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Join author and founder of the Center for Wild Spirituality, Victoria Loorz, as she explores the possibilities of restoring beloved community and sacred conversation with All That Is: human and more-than-human.
HW S1E11 Sheri Kling
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Stephen: You are listening to a podcast from the Center for Wild Spirituality.
Victoria: Hello and welcome to the Holy Wild. I'm Victoria Loorz and this is a conversation with human beings who are restoring sacred conversation with all beings. It's a podcast for the edge walkers, those who walk along the edges between an old story of dominance and separation, and an emerging new and yet very ancient story grounded in kindred relationship with Earth. All it takes is humility and deep listening, and allowing yourself to fall in love again with our holy and wild earth.
When I was involved in climate activism, I burnt out. My son burnt out. We had a nonprofit for our youth climate activism, and my son Alex, spoke to hundreds of thousands of people urging action to reverse the trajectory of climate disaster.
And no matter what he offered for young people to do. At the end, ride their bikes, change their light bulbs, organize a march, sue the government. The kids would still ask, yeah, but what do we do? It's a legit question. What can one person, or one organization, or one campaign do in the face of a problem rooted in a centuries old system of domination?
Like I shared in my Church of the Wild Book, I realized that the work we were doing in the climate movement was rooted in a flawed understanding of how change happens. There were funding models that required each organization to show how their latest campaign or program will result in a measurable change.
How do you measure change by units of individual actions in a problem rooted in an entrenched and complex system? We had to pretend that our youth marches around the world would result in government regulations that were somehow capable of changing a whole society into its complete opposite, and it's not like I'm saying that we're powerless in the face of this system of domination.
The system intent on essentially destroying the whole planet to serve the profits of a few powerful men. We aren't powerless. We actually do have power as co-creators of a new system or a new story, but only as we behave as a system ourselves, a system of interconnected relationships. There's a theology rooted in this kind of systems thinking, and I first became aware of the work of Alfred North Whitehead's Theology of Process when I was in seminary.
He named reality, not as the things in our life, but of occasions of experience. He called it verbs of change and becoming, and all of it's shaped by relationship. Whitehead imagined God not as an omnipotent ruler, but as a relational presence that's interwoven with all things in the world, and his understanding of the co-creation of meaning and of evolving life has been pivotal for me that every being has agency and a particular intelligence that is needed not just to balance the ecosystems of life, but to participate in its evolution and becoming. He imagines the universe as an unfolding in a conversation of divine initiation and then creaturely response, a conversation.
My guest today is the author of a book called A Process Spirituality Christian and Trans Religious Resources for Transformation. Reverend Dr. Sheri Kling is the Director of Process and Faith, an organization dedicated to nurturing relational spirituality, and she merges her scholarship in process theology and young in psychology in practical ways so that we can live into a spirituality that connects our inner landscapes with the outer landscape.
She shares in this episode, very personal stories of how the relational process of co becoming happens in simple and small ways, like a recurring dream and a butterfly who keeps showing up. She demonstrates how meaning and transformation is co-created with the holy and the wild.
[ transitional music plays]
Sheri, thank you so much for taking time today and make this connection. The work that you do, which I love your book, systems, basically process spirituality. I really haven't heard anybody talk about that before because the work that you do with Center for Process Studies is in my mind, just so intellectual.
Alfred North Whitehead is like brilliant and I love his work and it takes me forever to read it because it's just so intellectual. Yeah. It's like over my head.
Sheri: It's so dense. Yeah.
Victoria: And so dense and so brilliant. And you have done something that I think few have done, which makes sense why you've been asked to lead this Process in Faith Group.
But I thought maybe we could just begin with, actually, I wanna begin with something that you say on your website that I think is just captures it all. You say that you're sort of purpose is mid wifeing wholeness and to heal separation, which I think is the core of what all of this work is about. You wanna just begin there and just talk a little bit about what drew you into seeing what needs to happen in the world right now in terms of not just systems theory, but process theology, and then weaving that all together into a spirituality, a way of living in a wholeness.
Why don't you just give a little bit of background in how that happened in your life? And maybe even start sooner, like what role did nature play in your early life? The question we ask most people is who is the land who raised you?
Sheri: Yeah. I'll start with a brief story. When I was getting my master's degree at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, I remember being in a meeting with my thesis advisor, and I remember having this conversation with her where I said something like, oh, I feel like all I'm doing in this project is dealing with my own trauma and my own history through theology, and she's Sheri, that's what we all do.
So I'll just say that my early life was very traumatic. There was a lot that happened. I grew up in New Jersey, and there was just a lot of stuff going on in my family. It was very difficult and I like a lot of people, I never felt like I fit anywhere in the world, of course I was also overcompensating by being a really good student. That's the way I felt I had meaning in the world, was if I'm a good student and a good girl and don't rock the boat or do anything crazy and follow the rules, then certainly like they'll love me, right? They'll love me if I do that.
