E79: The Spiritual Domain of Exploring

Kirtly: Many years ago, there was a knock on our door. You might know that knock. Two LDS missionaries greeted us, "Hello, and do you want to know more?" I said, "Thank you, but . . ." And then my 7-year-old son said, "Yes, please come in." And so in they came and they taught my son about their faith.

Our son was raised with an LDS nanny, and then a Catholic nanny. And he went to the Jewish Community Center, summer camp, and sang Jewish religious songs. And the Episcopal preschool. He was in the Cub Scout troop sponsored by the local LDS ward.

And when I asked him if a God spoke to him or if he spoke to a God, he was thoughtful and said he believed in the force. Was that too much "Star Wars," or was he more spiritually elevated than I was?

So today we are finishing our 7 Domains of Exploring by exploring the spiritual domains. Of course, if this is your first listen to the 7 Domains of Exploring, or to the "7 Domains of Women's Health," check on the others after this one.

I'm Dr. Kirtly Jones from Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Utah. And with me is my co-host in exploring, Katie Ward. Katie has a doctorate in nursing practice with a specialty in women's health, and she is a longtime friend and one of the best explorers across time and space that I know.

So, Katie, I think that we as a species have been spiritual explorers since we could stand up, look ahead, and walk and talk. Do you have a sense as the anthropologist of when this came about?

Katie: We don't know for sure about talking, and it's an area of kind of hot debate, but there have been some exciting developments there where we've learned enough about the Neanderthals to recognize that they had the anatomy to talk and the genes for language processing. So there's a lot of discussion about how much communication was going on when those early pre-modern humans were exploring the planet.

But my guess is that they had to be able to communicate and share ideas. That's just necessary for cooperation, and that cooperation is necessary for migration. And so I think there must have been some communication going on for sure.

Spirituality is a different . . . that's a whole different thing. But we think we have the best evidence for things like intentional burials. So there are some really old graves on the planet that look like humans were burying their dead, maybe as far back as 400,000 years ago.

But we definitely see around 100,00 years ago lots of burials that were intentional, and we can tell that because people positioned a body in a certain way. They added what we call grave goods. So these were objects that were hopefully going to be useful in the afterlife or that were symbolic about that person's life. Or they would paint the body with ochre, this kind of ceremonial clay that was very colorful.

And so when we find graves like that and we can date them, those definitely date back 100,000 years. And so that tells us that people had some consciousness and they understood the link between life and death and past and present. They were making that connection with their ancestors, which I suspect is probably the foundation of a lot of what we think of now as religious and spiritual traditions. This goes back a long way in our human history.

Kirtly: Yeah, a long way. And we know now that every known culture has a spiritual tradition. And the fact that they're all different is not the point. It's the fact that we all are out there looking and finding a path to something bigger or a connection to something beyond us.

With us here in this virtual Scope studio is Chaplain Lorie Nielson. And Reverend Lorie Nielson is a board-certified chaplain, ordained Zen Buddhist minister, and a classical yogini. And I'm not any of those, but it sounds really interesting. She's also the senior staff chaplain at the University of Utah Hospital and part of the palliative care team.

Kirtly: So thanks for being here, Lorie. We're really interested to see what your perspective is, and she's going to help us think about spiritual exploring across cultures, across the lifespan, across critical life transition. So welcome, Chaplain Lorie.

Lorie: Thank you. It's an honor to be here.

Kirtly: If you're willing, can you talk some about your own spiritual exploring through your life and how you came to be a chaplain?

Lorie: A story that combines the two of them is when my childhood friend and I were visiting after I had decided to go on the path of chaplaincy. I did that later in life. I said, "Oh, yeah, I'm really finding myself called to chaplaincy." And she said, "Well, of course you are. You've always been like that." And I'm like, "What do you mean 'like that'?" And what she was referring to was this spiritual curiosity and how it was embodied, and just philosophically in an embodied way, I was curious.

My background is I was raised initially in the Lutheran and Presbyterian world, my mother being Lutheran, my father Presbyterian. So we'd go back and forth. And my deep memories of that were more the music and the community and just the values that were as part of the teachings from the Bible and from the community, and just some really good speaking from the minister there and how he held the community, especially one of our ministers.

