For redefinition, I was thrown back to myself, to my inner knowing… Marilyn Sewell, Cries of the Spirit

The Authentic Voice Project: Week 22 (New Moon)

U is for Union

Union = bring together, connect, to make one

Yoga = from sanskrit word meaning union

Religion = from Latin root ligare, meaning to bind together, a union

Spirit = from Latin root spirare, meaning to breathe (the act of which brings psyche and soma (mind-body) together as one)

Modern religion, based on hierarchical and dualistic paradigms, fosters the exact opposite of its root meaning. God over Man, Man over Woman and Nature, Mind over Matter (Body). Spirit vs. Flesh, Us vs. Them, Good vs. Evil. True Union – Oneness – cannot be achieved in this concertized pyramid.

But this is not the nature of nature – human or mother. The world – the earth – is not a pyramid; it is a circle. It has no edge, or top or bottom, left or right. It is a delicate balance of all. There are only interconnected circles of existence, continuums of being, webs of connection between nature, all humans, all cells.

There is Union between continents when the tides inhale on one shore and exhale on the opposite. There is Connection between peoples when we feel sadness draping over our communal shoulders in the aftermath of disaster. There is Oneness when a man and a woman come  together in sacred union. There is Religion when, standing atop a mountain or in a dense forest, the body seems so small yet so big, and the air is your spirit, your breath is the air, and you are One with it all.

True Religion is Spirit. It is the connection between all the things. It is the oxygen that you take in, the same oxygen breathed by every creature and plant surrounding you. It is the breath bringing life to all cells, all organs so your mind-body may operate in balanced harmony with itself. It is the vibration of one entity’s life force resonating against another, like a drum pulsing with the beat of another. A web’s every strand shimmying in the breeze.

Religion = Union with the Divine, with the divinity within each of us, the “God Within” – the Self that is our whole, holy, unified mind-body, fully in spirit with Mother Earth.