Beginners

The sovereign's way is how Christ described the preconditions to entering the kingdom of heaven.

But understanding what it actually means, and navigating what it actually takes, to be born again of the spirit… that is not an easy thing.

Our spirits must be cleaned before they can be born again.

And they must be unchained before they can be cleaned.

And that, is a dangerous pursuit – freeing our spirit. If we don’t handle it right, we either make a mess, create as much new trauma as we heal, or head away from the real truth (or at best circle it).

Until now there have been two ‘spiritual’ paths to choose from in how to deal with this (mostly subconscious) problem.

Religion aired on the side of caution – it built fear around sin and created adherents who followed Christ by their facades instead of their heart and full spirit.

Spirituality threw caution to the wind – it said that’s not right – ‘be free’ – and it fed its adherents a host of new fantastical beliefs about themselves and the nature of reality so they could redefine what is loving and unloving and justify their ‘free’ lives and actions.

Stay shut down…

Or open up, make a mess and reframe it…

Neither option is much appealing once you see them for what they are.

And neither option really leads where we were hoping either…

The way that does, walks the line between the two – it gracefully holds and opens to every part of the process; without getting stuck in new places when we inevitably miss the mark.

This is what it is to master the art of relating… it is a narrow path, but it is a navigable one.

We start from where we are without forcing anything.

And we make the right corrections to the way we relate – everywhere

The rest opens up or straightens in its right time.