This Week’s Quotation:
We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.
~ Saint Hildegard of Bingen, 12th century Benedictine Abbess, artist, composer, polymath
Sovereignty
Soul Care Facilitator
Saint Hildegard knew the preciousness of our primal spirituality and the necessity of relying on it as we live our lives. We are co-creators with the Divine, which means that we are each designed to directly experience the world and interact with it. We are born into this world equipped with our own innate primal spirituality, our way of knowing and experiencing life before the overlays of culture and societal programming that we tend to operate from.
Her words are a call to reclaim and value our own sensing and knowing capacities instead of relying solely on others to tell us what our experience should be—most contemporary western cultures value experts and authority figures. In and of itself, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Experts and authority figures can often inspire us and offer perspectives we have not yet considered. Where things go awry is that we are usually enculturated to value those opinions and perspectives above our own. We tend to live a life that is given meaning by others rather than trusting our innate knowing and living from there.
Saint Hildegard is calling us to embrace our sovereignty as individuated expressions of the Divine, to trust our powers of sensing and knowing, and to move in the world with assurance. We each have an innate right to our own knowingness through our first-hand experiences. We are vessels through which the Divine works in the world. Sovereignty is knowing this in our consciousness and embodying it in our day to day lives.
Mindful Explorations
Do you recognize the spark of the Divine that you are? In what ways can that recognition transform into deep knowing? Where do you need more courage in your life to use your own voice? What are some ways you can hone your listening skills to be more receptive to the voice of the Divine? Do you trust your ability to listen to the voice of the Divine?
