Engaged Spirituality & Mystic Activism

What will you cultivate in the coming year?

Happy New Year! With the dawning of a new calendar year, we have a ripe opportunity for checking in with our vision and intentions for living our spiritual or philosophical values and priorities, and for how we might want to 'be the change' we wish to see in the world -- and do it in our own unique, authentic way.

Though we might occasionally doubt or question it, judging from what we see happening in the world around us, most if not all religious, spiritual, wisdom, and philosophical traditions have guidelines for 'engaged spirituality' -- or 'walking your talk'.

Some traditions call this 'engaged spirituality', and others call it 'cultivation'. Some don't call it anything other than living 'the Way'. What weaves through all of these paths is a conscious intention to have a more whole, healed, and healing effect on the world, including one's own little corner of the world.

In choosing to cultivate 'higher values' such as loving-kindness, conscious intention, compassion, graciousness, gracefulness, creativity, joyful responsibility, consideration, integrity, gratefulness, and other 'virtues', we immediately shift our perspective, our energy, and our experience ... and others' experience of us. The more we 'cultivate' -- just as one might cultivate the soil, seeds, and plants in a garden -- the more our experience and effect becomes refined and lovely.

Take a moment to consciously choose a few 'higher values' you'd like to cultivate during the coming year -- ways you'd like to be, feel, and have others experience when they interact with you; ways you'd like to 'gift' the world around you and, through your ripple effect through the collective mind, the world at large.

Then, find ways to integrate those values as mantras, intentions and practices in your prayers, meditations, vision, goals, day to day behaviors, and aligned projects. You'll find before long that 'cultivation' is far from a dead or laborious practice, though it may be more challenging than anything else.

Despite the challenge, though, you'll find a sense of meaning, a growing gracefulness and effectiveness, and a greater sense of peacefulness and purpose that is independent of passing circumstance.

The muses and guides at Ivy Sea can help you 'engage' with your higher potentials, purpose, vision, and values in your life and livelihood during the coming year. You'll find a wealth of inspiring resources at Ivy Sea Online, and can call us to schedule a co-creative vision or right-livelihood consultation.

Wishing you very well in the coming year! May it begin in a bright and blessed way for you, and grow into a part of your journey that is rich and joyful.

Sincerely,
Jamie

Jamie Walters is the founder of Ivy Sea and the author of, among other things, Big Vision, Small Business, the critically acclaimed conscious-enterprise and spirit-centered right-livelihood guide published by Berrett-Koehler. She is a respected horizon-walker and guide for humane business, right livelihood, and engaged or embodied spirituality -- including the embodiment and expression of the Divine Feminine, and a 'reconnection' to and expression of your own brilliant Divine Spark.

Learn more about Jamie and Ivy Sea at Ivy Sea Online.

Thinking about spiritual practice

Over the past few weeks, I noticed a theme coming to my awareness. Whether in my own observations of my practice, or talking with friends and collaborators, the theme of 'the quick fix' or 'positive change by osmosis' kept coming up. Even in a cafe, enjoying some solo reflection time, the theme arose out of the loud conversation nearby.

The gist is that many hope for positive shifts that create more wellness, balance, harmony, joy, prosperity, and meaning (among other things), but for many, it never moves out of the intellectualizing of the shift and potential pathways, or worse, simply talking about it in a noncommital way -- and allotting much more airspace to all that is wrong (and hence why the 'shift' is desired!). We see it individually, and because organizations are groups of individuals, we see it in many of our organizations.

For some, this might manifest in the 'just give me a pill' or 'cut it out' mentality that frustrates truly caring healthcare professionals (brought to you by the thriving pharmaceutical industry). For others it might manifest in a hopping from coach to coach and seminar to seminar or church to church, wanting the 'change by osmosis' -- thinking one can just buy it or soak it up in a session or workshop or Sunday service, without having to actually do the harder, more time-consuming work of changing old habits, beliefs, thought patterns, and choices.

Yes, that all adds up to the 'R' word -- responsibility, and personal responsibility, not the kind that one delegates to someone else or another time, class, culture, or generation. The subject of 'personal responsibility' has never been a popular one, nor has it been joyfully received by the masses, who prefer a quick-fix-it pill to having to wake up and do something.

This dissociation between desire, thought, personal responsibility, and action rarely leads to place we want to be. Just read the news headlines and you'll quickly see some of dissociation's prime destinations: fear, scarcity thinking, environmental degradation, greed, wounded relationships, disconnectedness, chronic and acute unwellness. But there is a choice, though perhaps not a quickie magic pill.

As many of us know -- and all of us know deep within our core -- the joy, meaning, and real change stem from the 'narrow path' of Sophia that Jesus spoke of (as did many others). The virtues or 'noble paths' of patience, compassion, loving-kindness, faith, right thinking, right livelihood, and so on come from a minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, choice by choice commitment to show up and make them real.

Wishing you very well.

Until next time,
Jamie