Returning Home

I’ve lately been thinking back on my childhood and remembering how I would look to Nature and Life for a mothering spiritual presence that was absent in physical form. I’m sure I didn’t think of it this way then, but as I look back I believe that’s what I was doing. It has been with me ever since, and it’s what much later drew me to Marshall Rosenberg and Nonviolent Communication (NVC). 

This spiritual sense attuned me to a feeling of unconditional wellbeing, peace, joy, connection in just being aware. I could feel it by myself, and I could feel it with people, sensing the beauty of their humanness and aliveness. It has often been easier for me to feel the heights and depths of spiritual connection than the scariness of vulnerable intimacy and closeness with people. 

I then went through a period of years in which my deep love of spirituality slowly faded into the distant background of experience. I got married, had children, created a wonderful family, and was deeply involved in a long-term work partnership building a business and international training program. More recently, through a series of quite difficult and stressful life circumstances, I’ve been returned back to that wonderous, luminous presence of spiritual life, back to that boy finding nurturing peace to soothe and heal the carried trauma. 

In this homecoming return I see the gift more clearly – how my love of the formless Mystery of life somehow hidden within the form of all of us is as close and intimate as the awareness of my mind, the presence in my body, and the language of universal needs. The components of empathic communication (Observation, Feeling, Need, and Request) can each be a way to connect with this one consciousness and feel unconditional wellbeing in the gritty context of navigating life’s suffering, challenges and conflicts. I find such beauty in thinking and feeling how along with our differences we share this same Family of Being with one another; that paradoxically and mysteriously we are, and are not, each other. It is a leap of faith, but for me it makes all the difference. 

Does this resonate with your experience? I hope you will write to me to tell me.