About & Introduction

About

Spiritual practice can help us to show up in our lives, more whole-heartedly and courageously.

Meditation practice is vital to helping us slow down and come home to our bodies. Shared, engaged practice is equally vital to helping us wake up to our lives and become an embodied expression of our best selves.

I believe that spiritual practice needs to change. It feels like we are at a crisis point in the development of humanity and we need to learn how we can take care of each other better and harness the force of human ingenuity and compassion before we self-destruct.

The power of a team of people who care and respect for each other is immense. We are far more able to focus on the things that matter and to harness people’s productivity in a worthwhile way when they feel seen, valued and welcomed.

If spiritual practice is not actively helping us to do this, or is actually leading us to retreat further from a society that is suffering from a case of over-individualisation, then I believe that it is not worth doing.

When we form a group in which we are connecting whole-heartedly, amazing and seemingly magical things can happen. We create a group collective conscious where we understand and see each other on a different level. We form a group that can travel on a journey together – understanding ourselves and our challenges as a whole and harnessing everyone’s ingenuity to problem solve and come up with cool ideas and ways of looking at things.

Our hearts are incredible prioritisers, so we naturally make space for what is most important to rise to the surface and put our minds to solving it as a group. It is also an inherently rewarding space to be. Acceptance and belonging is one of the most beautiful experiences you can have, so we learn to love the experience of just being.

This is something that is severely lacking in our culture and one of the changes I would most like to see in the world is for people to find more belonging.

This sense of acceptance and connectedness is something we gift to each other by actively including, validating and encouraging each other to be our true selves.

The practices that I have shared in this section are designed to help people feel safer, increase a sense of belonging, engage everyone with the practice, encourage people to go deeper into their experience and give the teacher a good sense of where people are at.

All of these things will increase the depth of the practice for everyone, make profound transformations much more likely and mean that the practice will be much more likely to make an impact on people’s every day lives.

Facilitating

With all of these practices the role of facilitator is really important.

As the facilitator, whether it’s in a formal practice setting or with a friend, you will be holding the space for the practice to happen in.

The aim is to create a space that people can show up and be themselves in; one that is welcoming of all aspects of their being; rather than create a space where people feel like they have to adopt a persona to fit in.

It’s important to make the space physically safe and psychologically safe – people feel that they can share fairly openly without being attacked or judged.

A lot of these practices are incredibly simple and a lot of the magic comes from allowing them to come to life in the collective conscious.

To me, anything that helps us understand our internal experience better and connect better with the world around us is a spiritual practice. If it is accessible and relevant to people, it is far more likely to make an impact on their daily lives.

You can also use some of these practices to be your own teacher – they offer the tools to hold space for yourself and reflect on your practice in a meta-way. See if you can facilitate this with the same level of compassion and open-mindedness that you would for others.

If you are a teacher, you may appreciate this post on reimagining spiritual practice and identifying your unique values and approach to teaching. This may help you get clarity on your style of teaching and allow you to embrace and embody it more fully.