Sacred Desire

Growing in Compassionate Living

Nancy K. Morrison, Sally K. Severino

• Publisher: Templeton Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781599473574
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Is the call to spirituality embedded in human biology? Authors Nancy K. Morrison and Sally K. Severino draw on cutting-edge research, including the recent discovery of brain "mirror neurons" and the elucidation of the physiology of social affiliation and attachment, to make a bold case that we are, in fact, biologically wired to seek oneness with the divine. They have termed this innate urge "sacred Desire."

In their new book on the subject, em>Sacred Desire: Growing in Compassionate Living, Morrison and Severino, both highly esteemed academic psychiatrists, draw on neurophysiology, relationship studies, research on spiritual development, and psychotherapy to show how spirituality is intimately connected with our physical being. The authors offer several clinical examples of how recognizing sacred Desire can advance a person's healing and they provide an action plan for using Desire to move from fear to love of self, others, and all creation.

In addition to psychiatrists and neurophysiologists, who will undoubtedly welcome this significant contribution to their fields of study, Sacred Desire is sure to appeal as well to the much wider audience of spiritual seekers looking for intellectually and scientifically credible ways to understand spirituality in today's world.

 

CHAPTER 1
WOMB OF COMPASSION

The Beginning of Life and Love

From all eternity God [the Divine] lies on a maternity bed giving birth. The essence of God [the Divine] is birthing.

—MEISTER ECKHART

THAT OUR LIFE BEGINS IN LOVE is beautifully conveyed in Hebrew, where the word for compassion or mercy, rachamim, comes from the same root as the word meaning womb, rechem.¹ The view of the Divine as “womb of compassion” captures the vast benevolence that underlies all of creation, including our own coming into being. It also exemplifies how all of life is relational—from the relationship between the Divine and nature, between the Divine and humans, between parent and child, and between body and mind and spirit as told herein.

As Jeannie B., speaking of her first pregnancy, put it, “I felt like the three of us—my husband, my baby, and I—were all caught up in the wonder of the Divine.” Like Jeannie, we are sometimes acutely aware (just as we are also sometimes utterly unaware) of this wonder, this manifestation of our relationship with the Divine that is expressed as love.

Often parents manifest this love in particularly strong and compelling ways, even before a child is born. Shortly after Peg S. learned she was pregnant, someone asked her if she planned to keep the baby. “Of course, I’m going to keep the baby!” she cried, her response immediate and visceral like a power potion coursing through her body.² Looking back, Peg comments, “It was almost as if my own life was threatened.” Her body spontaneously readied her to protect the inviolable connectedness that she felt within her for her baby.

Peg’s love of and connection with the life growing inside her vitally illustrates the womb of compassion—what Jewish scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg calls “the space of desire, the hollow of holiness.”³ In a very unexpected way, Peg’s love of the life in her space of desire led her to a deeper love of herself. “I felt precious to have this child within me,” she says. “It was an honor to carry this child.”

The womb itself is inherently compassionate. While we live in the womb, we are kept warm without clothing and nourished without eating. We don’t even need to breathe. All of our needs in utero are met without our effort.⁴

In addition to a baby growing, much happens during pregnancy. Biologically, Mother’s hormones are changing. Psychologically, Mother is imagining her baby and forming a mother mind-set. Spiritually, Mother is developing a spirit-set about being a mother and about her relationship with her baby. Socially, Father and extended family are offering the support that allows this psychobiospiritual experience to blossom.

One mother—quoted by infant researcher Daniel Stern and his psychiatrist wife, Nadia Bruschweiler-Stern—gives us a glimpse of the mind-set and spirit-set she is developing. During her fourth month of gestation when she felt her baby kick, she said, “It’s as if this baby kicks in accordance with my moods, like he’s already tuned in to me.” According to the Sterns, “The imagined baby is, of course, purely subjective, so the same kick could inspire the mother to imagine any… possible character traits.”⁵

Peg, whom we met earlier, did not talk about her imaginary baby, but she did say, “I still felt precious even after he was out of my body. I’d never thought of it that way before, and that sense of preciousness remained.” In Peg’s sense of preciousness, she experienced the womb as compassionate in a very palpable way that nourished her spirit-set for motherhood.

