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Positive Sinking: a new spiritual trend
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I was talking with a longtime spiritual client recently and intended to use the phrase "positive thinking." But it came of "positive sinking." We both laughed. And then I realized it was one of those weighty slips of the tongue that could well have been meant to begin with.
"Positive Sinking" is a great description of a new current that's been emerging in spiritual circles here in the West and around the world for the last couple of decades. It's become increasingly prevalent in recent years. This is a spirituality that is not about getting your soul up and out of life into the heavens, or retreating back from it all into a cocoon of consciousness, trying to escape the trials, tribulations, pains and frustrations of daily living.
Instead, it's about how to access and sustain a transcendent joy, wonder, freedom and trust in the midst of even the most difficult crises. How to have God with you right here, wherever you are, rather than trying to get away from it all to make connection with Him, or Her. And how to take that indestructible, yet curiously vulnerable, wellness of being into all your relationships.
If we want to integrate the transcendent with the mundane, yes, we certainly have to learn how to access the transcendent. There are all kinds of ways and means to do that.
But even while we're learning and mastering those spiritual skills, there's an additional challenge. We have to learn how, in effect, not to jump out of the dark and difficult "stuff" of life that confronts us and appears to threaten our spiritual wellness, faith, and confidence.
So, a falling into, accepting, embracing, allowing, dropping into begins to take place. "Positive Sinking" is a good description of how it feels — though, until you learn to trust its rhythm, it can feel pretty scary and not very positive for a while.
Those who become acclimated to this descent often find that many traditional and contemporary spiritual descriptions for how to deal with the challenges of their lives no longer really work. Applying those precepts seems to perpetuate, for them, a kind of inner battle or war they didn't really know they were fighting until their positive sinking began.
And that in turn reinforces a division between the spiritual and mundane realities of their nature — what I call "the Spirit/Matter split."
Many such orientations, old and new, favor "positive thinking" as the key. The idea is to never let yourself get negative or down. Advocates of teachings like "The Secret" even go so far as to say that if something negative happens to you, you must have allowed yourself to "attract" it through negative thinking.
This makes for a trenetic inner war that very few people ever seem to win. And even when they do win, might they be losing something else at the same time?
One entrepreneurial coach ridicules what he calls "militant positive thinking." It prevents you from actually encountering both challenging parts of your present reality and possible, apparently negative developments in the future.
Positive Sinking is a different way of relating to what appear to be negative events, experiences, feelings and conditions.
If you feel yourself sinking — or sometimes plunging — into what seems to be un-spiritual in your mind, emotions, desires, reactions, attachments, or aversions, see if you can just take a breath there without trying to leap out of or hold at bay that painful, threatening feeling.
Consider that life is perhaps giving you a deeper initiation into its totality. Maybe it's helping you learn how to be with what is rather than fight, flee from, or try to fix it.
And see if you can begin, even if only for a few moments at a time, to notice that there is something very integrative about holding yourself in that kind of participatory presence. There's a paradox to this. It becomes positive in a greater sense to give yourself permission to sink at least briefly into deeply feeling and identifying with your "negatives."
So, positive sinking into the realities of our humanness, both apparently good and apparently bad, is good on a larger scale. What makes it most positive is learning to find and have faith in divine spirit right there, right here, in the midst of seemingly very un-divine parts of our minds and lives.
More and more spiritual teachers, traditions, and practitioners today are embracing this kind of orientation. It's been the focus of my work from early on; one term we have for it is "waking down."
Another of its expressions is a vigorous yet sensitive linking up of transcendental (sometimes called "non-dual," as in "undivided") spiritual consciousness with deep psychological understanding and psychotherapy.
Petaluma-based therapist John Prendergast and others have been hosting an annual conference along these lines for several years now. Another one was held this past November at JFK University in Walnut Creek. Its theme was "Embodied Awakening."
I didn't attend this time, but I spoke at one in the past. And if you check out books that Prendergast and his collaborators have brought out from their previous gatherings — The Sacred Mirror and Listening from the Heart of Silence — it's a sure thing that there was a lot of focus at the conference on what it's like, and what it takes, to combine deep psychological healing and growth with profound spiritual wisdom and awakening.
Positive Sinking is pretty much guaranteed to be part of what we experience as we move into embodied kinds of spiritual awakening. I doubt any of the speakers at the recent conference used that phrase; my tongue had to slip first to say it!
Still, the argument can be made that, by ending inner wars in our being, Positive Sinking may be one of the bright hopes for our sane (meaning "whole") human future.
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