And of course that then later on got projected onto God. You know where I joked later in my life when I went through a real deep, dark night of the soul where I was in my PhD program, here I am getting a PhD in religion and theology, and I was telling people I'm breaking up with God. I'm done.
I'm done with God. But I knew what I was breaking up with was the God image in my psyche, which was I used to refer to as the abusive father, bad boyfriend God. Who never gave me what I needed, who I had to perform and jump through hoops like a circus monkey in order to make that God love me.
So all that early stuff got projected onto God as well. So I was smart and I was doing well in school and all of that. I had a really wonderful group of friends that were so important to me. I honestly don't know that I would've survived my life had they not been in my life and speak about nature. It's interesting because probably, so many young girls, I was completely horse entranced, loved horses and I loved reading Black Beauty and the one about the wild stallion. Anyway, there were all kinds of horse looks I would get into, but I lived in a suburban New Jersey, 20 minute train ride from Manhattan.
This was not a place where people had horses. So I didn't have let a lot of access and then at 12 I became allergic to that, which broke my heart. So I wasn't, there was not a lot of nature around my immediate environment, but I will say as a kid, like I remember anything I found that was like a wounded animal I brought home.
Birds, anything. And I also remember one of the things like that would fascinate me in the winter. We had these, I think they were like hydrangea bushes or something, and there would be ice that would form on the leaves that would, if you peeled off the ice from the leaf, the ice was a perfect leaf, and I would collect them.
I would like make a little snow igloo and collect them. And the other thing I remember is we lived a few blocks away from a golf course and on the other outside the fence of that golf course in one place in my little community, this was on the way to my grammar school, was a little creek and I used to, I, we had a dog at the time, and after dinner I would take the dog for walks and I would always go over to that creek and we would cross the creek and there would be a hole in the fence of the golf course and we would sneak in, me and the dog.
I'd sneak into through the fence. I'd take my shoes off and just walking on that carpet of golf course grass, obviously it was a golf course, it was all, humanly manufactured and it wasn't fake, but it was, humanly perfected. But I remember one time, of course, we were always like watching for the maintenance people so we could not get caught.
And I remember one time seeing workers and taking the dog and diving into a grove of pine trees, like a little circle of pine trees. And being there and looking up and there was like a little barn owl sitting in the tree. And I just was transfixed by that.
And I'll just fast forward one more piece of this. When I was, so I grew up in New Jersey, went to Purdue for my undergrads, and then after Purdue, I moved to the Atlanta area and lived in Marietta for about 25 years. Then I had meanwhile fallen in love with this place up in the Northeast Georgia Mountains that was a very rural beautiful community.
I'd fallen in love with that place and had been going there and visiting people for quite a while and by 2006 I moved up to the mountains and I rented this beautiful little a hundred year old farmhouse on eight acres of land, and there was an old barn and a creek and a lake and pasture.
It was like, it was perfection. Other than that, it was on a very busy road. So if you had your back to the road, you, it was heaven and I got my first dog there and as an adult, and when I was wanting to move to a place like that, my hope was I was like on a search for the divine feminine.
Because I knew I had looking at Myers-Briggs type stuff and that's based in Jung's, Carl Jung's psychology. Yeah. I was a E-N-F-P. I was an and highest was my intuitive function. So my sensate function, meaning the stuff of the real world, the sensory world was my weakest function. I had been up in my head my whole life. I had been up in the spirit world with God. I didn't wanna be in this embodied world. I was just, not into this whole messy, traumatic world.
Victoria: There's enough trauma there to have you escape into a place that was safer, right? A lot of people with traumatic childhoods have a place in nature to escape a little hidden place like that place on the, yeah on the golf course. And to not have too much access to that, of course it makes sense that you would find a place not on earth that's in some ethereal other place. And in your mind.
Sheri: Exactly. I was on this quest when I looked for that place when I went to go look at this house, and as soon as I walked in it, I was like, oh my God, I have to live here and this adorable little cottage with a front porch. And then I walked outside to walk up to the barn, which was also extremely charming, and they're leaning against the barn as if it was yesterday's trash was a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Victoria: Wow, there it is.
Oh, like gimme shivers.
Sheri: I know. I was just like, oh my God, she's calling me here. She's calling me here.
Victoria: Yes. Where did that, you have another book that I'm fascinated with about finding home, and that's something for me having, I just moved to Pacific Northwest on purpose for place, like you said.
Very similar story with this place that I'm renting is like Magical Miracle.
Sheri: Oh.
Victoria: Overlooking the bay and a hundred foot cedar trees everywhere, and this is the 48th move of my life. After my mother died in November, I knew I wanted to come back to a place that. That same kind of quest. I'm really curious about that quest.
Sheri: Yeah.
