Inhabit: Your Wisdom

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Originally published at: https://integrallife.com/inhabit-your-wisdom/

Watch as Ryan and Corey explore a number of practices and perspectives to help you bring your own wisdoms to the surface, allowing you to move through the world with more skill, compassion, insight, and humility.

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Corey,
Thanks so much for this: A Self-Test for Spiritual Bypassing. It’s brilliant and super helpful.
Much love,
Roshana

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The topic of ‘wisdom’ is nearly inexhaustible. I do remember one of KW’s concise statements on it: wisdom is what you know of Spirit. So inhabiting or owning or embodying what we know of Spirit at some point becomes necessary in the life path, and failure to do so might be as wisdom- and growth-crippling as spiritual bypassing.

I too think Corey’s list of questions around spiritual bypassing are fantastic. Some questions on the other side might be: Am I hiding my spirituality as a way to fit in, belong? Am I holding back expressing a spiritual perspective out of the small self’s fear of exhibiting some ignorance, or of being thought wacky? Am I hiding my spiritual knowledge and experience because it’s easier to just blend in rather than stand out? Am I holding back as a way to avoid more responsibility? Am I hiding my spirituality because I’m too attached to the “real world”? Am I holding back because I’m not consistently living up to my own spiritual ‘standards’ or values? Am I hiding my spirituality because what I’ve experienced seems too “sacred” and meaningful, and to expose it would be like placing “pearls before swine”? And many other questions, but you get the point.

That aside…what I would add to this conversation on inhabiting one’s wisdom draws from the magical-mythic stage There are countless mythological characters and deities, as well as “real” beings, who are associated with wisdom. In reviewing in my mind some of them, and doing a little research, most of them are known not only as ‘gods’ or ‘goddesses’ or beings of wisdom, but also are associated with nature, and with the arts and craft-making.

The Hindu goddess of wisdom Saraswati, for instance, is also the goddess of speech, learning, music, art/aesthetics, and nature, particularly rivers. (There is a Saraswati river in Indian.) Same with a Japanese goddess of wisdom, Benzaiten (aka Benten), who is supposedly a derivative of Saraswati. Benzaiten is “the goddess of everything that flows”–water, time, words, speech, eloquence, music, knowledge/wisdom. A Japanese wisdom god is Kuebiko, a scarecrow god who “can’t walk but has comprehensive awareness.” He is not only the god of wisdom, but of agriculture. The list goes on and on, such as the Greek god and goddess Apollo and Athena, both also associated with art and music. Then there are the Biblical Magi, seers/prognosticators, “Wise Men,” bearing gifts (from the earth) to the Christ-child. And the philosopher Lao Tzu whose Taoist wisdom teachings derive from observations of nature, and particularly, the flow of nature (and of things, situations, one into the other).

So nature, the environment we live in, and arts/crafts, our creations, do seem to me vitally connected to wisdom. I was actually thinking this as I listened to the conversation, and found it interesting that Corey exhibited his wood-art during the episode, bringing both nature and art into the conversation. Beautiful pieces, Corey. They seem “alive,” and somehow remind me of sun-bleached bones found in an ancient wilderness, telling the story of birth/creation, life/sustainment, and death/dissolution, all the while suggesting that which moves through it all, the eternal breath of Spirit.

Inhabit: Your Creativity. That would be a good episode.

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