Walking with Turtles: Mindfulness Stories For The Spiritual Journey

The usual concept of ‘spiritual growth’ presupposes a forward movement – from where you are to a more desirable state or goal called enlightenment, God or whatever.

The sage in the book will turn your ideas of the spiritual life upside down. He insists that on the spiritual path there is nothing to practice, only something to understand. Indeed, he maintains that there is no such thing as a spiritual path. If a spiritual way has to organise itself into a system or requires practices for its fulfilment, it is no longer the way of freedom.

The way of the Divine is a pathless one. If you listen to the sage, we go beyond the mind, beyond mindfulness, beyond dogma and rituals, beyond all the means and paths that are offered to us but are not our own, and walk a path that no one else has walked.

So this whole spiritual life and practice is all an immense cosmic joke on us when we realise that, after all our travelling, we come back home to ourselves and find within what we searched without. It is then that we wake up to the tragic comedy of all our efforts and the irony of all our practices, prayers and penances.