Victoria: And how you had connected that with a divine feminine and how you knew at least intuitively, and maybe you'd done deeper work, to know that it has to be embraced by the natural world in some way.
Sheri: Yeah.
Victoria: And that those are un separated, reconnected, obvious. Connection of the divine feminine is deeply entrenched and embodied and interconnected and entangled with the natural world . so that's just a fascinating way that you knew how not only what the search was somehow in your own inner work, but you knew how to recognize it emotionally as well as intellectually.
Sheri: Yeah. I knew by the time I was 23 when I was in college, actually, I went twice to see a counselor and that was the first time I ever went to speak to anybody about anything, like that.
And I had related to her some information I had only just learned as a senior in college about the circumstances around my father's death. He committed suicide when I was 10. But we didn't talk about it. So for 10 years, 11 years, it wasn't discussed and it wasn't even really said out loud that he had committed suicide, but I guessed that.
But finally there was something that, a decision I had made that prompted my mother to then really sit down and say, here's the whole story that you don't know about his life, about all these things. Hugely traumatic. His life was horrendous, his early life. And so of course that all flows downstream, to the rest of us when he's in a family.
And when I spoke about this whole thing to this counselor, she said to me you have no emotional affect and you are very disconnected from this. And I'm, and I was like mad because I was like, I don't know what you want me to feel. This is 11 years ago that this happened. But by the time I was 23 when I had gotten outta college, some other things happened in my life that showed me that I was emotionally numb, that I was not having emotional feeling to things that should have caused that.
So I started on the path of inner work and therapy, and then later in the nineties was when I first read the book, women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Ola Estes. And that really changed my life because that set me on the whole path of being interested in Jung. Who I have found to be extremely life-giving Jung psychology just has resonated so strongly with me.
Victoria: Yeah.
Sheri: And so then it was probably, it's somewhere back, in those years that I did my first Myers-Briggs and learned that this whole sensate area had language for that. That it was this weak area and trying to learn how to be more embodied, how to be more in touch with the embodied world. Then meanwhile, I had also read a book by a woman named Joyce Rockwood Hudson called Natural Spirituality, recovering the Wisdom Tradition in Christianity where she brings Jung and Christianity together and it like was the answer to my life.
It was like I was thinking at the time I would, I could no longer call myself a Christian because of all the public face of Christianity, plus my own struggles and seeing what she talked about in that book really made it all come together for me in a new way. And it also introduced me to this idea of wisdom as the divine feminine and wisdom being present in coming to us in dreams and synchronicities and the flow of life and embodiment. So that all led me to that awareness. And then knowing that every time I went and visited this community in the mountains was when I would feel the best in my body.
Victoria: So your body helped you, guided you to that place, which is often how it happens. It's not an intellectual pursuit .Your mind catches up. But I think a lot of us have a similar path, very different stories of moving from our head to our heart.
Sheri: Yeah, for sure. So when I, was able to move to that place and it was the home of my soul, there was no doubt about it.
When I moved into that house after, and I decorated the front porch and stuff, people would say to me, Sheri, that house looks happier, since you've moved into it, and I felt like I had a relationship with that house in that land. I felt like we were in a deep relationship.
Victoria: There it is. To me, wild spirituality at the core, is that what you just said. It's that moving beyond, I like this house, I like this community. I like to look at the mountains into the actual relationship. And it's not, it takes some openness and intentionality, but it's generally invited by the wild.
The wild ones. The holy wild. Yeah. And so I'm curious about that as a internal phenomenon or a spiritual phenomenon. Some people feel that in places that make sense from their ancestry. Some people feel that in places that make sense from their own history. This is, I grew up in the, at the ocean and then we moved to Nebraska or whatever.
Sheri: Yeah.
Victoria: But a lot of people like you and I just recognize a place that calls us that has no real, like I'm in the Pacific Northwest. This feels like home to me. But I have no reason other than the place herself said here.
Sheri: Yeah. I felt more at home in Georgia than I ever felt in New Jersey where I grew up.
I loved the south, I loved that kind of salt of the earth type.
And we never really got back to the fragmentation and wholeness thing, which we can.
Victoria: That's okay. Let's go there because that's become center of your, the weaving that you have woven with all of these different experiences to this idea of process spirituality, but maybe just to send us a few paragraphs about who Alfred North Whitehead is and what process theology even is 'cause I think there's some of our listeners who won't have that background.
Sheri: So I'll first mentioned, I had been reading a book years ago called Radical Nature where he made this case that consciousness goes all the way down, which now, they refer to as Panpsychism. And he pointed to Alfred North Whitehead and processed theology as being similar to this idea of consciousness going all the way down. And so it, there was like a note in the back of my head, somewhere along the way, I need to look in, take a class and process theology. So when I was in Chicago. There was a class offered at McCormick Seminary, which is the Presbyterian seminary next door to my school, taught by Anna Case Winters on process theology. Meanwhile, I had been like fully immersed in young, and so very interested in young and psychology and transformation wholeness.
