The Ocean Inside Me: My Journey to writing my Spiritual Memoir
Written By R.G. Shore
It started out as a thought…
“It might be time to share my story.”
I wasn’t sure where it would go, I wasn’t even sure what it would be called, but I knew it had to happen. My spiritual journey is not linear, nobody’s is. It undulates and spirals… Heaven is not an upward path afterall, but an inward path.
My spiritual journey is a journey toward healing racial trauma, spiritual trauma, abandonment trauma. At first, I thought it was my own… and as the writing process opened up to me, I began to discover the healing was meant for something so much larger.
Sometime it isn’t the artist who paints, but the paint that guides the artist, each stroke allowing the artist’s hands to move with the brush, collectively one, no longer separate.
As I wrote, I knew that I was being guided to something much larger than myself. That is what spirit does to us, that is what creativity and expression, and longing continually do for us.
Spirituality is about expressing the Isness of our very existence. Spirituality is about expressing the Isness of our very self. The Ocean Inside Me quickly became not just my story, but everybody’s story because it was a story of finding myself in pain, and loss, and guilt, and shame, and wound and hurt, and realizing it was never just my pain, or my loss, or my guilt, but it was everybody’s pain, everybody’s guilt.
I realized through the writing process that I could connect through others just by sitting in my own pain. After all, meditation is not about escaping the world, but learning to find it in a much deeper way. Spiritual Wisdom teaches us, inherently, in the earth, that we are grounded and we are held in something much larger than ourselves, that takes us beyond this present life.
Spiritual Knowledge, or Spiritual Wisdom is flowing within us, like an Ocean. It gently guides us and helps us to see that each wave is not separate from each other… Each wave, though seemingly different and disparate, is actually a part of a much larger wave:
1 Wave
1 Hurt
1 Wound
and also — 1 Healing.
undulating in and out
of a much larger experience
Spirituality, at it’s core,
teaches us
— that we are one.
My writing Journey spilled out of me onto the page. The process was painful and also cathartic. When we allow the processing to happen unto us, we realize that the allowing and letting go is always happening, but not to us - - - for us.
The Ocean Inside Me is a continual spiritual Map, showing me my own spiritual patterns and loops that have maybe transcended life times.
I encourage you, as you go on your own journey, to sit within your own pain and your own patterns. The pain allows for the creative expression. The pain begins to open up and we begin to see from a separateness to a oneness.
Meditation Practice:
Spend 5 minutes today, just breathing in and out. First, close your eyes, and picture yourself as a wave on an ocean, floating vastly and ever expanding.
Notice How this feels, how does your breath feel as you expand in and out?
How do you feel as a wave?
I want you to imagine other waves coming in and out of your life, what do these waves look like? Do they brush up against you? Are you sad when they depart?
Just Notice, and Allow.
Spiritual Patterns are showing up in your life? Do you need help learning how to discover them?
To Purchase my Spiritual Memoir, The Ocean Inside Me, please visit my book page to buy the book and support my journey. Thank you!
https://www.northwestwisdom.org/book
In Kindness,
R.G. Shore