The Benefits of Spiritual Coaching: Oneness Does NOT Equal Sameness!

Another remarkable benefit of having a spiritual coach is that they can help to clarify any confusion about Spiritual Principles which may arise along one’s path of spiritual awakening.  

Often times our brains get busy trying to understand and make sense of Spiritual principles intellectually while the body is unknowingly retuning itself to the vibrational match of a newly (re)introduced eternal verity.  Something which was always known, but at some point became unknown or hidden, as the result of the conditioned experiences of one’s life.

What I have learned along my personal Spiritual path is that my body often gets it long before my brain does.  Then when the time is right, the spark occurs followed by a resonant mental understanding, followed by a heartfelt sense of grace and knowing.  Magic.

“Oneness does not equal sameness.”  Consider the simple hindu greeting and salutation upon meeting or the valediction upon parting ways of “Namaste.”  Namaste literally translates as “I bow to you.”  It also has the deeper spiritual meaning that the life force, the divinity, the Self or the God in me is the same in all. “Namaste - the God in me honors the God in you.”

So honoring the God in another person is becoming aware that we are all made of the same stuff.  But we are not identical expressions of the stuff!  Wouldn’t that be boring?  A bunch of me’s or a bunch of you’s walking the planet and nobody else but you, or me?  Spooky thought.

I had an experience of embodying oneness at a 5 night silent retreat with one of my favorite enlightened guys, Adyashanti.  It’s hard to describe the experience without sounding woo-woo or cheapening it but I am going to give it a shot here anyway.  

There were 400+ attendees on this retreat and we were four days deep into the container of silence.  In the second silent sitting of the afternoon I opened my eyes suddenly, looked around the room and noticed that everyone was together in the same silent container, observing the same things like thoughts, coughing, peace, body, mind - through different eyes in different bodies.  Suddenly I was hovering above the crowd, then I felt as if I were looking through the eyes of the person next to me, then before me, then the person across the room to the right, and then across the room to the left.  

I remember shaking my head quickly in an attempt to wake my brain up.  I have the subtle memory of attempting to get back into my body or brain and I couldn’t seem to locate me.  The head shaking was enough to wake up my brain and I said “WOAH” to myself silently in my head and closed my eyes again.  See, it sounds weird when I put it to paper.  But it happened and I recognized that the magnitude of the realization for me at that time, in where I was spiritually, was entirely too intense for me to reside in for more than a few seconds.

So the great paradox, the fine line of realizing this eternal verity presents the same dilemma as many other realizations on this path which is that we are in fact spiritual beings having a human experience.  God in form, individualized, unique expressions of the Divine.  As long as we are having this human experience we must honor both, the Oneness, the Divinity in me that is the Divinity in you, and our uniqueness.  

I’m a 5’3”, 40 year old, female, caucasian, with brown hair, hazel eyes, and athletic.  You may be a 5’8”, 22 year old,  male, person of color, with brown hair, brown eyes, and not athletic.  That’s what makes this life one thrilling adventure, our oneness and our individuality.  

So we honor the Divinity within one another, and at the same time we honor the uniqueness of one another as the individualized expressions of the Divine that we are.  We cannot honor one without the other.  To do so is to bypass the human experience and pretend as if it is not happening, which if you think about it, seems kind of silly!

Adyashanti once told me, “Elizabeth, you must allow your spiritual heart to marry your human heart.”  I was so deeply in love with the Spiritual nature of Life that I forgot that the gift for me was the human experience.

Affectionate awareness is what he called it.  I honor the Divinity within you that is you, and simultaneously honor the uniqueness, the individual expression of the Divine AS you!

In closing, A Spiritual coach can assist one in navigating, understanding, and embodying principles such as this.

Namaste.