It’s possible to experience a timeless, meditative union with love or consciousness, emptiness, or whatever you want to call it, without fully integrating and holding and processing in the body and psyche our childhood wounds.

It’s possible to experience a connection with source, awareness or ‘God’ without sensing into and carefully tending to and feeling into all the times when we were not met or held by a caregiver or the environment as a child.

It’s possible to experience rising of kundalini energy in the body without being fully embodied on the earth.

This is the problem with ‘spirituality.’ We can use it to get past or fly or hover over our bodies, feelings, wounds and pain. Many of these experiences — such as union with emptiness or love — are not an end, they are a beginning. People think they have reached the end, but they have reached the beginning. For this reason we have many people who are skilled at being meditators or tantra or spiritual teachers but not very experienced or skilled at being a human being.

The next stage is to integrate this understanding, this love or union or whatever it is, with your physical sensory grounded body experience. Once we’ve faced that these ‘spiritual’ experiences are just the beginning, then the truth may no longer be so ‘horrible’ and something more real can come forth.

Its not just a case of how you experience ‘God,’ Buddha, emptiness consciousness, awareness, or whatever you want to call it in a state of holy illumination, stillness, or meditation — but how you feel it in the muscles, in tiny sensations, in emotions, in the viscera, in the bones, and in your relationship with the earth, with the local ecosystem. How do you feel it in your everyday daily reality, in your work, in your relationship with family, friends, children, local community, world community, including with people you find difficult?

What’s important is to be able to hold the feelings and sensations in the body in the places where you were not held, where you were not seen and were not met, where there is sadness or anger, or despair, or grief. It may not even be only your pain, but also perhaps the ancestor’s pain too. What’s important is to work with these places, and to work with what is most unconscious or hidden, to find some safe space with a elder or therapist or healer on the earth or in trusted community where that which is most hidden which has been long ago cast into the dark well can be found.

Then it may be you might perhaps cycle back to the more ‘spiritual’ experiences in a more grounded and embodied physical way, if that feels right. The energies and life forces and hidden powers that have been contained in grief, in rage, in terror can then actually help us to connect with life.

But first we may need to find, there in the dark well, the real illumination. In the glittering dark, where the most painful and things that have been shamed and pushed down can be seen and felt and held, sensed as body experiences and raised above the threshold of consciousness.

Then you will find the safety of love as a deep body sensory experience in everyday reality on this physical earth. These strange and unusual mysteries, amidst the unknowing and the flowing of tears, may be the place of reclaiming of the real mystery and elegance, power, loving, immense, vulnerable, grounded, beautiful embodiment of who you are.