Tuesday, May 11, 2021

Spiritual Practice - Spiritual practices from a developmental perspective


 Spiritual practices from a developmental perspective.

 

As such, this “transcending and including” contains modules that address practices for the body, mind, spirit, and shadow dimensions of your own being. Because it is inclusive, this practice contains a distilled and condensed series of practices that are taken from premodern, modern, and postmodern approaches to growth and development. It is an “all-inclusive” practice in the sense that it takes the very best practices from all of them, and puts them together in a larger framework that uses—and makes sense of—all of them. Premodern practices include the world’s great wisdom traditions and the meditation practices that drive them. Modern practices include scientific studies of human growth and ways to induce it. Postmodern practices include a pluralistic and multicultural composite map of the human territory—the territory of you—and ways to include (and not marginalize) all of the important dimensions of your own being (physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual—in self, culture, and nature). Putting all of these together creates a “cross training” for human growth and spiritual awakening, a cross training that dramatically accelerates all of its dimensions—body, mind, spirit, and shadow—producing faster, more effective, more efficient practices than were ever possible prior to this time.

 

Wilber, Ken; Patten, Terry; Leonard, Adam; Morelli, Marco. Integral Life Practice . Shambhala. Kindle Edition. 

 

Because Unitarian Universalism identifies six sources for its living tradition it draws on spiritual practices from premodern, modern, and postmodern stages of human development.

 

UUs draw on practices from the perennial wisdom of the world’s religions, from modern findings from the human sciences, and from transpersonal and views of the Transcendent from postmodernism. Unitarian Universalism has a little of something for everyone at any stage of spiritual development.

 

One of the difficulties of leading and participating in a Unitarian Universalist church is that people are at different stages of development and this can cause conflict which can lead to judgmentalism and exclusionary practices. Therefore congregations become fragmented and people either leave or form sub groups which are served, in larger congregations, by different services labeled as “traditional” and “contemporary.” etc.

 

In which stage are you most comfortable: traditional, humanistic, New Thought? Do you tend to focus on spiritual practices from one category or do you select from them all in a eclectic fashion?

 

What are your two favorite spiritual practices which you do daily or weekly?


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