I would like to offer the following consideration for you, on using spirituality as a coping mechanism.
Please add your thoughts in the comments section if the Spirit moves you.
Here are my thoughts:
Be careful that you don’t get so caught up in reflexively falling back on love of god or spiritual thinking or positive thinking that you neglect the deeper elements of what is occurring within you. As profound as love of god can be, there are processes of consciousness that happen in the grooves inside you that require awareness to move through. And it is possible that constantly coming back to god, or prayer, or positive thinking, is a means whereby to avoid critical processes of awareness.
What do I mean by awareness anyway? Awareness is the ability to be starkly and unflinchingly present for every ugly and putrid, or unexpected and surprising thing that emerges in you, as it comes up. Comes up in to consciousness, that is; it’s always lurking there below the surface. Remaining present without attempting to escape it or do anything with it. However, I will say that when stuff starts to come up that’s when you get out your juicer and go to town cause you’re doing a cleanse, baby.
Why do I even raise the issue of awareness? Because, my friends, love of god, et al., can be like a drug that numbs. It can be comfort food you eat so you don’t have to feel your feelings. Comfortingly, god, transcendence, and related spiritual phenomena, as well as other more popular methods of numbing, or escapism — drugs, alcohol, sex, all sorts addictions — are under the domain of Neptune. We’ve got some kind of roadmap here.
So, I think coping mechanisms are healthy and necessary, to an extent. Coping mechanisms are even more awesome when you know that you’re using one, whichever one you choose, so you can wield that knowledge to the advantage of your psychological health. This, so we can more skillfully navigate Jung’s always relevant axiom:
Whatever is not conscious will be experienced outside the self as fate
(Or something like that. I quoted that from memory because I’d have to dig through books and papers to find the exact quote, and I want to get this post up. But look it up. Jung said it.)
p.s. The above reflexive falling back on a coping mechanism structure can take a number of forms. The coping mechanism is the empty glass and you can pour any liquid you like in there. So, coping can be: reading the news, being hyper critical, working too much, avoiding work, obsessively caring for people to avoid caring for yourself, staying occupied, paying too much attention to your feelings and not enough to your other drives, the list goes on. You are interesting, I’m sure you can add to this list methods I haven’t dreamed of here.
* Please take a moment to refer this blog to your friends on fb, or twitter, or tsu, or ello, or whatever it is you use to keep in touch with everyone you ever went to school with at once.
* I’d like to read your chart for you. Were thinking you’d like to have your chart read by me? We’re on the same page, you know. Come on over here, and we’ll get you set up tout de suite.