I've been doing inner work for now two decades, and found his work to be very nourishing and helpful. And so I signed up for this class and in the class, we were reading all of our texts and there's a kind of seminal text on process theology by John Cobb and David Ray Griffin, which is an introduction to process theology, which I'll say more about in a second.
But in their chapter on Christology, they talk about Christ as creative transformation. And the way that they talked about that, it just made me think of Jungian individuation that it had its similar feeling. And so I decided to dig more deeply into resonances between process thought and Jung, and found a book called Archetypal Process that was edited by David Ray Griffin, and I thought, oh my gosh, it's not just me that sees these overlaps. So that really, then I did a paper on that for her class. Then that was my, became my master's thesis. Then it became what I continued to focus on at Claremont.
But in a nutshell, Alfred North Whitehead was a British mathematician and philosopher who, while he was still in Britain, became pretty much like the best known philosopher of science, and he wrote books like Science in the Modern World, and he called his philosophy a Philosophy of organism, which was in contrast to the dominant philosophies of mechanism of the time. So whereas these other philosophies see the world as a machine and all things in it as machines, he saw the world as an organism and everything in it as alive and to some degree, basically, he talks about rather than reality being, when you go down deeper and deeper into what reality is made up of, it's not made up of ultimately bits of dead stuff that's pushed around by external forces, but it's made up of events, moments of experience, drops of experience is a phrase that William James used, but White had used that too.
Where everything that is made up ultimately of events and happenings, and so that each moment momentary event emerges from a past world of fact and arises from the past. It's like the Buddhist idea of contingent arising. And arises from the world of the past, but is lured toward possibilities by both God and the world because the world carries within it all the possibilities that were actualized in the past.
But God, according to, Whitehead made this case that God is necessary in the world and that God and world are one system, that there's one world, and that God calls into being each new moment with a given aim of possibility of what it could become. God has a vision for every moment of what it could become, but that ultimately then that moment decides for itself based on what it internalizes from the past world and this lure of possibility, what it will actualize and then creates itself into something, integrates all these relationships that it brought into itself.
Then becomes the data of the past for the next moment. So that's just the way things come into being. And and there's a lot more to it than that, but it's basically the idea that everything is always in the process of becoming. And that everything is interconnected. There is nothing that stands alone.
Everything, we are formed by our relationships with other things.
And so there's a lot of friendliness to process thought. For example, in feminist theology and ecofeminist theology, he's seen as very ecological. He talks about not only is everything interconnected with everything else, but also everything has value for itself.
Nothing that exists only has instrumental value for what it does for others. But everything he said, all of reality is bipolar, both a mental and a physical pole. So everything is also a subject and an object. Everything is has some degree of subjectivity. So he would not have said, consciousness goes all the way down.
He would've said, experience goes all the way down. Then there would've been the differentiation between more complex experience that then rises to what he would call consciousness, but that everything has some degree of inner subjectivity and has value because of that.
Victoria: It just feels so obvious now in a way that it was like it was such a breakthrough thing then. And like I would say that all of reality is relationships. It is. And that's the whole logos thing that, we've known that forever. We just, there's a reason why we're disconnected.
Sheri: Yeah.
Victoria: And so some, it's important to unravel those reasons. Ultimately it's about what are we gonna create?
What are we gonna do with the possibilities that are given to us right now?
Sheri: Yeah.
Victoria: And so in the midst of this decline, in the midst of this unraveling, in the midst of this destruction that came about because of our disconnection, how are those of us who are in that deeper consciousness capacity to see that there's something new arising and we are part of it?
And what are we gonna do with each moment, right? With each possibility. It's just, it's so beautiful. And then how you connect you and others. But I love how you have done the deep connection with the inner wholeness is completely related with the collective human wholeness. Societal wholeness, which is completely connected with the ecological wholeness.
And it doesn't surprise me that you, as you went deeper and deeper into this psychological journey, it led you to the theological journey. Whereas God in this, that leads you into the ecological journey because they're not separate. And you just see that every person who's gone deep into their area hits the other two areas, 'cause they're connected. And so you can enter in anyway, as long as you get to that place of wholeness, which is, none of this stuff is disconnected.
Sheri: Exactly. And basically the arc of my dissertation, which then became that book a process Spirituality, is that it starts with saying, here's the problem, fragmentation at all levels, like you said, interpersonally, societally, intrapersonally, meaning within ourselves.
And I talk about the whole ACEs study, the adverse childhood experience study from the late nineties that showed like the horrible effects on adult health and behavior of childhood trauma. And if that's the case, then there can't be this MINDBODY separation because clearly it's affecting everything.
