OVERVIEW
“In many scientific and philosophical theories there is a common principle that the one thing that is constant is change; everything is in a state of flux. If our consciousness is always in a state of flux, it is important for us as Soul Gym practitioners to do what we can, when we can, to positively influence our consciousness.” – Rev. Darrell Jones, Soul Gym: A Manual to Connect Mind, Body & Spirit for Soulful Living
TRANSCRIPTION
Good morning everyone. Those of you in the room, what’s up? Good to see your faces, your eyes, your lips, your hair, if you got it. I shaved the two that I have right here off this morning. Uh, those of you online greetings and salutations to you as well. Today the talk title is on Becoming. I was so excited when Reverend Amy sent out this month’s focus and theme on the Journey of Awakening. And this book fell off of my, uh, my shelf. It’s been taped up a number of times. Um, this was goodness for those of you in the Bodhi world, this I took class. This was back, uh, at Transition’s book place. Uh, I was, I was taking one of my classes to start, um, prac practitioner training and it was called Spiritual Practices. I think that’s what this book was for. And it was the, there was something about Ron Dawson, the way that he presented meditation that all of a sudden opened up the possibility for it to be accessible.
I had this notion that it meant one thing, and definitely at that time, in terms of my maturity and self love, I thought I could never be the right person to truly meditate. Um, and he just channeled something brilliant. And the, the words to focus on that came out of that, that Reverend Amy offered was the spiritual journey is individual and highly personal. It can’t be organized or regulated. It isn’t true that everybody should follow one path. Listen to your own truth. And so I always like to make this designation and I’m making it more and more and standing firmer in it that religion is an organized idea that is a bunch of people coming together saying, We agree to this thing. And there’s nothing wrong with organized ideas, an organized religion. But if we understand that our personal journey is one that is spiritual, it is not about anyone else.
It may bump into other people. And chances are it does. And thank goodness it does, cuz that’s where the growth happens. But it’s really about you and yours and what you understand. And if I was to change the talk title, I’m always thinking like, is this the right thing? Is that the not the right thing? Is this the right thing? Is that not the right thing? On Becoming the word become is something that I love so much cuz it implies this growth. But at the same time, it can pop us into the future and we don’t get present. And so I’m gonna modify the title from On Becoming to On Being. And if any of you are Krista Tippett fans, uh, if you’re looking for a podcast, I think she stopped recording, but there’s so many, uh, old episodes that are really worth, uh, your time and your listening.
Um, every single person that she interviews, it starts off with them telling, saying, What’s your journey? What’s been your road, uh, of your spiritual, uh, awakening? And one of the liberating aspects of that for me listening to it, is you get to hear how individualized this path is. The common component is that we all struggle with it, right? We struggle with it in different ways. So today we are going to explore on being, and thank you John for reading that quote, Um, from, from my book, Soul Jim, In many scientific and philosophical theories, there is a common principle that the one thing that is constant is change. You find that in the philosophical world, you find it in the religious text that there is this ever evolving expression of something. But we as humans in our ego, want to keep things the same. Cuz when it’s the same, it’s comfortable, it’s understandable.
So for some reason, we humans, we think that there’s a right something, a right path. We believe that there’s a right job, that there is a right relationship, that there’s a right weight, that there’s a right amount of money, that there’s the right test results, the right religion, the right science, the right truth, the right everything. And we’re constantly seeking the right thing. Would you agree? That’s what we’re here to do as human beings. That’s we’re trying to figure this beep out. And there isn’t anything wrong with wanting to be right. There isn’t anything wrong with exploring what we believe is right and true, but we must realize that right only exists in the simplistic ideological belief that life is meant to be simple and found in this duality of right and wrong.
