wool has been pulled over our eyes. Men who were too unhealthily egoically to admit that they couldn’t deal with their humanness, their feelings, their trauma, had to find a system that smokescreened 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.
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 "new cage" teachers claiming that they are liberating us from the world. They aren't- they are just offering up a more perilous prison cell. 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).
They 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. On Mother Earth.
— Jeff Brown
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