And so that then, lay, let me to, allowed me to set up this problem of fragmentation and pointing to this distorted worldview that we are swimming in the west, in the western world, which is dualistic, mechanistic, materialistic, patriarchal. And so there's this, again, separating mind from body. Fact from value, heaven from earth.
Stephen: Spirituality from everyday life. Just all of that is, is so much at the core, which kind of simplifies it to then the solution is reconnection, which is what religion actually means. This is it, and it's just a time and history where it's coming around, like in the midst of this destruction, there is this emergence of consciousness arising.
As well as this integration of what it means to be human is all of these things and how do we live that? And it, instead of it becoming complicated and oh my God, I've got so many things to remember. That's the old noun based way of putting all the things together instead of it's. How do we live in that deep relationship with ourselves in that wholeness way with one another, with people that are very different than us with people that aren't human.
And it's all then goes back to relationship. Becoming this, just like I love and you know this, but like the only time god said God's name. It was not a noun. I am who I am. It was a verb that is like becoming, is becoming. It's what you just said. It's the becomingness of aliveness.
It's not a religious concept, it's a aliveness concept.
[ transitional music plays]
Sheri: What intrigued me, what I saw in Whitehead and Jung and why I put these two guys together in my work was that whitehead at the speaking, at the level of the cosmos and the metaphysics of how everything works, and young speaking at the level of the psyche, the human psyche, all had these three elements in common, that reality is marked by value, relationality, and transformation.
And then I said, and then, so this is how we can understand at both the cosmic level and the human level that our reality is marked by these three things. And then through a practice like dreamwork, which is what I talk about in the book, we can have the embodied experiences of wholeness within our own embodied lives that show us the reality of these three aspects of our lives and show us that we matter, we belong, and we can experience positive change.
No matter what our past. Now, these are all lessons I am still learning. Like many people intellectually grasp things that haven't yet made it completely all the way down to my heart and body. I still doubt whether or not I'm worthy or matter. I still doubt at times whether or not I am connected and belong. I'm certainly having more of that reality in my own.
Victoria: That's what becoming means, that's right. And the same thing like in the collective consciousness, as young would say, we're not there yet. We're not at that place that we feel is becoming that that is what this new story that Thomas Berry talks about is happening in the midst of the decline.
Just like every birth, the baby is still around before there, is becoming. In utero before they're born, but the old way is dying at the same time that the new way is emerging. And that's where we live right now. Yeah. Maybe it's where we always live. But it's just so obvious right now.
Sheri: It's so obvious.
Victoria: It's so big. And another thing I wanna just bring into what you're saying is like these practices like dreamwork and that embodied wholeness, it's, when we say cosmos, it sounds like the, it's so big. It's also very local. Like the place in Georgia is part of that dreaming, interacts with that, dreaming, interacts with that wholeness. Like it, it plays a very direct and relationshipy role in a way that we are so disconnected. It feels odd, but once you start surrendering to that and experiencing that. It becomes just, it sh it helps to shift the worldview and shift your consciousness for what is emerging right now.
Sheri: For sure.
Victoria: Do you have a, like an example of how the dream work and the shift within your inner world has impacted your outer world?
Sheri: My gosh. There was a period of time when I was, embarking on being a musician. I took a summer to just be in as much silence as I could and be in nature.
I had a screen porch that was like all in the trees in the condo where I lived, and so I would sit out there and. I was working with some particular Psalms that really had a lot of meaning to me and reading Rumi poetry every morning and just in love with that. And at that time, I was just, it was like I took a deep dive into the unconscious.
I was at times writing down four dreams in a night, which were just crazy, it was crazy, the amount.
Victoria: But you even keep up with that. But it's interesting, your intentionality helped you to have that capacity to remember in a way that, yeah.
Sheri: Yeah, and it's, a lot of people say, oh, I never re remember my dreams.
But a lot of times if you set those intentions, if you put the notebook by the bed and you say, when I, whenever I wake up with a dream. Before I move, what? No matter what time it is, I'm gonna write it down. Your psyche is oh, you're paying attention here. And starts throwing you more dreams.
So I had a period, I can tell you this pretty incredible story of how two dreams, plus then synchronicities all came together with the natural world. This is probably a really good example. Probably the most dramatic example I have of a synchronicity.
And most of us, here's the thing, synchronicities are happening all the time, but we typically either reject them or just don't pay attention. But when you start paying attention and you actually give them respect and say, the whole world is God's mouthpiece. It's not just scripture or it's not just church services or whatever, like the whole world is speaking to me in every moment.
And when you start to pay attention and honor what comes, more of it. So you know, this, like I said, is a particularly dramatic example, but this was in 2006 and that was when I first read For the first time though, I had read many Jungian writers. That was my first time reading Jung himself, and I started with his autobiography, memories, dreams, reflections.
