From my Art & Spirituality journal. The meditation is as described in Art & Fluffybunny Cosmic Lightballs.

The meditation on the universe bothered me, partly because I couldn't resist the characterization of it as cheesy New Ageyness. Feeling the earth rotating under your feet and whirling through the universe? If gravity and your inner ear are doing their job right, you shouldn't feel this at all.

As well, I don't think I'd really realized how much I distrusted organized worship until I was put in that situation. I really disliked closing my eyes because to me, removing my sight is removing the main way I relate to the world, and it puts me in a very psychologically vulnerable position. When someone tells me to close my eyes, my first reaction is to think that they're trying to put something over on me. It's not something I'll do for someone I don't already know and trust.

The idea of being graded on how open I was willing to be about my spirituality recalled way too strongly the idea of "brokenness" I grew up with, where the more "spiritually helpless" you were, the more you boasted of your (nonspecific, naturally) weakness and pathetic humanity, the more virtuous you seemed. Here are people demanding that I make myself vulnerable before them and trust them when I have no assurance that they're not going to hurt me if I do, when I have been hurt before by those I did trust that manipulated my emotions and beliefs to their predetermined purposes? Man, I don't think so.

It bothers me that my initial reaction to anything spiritual is so violently allergic, but I don't feel like there's much I can do about it at the moment.

Labels: art, religion, school