Seasons of the Soul & Spiritual Masters

Different spiritual masters and the insights they brought me marked the seasons of my soul. In addition, the people who consulted me and the women I came to know and love were also, in effect, my spiritual teachers. Each season seemed to afford me a deeper understanding of human suffering and what I believed I could do to relieve that suffering.

In the springtime of my soul, I thought I could cure any emotional suffering and I had some promising results. Rabbi Ben came to me. I was budding in my work as a psychologist. I was going to cure people of their suffering, and I would do so quickly.

With summer, I focused on the vicissitudes of love, passion, and desire. The pathology of human relationships began to humble my expectations of what I could accomplish. By autumn, I began to realize the limits of my therapeutic bag of tricks. To my surprise, I discovered the tremendous healing power and wisdom of simply listening with compassion.

It was in the summer of my soul and on into early autumn that I wiped the sweat from my brow, rolled up my sleeves and pant legs, and waded into the swampy passion of relationships. I proceeded to wrestle with the alligators of human desire. San Francesco was my spiritual teacher; he taught me about the power of the spoken word. How appropriate, after all, I was engaged in what Freud had called the talking cure. He was with me until the first frost when the leaves begin to parade their panoply of colors.

With the trees bare, I reluctantly acquiesced to the truth that the roots of human suffering run deep. A cure is not so quickly attained, if ever. The people I saw who had been deprived of the security of nurturing relationships early in life taught me patience. They revealed to me the importance of a long-term therapeutic bond for healing the invisible wounds inflicted by love’s absence.

As I earnestly struggled to relieve human suffering, I met Tacomi, a Buddhist monk, my spiritual teacher for the autumn of my soul. He was the one who taught me about the profound power of compassion.

When Tacomi departed with the passing of the Winter solstice and the first snowfall, Shiva appeared. To my surprise, she appeared as a goddess instead of as the male deity revered in India today. She was the most beautiful female I had ever seen: her long-black hair was adorned with sparkling blue beads. She was wrapped in a silk sari that appeared to be made of intertwining blue and white scarves.
She handed me a silver-bladed knife with a golden handle studded with jewels: rubies, sapphires, and emeralds. The knife symbolized the ability to cut through the illusion of our separateness from the Divine. She helped me cut myself loose and set myself free from gender and the duality of male and female and all other divisive dualities such as reason versus emotion.

From all the teachers who appeared to me, I learned to appreciate the wisdom of their spiritual traditions. However, one day, well after my dialogues with Shiva had ended, I found myself irresistibly drawn back to what I knew in my heart as a child: “God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him” (1 John 4:16). I remembered something Rudolf Steiner had said in one of his many books, which one I cannot recall.

Steiner described how, by the time Jesus appeared, humanity had descended so deeply into matter, into an all-consuming attachment to the material world. A drastic step was needed to reverse the descent into materialism. God decided to become flesh and walk among us. God in the form of the Word of Love rolled up His sleeves and became flesh. I felt deeply moved as I thought of how He suffered, shed His blood, and died so that humanity could be saved from slavery to sin and thereby have a chance at true freedom, peace, and happiness. That day, I realized, I could no longer ignore such an awesome act of love on God’s part!

• Today, reflect on the phases of your life and what you have learned about what it menas to be human. How has your perspective on life changed over the yers? Who has influenced your thinking and your view of the world and your place in it? What experiences have shaped who you are and helped define you?