natural spirituality

I went last Saturday to a conference on Natural Spirituality. Some of the groups that came together were Seedwork, The Rose, and the Hayden Institute. The idea is that Natural Spirituality is the spiritality of universal human experience, such as dreams and synchronicity, as different from spiritual practices such as meditation which have to be learned. One of the founders calls it "inner work in a Christian context," based on the ideas of Jung. The leaders of the movement see what they are doing as in many ways universal, but choose to put it in a Christian container.

I hadn't been to this conference before and didn't realize that it would put so much emphasis on dreams. I haven't used dreams much, feeling that I have such good access to my unconscious (in the Jungian sense) through imagery that I don't need dreams. But someone gave me important reassurance last week by telling me a dream, so synchronicity seems to suggest it is time to pay more attention to dreams.

Actually, what I liked better was the brief exercise the newbie group did of a group dream. People suggested a set of dream images a sentence at a time. The person who started envisioned a beach, but someone else added a hurricane. Things were washing up on the beach and I said a hand (right) washed up on the beach. People not surprisingly saw that as a negative image, but I hadn't actually envisioned it as such. It resonates for me more with the hand that comes out of the lake bearing a sword in the Aurthur legend.