Finding The Divine In the Everyday
Well, aloha, and good afternoon on a damp winter’s day somewhere in West Oxfordshire. I thought today that I would talk about finding the divine in the mundane.
It’s a question that sometimes comes up, actually comes up quite often with clients. They want to find more ways to explore the divine, and it’s something that came up, I was coaching on a retreat over the weekend. It wasn’t my retreat.
I was coaching for somebody else and this was one of the topics that they were talking about, finding the divine in the mundane. For me, when I’ve been looking to find the divine, one of the ways that I typically do it is nature.
I go out for a walk, I walk in the fields. I connect with nature, I walk in the woods. Or I just stare at the birds in my garden, but at the moment I have a problem with my foot,
so going for walks in nature isn’t easy, and it’s winter, so the birds are perhaps not as frequent in the garden as they sometimes are, so it’s been really important that I use other ways to connect with the divine.
Now, there are many tools and techniques and practises that you can use, but one of the things that I think often happens is that we’re going along in our everyday, in our mundane way.
We’re getting the kids off to school if you’ve got kids. We’re getting the business together. We’re doing the accounts. We’re going and doing the shopping. We’re doing things. We’re going to the gym.
And it’s very easy to lose sense of the joy, the connection, that sense of something bigger, something beyond. When you go out to nature, it’s easy.
You hear the birds, you think about the wonder of creation, but when you’re just pootling about your home or down the supermarket, it can be quite difficult.
Back in the day, when I wanted to go round the world for my 40th birthday, I decided to get some back pocket skills, and one of the back pocket skills I decided to get was massage.
So I trained as a massage therapist, and as part and parcel of that, I had to learn physiology and anatomy, and the more I studied anatomy and physiology, the more amazed I became by the design of the human body.
Looking back, I think maybe that was the very start of my journey back towards more of a spirituality, more of a sense of faith, because as I looked at the human body, the more I learned about the human body, the more I found myself going,
“Wow, how could this amazing thing “have happened by accident?” And even when I’m sitting here with a sore foot, I still think, “How could this amazing thing have happened by accident?”
So for me, some of the discovery of the divine is actually in my own physical creation, my own body, the amazingness of just how my hand works, or how my foot works, how the muscles work.
It’s just extraordinary. Relating to just stopping, pausing, tuning in, listening to what’s going on outside, okay, it’s winter and I’ve got double glazing and I can’t hear necessarily what’s going on outside, but I can hear the solar collector when there is sun.
I can hear the solar collector collecting those sun’s rays to power up the water. I can hear cars in the road, and the sound of the cars tells me whether it’s raining or whether it’s sunny.
I can smell different smells. I might buy flowers or I might bring something into the house. I love the scent of rose, so I use rose water. I put rose water on my face, rose water in my body.
So these little things that are there to celebrate and embrace. Gratitude, the practise of gratitude’s a big part of this, being thankful for those small things,
whether it’s being thankful just for the fact that you’ve finished off something that you’ve been struggling to finish, for example, tax, given that in the UK we’re heading to the end of the tax year, and everything’s got to be in by the end of January.
Might be just celebrating the fact that you got your tax in, or your tax reporting in. Or celebrating the fact that you’ve got a roof over your head, or something, for instance, this.
I love the feel, the texture, and the look of this scarf. It’s just beautiful, and somebody made this, even if it was made on a machine, somebody designed the machines that it was made on.
Somebody came up with the blend of the colours. There are extraordinary things to be had. Food, great place to find the mundane, the connection with the divine through the mundane.
When you’re very conscious with your food, there’s this tantric practise, where you take a piece of food, like a piece of chocolate for example, and run it round your lips, and taste it, and smell it, and then put it into your mouth, so you totally experience it.
Going outside. Going outside, and just even if you’re not in a wood or a forest, but just going outside and listening, and smelling. What do you smell? What do you see?
Sometimes it’s the difference in colour. If there’s a very blue sky, it might be the amazingness of the blue sky. Or it might be, on a grey day, the extraordinary way that the grey kind of blends with the scenery.
What do you see? What do you hear? What do you feel? What do you smell? What do you taste? What’s going on? Connecting, really really connecting with your senses at the deepest possible level, in terms of whatever it is that you’re experiencing.
Staring at something. I recently, I haven’t got it by me, but I recently bought myself a new mug, and in some ways it’s a boring mug.
It’s a white mug with a metallic handle, and it’s bone china, and when you look at it, if you hold it to the light, you can actually see all the way through.
It was in a sale, and that was great as well, but you can actually see all the way through. That is so amazing, that you can see through something solid like china, and see the liquid inside the mug. It’s extraordinary!
So find the extraordinary in the everyday. Find the joy in the everyday, because the more you find the joy in the everyday, the more you get more joy in your life as a whole,
and the more you start to connect with that sense of something bigger, whether it’s Source, God, the Universe, the Divine, whatever that something bigger is, starting to connect with that something bigger, just through those little moments and spaces in everyday experience.
I hope this has been useful and interesting for you, and look forward to talking to you again very soon.
If you want to get in touch, either the Facebook group Secret Art of Huna, that’s the Facebook page, or the Facebook group, Secret Art of Huna For Powerful Transformation,
or you can find me on the website secretartofhuna.com where you can download the free meditation, or if you want to, go to \diary and you can book a call with me. So look forward to talking to you very soon. Bye.
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