Soul Resilience

Probably all of us are facing a future with a lot more uncertainty, and a lot less control. So what can we learn from people who have been living positively in that condition for thousands of years? By definition, nomads represent an extreme example of this, having no ownership or control of land, very few assets, and being at the mercy of whatever the climate throws at them.

Some of the most inspiring times of my life were the ten retreat groups I organised in the Tunisian Sahara, travelling by foot and camel with semi-nomadic Bedouin guides. You can see my blogs about these trips here.

These were men born and bred in the desert, as nomads, who in the 1980s had to move to a town because climate change had dried up the shallow wells and springs. They still bred and herded camels in the desert, and they loved my groups because they were back in the life they loved.

The Bedouin are profound teachers by their approach to life. Although their situation is materially tough and basic, they are happy, dignified people. As they sit in a circle in the chilly light before sunrise, they are chatting, lighting the fire, making the bread, tending the camels and singing. I join them and ask myself, “Is this work time or social time?”, knowing that this is a western mindset and the question would be meaningless to them. Their songs move seamlessly from praise of Allah through romantic ballads to children’s play songs. Their days really are a flowing dance uniting, work, spirit, fellowship and recreation. Because of some of them speak good French, this is a rare chance to share the life and culture of people who are still within the semi-nomadic tradition.

You might think that losing the nomad life, living quite poorly in a town, would leave them despairing or bitter, but it hasn’t. They are some of the most happy, resilient people I’ve met. Around a campfire under a million stars, we’d ask why. They said, “You may be rich in things, but we are rich in our families.” Beside their deep, tribal sense of community, I could see that they had roots in their love for the desert, and in their faith, in Islam. A friend who works in Palestine says this is all true there.

Physical navigation in the desert is very difficult: there are no roads, and very few features you can put on a map.  If you go into the desert with native Bedouin guides, as I have done many times, they never use a map or compass. They navigate the desert as their forebears did in Old Testament times. They literally know the desert like the back of their hand: every dune and contour, every stump of palm or odd shaped rock, they can distinguish and steer by. My guess is that the Bedouins’ love for this land nourishes them so deeply because it feels like a reciprocal relationship: their intimate knowledge of the land, their rapport with its fragile ecosystems, enables them to navigate the desert, and even harvest from it, in the sense of finding grazing for their camels.

On most of my retreats, we had 24 hours where the visitors went into silent, solo time. On one trip, I had a friend who is an organic farmer in Surrey: he said he spent a lot of time on his farm alone and in silence, and would rather spend this time living with the Bedouin. This gave him and me a deeper sense of how they operate as a community: they seem more like a group, and less like individuals than westerners, and they moved seamlessly from one combined task to the next.

It is probably no coincidence that Islam originated in the desert, and that the Prophet Mohammad organised camel caravans before he received divine inspiration. I have studied Islamic teachings enough to see their beauty, and their relevance to a life without control. The Fateha, the Islamic equivalent of the Lord’s Prayer, celebrates the idea of divine unity, recognises a bigger power than the human individual, and calls upon that power for compassion, guidance and inspiration.What might be called the spiritual resilience of the Bedouin is well worth exploring further: if this interests you, see my blog on Desert Wisdom: the book and the nomads.

The literal meaning of inspire is to draw in spirit, from the Latin spiritus, signifying both breath and a bigger connection. I know the word spiritual is hard for some people, so replace it with inspirational if you prefer. I’m using it because I believe that spiritual aspects of life and resilience will become more vital for most of us in the years ahead as turbulence grows. I’ve chosen three qualities which inspire me and lift my spirits:

• Meaning: our sense of meaning in our own life, and the world in general, is badly eroded by the power of fake news and social media. To find meaning, we have to use our intention and seek it at a higher, non-material level: and this includes the meaning of difficulties, worries, setbacks.
• Purpose: in a market economy, it’s sadly understandable that we’re constantly exposed to messages persuading us that we and our lives are pointless unless we buy Brand X. The best antidote is to find a higher purpose, one which inspires you and serves more than material and personal needs.
• Connection: consider how your ways of connecting have changed in recent years and even more since covid: more online shopping and messaging, and less face-to-face contacts. Probably your life is more full of technical connections, information, stuff, but fewer connections with people, Nature, purpose and meaning.  A main part of my spiritual life is  feeling the connections between life of all kinds, a sense of fellowship which I find very nourishing and meaningful.