Giving birth—like pregnancy—was a spiritual experience for Peg, but she was totally unprepared for the immensity of that experience. “Everyone wanted to prepare me for the pain, the panic,” she remembered. But Peg’s experience of giving birth included more than her labor pains. “Nobody told me how giving birth would be an experience of ecstasy,” she continued. “I was afraid people would think I was crazy if I told them.” Indeed, science now confirms what Peg felt. She literally was infused with the Holy. A holy nectar, a term we coined, pervaded her being, promoting her feeling of ecstasy and also producing her uterine contractions.⁶

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THE HOLY NECTAR

When experiencing safety, our body produces a biochemical named oxytocin—what we are calling a holy nectar—that appears in our bloodstream as a hormone and in our brain as a signaling substance (called neurotransmitter). This nectar

• Makes us calm and friendly
• Activates our parasympathetic nervous system that decreases our blood pressure and increases our digestion
• Gives us trust and security to bond positively with others

Unlike most hormones that shut off their own production, oxytocin does the opposite. The presence of oxytocin triggers the production of more oxytocin. In other words, we are made so that we can’t run out of love. The more we have, the more we get. The more we get, the more we live in the physiology underlying our trust of Desire.

Source: Kerstin Uvnas Moberg, The Oxytocin Factor: Tapping the Hormone of Calm, Love, and Healing (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2003), x–xii, 4.

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Mothers, nonmothers, fathers, and nonfathers know “womb” experiences—hollow of holiness experiences, space of desire experiences. Womb experiences demand that we take seriously the fact that our bodies are made to be spirit-nurturers for one another. Linda L., remembering when she was pregnant with her now-teenaged son, says, “What surprised me about pregnancy was what a huge responsibility it was to be carrying life inside me. I realized that anything I did to my body affected my child.” She worried about all the things she should or shouldn’t do, including what she should eat or not eat. Then someone told her that whatever she ate, the nutrients the baby needed would go to the baby first, then to her. “It was such a great joy to have a baby,” Linda continued, “but also a great relief to know that my body would give the baby what he needed.” As Linda experienced relief when learning that the whole responsibility for the well-being of her child was not hers alone, she experienced the reality of being a spirit-nurturer.

As infants, once held and fed by our mother’s womb, we enter the world with full potential to become spirit-nurturers (as well as the potential to be sidetracked from this destiny). How our potentials develop depends, normally, on how we are welcomed by our mothers and other caregivers. In this sense, the womb of compassion is our human capacity to be spirit-nurturers for one another. We are not whole alone. Our being and becoming—physical, psychological, and spiritual—are fed (or starved) in relationship with those around us.

We literally are relationship. As cell biologist Bruce Lipton puts it, “You may consider yourself an individual, but… I can tell you that you are in truth a cooperative community of approximately 50 trillion single-celled citizens.…. As a nation reflects the traits of its citizens, our human-ness must reflect the basic nature of our cellular communities.”⁷

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THE POWER POTION

When confronted by a threat (real or imagined), our body produces a power potion composed of hormones and neurotransmitters—such as adrenaline, noradrenalin, and vasopressin—that prepares us to either fight or flee. This is the physiology of self-protective behaviors. Our power potion

• Makes us angry, afraid, or both
• Activates our sympathetic nervous system that increases our blood pressure and decreases our digestion
• Gives us power to focus on defending against threat

When chronically aroused, this cocktail is the physiology underlying our mistrust of Desire.

Source: Kerstin Uvnas Moberg, The Oxytocin Factor: Tapping the Hormone of Calm, Love, and Healing (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2003), ix–x, 5.