We think that it’s actually simple to put it into those two terms, but actually I believe that it makes life a lot harder, a lot harder when we only live and strive to be right in ourselves when we live and strive to only make others right and wrong. That is actually the breeding ground for suffering. Misery, abuse, apathy, lying, coercion, theft, war, power, hoarding, and so much more. Think about that for a minute. That’s why so many people love that quote by roomy out beyond the field of right doing and wrongdoing, there’s something else. Life just isn’t that simple folks. But the human mind and the human ego wants it to be, I know I do. We want it to be easy. We want it to be effortless. And if there is something to understand, I gotta understand it right now so I can get on with it, right?
Anybody got time for that? Just let me know. And if I can understand it right now, then, then I can live. I mean the, it’s one of the things that I love about pop music. I have this back and forth dance with like, uh, we were joking around what it means to be spiritual. It’s like, Oh, spiritual people don’t go to the bathroom. It’s like, No, I had to go to the bathroom before service started today. Right? So we’re constantly dancing back and forth between the human and the spiritual. But in these pop song lyrics, you know, wake me up when it’s all over. Does anyone ever have one of those days like, I don’t wanna go through this crap today, just wake me up when it’s all over, when I’m wiser and I’m older and I can just get on with it. I think the past two years everyone would’ve said, You know what? I’ll just take a nap for two years and just wake me up when it’s all over. When we’re all wiser and when I’m older and we think that we’re lost, we think that we’re lost. And we constantly try to convince ourselves of that. But we’re not. We’re right where we are, but we keep looking, Well, where am I? Where am I? Where am I? Like man, you got a gps, You know where you are, Trust it.
The need to be right. And to discover that they’re isn’t a single rightness in this path. To me that is the journey of awakening. Let me say that again. The need to be right is part of who we are. But to discover that there isn’t a single right path, that is the journey of awakening. We fight literally wars to be right. What does it do? It just destroys and creates more separation. If we knew everything, if we were always right, if we never made mistakes, had bad relationships, made some bad food choices, we wouldn’t awaken to greater understanding. We would literally live a flat life. We would just know everything that we know. And that’s it.
It’s a little, it’s a little sleepy to me. Think about it, awakening, sleeping. If we know what everything is, then you don’t ha you can be so passive, you don’t have to pay attention. You don’t have to wake up to anything. You don’t have to be woke. Awakening doesn’t have to be painful. But so often we associate especially on the spiritual path to stumbling, to bumping up against a wall, to hitting a ceiling. But there is awakening that can happen through joy, through ease, through laughter, through celebration, through connectedness. But our need to be right often stifles that possibility in the moment.
The invitation was to talk about our, our personal spiritual path as, as ministers Liz, leaders as speakers today. And I’m gonna, and I’m gonna do that a little bit here. My personal path of spiritual awakening has taught me to seek less, to be right and more to understand, not to be understood. That’s where most of us go to. We wanna be understood. You better understand me. Don’t you understand me? No. My spiritual path has led me less to try to be right or to be understood, rather to understand, understand life that’s happening around me. But again, this word understanding sometimes can be a little limiting cuz most of us approach it from the standpoint of education and kind of the way that we consume data, right? We consume information to understand so we can get it right on the test. That’s not what I’m talking about. And understanding that doesn’t arise in a few seconds. And understanding that doesn’t arise in memorization. It’s an understanding that takes time, it takes patience and it requires you to be present in the moment. The understanding that arises out of active listening.
Active listening requires critical thinking. The definition of critical thinking is the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment. We’re going to school today, so stay up. I’m not gonna just try to regurgitate a bunch of stuff that I’ve said before. Let’s get to it. The definition of critical thinking, because critical thinking is not happening enough in the world today. It really is not. And it scares me. But I have hope and I’m gonna come to that in a minute. The objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment judging is not bad. We make this word about judging is that it’s about shaming and blaming and putting, you know, putting baby in the corner. Anyone reference movie, Okay? Um, we are constantly judging and discerning that is what the mind is designed to do. It’s not a bad thing.
