Posts Tagged ‘practice’
SacredRiver.org | Spiritual Practice: An Initial Outline
A significant part of spirituality is the development of a particular worldview, and that is what we’ve largely been working on. However, it’s vital to point out that a spiritual life is an active life. Since we do not have any mysterious “essence” that makes us more or less spiritual, being spiritual must include having a spiritual practice.
via SacredRiver.org | Spiritual Practice: An Initial Outline.
SacredRiver.org | The Streams of a Spiritual Life
For this reason Sacred River delineates seven core areas of living, all of which can be profitably approached with a spiritual perspective:
1. Self—fundamental functions of the self, including the biological, psychological, and characterological.
2. Relational—personal friendships, romantic partners, family, and community (e.g. neighbors, colleagues, classmates, etc.).
3. Work—labor in domestic, occupational, religious, and community settings.
4. Epicurean—creative or enriching experiences, such as art, food, music, travel, sport, dance, theater, and so on.
5. Intellectual—development of critical thinking and reason, education, research and analysis, and pedagogy.
6. Sociocultural—interaction between the self and the larger culture; working to influence social change in some meaningful way.
7. Natural—connection to and experience of the natural world, including and beyond human beings.
In reality, all these Spiritual Streams are interconnected via the body and mind; however, developing a spiritual life is not a metaphysical exercise, but ideally becomes an approach to living. In other words, this list is but a convenient way of focusing attention and implementing pragmatic action. At the same time, I am confident that it does a fairly good job of modeling, if not irreducible then at least well-demarcated domains of human life.