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Phyllis Tickle articulates the relationship of our physical, psychological, and spiritual aspects in a slightly different way. In reflecting on one of her pregnancies, Tickle writes:

I don’t know who in the late twentieth century decided to take the traditional trichotomy of body versus mind versus spirit and popularize it into the unified buzz phrase of “Body, Mind, and Spirit,” but I do know it was definitely a woman and definitely a woman who had been pregnant.…. The degree of fusion among body, mind, and spirit early in midpregnancy is not an emotion; it is a translation… into an ecstatic way of being that is more like existing within the aura of a great radiance.…. The prayers of early to midpregnancy rise… to some Completeness, to some Magnificence.⁸

Sacred Desire urges us toward wholeness, or, in Tickle’s words, toward “some Completeness… some Magnificence.”⁹ It urges us to fulfill what we are designed to be—persons who live and love graciously, freely, and fully in relationship.

Yet, paradoxically, we do not begin—or carry out—our journey as “unwhole” people. Throughout our life journey we are whole, though we don’t always know it or act like it. The Divine lives in our DNA, alludes Francis S. Collins, leading geneticist and head of the Human Genome Project, when he quotes C. S. Lewis, “If there was a controlling power outside the universe… [t]he only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way.”¹⁰

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OXYTOCIN AND VASOPRESSIN:
THE BIOCHEMISTRY OF ATTACHMENT

Both oxytocin and vasopressin are essential for human well-being. What is important is keeping in balance the two physiological conditions that they produce: calm and connection in balance with fight or flight.

• Oxytocin and vasopressin are closely related in chemical composition and are found in all mammals.
• Oxytocin and vasopressin are produced in the hypothalamus of the brain.
• The female sex hormone estrogen reinforces the influence of oxytocin and produces longer-lasting effects in females.
• In rats it takes twice the amount of oxytocin in males and in females without ovaries to produce the same effect as that found in females with normal estrogen levels.

Source: Kerstin Uvnas Moberg, The Oxytocin Factor: Tapping the Hormone of Calm, Love, and Healing (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2003), 61, 74.

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The challenge and the opportunity of our lives is to live from that command—that is, to reveal and express the Divine within us.¹¹ In short, from the beginning of life and with our mothers, we are co-creating ourselves in a womb of compassion to live out of and into our deepest Desire. We are co-creating ourselves both in our being (our Desire for the Holy) and in our doing (our Desire to express the Holy within us and among us). The practical implications for this are far-reaching. If we truly love in our being and in our actions, the world will be transformed even as we are transformed.

But the journey toward becoming and living out of our true essence is not always an easy one. Life experiences, cultural and familial influences, distortedness and pain dim our spiritual vision so that it is difficult to recognize the presence of the Divine around us and even more difficult to recognize the spiritual within us. Instead of experiencing wholeness of being that cannot be moved from its sacred center of enduring love, we feel fragmented by life’s throes and our own interior struggles. Instead of living in a world of compassion, we live in a world of violence. Instead of growing in love and freely manifesting our sacred Desire, we grow in fear and manifest our ego.

How, then, do we reorient our lives toward our deepest Desire—to express the Divine within us, to become who we are meant to be, and to become one with the sacred, which is love?

One avenue, through which life holds us close in the womb of compassion, is in the love and caring of others. In the next chapter we will explore how the seeds of Desire grow when we are infants and discover that, no matter ho...

Table of contents

• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedcation
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Womb of Compassion: The Beginning of Life and Love
• Chapter 2: The Grace of Gazing
• Chapter 3: The Widening Boundaries of Life and Love
• Chapter 4: Living in Sacred Desire
• Chapter 5: The Distortion of Desire
• Chapter 6: Beyond Distortion: Reconfiguring Our Past Today
• Chapter 7: The Healing Power: of Desire: Practical Steps to Loving Self : and Others
• Chapter 8: Redemptive Attuning: Desire’s Continuing Journey
• Chapter 9: Incarnated Spirit: The Work of Restoring Community
• Chapter 10: Toward a World of Compassion: Beginning to Live and Love Globally
• Glossary
• Acknowledgments
• Notes