By Amanda Moreno
It seems like the number of people approaching me on the verge of, or very much enduring, some kind of existential crisis has increased quite a bit lately.
I’ve encountered clients facing fear of death or dreams of annihilation by asteroid; friends with families in crisis; colleagues feeling rage over a court verdict, or the lack of coverage of Fukushima, or just expressing malaise at the state of the world.
And most of the time what I want to talk to them about is spirituality and the search for meaning. But I feel like I have to find the right language, like that’s such a loaded term — one that can evoke a whole slew of negative associations. And I hate it when language gets in the way.
This past weekend I was wandering around one of the massive parks that grace the city of Seattle, trying to get back into my body after a week of intense training of the shamanic kind. I was sitting on the grass, staring across the lake at a view of Mt. Rainier. There are days when that mountain, shouting out above the tops of the Cascade Range, is so surreal in its picturesque beauty that I can’t help but take a deep breath, let my jaw drop and wonder at how epic the chance to dance around this Earth really is.
I then began to think about the natural violence that has shaped the Earth — from volcano to wind to shifting plates — and the ways in which that violence is not malicious, but instead necessarily transformative and creative. Somehow that linked into this thread of wondering how to find a word or term for “spirituality” that is more expressive and more cyclical — and less loaded. And I realized that in order to try to shift the language, I have to try to understand what spirituality means to me.