Jeff Brown: A Spiritual Imperative

Deep gratitude to Jeff Brown for his books, his journey and his truth-telling, his talks and interviews, and for the deep wisdom and caring for our world that he offers us all. I now add Jeff to the list of my many teachers who have helped guide me ever deeper into my own heart and the loving wisdom that is threaded through us all.

What Jeff Brown describes in the excerpts that I'm sharing below from Grounded Spirituality resonates deeply for me, and in some significant ways parallels my own journey over the past nearly 38 years. As I write this post, I'm aware that so many of us are taught that it’s our human nature to seek escapes, that avoidance of painful “negative” emotions is just normal, that it’s understandable that we regularly reach for that drink or affair or religion or guru or shop till we drop or endlessly work to “rise above” our stories and our egos — all because it’s our human nature and/or because this is the path out of suffering into enlightenment. End of story.

THANK YOU Jeff Brown for illuminating how this is NOT the end of the story! Thank you for illuminating how this is the harmful story we’re fed that’s been normalized for so long and which we often believe it hook, line, and sinker — and I believe to the detriment of us all.

THANK YOU for illuminating how there is a larger human story that is so essential for us to embrace, heal into, embody, and integrate into the depths of our being.

Stories which perpetuate the justification for our disassociation from our divine human selves cause so much devastation and harm. I know. I’ve lived it. And I’ve witnessed it in countless others near to my heart and scattered all over our beautiful hurting Earth.

And there is another way!

I sat down for the first time recently and dove into Grounded Spirituality. It’s the first of 3 books by Jeff that I’ve ordered and received. It’s hard to find the words for how affirming this wisdom is and what a nourishing soothing balm it is for my heart. Perhaps it will be for you, too.

In my last session with my therapist two weeks ago — who I now see every three weeks on zoom — I experienced a great range of deep emotions which were fluid and ebbed and flowed from my heart. Lots of grief. Lots of gratitude. And I spoke to Doug towards the end of our session of my profound gratitude for this extraordinary journey over these many years from my head to my heart. I can feel! There are no words to adequately express my gratitude for the capacity to live with ever growing open-heartedness.

Alongside my gratitude is this place of sadness, tenderness, and compassion. And I wept as I reflected on how lost, how disassociated and fragmented I’d once been, and for so many years. The threads that I followed from my personal grief also led me beyond my own losses and into our collective pain and for all who suffer with being stuck in this disembodied way of living, disconnected from their hearts and the heart of our world. Today I know both experiences — that of often and unknowingly being disconnected from my heart and that of embodying more and more of the depths of my heart and the wholeness of myself as a human being.

At the end of our session, I affirmed to my therapist that today I experience my lifelong journey as being one of integration into greater and greater wholeness. It is one of an ever deepening grounded spirituality.

Perhaps later the same day as my therapy session was when I saw a friend’s Facebook post with one of Jeff Brown’s quotes. I’d never heard of him before. And it just blew me away with how deeply it touched my heart. Now, two weeks later, discovering the wisdom embodied in Jeff’s work feels like a true Grace-filled gift.

And one which is so needed in our world. Deep bow of respect, appreciation, and gratitude for all those who act in some way as midwives to our deep healing, awakening, integration, and transformation. May we all come to embody an ever growing respect and reverence for our holy whole selves and our sacred interconnection with all of life. May we experience a grounded spirituality which guides us into knowing our own wisdom and our deep capacity to love. This is truly how we heal ourselves and our world.— Molly

 

 "If we don't humanize our spirituality, 

how will we humanize our world?"

 

A Spiritual Imperative

Excerpts from the Preface of Grounded Spirituality

By Jeff Brown

 

We are a magnificent species. Endowed with remarkable gifts and abilities, each of us carries a profound and luminous purpose at the core of our being. Each of us is here with an unlimited bounty of treasures to bring to the world. This extraordinary human birth, this powerful physical form, this uniquely nuanced personality, all the threads and strands of our consciousness — are not cases of mistaken identity. We are not accidental tourists on this planet. We are here because we have a sacred offering to bring. We are here because we are intrinsically valuable and wholeheartedly worthy. We are here because we are needed here.

