Over the years, I have often been asked, “How does Incarnational Spirituality address the problems of trauma and suffering? How can we be sacred individuals, beings of Light, when it’s obvious there’s so much darkness and brokenness within humanity—and within each of us?”
I have always felt this is a vitally important question, one not to be taken lightly or ignored. But at the same time, I have not felt ready to answer it. To understand why, I need to explain something of the origin of Incarnational Spirituality and the vision that has guided my work for more than sixty years.
Before I do, however, let me say that I have never felt that IS in its current form is a finished or complete package. It is an evolving approach to human wholeness, individually and collectively. A human being is a synergy of body, psyche, subtle energies, and spirit. Ultimately, wholeness depends on the coherence and integration of all these parts, which means that, when and where necessary, healing must take place at each of these levels. A full expression of Incarnational Spirituality would, in order to support an individual’s unique incarnation, address the healing of suffering and trauma through a holistic blend of somatic, psychological, energetic, and spiritual modalities.
This is the future I see for Incarnational Spirituality, and it will require people trained in all these modalities working together to blend their wisdom and skills in service to the individual as a wholeness. Fortunately, IS is already attracting such people.
Before Incarnational Spirituality can unfold its future, though, I’d like you to understand why it has evolved the way it has up to this point.
I have always been aware of a subtle energy dimension in which the physical world is embedded. Occasionally, I would encounter a place that held uncomfortable and even scary energies, but for the most part, I experienced this energetic world as a place of vitality and joy. It was as if behind the surface of the world the most beautiful music was playing, with disharmonious chords occurring here and there.
When I was seven, I experienced a vaster and even more joyous and harmonious realm, a spiritual realm, a realm of Light. During that experience, I touched into my soul and even went on to witness the process of my own incarnation from those realms of Light into the physical world. What was most striking about this experience was how beautiful and radiant the physical world looked to my soul and the joy and love that I felt for the Earth as I took incarnation. I describe this experience in more detail in my memoir, Apprenticed to Spirit.
From that time onward, I was aware of an overlay of joy that was present in the subtle energy fields of the world around me, areas of disharmony and negativity notwithstanding. The fundamental underpinnings of the world were those of love and Light, and as an incarnate soul, I was part of that Light.
When I was seventeen and about to enter college, I was granted a vision of my future. In it, I saw a human figure, genderless like a department store mannequin, that was translucent and radiating Light from within itself. A voice accompanied this vision and said in effect, “Incarnation is a sacred act, and the incarnate individual is a being of Light. A new spirituality is emerging that will honor and celebrate this, empowering individuals to bring their love and their Light into the world. Your life and work is to take part in this emergence.”
This was my first introduction to the core ideas behind Incarnational Spirituality, even though I didn’t know it at the time. To my surprise, it was only three years later that I began this work and entered into a co-creative partnership with a non-physical spiritual mentor I called “John,” as well as with other subtle and spiritual allies. However, thirty-five years passed before I gave the name “Incarnational Spirituality” to what I was doing and teaching.
Working with John and with the subtle and spiritual worlds was, without question, an experience of working with joy and Light and love. However, early on in my training with John (most of which is detailed in Apprenticed to Spirit for anyone who is interested), he had me experience a layer of woundedness and suffering within the collective energy field of humanity. It contained the results of millennia of trauma and was a presence of habit, anger, pain, and negativity that exerted a powerful and distorting effect upon the course of human development. I called it “the Scream,” because it was like an unending scream of pain and a cry for help within humanity—and within each of us as part of humanity.
When John first introduced this “Scream” or energetic layer of collective trauma to me, I wanted very much to engage with it and to bring healing to it. But John was very clear. “It’s important that you know this condition exists within humanity,” he said, “but it’s not your work to deal with it, at least not directly. There are others for whom this is their soul’s work and service to humanity. You have a different calling, which is to represent the joy of incarnation and the sacredness of being part of the physical world.”
John, as it turned out, was the spokesperson for—and my liaison with—a group of spiritual beings who were engaging in an experiment. The overall objective was to heal the collective trauma of humanity and to liberate individuals from the negative habits of the unconscious and often malign influence of “the Scream.”
However, rather than engaging this negative energy and the trauma and suffering it causes directly, their experiment was to find and empower people who could realize the sacredness of their incarnation and consequently shift their sense of identity into one of being a generative source of Light and love in the world.
As one of my subtle colleagues said many years later, long after Incarnational Spirituality had become a coherent teaching, “our objective has been to focus on the healthy energies within humanity as a foundation from which to heal what is unhealthy.”
Representing this “healthy energy” or Light within humanity and the sacredness of the incarnate individual turned out to be a challenging task, and I made mistakes. The joy and vitality of the subtle realms was so real to me, so much a part of the subtle energy structure of the everyday world, that I often overstressed its reality in contrast with the negativity and darkness that people actually experienced. I remember one of the first lectures I gave was about the “illusion of suffering” and the “reality of joy.” I was speaking out of experience, but I was also asking a huge shift of awareness on the part of my audience (most of whom were at least thirty to forty years older than me at the time). These people had known suffering and trauma in their lives, and there had been nothing illusory about it for them. One woman, incensed by what I was saying, rose up in the audience, called me the “Anti-Christ” (the first (though not the last) time that name has been thrown at me!) and walked out.
