Holistic Spirituality

Spirituality is an essential facet of any culture, intentional community or a conscious individual’s life.

While there is not a single spiritual path that everyone here at GaiaYoga Gardens shares, there is something at a spiritual level that helps guide us and bonds our community together. In fact, one of the biggest challenges we’ve faced in “designing” our culture is clarifying and manifesting a spiritual community “glue.” One that keeps us together, but also supports diversity and change in peoples’ spiritual practice, focus and realization.

The primary filter we are monitoring in regards to spiritual philosophies or practices is whether or not they support a sustainable and holistic lifestyle. In other words, does the spiritual path support wholeness in the individual and does it support their ability to fully incarnate their human “beingness” as a member of a holistic community.

There are many spiritual traditions that subtly or not so subtly discount or invalidate parts of our humanity. Examples of this are the concept of original sin in Christianity or this punishing god found in the Old Testament or the Koran. Many Eastern traditions are interpreted to be saying that the world is simply an illusion or maya and must be transcended, that being incarnated is a fundamental problem or a fall from the divine. This often leads to psychic and emotional violence against the body and inner child. There is still value in teachings that have a fragmented understanding or practice in them, but as our intention here is to live in and as a holistic community, the value is limited because many of the fruits of these teachings don't actually support wholeness in the individual or at the community level.

It’s important that we are able to have open, respectful but challenging conversations around spirituality with people who stay here and that people are open to looking at their spiritual approach from a “permaculture perspective.” By this we mean looking at the design and basic structure of the spiritual approach and seeing if it actually produces the results you want and is actually sustainable over time. Does it actually support the integration of God and Goddess or Consciousness and Love/Energy? Does it support a functional, healthy, aware life?

In simplest terms, we see that there are two primary faces of Spirit. The Divine Masculine – which is the Consciousness, Witness, or emptiness sought through many forms of meditation – and The Divine Feminine – which is the energy of birth-life-death often sought through sacred sexuality, art, prayer, dance, music and ritual. We encourage people to engage in a spiritual practice that serves to integrate the Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine, that values both, and helps us deepen our realization and manifestation of this union.

Teachings and practices we’ve found to support this kind of spiritual community orientation include: Waking Down, Nonviolent Communication, some pagan rituals, 12-step recovery, Re-Evaluative Co-Counseling, nature communion, shamanic journeying, plant-spirit-medicine ceremonies, Tantra, The Michael Teaching, guided visualizations, prayer, Qigong, Tai Chi, and various yoga and meditation techniques. There are many others we are open to embracing but with which we are not as familiar.

While we don’t fully embrace any of the well-established “world religions,” (Buddhism, Christianity, Taoism, Judaism, Islam, etc.) we appreciate aspects in all of them. We find spiritual wisdom and support in many of the world religions and also in the more recent teachings of Osho, Adi Da (Da Free John), Ammachi, Saniel Bonder, Rumi, Malidoma and Sobonfu Somé (The Dagara People), native Hawaiian spirituality and many other indigenous spiritual traditions from around the world.

Our dream here at GaiaYoga Gardens is to create a holistic community (not a spiritual community) that integrates Spirit, self, community and Earth in a full and sustainable manner. Obviously, spirituality is an essential part of this. While many communities have spirituality at their core, for us the core is slightly different. Our core is balance itself, wholeness itself, integration itself – the approach we call GaiaYoga. We’ve seen many spiritual communities that are actually out of balance because of an “over focus” on spirituality (and therefore an under focus on other areas of life). This “over focus” is a structural issue that becomes possible when spirituality dominates over balance itself, wholeness itself, integration itself. So, while spirituality is an essential aspect of our life here, it is held in the same esteem as self, community, and Earth.

The greatest gift we offer people here is spaciousness. There’s real space here to fall into yourself, to unwind and have the time and support to explore your spirituality and find what is true for you. If you have any questions about our approach to spirituality at GaiaYoga Gardens please feel free to ask us.

If you come here, we invite you to look past your ideas of what “spiritual” looks like and acts like.

We invite you to realize that there is a very deep and mysterious process alive here that is guided by and rooted in Spirit – but it’s almost certainly not what you think it will look like.