Activating Your Spiritual Metabolism
Receiving, Digesting, and Sharing Spiritual Gifts
Today folks here in the U.S. are celebrating Thanksgiving, which is a holiday focused primarily on getting together to share a huge meal. There is the joy and stress of cooking, family relationships, and overeating. Keeping with the theme of digestion and sharing, we bring you a reminder that these holiday times are a perfect laboratory for experimenting with how you creatively act to expand, warm, and infuse the room with heartfelt spark.
Whatever spiritual gifts you receive after a trip to “the big room” of mystery must be metabolized—fully taken in, digested, transformed, and then outwardly given in a way that touches lives and changes existential rooms. After being filled with the sacred vibration, also called seiki, n/om, holy spirit, or universal life force, it waits to spiritually charge your creative participation in the world. It re-awakens whenever the room expands and heats.
You cannot know how the sacred vibration will specifically influence you and others until you activate it and put it to use. Sometimes it sweeps and at other times it weeps, offers a creative tweak, tickles and laughs, or shakes to bake and remake the day. Make a sincere and passionate effort to be the embodiment of change and the sacred vibration will rise to the occasion and effortlessly inspire and empower creative action.
Remember the Fruit
To set the metabolic process in motion, allow the vibration to do more than tickle your fancy and only make you happy with no consideration of altering your surroundings. Remember that the fruit, goal, practical outcome, and main purpose of spirited experience is found in the way it catalyzes your participation in expanding, warming, inspiring, energizing, changing, and recreating everyday situations.
You might be inspired to leave a poem in your loved ones’ coat pockets, surprise your spouse with breakfast toast that has a raisin-made smile, leave a map of heaven in a bar, jog one mile in honor of a lesser known saint, unroll a ball of string in a profound manner, ask your grandmother if she ever heard about the woman who married Jerusalem*, or simply infuse the right dose of mystical expansion, spiritual warmth, and inventive surprise into whatever present activity you have going on in your life.
Consider everything you do as re-creation. Recreation and re-creation go together on the big room playground. Vacate any small room in favor of taking a special vacation with a sacred vibration. Discover how anything and everything can be given some ecstatic flutter when it’s spread (or basted!) with numinous butter, the secret behind baking holy bread (or roasting turkey!) that never tastes bitter (or dry!).
If you are a bodyworker, the vibration awaits being metabolized in order to bring forth healing hands. If you are a writer, the vibration is capable of inspiring the birth of poetry and prose. For a composer, the vibration is ready to open your capacity to catch a song. For everyone, the vibration can make available healing words and transformative expression. The sacred vibration helps launch infinite forms of creative action, blessed performance, and remarkable stewardship.
Coming Alive
Theologian Howard Thurman penned the famous quote, “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” The same advice applies to your ecstatic spiritual life. Ask yourself what hallowed cornerstones, roomy spiritual frames, ray-full prayer lines, heartwarming melodic tones, surprising and arousing rhythms, temperature raising songs, soul stirring and body freeing movements, and divine celebratory dances wake up the sacred vibration inside you, light a fire in your bones, stir your spiritual emotion, and strengthen your mystical rope. Then engage with more of that, because what the world needs most is people who are cooked and ready to serve with verve.
Graciously accept all spiritual gifts while also accepting the practical wisdom that they grow exponentially the more you share them. You are given something in order to be a creative contributor to the whole of life, distributed to those who dwell around you. Spiritual prosperity has nothing to do with the accumulation of personal hoarded wealth; it is found in sharing. The more you give, the more spiritual guidance, ecstatic inspiration, and heartfelt blessings you receive—making you able to continue giving.
If you catch yourself spending too much time reflecting on your spiritual gifts (or the lack of them) than performing creative activity in your daily life, then you are definitely not completing a spiritual metabolic cycle. If no such action is taken, you will likely experience spiritual indigestion where the previous spiritual gain eventually turns to existential pain. Similarly, the more you are subsequently determined to prove to yourself and others what you spiritually know or have experienced, the less likely it is that you will fully benefit from whatever was received.
What truly matters most is your becoming a bona fide agent of Big Mystery Love with a license to change. When you are filled with n/om, seiki, the holy spirit, and the sacred vibration, surrender to the whole spiritual metabolic process so soulful stewardship and transformative action spring forth effortlessly.
Keep it Turning
The spiritual metabolic cycle is a reminder that everything in your life must keep moving around the circle of changing directions that include triumphant ecstatic jubilation, inspiring and perspiring creative action, mystically fortified absurd undoing, and far-reaching wisdom reconstruction. Throw all these things up in the air like a four-ball juggle. When they circulate and each ball alternates between being caught and thrown, the ecstatic circulus or recursive circle of an extraordinary life is in town.
Under the big top circus tent things are always changing to bring the spatial alterations, action transitions, scenery flips, role fluctuations, climate shifts, absurd twists, serious dips, and ecstatic ascents that make life rise and shine on stage. The alchemy for changing reality needs all the four directions that embody the dichotomies, triangles, squares, and circles of the Ouroborean dragon slayers and ecstatic players of higher geometry and ecstatic thermometry.
-The Keeneys, November 28, 2019. Excerpted and adapted from Sacred Ecstatics: The Recipe for Setting Your Soul on Fire.
*Inspired by the session Brad did in Mexico called “The Woman Who Married Jerusalem.” She did! See Circular Therapeutics for the transcript.