The Soul Embodied

For the Jews a disembodied soul was unthinkable. They understood the body as the vehicle of Wisdom. Likewise the Greeks knew that the body was the bestower of gnosis, knowledge not of the mind but of the sensings of the body, what Eugene T. Gendlin would call the felt sense - sense being meaning - derived not by logic but through an intimate communion as the felt interconnections of all the cells and their interface with the world, physically and imaginaly.

Modern man has become disconnected from the body and theology replaces communion with the living Spirit. Only the healers still explore what the theologians and ministers have forgotten... that Spirit is a life-force, an energy which animates body and mind. The felt sense or felt meaning is the perception of this life energy, a direct knowing of Spirit and its experience as Presence, operative as a power for evolutionary change.

By this omission, personal transformation has become the exception rather than the norm. By this omission preaching has proven itself impotent over the long haul and teaching become a misdirection into the abstractions of conceptual understanding resulting is violence. The need today within religious bodies is to restore the meaning of Spirit as a life energy and encourage the cultivation of a body based knowing - a knowing which is pre-verbal and a product of information processing one million times greater than the conscious mind can achieve.

Of course the great mystics have understood and the quantum biologist is discovering, that the body is really an amalgam of many subtle energies which form a blueprint for our garment of flesh and blood. What we see in the mirror is but an instrument of the living body, and the instrument can become damaged. Yet the energy body retains its knowing of perfect functioning and restoration as well as transformation become thus available.

Now a mirror has its function as the eye that sees can not otherwise see itself. What the mirror of flesh reveals is qualities and attributes of the body energetic that it might better know itself. So the the mirror provides a feedback loop.

So for me - to be more precise - the practice of Spiritual Direction is energy based, combining the knowledge streams of Gendlin's Focusing - exploring the "felt meaning" experience - and of modern energy workers in the domain of healing. It then becomes a skill of learning to allow the Body wisdom to unfold as energy and information in a contemplative healing process of Self revelation.