Where Do You Keep Your Spiritual Treasures?

A quick mini-retreat: Take a moment now to put things down, relax, and take a deep breath. Let the world fade away as you bring to mind a moment that felt particularly awesome, or when some kind of curtain slipped away between you and the bigger picture of Life. What did your senses grasp and what did your emotions feel?

What was your moment? Was it in nature, during a life cycle event, while traveling? Or just out of the blue?

 

 

My teacher, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (Reb Zalman), used to teach that we all have those spiritual moments, those flashes of transcendence. But too often they slip away from memory because we don’t have a container for them. By which I think he meant that we don’t have practices or language to keep them alive within us.

Not that you can capture your pristine spiritual state forever. We are all bound to (and must) come down the mountain from our spiritual highs. But we can come down with a postcard to remind us of what we experienced.

After I returned from a particularly powerful spiritual retreat, another of my spiritual teachers, Rabbi Miles Krassen, told me that each spiritual experience can become a deposit into our inner soul “bank account” to draw on later in challenging times, or to prime our pump when we feel creatively dry.

Those spiritual deposit boxes are going to take different forms for different folks, of course. Here’s a menu of ways I like to store up spiritual treasures, and I’d love to hear from you about yours.

Meaningful Objects

Just like pilgrims take a sacred object from a shrine, we can find an object that reminds us of that special time, like a seashell that recalls a sunrise at the shore, a pinecone that brings us back to a spectacular forest hike, a symbolic piece of jewelry, a crystal or a prism that recalls how our soul sparkled. We can carry it with us, or it can go on our desk, bedside table, personal altar, or near our prayer or meditation spot.

Journaling

For many years, journaling has been one of my favorite ways to store up my spiritual gems. I have kept small gratitude journals and dream journals by my bedside, and larger, beautiful Spiritual Journals that were dedicated to recording insights or special moments. To be honest, the gratitude and dream records have switched to digital form – I dictate them into my phone notes at bedtime or wake up. But for those profound experiences that I want to honor, I still like to put pen to paper in a bound journal. Such writing, done reflectively, can become its own spiritual moment.

Art

Another way to keep spiritual moments alive is to express them artistically. If you paint, collage, compose, write poetry, or do needlework, those can be your treasure chests. You don’t have to be a great artist, just to create something that triggers your memories or helps you to tell your story.

For me, photography connects me to my spiritual life and moments of awe in nature. Each time that I look at a photo, it takes me right back to the moment of that direct experience. I love to share my nature photos to invite other people into those moments (Find them here: Inspired Images.) You don’t have to be a serious photographer for this purpose and you can do a lot with a phone camera to put together an album of your most spiritual moments in nature.

Rituals and Deeds

Another way to record your experiences is in the language of ritual, either by creating your own rituals, or by connecting a ritual that you already practice in your own tradition with your personal experiences. For example, I like to say certain Jewish blessings for special moments in nature. This helps me to focus on being present and recognizing that life is a divine gift.

Spiritual Language

As you explore a spiritual tradition, you gain language to hold your own experiences. Not to say language can fully capture ineffable moments, but words and concepts that have been passed down for generations can be honored containers for the sacred. For example, I may describe having an experience of the Shechinah, a sense of the divine immanent within nature. I hope to share more of those from my own tradition as time goes by.

Sharing with others in a supportive environment is also a powerful way to keep our spiritual experiences going and to inspire one another.

Please comment if you use any of these or other ways to hold your own transcendent or spiritual moments in your heart.