 

And at the same time, we are at war with ourselves. It's a nasty, insidious war, one that has left few of us unscathed. Somewhere along the way, many of us became separated from our authentic humanness. We became fractured, adrift, severed from what is real. We moved further and further away from the inner wells that nourish us. Our self-alienation is now bleeding out everywhere we look, showing up in the forms of: misplaced aggression, meaningless materialism, psychotropic drug dependency, a perpetual dishonoring of the Divine Feminine, a lack of reverence for the earth that breathes us, and a blatant disregard for those humans we share a planet with. As brilliantly as we have excelled and evolved on a technological and virtual level, many of us are still at war with our humanness. We are still not at home in our own sacred skin.

 

In the throes of our estrangement, it becomes difficult to see through to its source. It is easy to imagine that our self-alienation is caused by something outside of us. But make no mistake — most of this madness is a direct reflection of our unhealed and misaligned inner worlds. We are manifesting our inner fragmentation everywhere and it has now reached a stage of dangerous perversity, threatening our very existence as a species. There is no time left to distract from the core questions of our lives. The present state of the world requires that we dig deep, and get to the root of our fracture. World events have made it perfectly clear that we can no longer find our answers independent of the self, itself. There is real work that must be done now, within each of us, to right this earth ship and to bring us into alignment. All self-avoidant flights of fancy must be grounded until further notice.

 

At the heart of this war is our fundamental amnesia as to who we are and why we are here. That is, what is our purpose here on earth? What does it mean to live a life of meaning? What is it to be a self-actualized species? What ways of being will bring us together, and into co-creative alignment — with ourselves, with each other, and with the natural world? What does it mean to be fully conscious, for this entire human experience? What is it to be fully alive? What is REAL spirituality?

 

To answer these age-old questions — we have often relied on systems of belief. This has taken manifold forms across the globe: world religions, scriptures, self-proclaimed masters and gurus, Father God in the sky, and a whole gamut of teachings and methodologies. With unrelenting determination, we have sought many of our answers outside of ourselves. And through the course of 2000+ years, these systems haven't managed to heal our fundamental divide. They may have served limited purposes, but they have not remedied our fractured awareness. In fact, many have made our fragmentation more pronounced and taken us further away from healthy wholeness. One thing has become certain: If we continue to look for our answers and direction outside of our embodied experience — we will not find our way home. 

 

It is time we looked in another direction — right at the heart of our humanness. Not out there — in the alleged wisdom of others — but deep within our own uniquely constituted human blueprint. Not the self-reflective brand of looking within that is confined to our thinking and rational mind, but the one that integrates every aspect of what we are into the equation: our emotional bodies, our flesh temples, our intuitive knowings, and yes, even our often misunderstood ego-self. I am not talking about a narcissistic honoring of the self — I am talking about a healthy and reverential regard towards our manifold components — in the full spectrum of what we are. Deep within our brilliant natural-born selfhood lie the answers as to who we are, and why we are here. We don't just have those answers — we actually are those answers. They make their home at the heart of us, continually feeding us information about our path and purpose. We just have to learn to attune to the subtle intonations and intimations of our inner knowing. We have to learn how to recognize and honor our inherent wisdom. We carry the information we seek.

 

This perspective runs counter to the culturally embedded tendency to diminish and desacralize the self. If we weren't born 'sinful,' we were born histrionic (women) or violent (men). We were born allegedly wild, and the only way to contain our unstoppable life-force was to condition and repress the self, making us dependent on religious institutions and marketing constructs to frame our lens on reality. When we are in a weakened state of fragmentation, it is easy to be subjugated. If you are not standing in the strength of your own embodied intactness, you will invariably seek a sense of wholeness from outside systems. You will have no other choice but to look to them to direct your path and purpose. Someone else's version of God, someone else's idea of truth, someone else's idea of where to spend your money, someone else's version of purpose, and someone else's idea of your inherent worth.

