Everybody Belongs
By Colleen Thomas
As spiritual directors, we are constantly in the process of deepening our own awareness and relationship with God through spiritual practice. To companion others on their journey towards deepening awareness, we “must take care,” as spiritual director and Rabbi Rami Shapiro says, “to not make [our]selves afraid…The inner work of a spiritual companion is learning to fearlessly see what is. The outer work of a spiritual companion is to help others do the same.”
While many of the faculty and staff at Stillpoint are spiritual directors, and many who find us on the web or through word of mouth come to us seeking to discern a call to become a spiritual director, some come simply wanting to know more. They want to answer the longing in their hearts for more of God. They want a space where they can learn and grow and put into practice a spiritual life that isn’t just lived in the secret interior places of our hearts but lived in community with others seeking to offer the gifts acquired on their spiritual sojourns into the depths and deserts of our soul out to the world. If this is you, Stillpoint is a place where you belong too.
My primary role as Stillpoint’s Associate Program Director is to advance the programming vision for our Introduction to Contemplative Community. We offer two programs:
Wisdom in Practice integrates spiritual practices into our everyday lives, gives us valuable tools for navigating life with wisdom and a disciplined spiritual practice, all while being in a practice-oriented community. Enrollment is open for this nine-month cohort based experience which begins with a Welcoming Celebration on Saturday, September 10th 2022.
The Spiritual Journey program was designed to be a prerequisite and discernment year for those feeling called to our Art of Spiritual Direction program. However, we consider the Spiritual Journey one of our Introduction to Contemplative Living programs because many embark on the journey to simply learn how to listen more deeply for “The More.” This Fall we are welcoming participants back to the in-person community with enrollment open for groups that will meet in Long Beach, Pasadena, and Santa Barbara, and continuing our online Journey options.
I hope you all have noticed that this year we are offering a Spiritual Journey group for the BIPOC community. Some have asked me what we will be exploring in this group. My answer is that we’ll be exploring the same themes and concepts as the other Spiritual Journey groups! As Cindy Lee (my co-facilitator for the BIPOC Journey) so poignantly said in her guest blog post last month, we simply needed a group wherein black, indigenous, and all people of color can see their sacredness reflected in one another.
Diversity and inclusion doesn’t mean dissolving cultural and ethnic differences, it means acknowledging and honoring differences. So what will be different in our BIPOC Journey experience is the approach to our spiritual exploration. We will expand our contemplative canons to incorporate books, articles, and poetry written by BIPOC persons. We will include spiritual practices indigenous to our rich and varied cultural heritages. The voices of our spiritual teachers, and our spiritual practices as the ways by which we express our relationship with the Divine must also reflect our sacredness.
It is my hope that the BIPOC Spiritual Journey becomes a universal journey; not one necessary to create safety and dignity for a few, but one that brings all contemplatives to terms with the beauty of a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic perennial wisdom lost to centuries of colonization and cultural appropriation.
As contemplative people we are inviting everyone, not just BIPOC persons, to expand their canon of resources. To look around your own spiritual libraries and notice - Do I have books written by people of color? Am I exploring contemplative practices that reflect a diversity of cultures while giving honor to those cultures for the origin of these practices? As Rabbi Shapiro admonishes us, to do the work of companioning others is to “fearlessly see what is.” To see what is and is not on our bookshelves. To see what we don’t want to see. To see what others see. To behold the beauty and discomfort of it and to keep on seeing.
Colleen Thomas is a Spiritual Director and Stillpoint's Associate Program Director. A long-time practitioner of Centering Prayer, she leads contemplative prayer groups for the ‘40s and Under’ community and works closely with Contemplative Outreach's diversity outreach initiative. Her particular passion for offering contemplative practice and teaching to younger and more diverse communities keeps her closely aligned with a new contemplative movement that sees contemplative life and practice as inseparable from social justice organizing and action. Colleen earned her MA in Theology and Art from Fuller Theological Seminary. She worked in television in Los Angeles for 15 years before relocating to her hometown of Washington D.C. where she continues to practice Bikram yoga and explore her creative passions while enjoying the close companionship of her family.