Indwelling Spirit

Another Facebook (FB) comment on a friend's post about our purpose being enjoying and living from our indwelling spirit.  

This is no doubt true, but how does one discover this indwelling spirit, especially when most of our society, including much of any flavor of organized religion is built upon suppressing it, and until you get a taste of it and recognize what you have tasted you do not really have any comprehension of what it actually is you are looking for?

I think my first decade or so of searching desperately for it in recovery from addictions (because life sucked drunk or high and dry and clean or mostly even before I ever used alcohol) I kept missing it because it was not what I thought it would be. Thus, I kept discarding the tiny glimpses I would experience, which turned out to be the path to more and eventually it becoming a strong and consistent source of peace, pleasure, and guidance.

Most of the early glimpses came from surrendering and sharing with another in an honest, deep, and thus vulnerable way, such that I found scripture to be true – “when two or more gather in my name.”

Another good example of a big glimpse that seemed suspicious revolved around emptiness. I often hear people talk of a vast emptiness inside and that used to painfully be my baseline. What I later found was that rather than emptiness it was actually a vast open space within me from which to embrace everything outside me. It had felt like emptiness because I was too scared to connect from a deep level with things beyond myself (or myself for that matter).

I should go on with many more examples but I do not have the gumption at the moment. My purpose with sharing though is to share a little of what experiencing the indwelling spirit looks like because we need to help each other recognize it in our own words and experiences so that it may grow individually and collectively from the small mustard seed into something sturdy enough to support ourselves and others.

If as you say (and I agree), our entire life’s calling is to discover and follow (I would say integrate) our indwelling spirit, then our most important conversation is how to do that, including what it looks like when it is happening.