When I was small, I’d be just six years old, I could still remember the feeling that I’d come from a place of wonder. I could not describe it in words…it was entirely a feeling state, like the best, most magical, blissful treat of a place. I’d come from there…and I could still feel it

Then as years passed, I couldn’t feel that state, I could only remember remembering it. And as more years passed, I forgot about it altogether. Until when I reached around 50 years old, a deep yearning to ‘go home’ led me to a meditation practice, Sahaj Marg, now known as Heartfulness and I realised that ‘home’ was inside me, in my heart.

It was after a few years of meditation that this memory of how I’d felt as a small child came back to me. I even remembered desperately trying to get the feeling back, as I grew older. I do remember that. So it must have been when I was about 6 years old that I started to lose the actual feeling. I can place my age because we’d moved to a new house and a new school for me and the memory is visual, with me in that small tied house (my father worked for the railways) and that bedroom I shared with my little brother. My mother would put us to bed and get us to say a prayer with her…a version of ‘Now I lay me down to sleep’…and blessing all our loved ones. It was the time of long light summer evenings; my birthday time.

So as an adult at my half century, beginning to meditate, beginning to understand that as Hildegard of Bingen said,

Humanity, take a good look at yourself.
Inside, you’ve got heaven and earth, and all of creation.
You’re a world – everything is hidden in you.

I was beginning a much more laborious journey, a return to apparently exactly where I’d been as a very small child!

And trying to describe it all in words is beyond frustrating. But finding the right words, finding ways of communicating the journey we all make in life to find ‘home’…is important.
The true language of the heart is silence…as the Scottish poet George Mackay Brown asked to be written on his gravestone…Carve the runes, then be content with silence.

We need poets, because they create a bridge between the heart’s language of silence…and the ordinary communication of words.

Whenever there is a need to express deep feelings, we turn to poetry. So we have poems read at weddings and funerals, we have hymns, psalms, bhajans expressing devotion, faith in god, in a higher self. And of course people have been writing poems in praise of the sacred for over four thousand years. That most intimate of encounters, the self meeting the Self has a need to be expressed in poetry.

And it’s universal. For the last four thousand years, in every language, seekers have expressed in words, their relationship with the sacred, their mystical journeys…no matter the culture, the language, the religion, the practice:

Despite the varying expressions and frames of their understanding – the full moon of enlightenment discovered within a person’s own house or heart, or the divine presence experienced as mystical Husband and Lover, whether Krishna or Christ, or the representation of ecstatic realisation as a universe whose ordinary laws of physics and perception are turned utterly inside out – I believe that each one might recognise in the others something she knew to be close to her own life. In the poems they have left behind, as Hildegard of Bingen wrote, the world-tree is blossoming – a fragrance everywhere unique and the same. (From Women in Praise of the Sacred by Jane Hirshfield)

Fragrance. That is the word I was seeking to describe my sense of a wonderful place I had come from, as a small child. And which I’d lost for a lot of my adult life. But it had lingered. Each time my heart softened, responded, leapt…with laughter or tears, almost always to a line, a whole poem, I stayed a seeker. Even when I didn’t recognise that this was always a spiritual journey.

I remember discovering Mirabai’s poem Why Mira Can’t Go Back To Her Old House and it felt like my heart was singing with her. Here was someone, a sixteenth century Indian poet, more than four hundred years before me…and in such simple language!…fearlessly telling us her truth.
Such a declaration of courage, finding her own spiritual path, having nothing to do with prejudice or discrimination.

I loved what she said so much that I copied it out on a beautiful reproduction of an Indian princess and stuck it to my journal cover.

The colours of the Dark One have penetrated Mira’s body: all the other colours washed out.
Making love with the Dark One and eating little, those are my pearls and my carnelians.
Meditation beads and the forehead streak, those are my scarves and my rings.
That’s enough feminine wiles for me. My teacher taught me this.
Approve me or disapprove me: I praise the Mountain Energy night and day.
I take the path that ecstatic human beings have taken for centuries.
I don’t steal money. I don’t hit anyone. What will you charge me with?
I have felt the swaying of the elephant’s shoulders; and now you want me to climb on a jackass?
Try to be serious.