William Bloom is one of the best UK teachers in this field. His books include The Power of Modern Spirituality. In 2015 he started an educational charity, Spiritual Companions Trust, which now has the first fully accredited UK course in this area: a Diploma in practical spirituality and wellness. The website lists a number of resources, with some useful videos and a booklist. See more at www.spiritualcompanions.org.

William believes, as I do, that one’s spiritual beliefs need not connect with organised religion or with belief in a deity. He describes three behaviours at the heart of all spiritual paths, whether or not these fit within a named tradition:

• Connection – with the wonder and energy of life.
• Reflection – on one’s life and actions, and how to change and improve.
• Service – a clear sense of what is right and what is wrong, and acting so as to do good for others.

If you’d like to explore inspiration and the spiritual dimension of resilience, here are sources which have helped me:

1. Nature connection: this is much more than feeling good in greenery. Try feeling at one with the vitality and wisdom in all life, including all of Nature. Imagine there’s a creative desire we share, which can guide us through the climate crisis.
2. Woodland wisdom and stewardship: there’s a special depth to the connection humans can find with threes and forests. I’ve found this most at Hazel Hill Wood, the conservation and retreat centre I founded. Stewardship is the idea that humans are here to care for and co-create with Nature, not exploit it, and this is a big inspiration for me.
3. Sufi wisdom: this has helped my sense of purpose and resilience for many years. Its core is seeing divinity in all forms of life, and keeping an open-hearted approach. You can learn more at another of my websites, living-organically.com.
4. Dreams and myth: American eco-philosopher Thomas Berry highlights the importance of dreams (visions of hope), and of changing our myths or prevailing beliefs. He highlights the amazing creative wisdom of Gaia, Planet Earth, in evolving through repeated crises, and the need for humans to connect with this. See more at thomasberry.org.
5. Deep ecology: a process created by Joanna Macy, drawing from Native American and Buddhist sources. She believes that most people are pushed into denial and inertia because they can’t process their pain and despair about the state of the Earth. Deep ecology is a powerful way to do this, and involves the support of a group as a key element.

Clearing our negative feelings enables us to find inspiration and a positive vision to engage with the troubles of our times. See more at www.workthatreconnects.org.

Meaning, purpose and connection are more a direction of travel than a destination we reach. They can help our journey through life to be one of discovery and service, even in these turbulent years.

Life is getting more changeable for most of us.  Many of us these days have to face mortality more directly: perhaps because of our own health, or the passing of a friend or family member.  Sufi teachings and other traditions urge us to face our dying to enrich our living: by getting through fears and denial, we can reach a view of death as a positive transition, and our soul can help us in this process. Exploring the soul’s journey was a weekend retreat on these themes, which I co-led with Jilani Cordelia Prescott in 2015.

One of our reasons for organising this event was a hunch that exploring these topics would be helped by the collective concentration and support of a group, and by having a whole weekend to explore deeply, with a mix of group and solo time, and two nights to sleep and dream.

It can be illuminating to imagine that we have a soul which exists before us and chooses this human lifetime, and the family we’re born into, to provide experiences and learning which it needs.  Believing that the challenges in our life have a positive purpose has helped me hugely, and stops me feeling like a victim of circumstances.  However, finding the positive aspect can be tricky!  The retreat offered various ways to help us to listen to our soul, and seek its guidance on questions about our life, death and beyond.