And then at a young age when it was not cool to have a mother that was a yoga teacher, I did.

Katie: That was never not cool?

Lorie: No, it was so not cool.

Kirtly: Maybe among the Lutheran faith, but it was always cool in Colorado.

Lorie: Right. In Wisconsin, when my grandmother heard she was interested in yoga, the classic Scandinavian comment, "Oh. Well, that's interesting."

And so in the process of her exploration into spirituality, my mother became involved with the Guru Maharaji Group in conservative Omaha, Nebraska. That kind of leads you back to why it was not cool.

And so as a child, I found myself in this very Eastern . . . I was 10, 11, 12, and I found myself in this Eastern, very different than the Christian background that I had originally been raised in. And that Eastern tradition, it felt like home.

Even before on my own, when the teacher came to . . . This was called you gained knowledge. I went up to him on my own as an 11-year-old and said, "I would like to be part of this." That was the first step that I took in my own formation of spirituality, and nothing else has felt so at home as the Eastern traditions. They just move through my body.

And then I was a dancer, and so I think the combination of the sound and the creativity of the Eastern tradition just got into my bones. I think that's what my childhood friend was referring to, that background. We were very close, but she also recognized this difference in relating to spirituality and religion, and the mystery of it way back then.

Kirtly: I think it does start early. Maybe not 2 or 3 or 4, but I think it's unique to each person.

I guess my own exploring began when I was about that age. I was about to be confirmed in the Episcopal Church. This is a spiritual get-together where you confirm that you believe.

I don't remember exactly the age, but I said no. And luckily, I didn't say no at the ceremony. I mean, when they ask all the traditions questions, "Do you believe this and that?" I didn't say no because that would've stopped the whole show and we would've had to walk out, and it'd be so embarrassing. But when my parents said, "Well, your confirmation is next week," I said, "No, I can't do this."

I knew I'd been exploring. And what I began to explore became more clear to me in the next couple years. So it started at a young age, and it's hard to find the words.

Katie, you had an upbringing that had a lot of expectations. What happened to you?

Katie: It happened later. And I don't know if I thought of myself as exploring. We've talked about this a little bit more in the intellectual domain, but I started out in the spiritual tradition that I was raised in.

Again, just the anthropology side of me, I think through most of human history, you wouldn't encounter the Eastern religions that Lorie did. You'd be in the same spiritual space where your family and your community were. And that's part of why traditions are so strong, right? You do them over and over again and they just become more and more recursive over time.

So one, I'm really grateful that I live in a time when I have so much other information available, and I like that I've had the freedom to explore all kinds of different ways of being spiritual. It's sort of like a smorgasbord out there, really. So much to choose from.

Kirtly: A menu.

Katie: But I'm curious with Chaplain Lorie, did you have to let go of your Lutheran and Presbyterian background, or do you retain some of that background and add on the Eastern, or is it a one or the other?

Kirtly: Is hot dish still a really important part of your life?

Lorie: Your thing about saying no, every time I've gone to India . . . So I started going to India when I was pretty young, and every time I've gone even since then, I've had a pretty major life change that has occurred.

I would say the first one happened the first time I went to India, and it had to do with going from the Midwest. Wisconsin/Nebraska was kind of my bubble of major experience.

So we were living with a family in India and I saw how their faith was embodied within their culture and how it showed up in their daily prayers and the roles that they took as a family system. And even just that kind of mind-blowing experience of going from the Midwest to India, it was my very first time out of the country. When I came back, I felt alive with just a whole different way of living and a way of engaging with spirit, but I didn't have that language at that time.

And I brought some of that enthusiasm back into . . . At the time, we had been a long time at the Presbyterian Church. And the response I got from that was, "Oh, you're so lost. They don't know Christ, and so that's not Christianity." There was just something inside of me that split. And in that split, I just knew that didn't sit. It was not the inclusive love and the inclusive lived experience . . . again, I wouldn't have had that language for it then . . . that felt right in my bones.

I still maintained the choir and I still maintained it, but I just had this other influence. And my mother by this time had opened a yoga school. And so the Eastern tradition was very much so woven into my way of seeing the world. Not just from the India perspective, but she taught classical yoga.

