I’ve never been troubled by being overly sensitive. My awareness of the non-physical worlds and spiritual forces has not been accompanied, as it is in some people I’ve known, by being overly impacted by the energies of others or of places. I’ve had no trouble in being with a wide variety of people or environments. Where others have said, “I had a hard time taking the energy in that place,” I’ve been happily oblivious to any difficulties. But the past two years, this has been changing. I’ve noticed myself becoming increasingly sensitive in ways I haven’t appreciated. Going out into public spaces or being with people has been impacting me in ways I’m not used to and often leaves me tired.

My contact and work with the inner worlds has heightened and grown over the past few years and become more intense, so I have speculated that this was the cause of my increasing and unwelcome sensitivity. But my wife, Julie, who, unlike me, is very good at seeing the obvious, pointed out a more down-to-earth reason. “You’ve lost your body tone. So of course everything impacts you more.” When she said it, I knew it was true. Various health issues during the past four years have put me in and out of hospitals and in and out of surgery and chemotherapy. I realized that my body has simply not recovered from all that. In addition, my work generally keeps me seated at a computer, and I’m not known as Mr. Exercise. All this adds up to a loss of the natural protections and resiliency a fit body normally provides. My body’s core strength has been diminished.

There are concrete things I can do, and am doing, to rectify this, and the good news is that what has been diminished can be built back up. In the process, it’s got me thinking about the meaning and nature of core strength. And this in turn has led me to think about the nature of incarnational spirituality.

Incarnational spirituality is a new and unique approach to spirituality that is still evolving and emerging. It has characteristics that are familiar and can lead one to say, “Oh, yes, I know what that’s about.” But this can be deceptive. There are subtleties and differences about this approach which are not always apparent on the surface and that only reveal themselves with practice. I know that everyday I discover something new about it.

For example, to say that incarnational spirituality is about bringing spirit into our everyday lives and affairs is true, but it’s not the whole truth. It’s equally true to say that incarnational spirituality is about bringing spirit out of our everyday lives, or that it’s about seeing our everyday lives and identities as generative sources of spiritual energy.

Because it’s a new and evolving approach, I am always challenged with defining it. Exactly what is incarnational spirituality? It has become apparent that it is a number of things. I call it, for instance, an “engagement” spirituality rather than an “evolutionary” one because its objective is not primarily to make us enlightened or more highly evolved, though that may be a side effect, but to bring us to a deeper and more spiritually and energetically skillful engagement with our world, an engagement that is abundant with blessings for all involved.

In the idea of core strength, though, I find another insight into what incarnational spirituality is becoming. It is about developing and practicing the core spiritual strength of our incarnation. This core is not found in a transpersonal or transcendent realm, though our transpersonal nature is part of it. It is found in our everyday, personal lives, in our incarnations, indeed, in the structure and process of incarnation itself. It is found in the fact that an incarnation is not simply an entering into physical matter but a gathering and synthesis of a variety of elements and levels of consciousness into a wholeness right here, right now. It is found in the presence of who we are as whole beings, not just as physical beings on the one hand or spiritual beings on the other.

The diminishment of my core physical strength has left me temporarily vulnerable to the energies and impact of people and places, making me overly sensitive in ways that restrict rather than enhance me. Similarly, if my core spiritual strength is diminished—and there are many ways this can happen in today’s world—I am equally vulnerable to the pressures and stresses, the impacts and diversions of life around me. I can lose my creative edge, my focus, my sovereignty, my capacities to serve. My boundaries become less healthy and useful and my ability to act with freedom in determining who I am and how I will connect to and bless my world can be subverted. Rather than being a co-creator with my world, I become an effect of my world.

Happily, the presence of a core spiritual strength can be built up and developed just as our core physical strength can be. That’s what we teach in our Lorian classes. This is precisely what the practice of incarnational spirituality offers and is another way of defining what this approach is all about.

Building our core incarnational and spiritual strength: it’s good for all of us.

© Copyright 2007 David Spangler