Who Is Accompanying Your Becoming?
by Jasmine Bellamy
Stillpoint Executive Director
cecile-mousist-via-unsplash
On Transformation, Wisdom, and the Gift of Spiritual Companions
Last month, I invited us to consider the caterpillar’s disappearance.
This month, I find myself wondering about what remains.
In my reflection, The Awareness and Acceptance of Becoming, I shared Alejandro Jodorowsky’s image of metamorphosis. It offered us a beautiful way to consider transformation: the letting go that often precedes becoming.
Afterward, a friend sent me a gentle challenge.
He reminded me that the butterfly carries something of its life as a caterpillar with it. His larger point was spiritual rather than biological: awakening does not mean leaving our humanity behind. In fact, he suggested, perhaps one of the challenges of awakening is learning how to remain deeply human.
I’ve been sitting with that.
Perhaps transformation is not erasure.
Perhaps we do not become by ceasing to have been who we were.
We carry memory. Experience. Joy. Wounds. Relationships. Longings. Patterns. The ways we learned to protect ourselves. The strategies that once helped us navigate the world. Even as something new emerges, something of the journey remains.
And perhaps the spiritual invitation is not simply to leave these things behind, but to allow them to be integrated and transformed by Love.
Becoming More Fully Human
This is one of the gifts I find in the wisdom of Fr. Thomas Keating.
Earlier this month, our Stillpoint community explored Keating’s understanding of the human condition and his teaching on our emotional programs for happiness, Divine Therapy, and the Welcoming Prayer with Pastor and Spiritual Director Tia Norman.
Keating understood that contemplative transformation does not remove us from the human condition. It takes us more deeply into it.
Our fears, attachments, wounds, desires, compulsions, and carefully constructed identities do not simply disappear because we begin to awaken. Neither does a spiritual practice make us immune from self-deception.
Instead, contemplative practice creates the interior spaciousness in which what has been hidden can slowly become visible.
We begin to notice.
We consent.
We release.
We receive.
And slowly, by grace, we become freer.
Not less human.
More fully human.
This is why transformation requires more than information.
We can read the books.
We can know our Enneagram number.
We can practice Centering Prayer.
We can understand Keating’s theology.
We can have profound spiritual experiences.
And still have difficulty seeing ourselves clearly.
Awareness is not yet wisdom.
Awakening is not the completion of the journey.
And transformation rarely happens alone.
We Need Wise Companions
The contemplative tradition has never been merely a collection of practices.
It is a wisdom tradition transmitted through lives.
Long before podcasts, social media feeds, search engines, and seemingly endless access to information, seekers went looking for people whose lives bore evidence of wisdom.
They sought elders.
Not necessarily people who possessed all the answers, but people who had lived deeply enough, listened long enough, suffered honestly enough, and practiced faithfully enough that their lives had become trustworthy sources of wisdom.
An elder is someone whose life has been ripened into wisdom.
And perhaps an elder is someone who has learned how to carry what has been without being captive to it.
The elder has not escaped the human condition.
The elder has been formed through it.
This September, our journey into transformation will take us into this ancient tradition. The Desert Mothers and Fathers understood something our highly individualistic culture can sometimes cause us to forget:
We do not become ourselves by ourselves.
People journeyed into the desert seeking wisdom and brought their questions with them:
How shall I live?
How do I pray?
What do I do with this anger?
How do I discern what is true?
What is happening within me?
The wisdom they received was born not simply from knowledge, but from lives shaped by sustained attention to God.
And this ancient practice has something to say to us now.
Who Is Accompanying Your Becoming?
We live in a moment with extraordinary access to information.
Advice is everywhere.
Wisdom may be harder to find.
Wisdom requires discernment. And discernment has traditionally been cultivated in relationship with God, self, within community, through practice, and alongside people who have traveled some portion of the road before us.
Perhaps this is another reason we need wise companions.
There are parts of ourselves we simply cannot see alone.
We need people who walk beside us long enough to notice what we cannot yet notice.
People who do not rush to tell us what to do.
People who can remain beside mystery without trying to resolve it.
People whose own interior work has cultivated enough freedom that they do not need our lives to turn out according to their expectations.
The wisest companions rarely tell us who we should become.
They help us recognize what is already being revealed.
This is the heart of spiritual direction.
For decades, Stillpoint has formed spiritual directors not to become experts in someone else’s spiritual life, but to become practiced listeners and companions capable of helping another person notice where God may already be at work.
This is not incidental to the contemplative life.
It is one of the ways contemplative wisdom moves from one life to another.
Be Still. Belong. Become.
Perhaps becoming has always required both stillness and belonging.
We be still long enough to notice what is moving within us.
We belong to communities and relationships in which our lives can be held, witnessed, challenged, and loved.
And we become not by escaping our humanity, but by allowing Love to transform us more deeply into who we were created to be.
Our summer journey has offered us different doorways into this work. And now, with Lisa Colón DeLay and the Desert Elders, we turn toward the wisdom of those who remind us that the journey was never intended to be traveled alone.
Perhaps that leaves each of us with questions:
Who is accompanying your becoming?
Whose becoming have you been entrusted to accompany?
What from your becoming are you being invited not to discard, but to integrate?
May we have companions wise enough to help us discern the difference.
Continue the Journey With Us
On September 13 at 3:00 p.m. PT, we welcome Lisa Colón DeLay, spiritual director and author of The Way of the Desert Elders and Wild Land Within, for the final gathering in our summer Transformation series.
Together, we will explore the wisdom of the desert tradition and what these ancient teachers might offer those of us seeking to live contemplatively today.
Whether you have journeyed with us throughout the series or are joining us for the first time, you are welcome.
Because perhaps transformation is not something we accomplish.
It is something to which we consent.
Something we practice.
Something we receive.
And something we discover, again and again, in the company of Love and one another.
A Blessing for the Becoming
May you become quiet enough to notice what is being revealed.
May you have courage to welcome the parts of your story that still ask to be transformed.
May you find elders whose lives have been ripened into wisdom
and companions who can sit beside the mystery without rushing toward answers.
May you discover that becoming does not require abandoning your humanity,
but allowing every part of it to be held and transformed by Love.
And along the way,
may you be still,
may you belong,
and may you become.
With gratitude for the journey,
Jasmine Bellamy
Executive Director
Stillpoint: The Center for Christian Spirituality
Jasmine Bellamy is the Executive Director of Stillpoint: The Center for Christian Spirituality and the founder of Love 101 Ministries and The LOVING Leader. A spiritual director and contemplative preacher, she is a doctoral candidate at Fuller Seminary, where her research centers on how love forms the inner life of leadership. She is a graduate of Stillpoint’s BIPOC Spiritual Journey Program and received her Certificate in Spiritual Direction through Liberated Together. Through her work, Jasmine integrates contemplative practice, spiritual formation, and leadership development to support individuals and communities in living and leading from love as a daily practice.