login
spirituality for introverts posted: Wed 2019-06-12 04:29:46 tags: n/a
The Free Love renaissance in the 60s and 70s inspired a lot of literature, and one of the most popular and iconic novels typifying the era was sci-fi grandmaster RA Heinlein's Stranger In a Strange Land. Heinlein's characters deliver many pithy quotables, but perhaps the most important of these is his definition of love: "...that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own."

I took Psych and Anthropology as electives in my senior year of HS; surely I must have learned in one or both of those courses that humans are by nature social animals. The importance of that observation was definitely lost on me, well past high school though. Not that I lacked a social life, but it was unintentional and undervalued at the time.

There's another quote that grabbed my attention today, introducing the chapter on spiritual compatibility in our Prepare-Enrich workbooks:
"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience;
we are spiritual beings having a human experience."
-- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

This sounds like it should be profound, but it falls apart on deconstruction. Spiritual beings having nonhuman experiences should also be a thing, but what does that even look like? John F. Kennedy had something quite different to say about the juxtaposition of the spiritual and the human: "There is no spirituality without humanity. On Earth, God's work is Man's work."

I have never read a definition of "spirituality" as concise and compelling as Heinlein's definition of love, so for now I'm stuck with this gloss: spirituality is a value rooted in notions of connection. We seek and find a spiritual satisfaction in a sense of connection with self, connection with others, in outward circles all the way to "connection with nature" or even "connection with the Divine".

Dawn prescribed the regular exercise of practicing mindfulness out in nature, as a means of cultivating a sense of connection with nature. Of course, sitting out on the beach feeling the sun and thrumming vibration of crashing waves, hearing the waves and seabird cries, seeing the birds and colors of the sea, smelling the sea and suntan oil... is not the only place we can practice mindfulness. If mindfulness is the intentional experience of connection, then mindfulness, for all its sensory meatyness, is a fundamentally spiritual exercise. The conclusion of the Rat Park experiments is that connection is the cure for addiction (among other maladies). When we can feel safe turning to people, when we're leaning in toward connection with people whose company is rewarding, then turning to booze or whatever becomes uninteresting. Substance abuse is not inherently seductive unless you crave anaesthesia for toxic, unreliable, or simply empty superficial relationships.

So what does this all mean for introverts? We do not gravitate as naturally to social situations, we have to be more intentional about it - and when we're already drained by social obligation then we have to get our connection fix from mindful connection with self and/or nature.