 

It is time to put an end to this delusion. It is time to restore power back to the individualized self and to see it for what it is — as the only authentic course in miracles. Far too many of us are spending our precious lives apologizing for our wondrous humanness. It has been systemically and collectively shamed — and somewhere along the way, we bought into it. Yet, the truth is — we are no mistake. We are a benevolently intended miracle in process, each here with a uniquely constituted sacred purpose residing in the bones of our being. Our life's work is not to shame and shun our magnificent selfhood — it is to celebrate and embrace it. It is to plumb its depths for encoded information as to who we are and why we are here. It is to embody and integrate all of the gifts and callings that we came into life to manifest. This is how we regain our sovereignty and how we evolved as human-beings.

 

Before we can identify our reasons for being, we have to arrive here, in the most inclusive sense. If we are disempowered, distracted, dissociated, or in any way fragmented — our experience of the here, now, will be intrinsically limited. And through that limited lens, we can only access a tiny splinter of possibility for our lives. We can only see the whole picture and actualize the full range of our destiny — to the extent that we are, ourselves, whole.

 

In order to arrive here, we must first acknowledge something that the powers-that-be often want us to forget. That we are all wounded. That we are all trauma survivors (to one degree or another). That we all long to be healed. The age-old established structures that were built on a maligned sense of self — are dependent on us forgetting this. When we focus on our own healing, it severs their reins of control. It empowers our voice. It strengths our intuition. It reminds us that our hunger for personal meaning cannot be satisfied by religious edicts, media sound-bites, or substitute gratifications. Our buried wounds and feelings keep us fractured and easily manipulated. Healing them brings us back into a strong, stable and rooted selfhood. Once there, we can no longer be controlled, and we begin to see more clearly the ways that all of us — even those in positions of authority and power — have been imprisoned by a divisive consciousness. It may have served some of us on certain levels, but it has served none of us from the perspective of a wholly integrated human-being.

 

The truth is that we have been denying our woundedness for centuries, and it has only made things words. We are pretending all is well, while stockpiling our grief and anger. Denial has trapped us deep within our woundedness. A few more generations of unacknowledged trauma, and we will all be lost at sea. The weight of our undigested baggage is making us mad. Because we all know where the unresolved material goes — back into destruction. It builds into a cache of weapons that turn inward against the self, or outward against others. It is imperative that we clear the trauma stockpile before it reaches a tipping point where we no longer care about our impact on the planet, or each other. We must address this at the root. Healing is the only thing that can save us. Time's up, in more ways than one....

 

... At the end of the day, when all other debates have been resolved, we will be left with the one that threads through them all: Human Consciousness. What does it mean to be a wholly human and to live a truly spiritual life? In what ways are we the same, and in what ways are we uniquely constituted and intended? What is an inclusive, wholly integrated consciousness? If we continue to limit our visions of possibility to compartmentalized spiritualities, we will most assuredly obstruct our collective expansion. We will imprison ourselves in our own alienation. And many more of us will be led astray, walking a path that is not truly our own.

 

To avoid this, we must embrace a conscious scrutinization of that which is said to be 'spiritual.' Nothing accepted at face value, no stone left unturned... A conscious scrutinization bows before no lineage, unless it honestly reflects and genuinely supports our individual and collective evolution. If we don't acknowledge dangerous spiritual teachings, the world of sacred possibility that we seek will never come to pass. The only sacred cow is truth.

 

At the heart of this debate must be a bold and brave willingness to examine the leaders, teachers, and influencers themselves. To look beyond their charismatic or hypnotic presentation, to the person beneath. To do a deep dive into the psychological factors that shape their perspective. To look closely and honestly at any possible interface between their unresolved issues and the models they advocate. To challenge the conditioned belief that 'spirituality' is above and beyond confrontation and reproach. To courageously call out untruths wherever we see them. Just because they call themselves spiritual teachers or leaders doesn't mean that we shouldn't critically review their perspectives. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't get to know the human-being below their revered identities. If anything, it's all the more imperative that we do. 

