Women In-Spirit

Pathway 28, The Sacred Sixth Sense.       I am  continuing on my journey through Neil Douglas- Klotzs book, “The Sufi Book of Life- 99 Pathways to the Heart,” by exploring each spiritual passage through art and in particular, collage. Exploring spiritual concepts through the expression of art has brought a new depth of understanding for me personally because I am someone who craves real depth and I relate especially to symbols and their meanings. Collage I find is the perfect medium for this.      I find as I get older or perhaps rather as I become more at home in my own skin I do not want to be chained to labels. By compartmentalizing ourselves into groups we stop our growth or at least stunt it because by excepting that marker you are saying I’ve found my spot and I’m not budging. One can argue that they are happy in that imagined, comfortable place but the universe is in constant motion between stages of birth, living and dying. Nothing stays the same and that includes humans

Awakened Sight Pathway 27.      Continuing my exploration of Neil Douglas-Klotz’s “The Sufi Book of Life- 99 Pathways to the Heart” through art collage the next pathway introduces us to Awakened Sight. In my last post I delved into Awakened Hearing which asked us to consider experiencing our senses from a different perspective, from a Spiritual one. Awakened hearing asked us to receive beyond what we hear, beyond words, to hear the Universe through our own ears and not through what others believe it should sound like. It too can be a point of reconnection.     Pathway 27, Awakened Sight, asks us to look beyond the thousands upon thousands of images that we are “bombarded” with every day. I know that sometimes I feel overloaded from the constant stream on social media, the news and in advertising. We spend a lot of time viewing life through a screen these days rather than experiencing life ourselves and seeing it with our own eyes. Which reminds me of a television commercial where

Pathway 26, Awakened Hearing.       What is sound? Sound is defined as “vibration that travels through the air or another medium and can be heard when it reaches the ear.’ That being said everything has a vibration, it’s own pulse if you will; trees, plants, rocks, the Earth, but we don’t necessarily hear them with our ears. We may feel them or sense them which is a different kind of “hearing”, “Awakened Hearing”, As- Sami, which means “the all-hearing.” Pathway 26, “Awakened Hearing” asks us to contemplate where sound begins within ourselves.  Hearing as a spiritual practice asks us to listen more intently.      “We are here to hold within us the consciousness of all the beings that have traveled before us in the caravan of life, and to include the view of  the whole cosmos in our vision.” Neil Douglas- Klotz .      These next three pathways from his book “The Sufi Book of Life- 99 Pathways to the Heart” all deal with our ability to listen and truly hear or see or sense