Jeff Brown is a Canadian author, former criminal lawyer and body-centred psychotherapist, best known for Soulshaping and Grounded Spirituality. Grounded spirituality, in his sense, is a spirituality that grows from the body, the emotions, relationships and everyday life, instead of trying to rise above them; he calls it “ascending with both feet on the ground”. Therapeutic Shamanism uses his phrase for its own picture of a healthy spirituality, rooted in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer and Soul as well as reaching to the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer and Spirit.
Who is Jeff Brown? #
A Toronto writer whose path ran from the courtroom to the therapy room. He trained in law and apprenticed with the well-known Canadian criminal lawyer Eddie Greenspan, then left law. He studied Bioenergetics, including sessions with its co-founder Alexander Lowen, practised as a body-centred psychotherapist, and took a master’s degree in psychology at Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco.1
His first book, Soulshaping, part memoir, came out in 2007. It was followed by collections of short sayings, which he calls spiritual graffiti, among them Ascending with Both Feet on the Ground (2012) and Love It Forward (2014), a novel, An Uncommon Bond, and Grounded Spirituality (copyright 2018; launched in 2019). He founded the publishing house Enrealment Press and an online school, the Soulshaping Institute, and appears in the documentary Karmageddon alongside Ram Dass.2 He is known for coining playful, irreverent terms, and for a deliberately outspoken style.3
What is grounded spirituality? #
A spirituality that refuses to split the sacred from ordinary life. For Brown, spirituality is reality itself, feelings, body, relationships and all, not an escape from it. His image is of ascending with both feet on the ground, which means moving into a wider perspective from solid roots, entering reality from the ground up instead of from the sky down.4 He sets this against what he calls “self-avoidant realization”, meditation or detachment used to flee the self towards a consciousness without feeling; detachment, as he puts it, is a tool, not a life.5
Several of his themes follow from this. The ego is not an enemy to dissolve but, in his image, the Soul’s “precious worker-bee”, doing essential work in its rightful place.6 Our personal story is sacred material, not illusion: “A spirituality without story is like a body without breath.” And he links spirituality fixed on transcending our humanness to a wider power-seeking pattern, one focused on “being above rather than being among”.7 For the ungrounded, extreme wing of the New Age, principles that imprison people under the guise of liberating them, he coined the name the “New Cage” movement.8
What is forgiveness bypassing? #
Forgiving too soon, as a way of not feeling. Brown writes that true forgiveness “can only arise organically, after a genuine healing process”, and that after abuse or trauma forgiveness is not the first place to go; healing is.9 Therapeutic Shamanism takes up his term. Just as spiritual bypassing avoids unresolved emotional issues, forgiveness bypassing does the same. Instead of facing and working through the anger, grief and pain, people choose to “forgive”, which resolves nothing and is another form of denial. Healthy forgiveness is a process, not a thought-formThought-form. A human-created living being: an ideology, religion, corporation, conspiracy theory or platform that has taken on a life of its own. Genuinely alive, but soul-less in the deep sense: natural things alone are full of Soul. More about this used to avoid feelings. It emerges in an organic way from working through the issues, and if it does not emerge, that is fine too; what does the damage is faking it.10 See What is the forgiveness trap?
How does grounded spirituality relate to Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely, and Therapeutic Shamanism gives it a map. In shamanism different parts of us correspond to the different realms, and no realm is better than another. The Upper-World is not superior to the Lower-World, whatever the sky-religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this say. Overemphasising the Upper-World leads to a top-heavy, imbalanced and ungrounded spirituality. A healthy spirituality is grounded and rooted, “ascending with both feet on the ground”, in Brown’s words, just as a healthy human is one whose parts are in balance, the Lower-World part of us belonging to nature and Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this, with no part dominating another.11 See How are the realms related to Soul, Spirit and the middle-world self?
Brown’s book is psychological and autobiographical, with no shamanic cosmology in it. What Therapeutic Shamanism adds is the realms themselves, the journey to the Lower-World, and the Soul found there with the help of the Animal, Plant and Stone People. It also holds that the sky-religions’ practices have their place; the point is balance, and psychotherapy as the right set of tools for a healthy middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer. See What is spiritual bypassing and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
