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1
Awakening
 
THE FIRST STEP
 
A Pause for Centering
 
Let us begin by being still. Sit back in your spirit; you do that by sitting back in your body. This First Step in the Dance of the Spirit is Awakening, the Awakening of your Spirituality. Let your reflections on Awakening emerge from your inner self. Take time, don’t hurry, and try to spend at least a few moments with each question, and with each of your responses, before going on to the next one.
 
When in your life do you find you are most awake?
 
When are you least awake?
 
Are there moments or times in your life when you feel called to be awake to life in a deeper way than you are now?
 
To what in your life are you most awake?
 
To whom?
 
Are you awake to yourself, to the self you are in the deepest parts of your being?
 
Are you awake to your inner life, as well as to your outer life?
 
Are you awake to God? Do you ever feel that God is calling you to a fuller life, addressing you in a special way, speaking your name with love, with tenderness?
 
Are you awake to the presence of Mystery in your life? To what is real but somehow beyond explaining?
 
Do you ever feel yourself touched by this Mystery? Do you ever feel yourself reaching out in order to make that touch of Mystery happen more often?
 
Has an event in your life—of either great joy or great sorrow—ever been the source for your spirit’s awakening?
 
Were you more awake to your inner life, your spirituality, when you were a child than you are now?
 
Do you ever wish you could be back in touch with your childhood sense of wonder, of awe, of spirituality?
 
Are you awake to other people, especially to their losses, their sufferings?
 
Are you awake to the voices of the earth, to the stars, the wind, the sound of the rain?
 
Are you awake to the possibility of being happy?
 
 
Many of us take our waking slowly. We hold back, not wanting to go into the new day. It asks too much of us; makes too many demands. We are frightened; scared that we may lose the little we already have, the little we can call ours.
 
Others of us are still children in our waking. We anticipate each day as if it were our first—we feel shiny inside and outside. For us, no limits exist, and even if it is a dreary day, we feel ourselves surrounded by care.
 
Still others of us, all too often, wake abruptly. We are startled into the new day, shocked into it. Our systems aren’t given time to adjust. We feel cheated—sleep and dreaming have been stolen from us too soon.
 
And then there are the Awakenings of anticipation. The days of being absolutely convinced that this is the day we start over and begin again. Literally, this is the day that God has made, the dawning of a time to rejoice and be glad. For today is the beginning of possibility, of fullness, and, finally, of happiness.
 
Whatever the circumstances, this coming out of sleep is familiar to everyone. Less familiar, however, is the symbolism this daily happening holds for a deeper and fuller Awakening. Less familiar, too, is the clue in each daily, bodily awakening which, if followed, can lead into new worlds. For people awaken not only from something; people awaken to and toward something. And the intimations of a budding spirituality begin when people awaken to themselves: to their deepest inner selves. It begins when people awaken to their sacred selves, and to God, to Mystery, and to the presence of the awesome in the world around them. It begins as people awaken consciously to the presence of sorrow and pity in the world as well as to joy and to delight. Or, to put it another way, people begin the dance of the spirit as they awaken to the possibility and glory of their spirituality. Today, throughout the world, as never before, this awakening is happening to women.
 
A woman who is seeking a richer spiritual life needs to probe the meaning of awakening in order to get a sense of it—to get a feeling for its texture, sound, and taste. And so this first chapter is an exploration of Awakening, the initial step in all spirituality. To understand Awakening, and to know how to move about within this first step, we have to study its choreography. So we need to attend to three themes: (1) the meanings of awakening in general and the teaching from both Western and Eastern religions concerning the awakening of spirituality; (2) the particular awakenings that contribute to the spirituality of women; and (3) those attitudes and approaches that can help us learn the moves of Awakening as part of our own spiritual dance.
 
Awakening: A Recurring Theme in Spirituality
 
Spiritual Awakening
 
The Awakening of spirituality resembles the awakening of poets and artists. Painters speak of the awakened eye, where seeing is complete, alert, and intense. Painters talk of facing paintings, and not only looking at them, but feeling them with their eyes. Artists acknowledge the awakening of the sense of touch in the hands and the fingertips, especially if they are potters or sculptors. Musicians, both performers and composers, know the awakening of the ear, the outer and the inner ear, to a special world of hearing. Dancers exult at the awakening of the entire body in movement, gesture, and rhythm. And those who are poets know the secret of awakening to words—to their sound and rhythm, their precision and splendor.
 
The Awakening of spirituality starts with this special form of sensual attentiveness, which all of us possess, to feeling, touching, seeing, and hearing, as well as to movement, gesture, and rhythm. As the Awakening of Spirituality begins, we gradually find ourselves becoming aware of the capacities and possibilities within ourselves to be sculptors, musicians, painters, and poets of our spirituality, able to hear, touch, and feel a new life emerging and blossoming from within. We find ourselves ready to become dancers—dancers of the spirit. We begin to look at things and people with more care, hearing words and music not heard before. We experience our senses coming alive, and we reach out to feel what we have not felt before. We move in new ways, with more assurance and more grace. We hold a leaf or a shell, a bird or a baby, as if for the very first time. We listen to a song or a symphony, a conversation or a cry, and feel ourselves stopping, pulled toward a response.
 
The Awakening which is the first step in all Spirituality starts here, but then it begins to build on this experience of the senses “coming to”—coming into their own and ready to receive everything in the universe. Although its point of departure is sometimes sudden, sometimes gradual, Awakening is nonetheless clear and obvious attending. It happens as a person begins to notice her characteristic ways of being-with, staying-in, resting, and listening as preliminary to whatever comes next. And with that comes another shift in the pattern: the experience of slowing down and taking time, just as in childhood, to wonder at how she is a part of the entire creation. These are moments of intense and poised standing still and listening in order to make a beginning. These are moments to be cherished.
 
Such Spiritual Awakening presumes a willingness to interact with and get to know, without haste, anxiety, or immediate results, the parts of our lives that are unseen. Spiritual Awakening is the capacity to start connecting with those aspects of ourselves that although real remain hidden—mystery, and love, and sorrow, and dreams of wholeness—those that make us truly us. Spiritual Awakening is unhurried, yet when people agree to step into it, and move around within it, it discloses magnificent possibilities—most importantly a movement toward discovery, creation, and transformation in the inner life. Layers, crusts, and shells which may have been built up over years become brittle, break apart, and begin to disappear. Muscles relax. And a realization dawns that a personal daystar has begun to shine, giving us its light.
 
The first step in the dance of the spirit, Spiritual Awakening, then begins in earnest. Something has made us alert and kindled our sensitivity to and awareness of the deep places, the quiet places, the hidden places. Something has called us to follow the hunch that now is the time to allow the light into these places, to be willing to look at the shadows too, and to become comfortable with both. Something has impelled us to befriend ourselves, one another, and the world in which we dwell. And although we recognize we are claiming our selves, sometimes for the first time, that claim is set in the midst of something greater, something more.