‘Spiritual Ecology - What is it? And does it matter to me?’

By Abhayraj Naik

This was probably the most attended session at the Winter Retreat, so I asked Abjayrai Naik who came to Malaga from Bengaluru, India to give us a short synopsis about the concept of Spiritual Ecology and the session that he held. Get in touch with Abjayrai if you want to know more.

The session was an experimental and exploratory journey into “spiritual ecology” and what that might mean for me, for the Retreat participants, as well as for the Microsolidarity Network more generally.  I also wanted to use the opportunity to generate some shared sense-making that I could integrate back into the work of the centre for spiritual ecology, which is an emerging living-learning experimental space in Bengaluru, India with an emphasis on the study, practice, and realisation of spiritual ecological consciousness (get connected at: centrespiritualecology@gmail.com). 

After getting started with an embodied meditation that centred awareness on connection to life, we had a quick opening circle where everyone present was invited to respond with a key word, term, phrase, or image that came to mind when they contemplated the term “spiritual ecology”.  I then briefly presented my own background and interest in spiritual ecology, along with six distilled thematic notes that had emerged for me in considering how to communicate the essence of this area of inquiry:

 1. Honouring the sacred and the divine in nature, in our selves, in each other, and in our relationality with our selves, with each other, and with nature.

 2. Willingness to experience belief and faith in the goodness and rightness of particular configurations of social-ecological systems.

 3. Staying with the question of what spiritualities, faiths, and religions offer us at these moments of climate breakdown and conflict.

 4. Inviting openness, power, connection, knowing and unknowingness, forgiveness, redemption, grace, healing, and the more than human….into our natures and our being in nature.

 5. Discovering the religion of nature, and the nature of religion. 

 6. An honest conversation about death, disintegration, birth and life. 

We then opened up the conversation for a free-flowing dialogue and lightly-mediated introspection on what spiritual ecology evoked for us and our work together. Much preciousness was shared and felt here during the dialogue, and hopefully many echoes of these tender moments together will find their way into the world in the days ahead. We concluded with another short meditation practice to allow for the settling down of what had been raised up and for the quiet individual identification of one key edge in our own conscious engagement with spiritual ecology. 

 ⁃ Abhayraj Naik (abhayrajnaik@gmail.com)