Spirituality and Plateaus
Sep. 9th, 2006 10:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qosI have several major posts building up about various aspects of my spiritual life. The major themes are integration, transformation, and embodiment. It's all part of The Pentacles Gig: taking what's most important to me out of the abstract, the intellectual, and the interior, and manifesting it in the outer/material world.
I found myself using the phrase "spiritual plateau" in conversation with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
havah_prewett a few weeks ago, and the concept has been sticking with me. Not "plateau" as in an exalted vantage point, but in that long, flat space that seems to be void of progress.
We need the plateaus to adjust to and integrate all that we've achieved in getting there. They aren't the end of the journey, even though they may feel that way. And we have to do the work that goes with them, even if that "work" is rest. Or stillness. Or germination. All the silent, invisible, it-doesn't-look-or-feel-like-anything-is-happening stuff.
I've been trying to move forward, but I'm getting the sense that I haven't done enough integration to be ready yet. I've been trying to rush too quickly from one state of being to the next without having fully integrated what I've learned, without really getting to know who I've become. But during the past weeks, as I've been starting to do that work, I'm feeling the power slowly gathering, the momentum quietly building for another leap ahead.
But not yet.
Not quite yet.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions. Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke
I found myself using the phrase "spiritual plateau" in conversation with
havah_prewett a few weeks ago, and the concept has been sticking with me. Not "plateau" as in an exalted vantage point, but in that long, flat space that seems to be void of progress. We need the plateaus to adjust to and integrate all that we've achieved in getting there. They aren't the end of the journey, even though they may feel that way. And we have to do the work that goes with them, even if that "work" is rest. Or stillness. Or germination. All the silent, invisible, it-doesn't-look-or-feel-like-anything-is-happening stuff.
I've been trying to move forward, but I'm getting the sense that I haven't done enough integration to be ready yet. I've been trying to rush too quickly from one state of being to the next without having fully integrated what I've learned, without really getting to know who I've become. But during the past weeks, as I've been starting to do that work, I'm feeling the power slowly gathering, the momentum quietly building for another leap ahead.
But not yet.
Not quite yet.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions. Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-09 08:56 pm (UTC)Great Rilke quote, as so many of his are.
I've been trying to pray for a particularly toxic person in my life. One who directs her toxins at me, specifically. You know what? I can't, yet. I mean, I can say the words, but I can't, yet. So I'm still trying.
Some days I don't try all that hard.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-10 02:25 am (UTC)