 

This level of cutting honesty and discernment will require us to pierce the veils of protection that shroud many spiritual teachers. Repression is an industry and the ungrounded spiritual community is one of it primary merchants....

 

...Examining the real-time implications of spiritual teachings also means looking closely at their distorted cultural roots. At some point on my own journey towards wholeness, I began to see the parallels between much of the 'spiritual' world — particularly those communities fixated on transcending their humanness, and the greedy capitalistic structures that permeate our Western society. It became clear to me that it is all part of the same power-seeking patriarchal culture — one that focuses on individual mastery at the expense of connectiveness, one that focuses on being above rather than being among, one that denies the value and significance of the world of feeling, one that refuses to honor the earthy and relational wisdom of the Divine Feminine. We see this unhealthy self-centeredness in the single-minded focus of the unconscionable capitalist who seeks to accumulate at the expense of all else. On the endless quest for more, his obsession with achievement and accumulation is grossly confused with self-actualization. And we see it just as vividly in the ungrounded spiritual movement, where a vast cadre of pseudo non-dualists seek to master a unified field of consciousness while bypassing the very substance of their humanness... So busy imagining themselves as actualized or enlightened, they do nothing to advance humankind. So busy pondering their no-navels and trivializing our human story, they are oblivious to the impending threats that we looking us square in the eyes....

 

... Of course, as we expose those philosophies that don't serve — we must also seize the opportunity to delineate spiritual models that offer the greatest liberation for all. We must work together to develop consciousness paradigms that reflect a more horizontal and connective way of being, that celebrate an intuitive and empathic way of relating, that revere the role that emotional healing plays in transformation and in the fostering of awakening states. We need models that understand that healing our stories and growing in relationship are as, or even more, fundamental to our spiritual development, as solitary path pursuits. We don't need more disembodied men meditating in caves while the village suffers. We need embodied humans healing together, communing and exploring the relational field as the grist for our spiritual development. We need accomplishment to become a relational construct; that is, we co-create together, with mutual benefit as our shared goal. We need models that lead us back into our hearts, into a deep and reverential regard for the self. These models may invite us to detach momentarily, in an effort to see ourselves through a different lens, but they will not leave us stranded out there, floating into the eternal emptiness and calling that a life. We need models that invite us to integrate what we find 'out there' with who are 'in here.' Without their new paradigm, we are at risk of inviting humanity further and further away from the field for our soul's expansion — human life, itself. If we don't humanize our spirituality, how we we humanize our world?

 

It is time for a version of spirituality that is rooted in whole-humanness, fiercely unafraid to embrace all that we are. At the core of these new models must be the assertion that real spirituality exists right at the heart of our daily lives. From this perspective, the most spiritual being will be the one who is the most engaged in and connected to all aspects of the human experience. For too many years, we have been leading humanity away from the place where the answers reside — the embodied, enheartened, enrealed, enlivened SELF. It's not outside the self, for God's sake — it IS the self. The magnificent purpose-full self. The self that is in the everything, the self that is our portal to divinity itself. The self that is no accident, the stories that are no accident, the difficulties and challenges that are no accident, our nitty-gritty physical composition (imperfections and all). Not self-realization that leads us to find our awakening outside of the self — but that finds it deep within it. Grounded Spirituality.

 

From this truly self-honoring vantage point, one cannot ignore our impact on each other and the planet — because one understands that all of it is sacred. That all of it MATTERS. That we are not connected in theory — but connected in fact. And then we are inspired to take action, in every sphere of society, to craft structures, systems, and laws that honor, encourage, and connect us. With those in place, no one gets left behind, and every human gets an opportunity to participate and improve their life conditions. Inclusivity — within and between us, and at the heart of a humanized notion of spirituality — is not just a 'politically correct ' progressive notion. It is way of being where every one of us matters. Every struggle. Every wound. Every dream. All sacred. And when we believe that the plight of the self matters, we cannot help but work together to grow our humanity forward.

 

 * * * * *

 

Please go here for Jeff Brown's website:

https://jeffbrown.co/