People often ask me whether or not I am spiritual; the intention of the inquiry, I sense, is to find out if I follow any religious teachings. For this, I’ve recently started to offer a mischievously vague response: I am a mystic. I have an internal conflict with the general concept of spirituality, as it has been white-washed and commodified in Western culture. I also feel within the narrative of spirituality there is an impermeable boundary between physical and spiritual worlds — something that doesn’t align with my lived experience. For me, spirituality is a sensuous experience that flows through my body. Physical intimacy, in its many forms, is spiritual alchemy. The body is sacred, and divination is embodied. The two are inseparable; they are one and whole.
In Western culture, the body started to lose its sacredness when Plato in Ancient Greece created the realm of Forms in his philosophy and separated the body and the soul, claiming that the soul is imprisoned in the body, and that death is its release. In his view the soul is immortal, perfect, and rational, inherently belonging to Forms, the ultimate objects of knowledge, while the body is mortal, imperfect, and a source of distraction and corruption. Nearly 700 years later, a theologian and philosopher Augustine of Hippo, tormented by his own carnal desire, inherited this Platonic dualism and cast the flesh as the site of sin and temptation and elevated the soul as the part of us that could commune with God. He perceived sexual desire and intimate pleasure as spiritually corrupt, and thus he degraded the body to a battlefield of shame and guilt. In 17th century, a French philosopher and scientist Descartes played a role in formalizing the modern concept of mind-body dualism, viewing the body as a machine — material, measurable, and separate from consciousness. He extinguished luscious breaths that flow through our bodies; mysterious echos of consciousness that are felt in our cells; joyful thoughts of love that fill the heart with a flood of light — a profound sense of aliveness, an existential confirmation akin to therefore I am.
More recently the concept of mind-body dualism has expanded into separations of everything from everything else in our existence — desires, thoughts, perceptions, heart, nervous system, faith, body, intuition, spirit, mind, emotions, soul, perspectives, brain, intelligence, consciousness, ego — each has become a legible fragment that is supposed to reside somewhere in our concept of being, and we seem to have forgotten how to weave these fragments together into a human life that breathes, moves, flows, and dances as a vibrant whole. I often wonder if this fragmentation within is a reflection of the division in our society, or vice versa. When we fail to embody the oneness within, how will we be able to experience humanity as a harmonious whole, where you are another me and I am another you? And how will we even begin to fathom this intricate and inextricable tapestry of Earth, where everything is part of everything else?
Mysticism may sound unreal and illogical; it may feel like a fairytale or a fantasy. To me it is a practice of returning to the wholeness of being. It can be as simple as a slight shift in how we breathe — cherish every inhale with gratitude and offer every exhale with intimacy. It is a cycle of giving and receiving through breaths while being attuned to what enters and what leaves. We may be inhaling someone’s loneliness and exhaling our joy. Gradually the practice may expand to thinking with the body, feeling with the mind, understanding with the heart, and discerning with hands. Sitting beside my trees, I feel their ancient wisdom flowing as riverine breaths through my inner forest. The water in their cells carry memories where time feels like an entanglement. The darkness of the earth whispers of heavy sorrow from the other side of the world, to which I offer my tears. This is when the tree bark becomes soft, my being dissolves into the space, and I exist as Earth.