I was then aged in my mid forties when I found this poem. I was keeping a journal. I was recording my feelings, my thoughts. I was indeed a Seeker, though I didn’t know it. It would be another decade, before the buried longings, the need to re-find that ‘magical fragrant world’ of my babyhood would emerge as a clear yearning. But in the meantime, the poets above all were showing me the way. Mystical, sacred poetry, yes…but not exclusively. And everything I read, everything which found a place in my heart was universal. There are no real divisions in the different versions of our search to express our relationship with the sacred – not language, nor culture, nor different systems. And what makes me sure of this is the truth expressed, especially in poetry. It’s unity. It’s simple.

Poetry: a Universal Language of Spiritual Expression.

It was in 1993 that I found myself sitting with someone I knew, who did a meditation practice ‘on the heart’. I’d been to see her for a counselling session ( My mother had died the previous year; I’d recent taken early retirement from 30 years of teaching secondary school…my life had undergone big changes.) And in that session an important truth had come to me. It was the realisation that I needed, indeed yearned, ‘to go home’. And I knew that this need to ‘go home’ was a home inside me, only inside….not an outword form of home, however familiar, needed or beloved that might also be.

So I said to her…she was a Heartfulness Trainer, though I didn’t know her in that role…
‘That’s it! I need to have a regular meditation practice. Something I do every day. Not the kind of occasional, ‘meet with friends to meet the new moon’ kind of thing which I’d been doing for years. I need to have a regular way of going inside.’

And so I began a regular morning meditation…a conscious decision to take me on a spiritual journey, a going inside. And I joined a weekly group doing the same practice. I’m recounting this beginning here, because it’s so relevant to to looking at how poetry is an integral part of a spiritual journey. A few weeks after beginning regular meditation, I wrote down a dream. I was in the habit of writing down dreams in my journal and this dream felt huge. So I re-wrote it as a poem.

Master’s Garden
I fled from the light
shining from your unveiled eyes.
And when I stole back, breathless
I saw you walking,
singing to yourself quietly
twilight a purple glimmer in your garden.
I’ve come for my basket, I said.
I left it here.
You knew.
And my heart is squeezed with the joy
of your exquisite welcome.
The pain of promise, that at heart
I am beloved.

I’d never acknowledged this before. That I might be beloved; that surrendering to my higher Self, expressed in my dream as ‘Master’, this kind old man, my outward spiritual guide, a real person called Chariji, actually accepted me exactly as I am. The essence of love. This felt painful…and real…that I was meeting parts of myself I’d denied, repressed, needed to bring out into the light… that this is the real spiritual adventure. And the only way I could express it was in a poem.

The great 13th C Persian poet Rumi said much the same thing, better than I could:
On Love
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi

There was such a need to express the importance of my dream as a poem! And of course I’m not alone in this. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that just about everyone who wants to express their experience, their feelings about their spiritual life…does so in poetry. Even when they don’t write it down, the words come out as pure poetry. I’ve so often heard words tumbling out of mouths in group discussion, language stumbling, tentatively trying to express what is deep in the heart…and it’s often what I would describe as ‘heightened language’…in other words…poetry.
This is true, I believe, of all religions and all spiritual practices. Just read the Old Testament of the Christian Bible…the Song of Solomon, exquisitely beautiful; read Rumi on the heart…It’s healing you can hold. It’s a journey into your own beautiful, beating heart.
Oh so many examples from all cultures, all spiritual belief systems.
It’s the poet Robert Hayden, a former US Poet Laureate, saying in 1978… What is a poet but a human being speaking to other human beings about things that matter to all of us?
That needs to be repeated: What is a poet but a human being speaking to other human beings about things that matter to all of us?

Sheila Templeton