You walk into a room and you immediately start calling out colors or shapes, you know, long hair, short hair, whatever it may be. But most of our judgment and discernment is not objective, it is emotional, it is connected to story. It is connected to our personal history that we rarely vet to see if our beliefs are actually accurate. That requires objectivity. That is the critical thinking to me, that is required on the spiritual path to let go of needing to be right and wanting to be right sometimes. And just listen actively and take it in.
When we are in this state of critical thinking, when we are in this space of active listening, it is the humble practice of lovingly reminding ourselves that we don’t need to know everything. And how awesome is it that we don’t know everything? I praise God every single day that I don’t know everything. Why? Because if I did, then there would be a certain limit to what my life experience could be. The fact that I don’t know everything means that anything is possible. So when you find yourself in that tight space of like, I just wanna know, I just wanna know. I just wanna know what’s right. What if you could just soften that a little bit and recognize the fact that you don’t know what’s right means that anything is possible. That’s the boundless limit, limitless edge of consciousness and of the divine. So in, as opposed to going back and telling you the stories about growing up as a minister’s kid and all these things up to this moment, I wanna, I wanna reflect on a couple moments of awakening, personal awakening for me that have been fairly recent and has always tried to pull that principle of being humble and actively listening and critically thinking.
Some of you may or may not know in the past few weeks we, uh, those in the world that celebrate Judaism have the high holidays of the New Year Rashaan. And as a part of that arc of high holiday, there is this invitation to reflect. There is this experience of looking at oneself and a very specific way during this time of the holiday called Ya Kippur. And in particular, uh, my wife has introduced me to probably one of the, my most favorite moments in all of the high holidays, whether it be Judaism, Christianity, Islam, anything else. And it’s this service called Colere. And we, uh, listened, if any of you’re familiar in the Chicago area with the Mishah congregation. We have danced in and out of that congregation over years celebrating the high holidays with them. And we listened this year online. And Rabbi Lizzy, who is one of the badass like rabbis on the planet, she’s so dope.
Um, she was speaking on Cole n Dre in this time where the community comes together to be honest and humble and to realize that we have done some wrongs, right? So let’s go back really quick. We’re always trying to be right. We always want to be right. We always wanna know what’s right. But the truth is, is we’re human and we do a little bit of wrong. So the community comes together and literally pounds on their chest to honor and recognize all the wrongs that they have done individually and sometimes collectively. Have there been any collective wrongs that have happened on this planet? No, but let’s make it, this is your spiritual journey. So let’s make it personal to honor and, and, and realize that okay, I’ve been wrong, but actually I have wronged someone. I’ve cheated. We’ve all cheated in some way, shape or form. We’ve lied, we’ve manipulated, we overate, we over drink, We selfishly hoarded all the stuff for ourself. We didn’t wanna share with anybody cuz there’s just not enough.
We judged, we condemned and so on. But in all of that, Rabbi Lizzie invited the practice wasn’t just about shaming ourselves and kind of like looking at all the ways we fd up in the world in the past year. It was actually this really beautiful moment, to be honest with ourselves, to liberate our space, to embrace what is and what is possible in the upcoming year. And she offered a quote from an activist that I was not aware of until last week. And I’m so grateful I just started reading, uh, this woman’s work. Her name is Miam Kaba. And if you want your comfort zone stretched, I highly recommend that you read her. If you want your spiritual journey to be awakened, I highly recommend that you check her out. But she is an activist, um, in the community of the, uh, prison complex and trying to get that shut down and getting people to question what is the actual purpose of police on the planet?
Take a deep breath. I’m not gonna get up here and say shut down the police, but I might. You never know. The bottom line is, is that she speaks to hope and that in the struggle and strife of our life, there is hope. And she gets quoted for this a lot, but there’s a really deep, uh, she says that it, that hope is a discipline, which in and of itself, that statement is beautiful. Hope is a discipline. But let me give you a larger context. It was an in and in an interview that she made that quote, she said that hope doesn’t preclude the feeling of sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, it isn’t optimism. Hope is a discipline. It’s a practice and you have to exercise it every single day.
