Spiritual Practices through Creativity: On a Journey Home
Theme to a workshop I facilitated focused on utilizing imagination and creativity as the catalyst towards spiritual growth. The group engaged in an art piece derived from a visual processing experiential to conceptualize their idea of heaven.
When you think of an ultimate being or afterlife I’m sure your perception is different than mine. Now sure this could be based on morals, culture and spiritual beliefs, but even if we had the same morals, similar backgrounds and same faith belief system our idea of what afterlife looks like would still be vastly different. How we perceive situations we cannot see, feel, smell, touch-ultimately experience at all -we use our imaginations and creativity to create that said experience in terms we can understand.
In this piece the group worked on one large piece of paper taking turns, some going up in pairs and others one at a time bridging all the ideas together into one piece and throughout the time together each person chose to place themselves in the piece. It was explained the longing to belong in this piece with one another and then someone shared this quote:
“We’re all just walking each other home.” -Ram Dass
What if we lived our lives this way?
No longer about personal and professional success
No longer about keeping up with the Jone’s
No longer about the next best thing to accomplish
But rather in a moment along one another just joining along for the journey-it’s easier to carry loads when all you are doing is focusing on making best the time you have to spend together in this impermanent life we are living. I hate to be the bear of bad news-but if you didn’t know this life is not going to last forever. Each person you meet and you come across today, tomorrow and the all the following is just spending another day to get to the next and so on and so forth while trying to fulfill each day and actually enjoy their time spent too while living it.
So it’s no longer about stress
It’s no longer about getting “ahead”
No more judgment
Just a journey with a bunch of other people all in this life ending in the same place:
All going home.
Author: Leara Glinzak MSAT