7
Jun 12

What Is a Reluctant Metaphysician?

My philosophy is that psychological issues and bodily disease are "divina afflictios" (divine afflictions) giving us opportunities for psycho-spiritual growth, soul-making, and finding the source of healing.

Are you a Reluctant Metaphysician? A career change, an upsetting external event, a serious illness, a painful breakup, or an unravelling culture can all be invitations to enter a deeper world behind the world. You may not have chosen to go there, but you evolve thereby. No less than Persephone’s abduction created a journey to her becoming a Queen of the underworld and a rebirth into a new life stance, so can our world be transformed at such times.

The Path of the Reluctant Metaphysician leads each of us to create a holistic spiritual philosophy in our current times of the “great unraveling” of our political, economic, cultural, and ecological world.  The metaphysical path incorporates the spiritual path, but includes both “spiritual” and “soulful” pathways (Hillman, 1975). Daniels (2009) calls for an “all vector” approach to spiritual traditions. The path of the Reluctant Metaphysician is such a path… an integral approach to finding your life stance in troubled times.

Each soul’s purpose is to take the joyful and painful stories of our lives, and from those experiences to weave a “coat of many colors” to pass on to our children or future generations, as biblical Joseph’s father Jacob did. Each of us weaves together our unique quilt from the threads of various spiritual traditions we have explored (blue threads), the light hearted moments we have experienced (golden threads), the wounds we have suffered (red threads), the places in nature that have become our sanctuaries (green threads), the people we have met (uniquely colored threads), and from our dreams and visions (purple threads).