And so the classical was the very core values, which were so Christian-oriented too. Devotion bhakti, you have a devotion to something that had this pureness to it that you studied, just like you do in Christianity. You study the Bible, but you were studying different things, and you were studying humanity. That was part of what we were taught, what I learned.

And the music of it, listening to our bodies, and the way of karma. How we engage in society is important, and how we do that was such a key part of yoga and part of what I connected to within the previous entry into Eastern tradition with [inaudible 00:13:00]. That made sense in my soul.

Kirtly: Well, back to my confirmation story, I became a confirmed biologist at age 13, and it shaped my wonder of the world and my sense of unity with the universe. But I didn't have the words that I needed to think about how I felt. And I kept searching for a tradition that would give me the words. I'd say I'm still searching.

Lorie, sometimes spiritual searching takes a long time and a deep dive, and sometimes it's reaching for a lifesaver at a time of crisis. And you see people in the hospitalization with an illness or death who may be having a crisis leading them to do a dive. How do you help people guide when they're doing that kind of crisis exploration?

Lorie: The core of how I accompany people when they are in time of crisis is that I'm coming in with a non-judgmental accompanying presence. And it is meeting them where they are, listening deep, listening to what's not being spoken, and seeing from the lens of spirit.

There are enough people looking at your blood pressure, enough people looking at the state of your cardiac heart. I am listening with all of my senses and seeing with all of my senses what is stirring in the spirit aspect of it, what is giving meaning and purpose, where religion may or may not be a support, where it may or may not be a place where there is a conflict, because what they're experiencing is not in line, whether it be mentally or emotionally, with maybe their understanding of their belief system.

And so it's the ability to come alongside and meet them where they are and be able to go into the depths of both their suffering and their personal experience.

Katie: That seems like such a great skill that you've got where you're bringing what we may think of here in the US as traditional religious backgrounds, and then these other ways of viewing the world. That probably gives you a lot broader vocabulary and a lot broader openness to people's beliefs and ability to be present in that way. I am really impressed how you're thinking about that.

Kirtly: Yeah, when my mother was dying and was on hospice, she got a hospice chaplain, which was very different from the chaplain that was in the nursing home who was very traditional Lutheran Christian. The hospice chaplain was a Native American shaman by his tradition, but he just sat there and as a presence allowed her to feel and say what she wanted, and his presence allowed her to do her spiritual exploring. So there is sometimes a presence.

I have a very good friend who had a very terrible bicycle accident that left him spinal cord injured at a very high level. He was in the hospital at the University Hospital, and he had been a practicing Buddhist for a while and he asked for one of the monks to come visit. This man came in dressed in saffron robes, and the whole temperature of the room both warmed up but cooled off. It warmed up, but all of the stress and strains and anger and fury and pain went away just by his presence.

Lorie: Meditation practice.

Kirtly: I guess.

Lorie: It is such the core of it. It's being present.

Katie: I was thinking about for myself . . . and I know this happens a lot for people locally, that you grow up in one faith tradition and then something causes you to turn away from it and you're kind of left in the space where something's missing, but not knowing how to find the next thing.

What guidance do you have for someone who has sort of fallen away from a faith tradition of their childhood and is now beginning to explore what else is out there?

Lorie: Even when we leave a tradition of origin, there are the core values that still are in our system. Exploring what's missing is first actually finding some way to . . . "make peace" isn't quite the right word, but acknowledge the parts of the tradition you've been part of that are still important to you, and then also being curious.

Kind of going back to what we said earlier, it is sometimes in states of crisis that people . . . there's a wrestling or a coming into their faith tradition.

There's a saying that our relationship with our mortality is at the essence of our spirituality. When someone is in a state of crisis, and it could be a big crisis or a little crisis, there's a default. Just like in trauma we have a default trauma response, there's a default in our spirit response, I believe.

So often there will be people that have not been part of their faith tradition, but they're seeing that piece missing, and so they do reach out. And in the hospital setting, they reach out for hopefully being able to get connected with the chaplain. Sometimes it is getting the ritual because of the familiarity of it.

And so knowing what does speak to you, and then having the openness to go and explore different things. Now there are so many different ways to do that, and finding what it is that stirs you and your light to be able to shine instead of be cloistered.

