A spiritual journey is a strange adventure. Well, at least mine is. You come to these amazing insights and promptly forget them again. And then they come back to you, sometimes years later, and you wonder why you failed to realise their importance the last time around.

At other times, you come across ideas in books that you reject out of hand, because they don't fit your world view. And then something shifts and all of a sudden that very thing you rejected turns out to be what you were looking for after all.

One of those things is disidentification. I have come across it many times. The Course in Miracles is one of those places. I always rejected the whole concept of the Course because it starts with affirmations like "This chair does not mean anything. This hand does not mean anything. This foot does not mean anything." I rebelled against this because it seemed to deny the essence of what my pagan spirituality is all about: seeing the deep meaning and the life of Spirit in everything, and being alive and aware in my body. But then I saw it explained in a different way, at a time when I was ready to hear it, and now suddenly it all makes sense.

As I continued to develop my sense of sanctuary in the last month, I have discovered this place of peace inside myself. And at the same time I was re-reading one of my favourite spiritual books: Sandra Ingerman's Medicine for the Earth. The book is all about becoming aware of our connection to Divine Spirit, and embodying it the world. One way of doing this is by disidentification. You look at what you experience around you, in your mind, in your body, and realise that you have these experiences, but the experiences are not you.

Sandra describes an exercise of looking around you and then asking the question: "Who sees? Who is aware?" She then asks you to do the same with things you hear and things you visualise. Even doing this first part shifts my perspective of who I am. The exercise then moves on to sensations in the body, feelings, and thoughts. "Who feels? Who is aware?"

I'm not sure why this simple exercise was such a revelation to me. Surely, it should be obvious that I am not that ache in my back, or the tension in my jaws, and that I am not my anxious thoughts. But somehow, over time, I seem to have forgotten that. I identified with all of that, with the heaviness of life in a body, life as a human being. And now suddenly I realise that the "I" who is me is unchanging, an eternal fragment of Spirit. I have a body, and a very busy mind, but none of that is my true identity, my true home. The unchanging part of me that touches Spirit is a place where I can find peace. The only place where peace is to be found in a world that always changes.

The place of peace inside myself that I found through my practice is the essence of me. I am so grateful to have made this discovery. Of course, I have known this for a long time, but I have never experienced it so clearly.

The next step on the journey strikes me as a bit of a contradiction, though. If I want to carry that peace out of my spiritual practice and into my life, I'll need to practice staying in that place of peace and making it my identity. But at the same time, I need to stay awake and aware in my body. Because those physical experiences have much to teach me. In fact, the practice of sitting and listening to the world would have no meaning without them. Somewhere, I need to find a way to balance this. When I've found it, I'll be sure to let you know!