Which, completely impressed me. I just felt like he was my soul brother, in reading that. And so I was in the middle of reading that book and I was traveling from Georgia to Florida to do some gigs. I had a gig in Pensacola and then a gig in Tampa, and I had friends in Pensacola, so I was staying with them.
And so I also had taken some audio books out of the library to listen in the car. At the time, I was listening to a book by, I think it's Tony Morrison called Possessing The Secret of Joy, which is a beautiful book about an African woman and who'd had this t really traumatic events in her childhood with her sister and that whole sort of arena of genital mutilation and all of that.
Yeah, and it was like talking about the effects of all this on her life. It mentions in the book, she's referred to a Swiss psychologist or psychiatrist or whatever in Switzerland, who is the uncle of a friend of hers. So she and her husband go to Switzerland to like basically work closely with Uncle Carl.
And I'm like, oh my God, this is Carl Jung and I can't believe Carl Jung is in this book, and I'm reading his book right now, and here he is in this book I'm listening to. It refers in the audio book, the fact that this African woman referred to him as mz, MZEE. That was like a, an honorific title. So I'm listening to this and then I was driving and I decided to stop for lunch, like a Cracker Barrel or somewhere.
And I took my book in with me to read while I was eating. And I just had happened to just begin the section of the book on his travels in Africa, which say that they called him mz. Wow. I'm like, oh my gosh. Actually, I need to pause right there. I forgot to tell you the two dreams I had two dreams.
One was, at this time, was in a place where there was a river and there was talk amongst this town. It was like a resort area that they were gonna release the dam that, that the river, that the dam was gonna be opened. But I didn't know when. So I am later in the river with a raft with an another woman figure who, I didn't know who she was.
We were in the raft together going down the river, and I was in the water, and the water started to get colder and colder. And I thought, oh no, they've released the dam. Are we gonna be okay? And I, we went to the side of the creek and there was like a man, a professor in a house, and I talked to him and he said, no, you'll be fine.
The second dream was me with my parents and my brother in a van, in a parking garage with a circular drive that went down under the water. So we're driving the van under water in this area that then became like a little town, but all under water. And I'm thinking to myself, oh my gosh, are we gonna be crushed by this water pressure?
And I remember again, getting this message. You'll be fine. Everything will be fine. So there was obviously in me this fear around I'm gonna be overwhelmed by something. I'm feeling overwhelmed by what's coming.
So then I'm driving more. I stop at a rest area and I'm coming out of the restrooms on my way to my car, and there's a butterfly on the sidewalk fluttering its little wings.
It's be really pretty butterfly. So I put it on my hand, it crawls on my hand. I'm talking to it, of course, like I do, and it didn't fly away. I don't know if it couldn't, but it didn't fly away at all. So I took it with me in the car and it's sitting on my arm and I stopped for gas. I got gas. It's still on my arm.
I get back in the car, it's still on my arm. I'm driving an hour, it's still on my arm. And then it fluttered back into the backseat. So I'm coming into Tampa on I 2 75 and I see this billboard. With this huge butterfly on the left, and when I got closer to it and could read the text just said, change is coming.
I was just like, okay. Now you know Yung called Synchronicities Acausal when our inner world and our outer world are connected. Not in a causal relationship. So obviously my mind didn't cause there to be a billboard with a butterfly on it, but what young talked about was the unes mundus one world, that everything is one.
There is only one psyche, he said. And that ultimately everything, the meaning of the world goes all the way down. And that's why we can connect this inner and outer thing, because the meaning is everywhere. And it's all interconnected.
Victoria: And so it's not like we create the connections. We just agree to participate again.
Sheri: We're just part of the flow. And the flow just happened to flow that, these ways that then show you a these little things that happen.
Victoria: So then the practices are your transformational practices of wholeness are basically just ways for us to reenter the flow. And remove the barriers or recognize the barrier. You see 'em first. Recognize the barriers so that you can be back in the flow.
Sheri: I think that if we, as people can see, i'm in this interconnected world where meaning if in me is showing up here, I'm also being guided by some kind of wisdom greater than my own that is giving me these experiences or these dreams that show me something that I didn't know before about where I'm headed or what, where, what might my life, what should I think about it? Dreams are compensation for an ego attitude that's outta balance, right? They're trying to compensate and take us where we should be more balanced. And so if we see this evidence that, gosh, this, the sacred presence, whatever we call that God or the universe, or its source, this sacred presence is working in my life.
It's caring about me enough. To flow within my own body and world, in dreams in these synchronicities, and it's helping me to overcome these past traumas and become alive and enlivened and awakened to new possibilities and new directions I can take then that to me, that's faith, that's trust in the flow of life.
Victoria: It's aliveness. It's full aliveness. Like I, yeah, the word wholeness is tough 'cause we're already whole. And so I always have to do some gymnastics in my mind. But I think aliveness, like Andreas Weber talks about, aliveness works for me a little better, but it's like this full aliveness, 'cause part of us are not because we're disconnected. Full connection. Full reentry into the flow and fullness is even not a real thing. 'cause we're always becoming so, I love that word, becomingness. It's like our language is just, there's a paucity of words and capacity to express the numinous, which is part of the deal.
