Finding the Daily Divine
by
Sarah Varcas
We begin the month with some adjustments to make. They may be apparently tiny, a small change of schedule, a new route to work, moving some furniture around! It’s easy to overlook little things like this, but the capacity of tiny changes to clear the way for bigger energy shifts is profound. Life doesn’t have to be about huge moments of insight, sweeping change and new beginnings every week! Sometimes the apparently insignificant things are the driving force of our onward journey. That new route to work might cross your path with that of someone who becomes a dear friend. That shift of furniture may change not only the layout of your room but also your perspective on life itself. Even sitting in a chair you don’t usually occupy can help a new perspective arise as you view your familiar environment from an unfamiliar position.
This openness to the little shifts is important now. After several weeks of upheaval and challenge (and even positive developments can be challenging!), we have an opportunity now to settle into something more low key and subtle for a while. A time to look around at the little details we miss in the course of daily life – things left undone, overdue adjustments, neglected activities – and sort things out. If it feels mundane, that’s fine. It’s meant to be. Life in the material realm is often mundane. We make the mistake of thinking it shouldn’t be, that somehow the everyday world of work, house-keeping, eating, sleeping, shopping and commuting is a poor relation to the world of spiritual development and burgeoning self-awareness but this isn’t true. Our spiritual path exists here and now in each and every moment. Not somewhere in the future once we no longer have to deal with the mundane world. Even the Buddha had to take a pee, but he was no less enlightened as he did it!
The Sun, Jupiter and Pluto have much to share with us right now. They remind us that it is the mind which assigns value and worth to our experience, deeming some bits of it more ‘spiritual’ than others. This is a red herring (as so many mind-made things are!). Spirit, life, energy, the divine – whatever you want to call it – is everywhere all the time, and the more we can experience this as fact rather than simply a theory that sounds good, the more everything becomes radiant and full of spirit, no matter what. I recall speaking many years ago with a Thai Buddhist monk who had engaged in the practice of contemplating corpses (one of the less popular traditional Buddhist practices!). As he sat before a decomposing corpse with the remit to contemplate the impermanence of the physical form, the realisation arose that whilst dead, it was far from devoid of life. In fact it was teeming with it, not only in terms of the creatures which were feeding upon it for their own survival and the process of decay which depends upon various bacteria, but it was also vibrant with the potential of new life as it fed the soil beneath it, enriching it ready for future growth of plants and trees. He realised that life is everywhere and can never be destroyed, it simply shifts, changes and moves on in a different form.
Now whilst we (hopefully!) are not surrounded by dead bodies, there is an important parallel in this story, for we tend to treat many aspects of life as dead and sterile, skipping over them or paying as little attention to them as possible, while we rush towards the things which inspire and energise us. Right now the heavens ask us to stop rushing and pay attention to those things we routinely overlook and find the life in them, the spirit in them, the vibrant energy which resides there. The little adjustments I mentioned earlier can be a good place to start, for in making them we can experience the power of a tiny shift in something we thought was inconsequential in the first place. And as we make these shifts and feel into their energetic consequences we can begin to experience the pulse of life in the most ‘everyday’ aspects of existence. This is a vital part of the spiritual path, for if we only ever perceive the spiritual as something other than ordinary life we will never fulfil our potential as embodied beings in what can be a mundane material realm.
Tiny steps, small adjustments, finding the divine in the washing up, the bus queue, cleaning our teeth, this is the order of the day as we begin a new month. Everything is infused with the divine, our task is simply to recognise and rejoice in it.
Sarah Varcas
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