So that that, that really resonated with me that night. I was awakened to something else on my spiritual journey, which is still evolving my default. The, the thing that I woke, I woke to and I shared it with my wife that I was like, Oh my God, I don’t like hate myself as much as I used to. I used to wake up every day condemning, blaming, shaming, and doubting myself every single nook and cranny of who I was. And in that moment I was like, Oh, wow. Like I, it was a palpable sense and feeling in my body that cringe, that tightness of, of self deprecation wasn’t there.
My spiritual journey and path has brought me to this point where my default isn’t that hate of self anymore. It is a default to hope. I have read, I have prayed, I have meditated, I’ve visioned, I’ve done all the spiritual practices, not just once, not just twice, but it’s something that I do every single day. I work out every day to make hope a possibility. Not in anyone else’s world, but in my consciousness. And as a result, you know what? I know that love is real. I know that there is a creative force for good. And I trust that every single person on this planet, regardless of their affiliation to religion or political party, regardless of what they have or haven’t done that I like or don’t like. The only thing that every single person on this planet wants to do is love and be loved and to be healthy in that loving. That’s really what we all want.
It is taken the majority of my adult life to stand in conviction of that statement. That’s been a part of my journey of awakening. To look in the face of people that I do judge and say that they are wrong. That I don’t like what they’re doing. I don’t like the words that come out of their mouth. I don’t like the behavior that they make to be able to stop for a minute and go, all they’re trying to do is love and be loved to the best of the capacity that they can. I still have hope.
I still trust, I still love and the face of hatred. But it takes practice. It takes discipline. This isn’t something that you get to passively wake up to and go, Oh yeah, maybe today will be a good day. No, today is gonna be a good day. Why? Because I’m declaring it’s going to be a good day and I’m going to do whatever I can to put on not rose tinted glasses, to uh, make me void of what is wrong in the world, but to bring my light into the world, to bring the possibility into the world, to bring hope into the world, to bring love and acceptance into the world. Another recent awakening and awareness in terms of the edge of growth for me was around gender and the designation of being non-binary. Now I don’t really have a judgment around that, but I will admit that there’s a part of my mind that gets a little caught up in trying to understand that I understand what it means to be this side of the binary, to be right and go, Yes, I am a man and this is what I do.
I want to be right still. So as my rightness to my level of understanding is questioned, it gets a little uncomfortable. Did anyone ever have that experience? When someone questions your rightness, it gets a little uncomfortable, but guess what? That’s the journey of awakening. That’s the path of discovery. So I wanna just relate in terms of this is still a growing edge for me, but the understanding of what it means to be non-binary, the need to let go of these pronouns of he or she and claims something else, I’d been grappling with it. And then I had a flashback to my college years. No, not because I was doing drugs. I mean then I was, you know what I say, but I had a flashback to one of my classes and it was in this class called Women in the Modern Western State. And at the time it was cons, it, well it still is, it was a political science class, but it was, uh, considered radical feminist ideology.
And I have so much gratitude for my professor, Dr. Amy Elman, who really I was, I think maybe 19 just cracked my head open in a great way to the way that I, without any question, exclude and in particular exclude women as a man. I read a book called Refusing to Be a Man. Anyone know that book? It was in the nineties. It was intense. But here’s the whole thing in that class, I digress a little bit in that class. It was me and one other man and the rest were women. And it was, I mean it was heavy, philosophical, political science, uh, ideology. But in that class I was constantly questioned and invited to question what do I believe? What is my default? And there were times when I was like, I just don’t understand why women feel like marginalized and voiceless and powerless.
