Primal Spirituality Courses
Primal Spirituality is the spirituality we were born with.
What is Primal Spirituality?
Every child comes into the world with an innate connection to cosmic realms that they are intuitively in touch with. Through the course of their life, the child grows and develops physically, mentally, and emotionally. If all goes well, they become more and more able to express and embody who they are. They become stronger and wiser. But they never become more spiritual than they were on the day they were born. We were all born spiritual. This is our Primal Spirituality.
The word primal simply means first. So our Primal Spirituality was our first spirituality. It is how we were originally made.
Primal Spirituality is also the original inspiration behind all the world’s great faith traditions and religious paths. It is what awakened the Buddha, called to Moses, and illuminated Mohammed’s vision.
Followers who come after the original inspiration usually seek to teach the life lessons that arise from it. They establish spiritual communities, religious traditions, and moral codes. But seldom do they take people back to an experience of the original inspiration, to Primal Spirituality.
What Happens to our Primal Spirituality?
All too often, spiritual traditions become like a game of telephone. There is an original experience. Out of that is born a message. The message is passed on from person to person and from generation to generation. By the time the message gets to us, it is hard to find the original inspiration or the original message. Just like a game of telephone.
The experience had by the founding teacher is even harder to find or have for oneself. So then we are left with ritual, tradition, social convention, and sometimes dogma. Those things may have value to people and to our culture. But they are no substitute for the original inspiration—for our Primal Spirituality.
In our individual lives, contemporary culture doesn’t necessarily encourage an experience of Primal Spirituality. The child is taught to be good. There are often layers of fear-based conditioning embedded in the child’s mind and heart.
School tends to add more layers of mental habit and emotional scarring that obscure a person’s Primal Spirituality further. And then the beliefs, attitudes, and values of our post-modern culture take over. The result is that it is a rare person whose Primal Spirituality is intact, or who has recovered it for themselves.
What does it mean to return to our Primal Spirituality?
We can’t go back in time to witness enlightened spiritual teachers or to experience our own childhood. But we can find the primal impulse in ourselves now and respond to it deeply.
For most people, this means they have to become aware of what is in the way for them—what they are believing about themselves and the world in which they live that is not really true for them. Or what emotional states they experience that are repetitive and self-sabotaging.
Returning to our Primal Spirituality is a process of unlearning what isn’t working and embracing what brings us joy. It is knowing the vigor that is at our core. It is allowing the urge to live our life as a loving person to take over.
What Does Emotional Intelligence Have to Do With It?
Emotional intelligence is wisdom around the part that our emotions play in our life. Every significant facet of human life has an emotional component related to it. So our ability to work with our own emotions is a huge factor in our life.
Sometimes authors define emotional intelligence as a set of skills that help us perform at a higher level in our life—in our profession and in our relationships. Experts say that the emotional quotient—EQ—of effective leaders is just as important as their IQ. Emotional intelligence will increase your job performance, they say. It helps with interpersonal skills and relationship management. Emotional awareness helps people communicate effectively. Managing emotions is a key to success, they say.
Of course, the skills of emotional intelligence do help us perform better in our life. But there is a bigger picture.
The Bigger Picture
To see that bigger picture, a person has to rise above the traditional view in Western culture that we have to manage emotions. Usually, that view means that a person is managing their emotions from a mental perspective. They have ideas about what they should and shouldn’t be feeling, and they are attempting to control their own and other people’s feelings, as if it is all about gaining a set of emotional competencies.
The mind can be a cruel master, and people shame themselves for what they feel. And often, a person’s interpretation of what it means to be emotionally intelligent ends up being some form of emotional repression and the ability to manage what they feel.
High emotional intelligence is emotional fluency. It is not the repression of feelings. It is a balanced expression of emotions. The significance of this goes far beyond performance. Emotional intelligence is a key factor in physical health and spiritual well-being. Our emotional experience connects us to the wellspring of our creative flow—our inspired thoughts, vitality, and imagination.
Our emotional perception is a conduit for the compassion, love, and empathy that is at our core. And yes, it empowers us to act wisely and effectively in our world.
Emotional Intelligence, Self-Awareness, and Human Happiness
When you stop to think about it, doesn’t your emotional experience let you know who you are? Could you know yourself as an idea or a name devoid of feeling? And if it is true that emotion is necessary for self-awareness and self-confidence, isn’t emotional intelligence vital so that you have a positive experience of self?
High emotional intelligence brings a sense of meaning to a person’s life. Just imagine. Any outer experience of apparent success is hollow if you don’t have a feeling of love and appreciation for it. Any relationship is empty, no matter what form it takes, if feelings of love and appreciation are blocked. That emptiness will destroy a relationship from the inside out. So if emotions are blocked, people have to be emotionally intelligent enough to figure out why and unblock themselves. They have to be able to figure out the key to human happiness.
Emotional Intelligence and Your Primal Spirituality
Does emotional intelligence have anything to do with your Primal Spirituality?
Call it what you will, there are things that happen to the emotional body that can block a person’s experience of the vitality, love, and wisdom at their core. It can obscure their intuitive self-awareness. Emotional factors can eclipse their Primal Spirituality.
At the same time, the emotional body can be a connection to our Primal Spirituality. And it can be a conduit for the flow of Power, Presence, and Wisdom into our experience.
David Karchere, Author
David Karchere, author of Becoming a Sun: Emotional and Spiritual Intelligence for a Happy Fulfilling Life, and creator of the Primal Spirituality Courses.
Find Out More
You can find out more about the Primal Spirituality Courses and when they are offered at the Sunrise Ranch website, the place where they are offered.