It's why it's mystery.
Sheri: Yeah.
Victoria: But I think us continuing to work within the boundary, the barriers that we have, some of which won't be removed 'cause it's numinous and mystery. And some of them are put there by our culture, by our traumas, by even just the collective consciousness isn't there yet. Like it's just where we are in the flow.
And that to me, simplifies it. It makes me feel less like anxious about it. Like we're already whole, it's already connected, we're pretending it's not. And we are still disconnected in a lot of areas, and so the more we can deepen into that and which I love your, the work that you're doing is precisely that.
Starting with this interconnection and then exploring these different practices that will help us remove those, allow the dams, like your dream to be removed and have the divine feminine in the boat with you, you know that it's gonna be okay.
Sheri: Yeah. Even if it gets rough waters for a while, and I've, I've been struggling my whole life with these feelings of disconnection and separation and because, part of it is because I though I had goals all along the way of wanting to be married and have children. That never happened for me, and so I never felt like I couldn't create love in my life. I couldn't, create the things that I wanted.
What's funny is just this year, I've had these incredible last few years and the talks that I've given at the Hayden Institute conference have all reflected this really these big shifts that have been happening lately. And the main thing. So two years ago I did a keynote there that was on sacred Sorrow, something about a suffering in a fully lived life.
And I was really honest and vulnerable about how, in so many ways, I felt like I really had failed at everything in my life. And this year's talk was, the theme was Cosmos and Soul. Ia. Delio was one of the other keynote speakers. Oh, okay, great. Yeah. And so I did, my talk was God soaked, divine and cosmos and soul.
And part of what I talked about in that was embodiment and I, that was also a big part of what I talked about two years ago. So I've beco begun lately to talk about coming from a Christian perspective, this whole idea, we talk about sin and we talk about original sin and all that kind of stuff. I've begun to say that sin is the illusion of separation.
Sinful action is action based on the illusion of separation. And original sin is the necessary illusion separation. Because see, we can't have a world without embodiment and differentiation and diversity, we can't have a world without the opposites that are always pulling us in tension. There would be no boundaries between things, so there has to be this illusion.
We have to agree to the game. We have to agree. That's such a great way to, to play this game of separation in order for I think, God to experience, experience. Experience God's self and we are little bits of God giving God experience and relationality, and we can't do any of that without the illusion of separation.
So it's necessary. That's why it's original. It's original to the human condition it's necessary.
Victoria: Amen. That's so good. It's like the Pascal mystery. Yeah the exile, the death, the separation, all of that is necessary. It's how things evolve. Like it just does, and it makes like logical sense when you think about it in a small way that.
But that emptiness, that death, that exile, that separation, that wounding of your children. Even if you do the best possible, intention of being the best parent ever, it's gonna happen because it's essential and it has to happen.
And I love how though, like there was a physician at a. A retired physician at a workshop I, or a retreat I just did at a church last week, and he was just like tripping out on the side idea of membranes.
That membranes are there to keep us separate. And he couldn't wrap his head around why would that be so essential in life? And what you're talking about is exactly. Exactly what he was wrestling with.
Sheri: Yes. Yeah. And so that's why to me, that's why Julian of Norwich could say sin is necessary and all will be well, and all will be well and all matter of things shall be well. Everybody forgets that first part, but she says that sin is necessary. So if you think about it, this illusion of separation is necessary and all will be well, yeah, all will still be well even in the illusion.
Victoria: And that goes with the meaning of religion, religios, reconnection.
Like we've had religion from the beginning of humanness, for over a million of years that they're showing Oh, wow. Even earlier. It was here. Even earlier because it's part of the story. Like we need practices and community and rituals of reconnection because the separation is going to happen.
It's not something, it's original because it's not something we intend necessarily. I think when you start intending, severance and you start intending, like racism or any of these severances when it becomes part of your intention and part of your, oh, this is, I want to intentionally continue this, then it becomes really harmful death. deathly harmful.
But to see that it's there as part of our original makeup. That the human journey is to bring about that reconciliation.
Then those Christian words start to make sense. I'm feeling myself in this phase of my spiritual journey, hearkening back to words that I've long released because they were manipulated and abused and used in harmful ways.
Going back to going, okay, actually a word like reconciliation or word like sin. I'm starting to understand it on a deeper and more real and more connected way. Which helps me see the difference between the original message of Jesus and the way that the church has distorted it.
Sheri: Yeah. And so if we can hold together that original sin and original blessing, that both are true, yes, that the illusion is necessary for there to be a world, but we can awaken to the fact that it's an illusion like Jesus did and live out of the connection rather than the separation and live out of the compassion and the love.
