September has felt like a month of finding threads.
Not necessarily finding answers. I don’t think I’ve found many answers. If anything, I’ve accumulated more questions, which I am beginning to think might actually be the point.
I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about Buddhism and Taoism this month, and noticing how much my interest in them seems to connect with something much older in me. It’s strange how often we think we’re discovering something new, only to realise that some version of it was there all along.
I’ve been thinking about myself as a teenager. I remember being fascinated by paganism then. I was drawn to the idea of nature as sacred, to seasons and cycles and the possibility that spirituality didn’t necessarily have to mean going somewhere specific on a Sunday and being told what to believe. There was something incredibly appealing about finding the sacred in the ordinary world.
Trees. The moon. The changing seasons. The feeling of being outside. I think I wanted a spirituality that felt alive.
And from that interest I ended up exploring Taoism and Buddhism. I remember reading the Tao Te Ching when I was a teenager, although I suspect I understood about five per cent of it. Probably being generous to myself there but something about it stayed with me and I find that quite moving now.
There are books we read at one age which we think we’ve finished with, only to pick them up again years later and realise that perhaps we hadn’t really read them the first time. We had only read the version of them that we were capable of understanding then. I’ve been feeling a bit like that this month. The Tao Te Ching makes much more sense to me now, or at least different things stand out. The ideas around flow and resistance, simplicity and allowing, not constantly trying to force life into the shape we think it should take.
I am very familiar with trying to force things. I’m good at thinking. I’m good at analysing. I’m good at trying to work things out until I am absolutely exhausted from working them out.
So the Taoist idea of not forcing has a particular resonance at the moment. What happens if I don’t push? What happens if I listen? What happens if I stop assuming that I have to know where something is going before I allow myself to follow it?
And then there is pantheism, which has been another interesting piece of the puzzle and something I was also drawn to as a teenager. The more I’ve explored it, the more I can see why it feels connected to those teenage pagan instincts. The idea that the divine might not be separate from the universe, but somehow within it—or that the universe itself can be understood as divine—feels surprisingly close to something I have always found comforting.
I don’t necessarily need to imagine God as a figure somewhere else. I find something much more moving about the possibility that whatever is sacred might be here. In the trees outside my window. In the changing light in September. In the fact that the days are getting noticeably shorter. In the body. In nature. In other people. In me.
I’m aware that this sounds like a fairly big philosophical leap to be making while drinking coffee and staring out of a window, but that has rather been September. Big questions in ordinary moments.
I’ve also been going deeper into IFS, and this has started to feel connected to the spiritual exploration too. The more I explore IFS, the more I find myself thinking about the different parts of me with a kind of tenderness that I didn’t always have. There are parts of me that are frightened. Parts that want to control everything. Parts that are angry. Parts that feel small. Parts that want reassurance. Parts that are constantly scanning the horizon for something that might go wrong. And instead of seeing those parts as evidence that something is wrong with me, I’m learning to become curious about them. What are they protecting? What happened to make them take on this role? What do they need from me?
There is something profoundly spiritual about that for me. Not because I want to turn IFS into a religion, but because there is something about the practice of listening to myself without immediately judging what I hear that feels like a spiritual discipline. Almost a form of reverence.
And this is where my interest in shamanism has started to appear too. I’ve been noticing the connections between IFS and some shamanic ideas around inner journeys, guides, parts, symbolic experience and entering into relationship with aspects of ourselves rather than simply trying to analyse them and I find this fascinating and slightly intimidating.
There is a part of me that wants to understand everything before I allow myself to experience it. Of course, that is probably exactly the part that needs to relax.
September seems to have been asking me to loosen my grip a little, to let some things remain mysterious, which is difficult for someone who would quite like a spreadsheet explaining the mystery!
Barcelona
In amongst all of this thinking, I went to Barcelona for a few days. It was a completely different kind of exploration, but somehow it fitted. I walked around the city, visited the cathedral, went to the Sagrada Família and spent time in the Picasso Museum. I loved the feeling of being somewhere where I didn’t know quite what the next street would look like.
There is something about travelling that interrupts your normal mental loops. At home, I know where everything is, I know which shops are where, I know what the roads look like, I know where I will probably be at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon.
Then suddenly you’re in another city looking at a building you’ve only ever seen in photographs, trying to work out which direction you’re walking in and wondering why you haven’t been here before. The Sagrada Família was probably the moment that stayed with me most. Standing inside it, looking upwards, surrounded by all that colour and light, I found myself thinking about the human urge to create places that make us feel something bigger than ourselves.
And perhaps that was particularly poignant because I’d been thinking so much about spirituality. We build cathedrals. We create temples. We make art. We travel for pilgrimage. We stand in front of paintings. We sit quietly under trees. We look up. Maybe humans have always been trying to find ways of getting outside our own heads for a moment.
The Picasso Museum gave me a completely different experience, but I loved that too. There’s something wonderful about seeing the development of someone’s thinking through their work. The permission to experiment. To change. To become someone different from the person you were before. That idea has been following me around a bit. The fact that we don’t have to remain the person we thought we were or even the person we thought we’d become.
Barcelona also made me realise how much I want to travel again.
I’ve come home with a list.
Lisbon.
Madrid.
Rome.
Florence.
Athens.
And Barcelona again, because apparently a few days wasn’t enough.
There is something comforting about having places in the future that I haven’t seen yet. Little promises to myself.
Coming full circle
Perhaps the strangest thing about this month is how connected it all feels. Teenage me, reading the Tao Te Ching and wondering about paganism. Me now, reading about Buddhism and Taoism and pantheism. Me exploring IFS and becoming increasingly curious about spirituality and shamanism. Me walking through Barcelona and finding myself moved by buildings and paintings and the evidence of thousands of years of people trying to make sense of being alive.
It doesn’t feel like a collection of unrelated interests anymore, it feels like one long thread.
I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking that growing meant moving away from earlier versions of myself. That perhaps I was supposed to become more sensible, more rational, more certain but maybe growing up isn’t actually about leaving those earlier selves behind. Maybe it is about going back and listening to them with the understanding you’ve gained since. I think about that teenage boy who picked up the Tao Te Ching. I wish I could tell him that he was onto something. Not necessarily that he had found the answer, I don’t think there is one, but that the questions he was asking mattered. That the fascination with nature and spirituality wasn’t something embarrassing or childish that he would eventually grow out of. That it would still be there.
Waiting.
And now, all these years later, I am finding it again only this time I have a little more life behind me. A little more experience. A few more bruises. A better understanding of myself. And, thankfully, a much greater willingness to admit that I don’t know.
Maybe that is what September has really given me. Not certainty. Connection. Connection between the person I was and the person I am becoming. Between psychology and spirituality. Between Buddhism, Taoism, pantheism and those old pagan instincts. Between travelling somewhere new and returning to something very old. Between the parts of myself I am still learning to understand.
And between the ordinary and the sacred.
Perhaps I’ve been looking for something outside myself when, in some ways, I’ve been circling back towards myself all along. I’m not quite sure where all of this is leading. For once, I’m trying not to force myself to know.
There is October.
There are more books. More IFS exploration More questions. And, hopefully, more journeys.
For now, that feels like enough.
