What Keeps Us On The Ground
What Keeps Us on the Ground
A reflection for CSL Nashville, October 2026
In the turbulent world we live in, it can feel as if our souls have forgotten how to fly.
Ernest Holmes was insistent in The Science of Mind that this teaching was never meant to lift us out of life, but to lift life itself. The indwelling Spirit, the Source, the All that is all: these are not exits. They are elevations. We rise through the world, not away from it.
So, if flight isn't escape, what is it?
Flight is what happens when identity stops being negotiated by circumstance. It is the moment we return to our inner knowing and remember that our true nature was never grounded at all. We simply forgot we had wings. Meister Eckhart spoke of our soul as untouched, already one with Source. The soul doesn't need to earn its lift. It only needs our human self to stop believing that gravity is the end of the story.
What keeps us grounded?
Fear disguised as caution. Fear is very convincing. It urges us to stay quiet and play small. It warns us that the heights we dream of have never been tested, and that it is safer to stay put than to venture out. Comfort zones are comfortable, but they also hold us in place. John A. Shedd wrote, "A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." We are built for flight. Our souls long to soar.
Old identities we have outgrown. We carry them anyway. When we outgrow an identity but never release it, it clings to us and grows heavier with time: the persona that got us through a hard childhood, a difficult marriage, a season of survival. These identities were not lies. They were wings suited to a different sky. We are ready for something new; something more.
The myth of separation. Like a tune we can't get out of our heads, it keeps us on the ground, wishing for the sky. Habitual thoughts of lack and limitation undercut our faith and optimism, clip our wings, and blind us to the expansive horizon. We pray for change, and yet our fear of change paralyzes us.
Practicing Lift
Flight, like most spiritual realities, is less an event than a practice. Here are a few ways to begin:
Notice the weight before you try to fly. You cannot release what you refuse to name. Ask honestly: What am I carrying today that is not actually mine to carry?
Let go before you're certain what's next. Every bird trusts the air before it can see where the air will take it. Certainty is a ground-bound demand. Flight requires a different kind of trust, the one Eckhart called Gelassenheit: releasement, letting-be.
Rise in relationship, not in isolation. Check who you are lifting as you rise. If your ascent leaves love behind, it isn't yet spiritual flight. It's just personal advantage wearing wings.
Return to earth on purpose. Birds don't stay aloft forever. They come back down to nest, to feed, to tend the ground that made the flight possible in the first place. Our task is not to escape embodiment, but to bring the view from above back into how we live, and to share it.
The Invitation
The question is not can we fly, because we already can. The question for our spiritual practice is: What are we clinging to that keeps us from lifting off? Name it. Not to shame it, but to see it clearly enough to finally set it down.
The sky was never the hard part. It is learning what we no longer need to carry.