It had not been my intent to demean or lessen anyone’s experiences of suffering, or the strengths and wisdom they may have gained from them. I simply wanted them to align with a different identity, one resonant with the joy and Light of the spiritual realms. I learned quickly that what I experienced as a natural fact of life was only a theological theory for many others and seemingly difficult to attain. Metaphorically, like Marie Antoinette, I was asking people to “eat cake” when they were actually struggling just to find bread.
However, my inexperience in presenting my message was not the primary challenge, and it was one I improved through practice and training. More disconcertingly, I discovered there were strong habits of mind when it came to defining who we are as incarnate individuals. One of the most powerful was the religious and cultural idea that incarnation itself was a “fallen” state, one that had to be redeemed. Even in the metaphysical and esoteric circles where most of my early work took place, incarnation was seen as a kind of exile from our true home, something to be endured for the lessons we might learn or the karma we might expunge. Messages through channels and mediums from the post-mortem realms often spoke of how happy souls were to be rid of the physical world and its limitations and to finally be back in the realms of Light. Asking people to see the world itself as a realm of Light and themselves as generative sources of Light within it was a big ask. As I say, it flew against habits of mind.
Another challenge was the understandable need to address the suffering and trauma in the world. There were those who felt Incarnational Spirituality was failing in this need. Putting emphasis on realizing one’s sacredness and Light seemed like a “spiritual bypass,” a denial of the need of the world and a retreat into a personal nirvana. And the sad thing is that it could be. I knew people who used spiritual teaching and attunement as a way of escaping or denying the negativity and darkness in the world. But what my spiritual colleagues were offering wasn’t escape; rather, it was being in the world from an unfamiliar and (in our culture) relatively new place, a place of Light and joy and the knowledge of one’s innate sacredness and acting from that place to be a presence of healing and wholeness.
The Greek philosopher Archimedes is reported to have said, “Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the world!” This is the outlook of the spiritual colleagues with whom I have been working. The “lever” in this case is a sense of joyous, generative, sacred identity, and the “place to stand” is the ordinary, everyday physical world with all its beauty and its ugliness, its light and its dark, its health and its illness. A person who can stand in their sovereignty and presence as a person of Light can indeed begin to move the world—at least the part of it with which they are in contact. They become a source of blessing in a world that all too often seems cursed.
Let me be very clear. My intent, and certainly that of my subtle and spiritual colleagues in the non-physical realms, has been and is the liberation of individuals and humanity as a whole from the effects and compulsions of the “Scream.” Their approach, and mine, has been to stand in and draw power from the healthy, sacred, Light-infused energy that is innate in each of us and that itself is untouched by the Scream. This is not a matter of years of spiritual development or attainment; it is a shift of identification. It is a shift from identifying oneself with one’s wounds and trauma, using them to say who one is, to identifying oneself with the soul’s Light that is always present and permeating one’s life. This shift doesn’t deny the presence of trauma, but it gives us a different perspective from which to address it.
Sometimes I’ve seen people make this shift of identity in a very short span of time; other times, it can take years of moving past limiting habits of mind (which themselves can arise from our collective human trauma). But I and all the other IS Lorian faculty have seen it happen and the changes this can make in a person’s life—and the consequent positive effects they can have in bringing Light into the world.
Over the years, I have felt the need–sometimes through overemphasis or focus–to keep the message and vision of Incarnational Spirituality clear and strong in spite of the habits of mind and the very real presence of suffering that would move it in a different direction and turn it into something else. As IS was developing and finding definition and coherency, I felt that to focus on the negative aspects of ourselves, our trauma and our “shadow,” would dilute, if not actually distort, what Incarnational Spirituality was about and what it was trying to accomplish.
IS is about healing our sense of spiritual identity, which is every bit as important as healing ourselves psychologically or physically. It’s part of our wholeness, as is the healing and wholeness of our subtle energy “body” or field, which is also a focus of Incarnational Spirituality.
I am no longer as concerned that the essential message and purpose of IS can be lost, though care must always be taken. Over the years, Incarnational Spirituality has clarified and strengthened its work and its contribution to human wholeness. Increasingly, it takes its place as offering a powerful set of tools to bring our innate spiritual resources into play. But other tools are possible and needed as well, which is why, looking ahead, I am delighted that steps are being made to add to the IS toolbox psychological and somatic forms of healing and empowerment. This recognizes and honors the many levels that make up our incarnation.
Such a holistic approach is necessary if we are to fully engage, neutralize, heal, and dissolve the “Scream” that continues to haunt humanity. This is the promise of the future, one to which Incarnational Spirituality has a unique and important contribution to make.