I just don’t get it. And then all of a sudden I had this bing and I was like, Darrell, when have you felt marginalized? When of you felt powerless? One of you felt helpless. And immediately I could identify as an African American black man, how many times that I felt marginalized, how many times that I felt helpless and voiceless and immediately I had connection and an understanding to what was going on. I didn’t live the life of any woman that I had met or known, but I had a glimpse into what it was like to be on the edge of that feeling. And so I understood, I was actively listening, I was getting humble. I was having this critical thought, I was trying to be as objective as I possibly could to bring some understanding into the moment. And so when it comes to the whole gender and the non-binary thing, I’m, you know, you see me as a light skin black man, but my mother, her last name is Friedrich, There’s Irish and German, I’ve got African and Native American.
I’m like mutt of mutts, y’all. I mean there’s so much stuff mixed up in my DNA. It’s crazy. But I remember a good time in my teen and early adult years when I was so angry and frustrated because people were like, Are you black or not? And I’m like, What the fuck does that have to do with anything? What are you gonna know more about me? Because I check a box and all of a sudden I had an awareness. There are these people walking around on the planet and they’re like, Are you a boy or you a girl? And it’s like, what the hell does it have to do with anything other than make you comfortable with knowing how to appropriately interact with them?
Our journey of awakening, our understanding of levels of interaction and life is just not that simple, y’all. It just isn’t. We are being called here to embrace the complexity of life. And to me that the spiritual practice, cuz God is not simple, God is complex as get out, God is deep and wide and inclusive of everything. So when we find ourselves excluding anything, it’s not that we aren’t in an uh uh, we’re not, we’re less spiritual or anything, but it’s just an opportunity for us to wake up that our default tendency is to be comfortable. But life is constantly giving us opportunities to embrace our discomfort. And if we have the wherewithal, we can do something with it. But just like hope, it’s a discipline. It’s a practice.
We are talking about being as opposed to doing. The journey of awakening is about being an understanding. Most importantly, that we are not defined by anything or anyone else outside of us, but we are defined by our own consciousness, our own heart, our own mind. My personal journey of awakening has been so profound that it’s not only in the forefront of my daily living, but in 2008 it became a part of my professional life as a spiritual practitioner. And because I’m a nerd and I couldn’t stop there, I kept going and I went back to school and in 2012 I graduated with a Master’s in Consciousness study and was licensed as a minister. Now I have accreditation as a part of my journey of awakening, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I know everything. I’m not right half the time or even most of the time I’m wrong. Most of the time I find and thank God I am because there’s more to discover, there’s more to know. That is what I see as my job as a minister. That is what I see as my job as a spiritual practitioner is to lean in more and more to my not knowing. To lean in more and more to trying to understand others, not be right regardless of the situation. Lean in and listen for the whisper or the signature of the divine because it’s always there.
The book that I wrote, Soul Jim, a Manual to connect Mind, body, and Spirit for soulful living is all about the tools and exercises to support us on the spiritual journey. It’s not a book to tell you how to be more woke or the right way. It’s simply these are things that I have been doing day in and day out for the past 20 years that keep me on my awakening journey consciously. We’re always on the journey. You’re never off. People always say, Oh, I fell off the path. No you didn’t. You’re on the path all the time. Sometimes you’re just awake. Most of the time we’re asleep. So these are the practices that keep us alert and aware and present.
The journey of awakening is about being loved and loving at its simplest. For me, that’s my understanding and I don’t want to tell you what your journey of awakening should be or what your journey of awakening is about, but what I do know is that there are practices. That’s why I use the term soul gym to work out every single day. Does something to impact your musculature, to do some yoga and stretching every single day. Does something to bring about greater agility and flexibility in your life. How many of you want to be more agile on your spiritual journey to be able to handle the ups and downs, to be able to handle the highs and lows? If we think that stepping back and waiting for something to be okay, then we’ll be able to step into it. You’re setting yourself up for a failure.