Victoria: And that's the whole spiritual journey, isn't it? Right there. It's right. Oh my gosh.
Sheri: Yeah. I'll just add, I'd started to talk about the last talk at the Hayden conference. One of the metaphors I was using the idea of the butterfly the caterpillar and the chrysalis, and then, emerging as the butterfly and about how that process, the caterpillar goes into the coon and has to, it becomes, it completely dissolves itself. It just becomes completely dissolves. It's nothing liquid. Yeah, nothing but these. But these, the cells that are left that form everything new are called imaginal cells, and it's like crazy that they're actually called that.
And then the butterfly forms and then it, comes out of the chrysalis and there's those stories of people who try to help the butterfly and they cut the chrysalis. And they kill it. 'cause it, it has to push the fluid from its torso out to the fullest extent of its wings and gets strong by pushing in order to fly.
So I was talking about that. So right after the conference. I went to do an experience with some plant medicine. And it was the second time I had done that also. And the first time was, the first time was amazing. It was all about self-love. It was, there was no, like my meeting God as an external, there was all arising from within me, which was really what I needed.
Victoria: Beautiful. It's a place of grounding for your body. You needed to start. Yeah.
Sheri: Yeah. And this time. There was, it was like I finally climbed into my life, my bodily life for the first time fully. I was literally lying there, pushing out my limbs and legs and arms, like pushing my spirit all the way out into my body and drawing it all the way in, but pushing it all the way to the edge of my skin all the way through.
And ever since then, it, and I made this also thing like, I am gonna marry myself. Like I am gonna marry myself. Already there are shifts happening in my outer world, both with my possibilities of relationship and also my lot, my work life. Like I had to move in, I had to fully move in.
I'm 64 years old now. I'm finally just moved into my own life.
Victoria: Amen, sister. That's what the journey's about. And every single step of the way was essential. And here you are. Oh, there's so many more things I wanna keep talking about. It's annoying. Maybe we'll have to plan as a conversation.
But I just send you many wild blessings that the fullness of that phase of butterfly where she's flying. That, that might be the definition of your life for this next season. I tend to skip past that, and go back to, okay, what else needs to dissolve, but to really stay in that place of flight and freedom and softness , a companionship. That little butterfly came with you all the way to Florida?
Sheri: Yeah. Oh and people always ask me what happened to it? What did your butterfly?
When I got to my destination, I was staying with a woman at her home who had organized this gig for me, and I, the next mor it was dark when I got there, so I couldn't find the butterfly, but the next morning I went back to my car and it was there.
It was still alive and I put it in her garden. So of course, I don't know if it went on to live, but it moved. It moved from wherever it was to the panhandle, to Tampa.
Victoria: And that interconnected story, makes me want to believe that story, that you were part of that butterfly's journey. Yeah, there was some intentionality there. So good. Thank you.
[ transitional music plays]
Encounters with the holy wild happen when we are open to them. When we approach the natural world with reverence and an open heart, each week I offer an invitation to wander in the wildest places of your home with reverence and to enter into sacred conversation with the holy and the wild yourself.
Dr. Kling shares a story with a chimpanzee that demonstrates the power of connection, respect, and reverence, honoring the reality that each being is sacred and interconnected with you through a complex and mysterious system of relationships. As you listen to this story. Allow yourself to become more aware of what can emerge through you when you remember that you are not alone and that your power in changing systems of domination lies in your embodying a way of being that is aligned with the co-creation of a new story that's emerging.
Sheri: There's a wildlife sanctuary in North Georgia. And I went just to see it. And they had, they have all kinds, they had big cats, they've got all kinds of zoo type animals, but they're there as a sanctuary and rescue and all that. And so there was a habitat with three chimpanzees, a male and two females.
And there was an outer cicu, an outer rim fence. And then there was an inner rim fence. And so when I first got there and walked past, there was a small group of people and a docent there at the gate looking in, and the male chimpanzee was on the other side of his side of the other fence with a really aggressive, ah, really aggressive display pounding and screaming.
The docent was saying, yeah, they, they're very aggressive and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, talking about this. So I thought they're blocking the view. And I just thought I'll come back later. So I went on my way and when I came back, I was by myself. There's nobody else there. And so I went to this gate and was watching, and again, he came out, ah, pounding and screeching and screaming.
And I just looked at him and I just said, you are doing such a good job protecting your family. And he got down on his pons and he just looked into my eyes and was completely calm.
Stephen: This has been another episode of the Holy Wild. For more information about the movement to restore sacred relationship with Earth, visit wildspirituality.earth and please subscribe to the podcast. Leave a review and share this episode with someone you know who is hearing the call of the Holy Wild.
Music by Alec, Slater, and Sandy from Inside the Silo at the farm.
Produced by Stephen Henning at Highline Sounds and hosted by Victoria Loorz.