We all have within us the keys to a life of freedom and fulfillment. But when the outer demands of change and challenge exceed our inner resources, we experience overwhelm.
When a momentary experience resonates with a painful, unprocessed experience from our past, we are triggered, or feel tremors of trauma.
The unprecedented turmoil spewing from our political, racial, climate, and pandemic upheavals threatens the lives we want to be living.
Fear, anger, and helplessness arise and these emotions become cages for us. And then, of course, there’s all the hard stuff from our personal lives that layers onto the outer turmoil, adding more bars to our cages.
The sages, prophets, and wisdom figures through the ages have pointed out that spirituality holds keys to unlock the cages that bind us. Here are four spiritual keys that can open doors and help us live amidst the overwhelm, triggers, and trauma.
Key 1 - The Spiritual Mind
A healthy spirituality shapes how we think. It helps us to take our challenging experiences and place them in a wider frame. Viewed from a vantage point of Spirit, our problems don’t go away but they get right sized. These verses from Christian scripture (Romans 8) provide an example of a frame that bring us into a comforted mind:
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God.
Key 2 - The Spiritual Heart
The heart is the organ of Spirit. Our spirituality blossoms in an open heart, and its fragrance is trust and hope. The quiet heart rests in a knowing that is beyond mere thoughts. A beautiful example of this knowing and trust is expressed through the Sufi prayer that goes as follows:
My heart is at ease knowing that what was meant for me will never miss me, and that what misses me was never meant for me.
Key 3 - The Spiritual Body
When we feel it within the body, spirituality opens up a profound and quiet sensation, an inner spaciousness that arises out of a Still Point. When our body is deeply relaxed and alert, we find our Essential Self contains a quiet center. We open to the ever-present Still Point through relaxed and meditative breathing. The poet TS Eliot reminds us that:
At the still point of the turning world, there the dance is… And there is only the dance.
Key 4 - The Spirit of Relationship
Spirituality is always relational. Whether it’s through our mind, heart, or body, it brings us into a relationship with the Source of life. As it opens the cages in which we live, we are free to be in deeper relationships with others and our world. And at times, as Albert Schweitzer beautifully states, others offer the keys that unlock us and free us into a more expanded Spirit.
Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into flame by an encounter with another human being. Each of us owes the deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this inner light.
So, here are some powerful options for you when you find yourself caged-in by overwhelm, triggers, or trauma:
Shift your frame of perceptions and place your problems within a wider, spiritual mind and frame.
Drop into your open heart and entrust your life, the world, and others to God.
Breathe into the stillness of your body experience and the nourishment of the Still Point.
And open yourself to listen for guidance from the Divine, while drawing upon the support and care of loved ones.
The next time the world seems more than you can manage, which key will you choose?