Exploring Spirituality Through Different Traditions
Exploring spirituality and how it fits into the story of your life can help you let go of limiting beliefs about who you are and why you are here.
Exploring Spirituality
Have you encountered particular wisdom or spiritual traditions that have intrigued you? Where did that experience take you when it comes to exploring your spirituality?
I first learned about shamanism from a book that my wife gave me as a gift, never imagining it would lead to my becoming a shamanic practitioner and teacher. I believe that regardless of your current spiritual beliefs and practices, learning about and reflecting on other traditions can help you break out of old, rigid thinking about how to express your spiritual nature. Then it will be easier to adopt new ones that are more pleasing to yourself and Spirit, Source, God—or whatever you choose to call this loving consciousness.
I have attended and belonged to different Protestant churches and for many years, I have attended Catholic services with my wife. After years of spiritual explorations, increasingly, my bond with Spirit is simply about having a reciprocal relationship with this all-loving force that I sometimes call Source. Our relationship involves my acknowledging that ultimately, “thy will be done”—and realizing I’m just one small participant in a dance much larger than myself. What about you? What is your relationship with Spirit as a result of any spiritual exploration you’ve done?
Taking communion or singing the doxology feels familiar and comforting to me as a Christian. It also gives me a sense of belonging—to a community of people who recognize and honor larger spiritual forces that I honor as well. As a teenager, I had hoped Christianity would answer the bigger philosophical questions I had, such as how much does faith count when it comes to salvation? And what if that faith isn’t accompanied by works that reflect Christian values? I have come to believe in Christ’s divinity and his messages, such as following the Golden Rule, helping those less fortunate, and being nonjudgmental and forgiving. But I never became caught up in the conflicts between Christianity and other religions. Such conflicts, and self-righteousness, seem to me to miss the point of Jesus’s messages regarding love, compassion, generosity, gratitude, and kindness. Have your spiritual explorations led to more clarity on what your values really are? If so, how?
I try to experience or create rituals drawn from other traditions, some taught to me by elders who wanted to share their ways with people respectful of their spiritual beliefs. Some might be puzzled by how I blend metaphors, teachings, and practices from seemingly contradictory wisdom traditions, but as a young boy, I experienced an overwhelming sense of unity and interconnectedness with an apple tree in a farmer’s field. The memory of that blissful experience of oneness has remained with me, so I don’t see why I should separate myself from others through embracing this and not that. Religion and church, for me, are about finding connections with other people and with God and nature—and recapturing that feeling I had felt as a child in the farmer’s field. Maybe you, too, have had some blissful moments of reconnection with Spirit you would like to recapture. Do you have any ideas on how you might do that? If so, what actions, if any, would you like to take to feel that reconnection?
As I studied Jungian psychology and Carl Jung’s writings and continued with my own analysis, I became increasingly intrigued by how healing could happen when in altered states of consciousness. I could see overlaps between the work of this European psychologist from the twentieth century and ancient traditions of indigenous people in the Americas. I became more comfortable than ever exploring Jungian ideas, martial arts traditions, and the very edges of Western thought. My spiritual life grew as I began traveling to visit healers or shamans, attending rituals or ceremonies from traditions other than my own, and stepping out of my comfort zone to explore new ideas. Practices such as shamanic journeying helped me feel my connection with Spirit and with all living beings and the earth.
Once, I traveled to China to meet and learn from some qigong masters, and I was struck by the fact that some of them believed the same thing that shamans I had met on the other side of the world believed: that energy containing information can be transferred into and out of the body intentionally by using techniques that involve altered mind states. One told me that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously in another dimension, and by working with it, a healer can gain information and energies. Here I was, halfway across the globe from the shamans in Peru who had trained me in their wisdom ways and techniques, talking about the nature of time being nonlinear with a man who had no way of knowing what his brothers and sisters in the Andes and the jungles near the Amazon believed about time—or what Carl Jung believed about the mind-body connection.
Thanks to shamanic journeying I have done over the years, my consciousness and perceptions have expanded. I now recognize I am a part of something far greater than myself that I’m always connected to. I aim to practice ayni, or reciprocity, with the world and to echo the activities of nature, which is perpetually balancing and rebalancing itself.
In my experience, drawing upon spiritual wisdom from my own culture and that of others (while honoring the cultures from which those teachings originated) helped me feel a stronger connection to Source and to my spiritual nature. I believe exploring your spirituality and how it fits into the story of your life can help you let go of limiting beliefs about who you are, why you are here, and what you can hope to experience in this lifetime and adopt new ones that will better support your dreams and aspirations.
Excerpt from The Necktie and the Jaguar: A memoir to help you change your story and find fulfillment.
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About the Author
Carl Greer, PhD, PsyD, is a retired clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst, a businessman, and a shamanic practitioner, author, and philanthropist, funding over 60 charities and more than 600 Greer scholars. He has taught at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago and been on staff at the Replogle Center for Counseling and Well-Being. Learn more at CarlGreer.com.
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