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70 CONVERSATION

the suburbs or in the country, she lived in an inner-city area of Nottingham. She was a single mother with two smali children. As we spoke, it became elear that life had been tough for ber and her personal history included suffering violence from a former partner. Spirituality played a pivota! role in helping her to cope with the special demands of her everyday life.

Stephanies spirituality falls into the category of New Age think-ing. She was unusually outspoken about her beliefs, whilst being well aware that for many people they were off the wali’. As she said of her presence in the focus group:

I was sitting there quite a lot of the tiine and thinking,‘I dont think l’m what they expected really’, do you know what I mean? ... 1 felt like, you know, a bit of a loose cannon in a way ... Like a bit odd, compared to everyone else.

During the conversation Stephanie spoke unselfconsciously of her belief in reincarnation, the power of meditation and the ‘Universal    §

Consciousness’ that binds everything together. Yet Stephanies    3

spirituality is not sinrply esoteric; it is a serious business for her. This    |

was elear from the way she spoke in the focus group, uninhibitedly    1

and without the slight feeling of embarrassment felt by several other    |

members of the group. Stephanies spirituality in sonie respects was    i

like Tonis in that it was a ‘spirituality of practice’:⁹ she makes time to    li

meditate, read books and connect with the universe. But, compared    |

with Tom, she had an air of intensity, and her commitment pervaded    1

the whole of life. So this is quite a different spirituality from, say,    |

Nicolas. Instead of being a handy life-insurance policy or backdrop    |

to life, it is centre stage, informing her daily living.    3

Spiritual awareness had been part of Stephanie’s life sines child- I hood. She described her youthful musings over what it ineans to be 1 h uman:    j

I’ve always been very aware of my own mortality, even when I I was a little girl. You know, when you look in the niirror, and you see yourself, and you don’t really pay any attention to it on a    |

day-to-day basis. But I would stand, I’d look in the inirror and    j

Pd be kind of, ‘that’s me in there’. Do you know what 1 mean? I    j

was very aware of self, and the fact that, I don’t know, but    t

bodies seemed a bit inadequate in a way for everything that was

inside. And I used to stand there, and I’d look at my eyes and like, trying to see what was inside.

But Stephanie is aware that our culture tends to disparage these kinds of thoughts.

But then you are taught things at home, and at school, which take you away from that, which is a sad thing. And I kind of, I let it go I think for years. I was always still very aware of that, looking in the mirror and things like that but, like I say, youre taken away from it.

Stephanie had decided about three years before this conversation that she wanted to renew the spiritual inquisitiveness that she had experienced as a child looking in her mirror. She had not gone to the traditional religious institutions in her search because she found them too narrow and too obsessed with pain and suffering. Stephanie knew only too well what pain is, and indeed:

You should feel it sometimes, because I believe like, you know, with pain, there’s no way around it. You cant go over, you cant go under it, you cant nip [out], there isnt a side door, you’ve got to go right the way through it, feel it, and then you get to the other side ...

But she went on to say:    •'

The sad thing about religion is like, you know, they say the easy path isnt the path to spiritual enlightenment or whatever. And you have to walk down this road with thorns and things like that. I don’t believe that is necessarily the case. I believe the patii to spiritual enlightenment can be beautiful.

She was in effect criticising the church for claiming (as she saw it) that true spirituality is only about pain and suffering. Her image of the church was of a long linę of people following the leader, the priest, on a narrow path towards the gates of heaven. Stephanies own view of the spiritual journey is one where people join hands together rather than being in crocodile file:

This path that we go on, I dont believe that each path is a separate thing. I think there are points in the way where each path will meet, and you have a choice to say, ‘Oh actually TH