There is something very sobering about the earthy when it comes about. It puts you in your place, it shakes you out of your imaginary outcome. It is dry, unsympathetic and often ruthless. It is a pallet of dull mud brown and dirty grey. It lacks vibrancy. It is needed sometimes and when it’s needed, it can be very grounding like putting us in front of what we are truly meant to be focusing on at a certain time. Earthly is solid, inflexible, it is how it is. Earthly let you know that choices are limited, it is either this or that and that’s it. There is not much room for manoeuvre or space for negotiating. We often find it hard to deal with, which more often than not causes us stress, anxiety, depression and disappointment. However, it is not always a bad thing. It can also be containing and reassuring when it is needed, when our imagination might have run away with us and we lost touch with the ground, so to speak. Pulling us down can serve a providing a level of safety. Earthly is about what we do and how we do it.

 

Spiritual is about limitless choices, but not necessarily about what we do, but how we are being, feeling, flowing with life. It is full of pure whites, bright purples and emerald greens. It is about feelings we choose to engage with when faced with certain situations, earthly situation, and even when we make a certain earthy choice or given one where we don’t have a say it is that spiritual choice of being a certain way with it that can become our light and saviour in such times.

 

Both earthly and spiritual have their functions and it is often a challenge for a human being to be able to see, be and engage with both if and when needed. Having both running in parallel is not easy all of the time and there is a certain push and pull motion that frequently occurs. It can be confusing, but it teaches are awareness about what we do, how we think, how we react, being and what we feel.

Both can become distorted and go ‘wrong’.

Just as earthly can restrict us whether necessary or not in a way that will serve us, so can spiritual become an illusion. Attachment to a certain spiritual idea or a construct can lead to disillusionment and even a loss of faith. I have touched upon that recently and came close to seeing how and why that might happen. I could understand why people turn away from faith and find it difficult to reconnect. When an idea we attach to, e.g. ‘How can God allow this’ or ‘universe is always on my side’ gets crumbled we get disillusioned. These sorts of ideas, I suspect, get crushed often and everywhere. The reason for that is that ideas, as above, are limited, constructed and do not allow for flexibility, so they become a sort of fantasy with not much bases. Those ideas are not expanded further or looked at from various angles. I experienced the crumbling of ‘it will be fine, the universe is always on my side’ idea recently and it was painful. I found myself questioning a lot of things and it took a couple of days of unpacking through my emotional body and feeling through what was coming up before I again began to see clearly. I can see how, if one allows to surrender to that disillusionment without processing the whole thing, human being can lose their faith in the spiritual. What became clear was the need to redefine of ‘the universe is always on my side’. Do you see how limited that is? Of course it is on your side, but it might not feel like that when certain concrete earthly elements come into play. It can be about an error somewhere along the way, or it can be that some things can only be one way or another. Examples of such earthly ways and they are often inevitable regardless of whether universe is on your side or not (do you see how irrelevant that spiritual construct is here?) are typically when dealing with death, illness, government rules, schools, regulations and law. All of these are very concrete earthly positions where spiritual may not hold much weight when we are faced with it.

Spiritual is a bird’s-eye view, general overall feeling, a flow of energy. It is about lessons we learn as a result of our earthly choices or their lack of. Taking spiritual to heart in difficult times eases the pain and restores the flow. Spiritual helps us keeping our spirit and soul light at times of difficulties. It is hopeful and free. It speaks of things beyond the physical and that earthly is not the whole picture. There’s a bigger and wider view available. It expands the awareness and helps keep hope and resilience in us alive. That is the function of the spiritual, much more expansive and it is felt through the body and seen through a hidden eye available to us all in times of hardship.

The balance of both, therefore, is necessary and cultivation of that unity and collaborative work is a life-long commitment. It is, indeed, possible to navigate life with the heart completely open, soul shining while engaging with all things earthly. The alternative is being either one or the other, which lacks balance and doesn’t promote the wholeness of human experience.