We must work out. We must create and build our own gym, our own spiritual practice. How do you do it? That’s for you to explore. That’s one of the things we’re gonna do in the workshop today. I’m not gonna say on Mondays you should meditate on Tuesdays, you should pray on Wednesdays, you should do visioning on Thursdays, you should take an enema. Like, no, it’s not that prescriptive. But there is this idea of engaging things that keep us present and that most importantly, most importantly, keep us in that space of possibility, of hope because most of the time we think we are right and we are whatever you think is right. Let me say that again. Whatever you think is right, If you think there’s not a partner for you out there, you’re right. If you think the job that you want is not available, you’re right. But guess what? If you think that there is a partner out there for you, you’re right.
You are in the driver’s seat of your belief and your consciousness. This is the becoming. This is the beingness. Don’t wake up when it’s all over because then it’s all over. Be on the ride. Be on the journey and to the best of your ability, bring a little bit of fun to it. Have a laugh every once in a while. I used to think that it was, I, I, I would be so serious when I was like in my twenties and like in in my late teens when I first I, I was y’all. I mean, I was always goofy. But in terms of like my internal dialogue, right? It was so serious. It was so heavy. Like I I, I took myself way too seriously. I made myself way more important than I needed to be cuz I wasn’t. Once I let go of a little bit of that, then there was this lightness that came into then there was this joy, then there was this possibility, then there was hope. And on the journey every single day that is what I attempted to return to on my path. Whether it is sitting in meditation, whether it is saying a prayer, whether it is reading a new book or being introduced to a new author like Miriam Kaba. Or if it’s truly simply making some sort of physical health decision. Am I going to eat this entire pizza today? Or maybe will I have a salad? There’s power in all of those choices and it impacts our spirit.
The principle of choice lives everywhere in the big areas of life and in the small areas of life. If we are conscious, if we are awake on the journey, then we are empowered to make choices. But a lot of times we give that power away. My spiritual path continues to be full and rich daily offering opportunities to remember my purpose, to love and be loved. My prayer today is that we all continue to know that love for ourselves and one another. So let’s go into a prayer right now. There is a power and presence that I call by so many names because I know there is not one right name for this essence of life. It is so grand that is actually so limited by the language that we speak. But to the best of my ability, I try to honor and recognize it by saying, I see you spirit. I see you God, I see you mother, I see you. Father, I see you. Intelligence, I see you wisdom. I know this power and presence to be the frequency and vibration of love, of creativity, of possibility, of sufficiency and abundance, of joy, of gratitude, of thanksgiving, of peace and compassion, of all the words that do something to uplift life as opposed to take away from it. This is the greatness of life that I recognize in this moment. To be all That is. All that is. It is the foundation. It is the foundation of being.
I am a being. You are a being. We are all beings. So we live as the foundation of life itself. We are living expressions of the whole spirit. We are love, we are light, we are peace, we are truth. We are creative and abundant and sufficient. We have everything. So it is from that place of oneness that I speak a word right here for myself, for everyone listening in the room, for everyone listening virtually, for people hearing this at another point in time. Let us remember right here, right now that we are being, that we are the actual becoming of the divine. That we are the edge of growth. And as we hit a spun in life, as we hit something that is uncomfortable, as we hit something that is uncertain to us, let us remember that it is an opportunity for us to stay awake and to be available and to actively listen and be critical and go, Oh, where is the signature of the divine here? I know it’s here. I may not see it, but I know it’s possible. Yes. Keep that hope active. Let us be not only hope for others. Let us not only be love to others, but let us be love and hopeful for ourselves.
Take a moment to imagine if every single person on the planet for just one minute at the same time believed that they were good. How might that change the way that we interact? How might it change the way that we do things in policy making? How might it change the way we try to correct people instead of through punishment and condemn, condemnation and shame, but through love, acceptance, and support? Let us be the very thing that this world means. Cause you’re, you’re, and I’m so grateful for the fulfillment of this truth, Not because of some possible condition in the future, but right now, right now, in this moment, I am grateful for the fulfillment of love as all of us. So let us be that love today and forevermore and so it is. Yes we are. Thank you.