A Spiritual Path Requires Balance

What is a spiritual path? Great question! The two preceding posts by Woman in the World definitely stir up some familiar thoughts, memories, and feelings. I, too, grew up Protestant. (Although likely in very different flavor than she did - the whole mega-church thing is a little suspicious among the Christians I know and love.) And by my young adult years, I also was yearning for something more.

For me, the initial hallmark of that longing was better recognition of the balance between the male and the female energies. I went to churches and prayed with people that were very inclusive of women, but the Christian pattern of either starting with male images and references and then working to expand from there, or of relegating the female to key support roles while defining the starring roles as male, just didn't work for me.

I found the counterbalance to this in pagan/wiccan spirituality in my 20s. There, the honoring of the feminine helped me learn about the unbounded mystery and power of the feminine, and taught me to a better connection to the earth and sky and moon, and to honor the wildness of nature that I found both around and within me.

But, indeed, my experience in pagan spirituality was a counterbalance - as skewed toward the feminine as my experience of Christianity was skewed toward the masculine. In both places I found myself subtly at war, working against the settledness and constraints of these spiritual expressions in order to honor something I knew instinctively as missing or off.

When I found the Flowering Tree Lodge, a teaching the Sweet Medicine SunDance tradition, I breathed a huge sigh of relief and had a palpable feeling of "coming home" - in large part because male/female balance is such a core tenant in this tradition. Here I found a radical challenge to know and discover on a daily basis how men and women are equal, even amidst all our differences; to honor and develop both the masculine and the feminine energies within me in balance; and to understand how its the balance and interaction of these two energies that makes creation possible.

And that, creation, is what I see as the defining characteristic of a spiritual path. Woman in the World talked about it as growth, some might call it evolution, or you might even just call it change. All of it is an act of creation, a birthing. And birth requires the egg and the seed and the mystery of what is made in their joining.

Like Woman in the World, I now have the sense that many forms of spirituality have the capacity to be a spiritual path: Christianity, wiccan spirituality, Judaism, etc. To find that stream, though, requires finding those arenas that are truly alive, that are based in the balance of female and male energies and thus able to produce life.

Celebrating and appreciating the life that has been produced has its place - I do enjoy showing up at 2 p.m. for the guided tour of some historic mansion where I learn about the story, triumphs, and challenges of some historic figure. There is much to be learned and appreciated there. But wandering repeatedly through those rooms is a path to nowhere.

The old saying "we create the path by walking it" says it well. Walking naturally happens in balance, shifting from left to right to left to right in a smooth flowing motion that takes us where we want to go. And it's out of that balance that we create the world we choose to walk in, and the person we choose to be in that world.

For me, that's the basis of a spiritual path.