Before the weekend, we shared a number of questions we hoped to explore, so that the soul and intuition would already be engaged with them. Does some part of us have a life of its own, before and after our time in a human body?  If we call this our soul, why did it choose to experience life through us?  Can it give us some guidance, for this life and beyond?  How can we hear its voice?  Our aim was not to prescribe answers, nor to assume we all shared the same beliefs, but to share teachings and processes, and create a safe space for each person to explore their own answers.

One of our main sources for this weekend was the book ‘The Soul’s Journey’ by Hazrat Inayat Khan, a leading Sufi teacher in the early twentieth century.  He believes that each soul chooses its human life, and is guided by departed souls and angels.  He says that “ignorance of the self gives the fear of death”, and the antidote is to identify more with the soul than the body.  One benefit of drawing on Sufi teachings is that they are un-dogmatic, centred on open-heartedness and a sense of divine unity in all life: so they can fit alongside many other spiritual teachings.

Another main source was the work of Neil Douglas Klotz, who has explored the deeper truth of Christian and other teachings by re-translating them from the original languages.  This often adds great depth of meaning compared to traditional translations.  See more at www.abwoon.org.

Here’s an example of Jesus’s teachings on this topic: “unless a human being returns to that sameness with the cosmos that feels like death – the dark, moist place of birthing, the place where only flow and animating spirit, only water and breathing, exist – that person cannot enter the reign of unity, the “I can” of the cosmos…”  This is Neil’s rendering of John 3:15, in the King James ‘Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God”.

The retreat proved to be a powerful, illuminating experience for all of us, with a lot of depth and tenderness. This was partly because mortality was a live, current issue for most of those who came: several had recently been closely involved in supporting a parent or friend who had died, and others were facing that situation in the near future. The level of trust and mutual care which evolved in the group from early on was remarkable, and there was a strong sense of collective wisdom, where we learned from each other, and the atmosphere in the group took us further.

Although I’ve led many groups and retreats, a recent weekend was one of the edgiest: on the theme Exploring the Soul’s Journey.  My co-leader Cordelia and I both felt nervous about helping people to contact their souls for guidance about good living, good dying, and what my lie beyond.

Our weekend at The Abbey, near Oxford, was a deep, illuminating shared journey for all of us.  Cordelia and I began it by emphasising that we did not offer answers on these delicate questions, merely teachings and processes which might be helpful.  It was clear that a collective journey in a smallish group (fifteen people) enabled all of us to gain insights which took us beyond where we could reach individually, many of them from the experience of others in the group.

One factor in this was our use of Dances of Universal Peace, a form of moving mediation using sacred chants.  Over the past three years, Cordelia and I have led a range of groups where we have successfully used these Dances to enable a group to build trust, and deepen their connection to spiritual guidance in some way.

Dance, walking, meditation and sound mantras all proved peaceful ways to move people beyond everyday awareness and into a profound conversation with their soul.  We explored the idea that the soul is a ray of divinity which chooses a particular human life for its own growth, and which continues its own growth, and which continues its life beyond this human one.

All of us made deeper contact with our soul in some way, and found rich guidance from this.  A common message was to slow down, do less, and enjoy every moment of being in a body, with all its scope for sensual delight.  Several people struggling to care for frail, demanding parents saw ways that this served their own soul’s growth.

Cordelia and I did a lot of research for this group, and found some excellent books.  One which was much appreciated is Testimony of Light by Helen Greaves: dictated to her by a dead friend, offering a detailed and affirming account of the afterlife.  Her experience after death is “life separated by density-that is all!”  She finds that one can only understand one’s human life after it: “our ‘inner eyes’ are opened… to the errors of our old patterns… We are allowed to progress into such experiences as will help us put right these errors.” Click here for my blog on the book.

One aim of this weekend was to face our fears and prejudices around death, and explore it as a passing over for our soul.  The conversations with our souls certainly helped this, as did some touching accounts from several of the group of deaths they had been present at.  These are supported by research showing that many people find more peace as they approach physical death, and feel themselves being welcomed and helped by souls from the other side.