…to Need a Spiritual Practice Preparedness Plan

Everyone thinks that preparedness is for people who have clients. It is for people who work with others in their spiritual practice, and it is also for those who don’t work with others.

Maybe you don’t have a business. Maybe you don’t teach. Maybe nobody pays you for what you do. You still have a practice.

You have an altar. You presumably live on land. You engage Nature in some way, by tending animals, plants, trees, elements, water… You engage your Ancestors. You have a devotional practice through which you engage your spirit family and receive fortification from that devotion. You have maintained a grimoire or journal of your spiritual growth. You have ritual objects. You engage a spiritual community.

To be blunt, most of us aren’t surrounded by like-minded others who even know what our path is, let alone respect it. In your own relational circumstances, who do you trust to know impeccably what to do with each facet of your spiritual practice in your absence? Even more so, do you have more than one person you can trust to honor diverse facets of your spiritual practice, so that it doesn’t fall all to one person?

We tend these relationships because they matter to us. Preparedness asks us to extend that tending into the times when we cannot be the one doing it.

Things to plan around:

• Who needs to know what about your path?
• What needs to be tended in your absence?
• What can be entrusted, released, returned, or allowed to end?
• Who should not be involved in your preparedness?

That last one is a doozy. These aren’t questions reserved only for the end of life. They are questions about how seriously we take the relationships that have shaped our spiritual lives. And they are the questions at the heart of No Loose Ends – The Practice After You.