Some of my favorite stories are when people have had . . . Not that having a near-death experience is a funny story, but they will have a near-death experience, and then they want to see a chaplain. They'll be either agnostic or atheist or . . . We'd stopped in to see them before and they've never . . . "No, I don't need any help with that."

But then they have a near-death experience and they have all these questions because of things that have occurred in that near-death experience. And to come alongside and just the ability to honor what's coming up in the moment, and also to be able to honor what is being asked for.

And it doesn't need to take a crisis to do that. When you're raising children, those questions come up, so being able in that same situation to be curious about that.

Kirtly: Well, I was thinking back a little bit when I was in the operating room. I was not operating, but I was there as support for a medical student because the person who was on the table was in mortal danger, and their family knew that this woman was in mortal danger and they asked for an LDS blessing, and you need two.

So these two people came in and they had to be masked and gowned. They came in, and again, much as when the Buddhist priest came in, the whole room filled with people with all different faiths just calmed while these two men gave this person, who was in an anesthetic state that will not know, a blessing. And we all felt blessed by the presence of the hopes that these two men offered. So it was something deep in this faith that brought everybody in the room together.

I don't necessarily follow all the tenets of any particular faith, but the fact that these two men came and gave a blessing of hope, it was really something and everybody felt it.

Lorie: It's a pause.

Kirtly: Yeah.

Lorie: In the midst of chaos, to actually have a pause, to drop into something beyond the cognitive. And ritual does that, this invitation into sacred ground. Whether it be in the robes, whether it be in the offering of a blessing, there's this ability to shift the purpose of being there from about numbers to about humanity as a whole person.

Katie: Yeah, I really connect with that. I don't attend any particular worship service, but I miss singing hymns, the ritual of being in a room and singing together. I sometimes get that need met from going to a concert where everybody's singing along. But yeah, all those rituals matter a lot.

Lorie: I had an interesting experience about this aspect of singing and the familiarity of the songs. It was a family system that had experience within the same tradition, but had fractures within the family about it. And the patient that was dying . . . they were all in the room and the LDS branch came in to offer sacrament. And so it shifted what was happening.

Sacrament came around the room and everyone participated, but there was still a little resistance. Where it shifted completely is the branch members said, "Well, we usually just speak the hymn." And I suggested, "How about you sing it?" Everyone in the room, slowly, little nods. "Yes, we agree." And so then they let them choose what hymn it was. The beauty of the phone is then everybody was able to pull it up on the phone.

The singing started slow, and there was not total buy-in yet. And then I just kind of saddled over to someone's phone and started adding voice into it. That was a part of the chaplain part of it, accompanying them where they were and bringing the voice.

We did all of the verses, and by the time we were done, the sound had changed in the room. There was such fullness in their singing. And it was the first time the whole room was in tears too.

So the unification of the vibration of the music was having a healing power that we couldn't do with our thinking mind. It took the ritual and the familiarity to hold that space.

Katie: That is beautiful.

Kirtly: Well, I'm very grateful to Katie and to Chaplain Lorie for helping me think . . . or maybe I overthink. We've talked a little bit about metacognition, the way we think about thinking, and maybe we do our best spiritual exploring when we're not doing that much thinking.

But we hope that this helps you think, or not think, and feel about your own exploring, and to go deeper into the spiritual tradition in which you were raised or help you think about your current journey. And maybe this will help you start a conversation with a friend or family or someone you love. It is a worthy journey.

Before I end with the little haiku on the spiritual domain of exploring, we are so glad that you would listen in. And if this series has sparked an interest, explore our other domains. You can find our podcasts on the 7 Domain of Exploring or the other topics on the "7 Domains," you can get them at womens7.com.

So I've been doing these little haikus since we started the longer format several years ago. My sister says they're hokey, but that made me smile. They're just a little verbal exercise that pulls an idea together, and that is good enough for me. I encourage you all to try a little one of your own on your spiritual exploring. So here it is.

Katie: Before you get to the haiku, they're a tradition, and . . .

Kirtly: They're a tradition.

Katie: . . . I think that ties in nicely to what we've been talking about, is the importance of that tradition.

Kirtly: Oh, thank you. So here it is.

So why am I here?
A force that unites us all
is worthy exploring.

Thank you all for joining.