I once asked a bird, ‘How is it that you fly in this gravity of darkness?’ She responded, ‘Love lifts me.’ Hafez
Recently, I was offered the most beautiful gift. Rev. Barbara Landry, Tree of Life Seminary Class of 2011, asked if I’d like to speak about my newly released memoir, Dancing on the Moon: The Non-Ordinary Life I Never Saw Coming, A Spiritual Memoir, on her podcast, “The Truth So Help Me Good.” As I listened to the recording, it occurred to me that for all I’ve written in books, blogs, articles, or spoken in classes, workshops and presentations, this is the first time I’ve talked about the seminal events in my personal story which would shape the trajectory of my life and become inextricably interwoven with my spiritual journey.
While I first mentioned a part of the early events in my July 2018 blog, The Monomyth: The Heroine’s Journey, and again recently in my June 2024 post, A Memoir Journey, I write the full depth of it in the introduction to my memoir, When the Katydid’s Went Silent, and have given it my voice here on Rev. Barbara’s podcast for the first time.
Listing to the recording, it occurred to me how many times I’ve wanted to know the personal story of my spiritual teachers. While so many have gifted me in immeasurable ways, it feels important for those of us offering ourselves as spiritual teachers and guides to also be as transparent as possible, in appropriate ways, with those we serve. To not be so can run the risk of fostering a sense of spiritual superiority or separateness.
I believe we, as spiritual teachers and leaders in the Aquarian Age, are called not to sit apart and above in the old patriarchal paradigm but, rather, with and among. Having walked the spiritual path, we’re able to be transparent, speak authentically, and offer up our own life experience as just one illustration as to how, in the end, the personal and divine journeys are one and the same. And in the telling, we are all lifted from the darkness of separation into the light of connection and unity where we find one another and know ourselves to be, at once, unique and the same.
Here is a taste of my story.
Stephanie Rutt 