Where Two Worlds Touch: Spiritual Rites of Passage: Learn to Embrace Change as Part of Your Spiritual Homework with this Pathfinding Guide - Softcover

Karpinski, Gloria

 
9780345353313: Where Two Worlds Touch: Spiritual Rites of Passage: Learn to Embrace Change as Part of Your Spiritual Homework with this Pathfinding Guide
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0345353315 ISBN 13: 9780345353313
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 1990

Inhaltsangabe

No matter where you are in your own spiritual work, this book can show you how to harness the power of an experience we all share and often fear: change. Discover how you can learn to consciously use change as a spiritual rite of passage. Illustrated with wonderful allegorical tales from all the major spiritual traditions, compelling life stories and transformative exercises, WHERE TWO WORLDS TOUCH shows you that even the mundane details of everyday life offer rich fuel for personal evolution.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gloria D. Karpinski, a holistic counselor and teacher, is the author of Barefoot on Holy Ground: Twelve Lessons in Spiritual Craftsmanship and Where Two Worlds Touch: Spiritual Rites of Passage. She received her degree from University of North Carolina and has presented lectures and workshops throughout the world.

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No matter where you are in your own spiritual work, this book can show you how to harness the power of an experience we all share and often fear: change. Discover how you can learn to consciously use change as a spiritual rite of passage. Illustrated with wonderful allegorical tales from all the major spiritual traditions, compelling life stories and transformative exercises, WHERE TWO WORLDS TOUCH shows you that even the mundane details of everyday life offer rich fuel for personal evolution.

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Introduction
 
Change challenges, relieves, frustrates, threatens, saddens, or exhilarates us. Mainly it forces us to grow. It is the mechanism through which nature ensures evolution and the way God calls us home. It scares away our illusions about ourselves and others. Angel of mercy or Saturnian disciplinarian, change is constantly tailoring us to become all that we are meant to be. It molds us as surely as winds sculpt a tree or flowing waters reshape the hardest rock. Through change we are initiated into higher and higher states of consciousness. Our consciousness is our total awareness, a synthesis of heart and mind that enables us to act.
 
Change invites us to stretch and risk. It offers new births in consciousness to the degree that we are willing to die to the old. When change is only stoically endured or loudly protested, nothing is learned and the inevitable is delayed. Yet when change is accepted—no, more than that, embraced—it catalyzes our lives, expands our understanding, and shifts our perspective from one of fear to one that affirms life. For life is change.
 
There are ways of dealing with change creatively and without fear. One of them is by understanding the dynamics of change itself. Caught in the drama of a sudden personal crisis, it is often challenging to be able to see any purpose in it. But change is always a matter of process, even when it comes suddenly. Change often seems to be chaotic and threatening, with no intelligent direction. The key word here is seems. From a larger perspective or in retrospect, in change we see the workings of personal or planetary evolution.
 
THE RHYTHMS OF CHANGE
 
There is a rhythm in the way change occurs. I gradually became aware of this rhythm through years of being privileged to share the “classrooms” of hundreds of people as they met their challenges, even though the arenas and specifics were as different as the people themselves.
 
As I attuned myself to the rhythm of change, I realized that many of the people who came to me for counseling for the first time were either twenty-one, twenty-eight, thirty-five, forty-two, forty-nine, fifty-six, or sixty-three. In time I realized that this meant that they were in the first part of a seven-year cycle.
 
I came to see that the major turnings in their lives that heralded profound changes—marriages, divorces, deaths, births, career moves—all clustered around the actual year of a cycle change or a few months going into it or coming out of it. In case I missed the point, I would occasionally have clients who would insist that I see their teenagers, who were, like as not, age fourteen.
 
At first I casually assumed that this occurrence was in sync with the biological and psychological developmental tasks of the various ages. And I do think there is some correlation there, certain broad strokes that have to do with the desire to marry, likely times for career promotions, our own aging, and the aging and deaths of our parents.
 
However, it stretches credibility pretty far to make all the changes I was observing fit the scientific models. And this point of view made no sense at all when a man experienced a car wreck that crippled his body and changed his life exactly when he was thirty-five; or when a young woman’s mother would suddenly die when she was twenty-eight. Why not twenty-six or thirty? Why did the divorce occur precisely at forty-two? The lawsuit at fifty-six?
 
Many cosmologists from around the world suggest that creation takes place in cycles of seven. In the biblical account, God created for six days and rested on the seventh. Metaphysicians would say that cycle symbolizes seven great epochs of time and would point to corresponding versions in Zoroastrian beliefs and in Japanese Shintoism, in Hinduism, and in the myths of a number of other world cultures.
 
From sunspots and economic crashes to the spawning of fish and changes in fashion, all life moves in cycles. Good astrologers are rarely surprised by predictable cycles of activity. They look at the horoscope of an individual person or an entire country, plot the cyclical paths of the planets through the symbolic signs of the zodiac as they overlap, oppose, or complement each other, and indicate the likely times and intent of upcoming changes. They don’t know what specifically will happen, but they can successfully indicate that something profound is going to happen.
 
The universe is just that—a universe—and we are in rhythm with the energy that holds it all together. We affect and are affected by all that happens.
 
Whether we’re working through a deeply ingrained pattern, in which the dance of change might last a lifetime, or addressing a more superficial pattern in which the stages of change might be worked through from beginning to end within a few weeks or months—we are always in process with many changes at one time. Our lives are made up of cycles within cycles—some turning over rapidly, others moving slowly.
 
THE 7 STEPS OF CONSCIOUS CHANGE
 
How we perceive change begins with our understanding of who we think we are. The collection of habits, attitudes, and beliefs we gather around ourselves tell us who we think we are. Events might come and go, but there is no real change in us until one of those events actually challenges our perception of who we are. It’s quite possible to simply endure with the same mind-set until the next big event. But once a deeply held belief about ourselves is really challenged, then the dance of change begins. We may resist, or we may join the dance—usually the former before the latter—but we’ll eventually resolve the conflict between the status quo and the challenge, commit to a new direction, endure the necessary purging of the old habits, and finally surrender fully to the new.
 
It is this journey, through these seven stages of conscious change, that is the focus of this book.
 
1. The first step is the FORM. This is the basic belief we hold about ourselves on any subject. It defines the boundaries of our perception, dictates our opinions, and, most importantly, establishes our personal reality. This is the point at which all change begins.
 
2. A sense of movement in the process of change begins with the second step, the CHALLENGE. Some event happens, or we are exposed to something or someone that disturbs the status quo, and our original Form no longer works.
 
3. RESISTANCE, the third, and usually quite uncomfortable, cycle of change, when our old way of being and our new perception lock horns in a battle of ambivalence and indecision. Logic, conditioning, and history argue for the past, yet the strongest pull is toward the new.
 
4. Eventually we’re rescued by the fourth stage—the AWAKENING. This is the exhilarating part of the cycle in which a breakthrough occurs in the previous struggle. At this point we make the critical shift from indecision to the new viewpoint.
 
5. Next comes COMMITMENT. This is the point in the cycle when we put all our resources—time, money, energy—into the new direction. This stage presents us with a series of choices that help us bring our new goal into manifestation.
 
6. PURIFICATION is the inevitable next step—one that takes us totally by surprise. This is the time the actual transformation takes place. And it is often painful. Old hurts and fears repressed during earlier parts of the process rise up to be acknowledged and, ultimately, transformed. It is a time of dying to the old; a time that tests our faith in the new.
 
7. Finally we reach the last stage—SURRENDER. This...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
1990
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345353315
ISBN 13 
9780345353313
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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Osnabrück
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Deutschland

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