Sloww Sunday 212: Art of Inwardness, Living the Questions, Purpose of Poetry

Sloww Sunday Newsletter 212 (Mar 2, 2025) — Art of Inwardness, Living the Questions, Purpose of Poetry, & More

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New to Sloww? Here’s what it’s about in a nutshell (which mirrors the newsletter sections below):

🌀 Vertical Development & Polarity Thinking

I thoroughly enjoyed this podcast with Beena Sharma, master of polarity thinking and leader of the Vertical Development Academy (VeDA):

“One of the definitions of maturity is you come closer and closer to what is, and not what you think it is.”

“Even when we imagine that there are some people who are not growing or who are stuck, we don’t know the ways in which they are shifting—we don’t know the invisible forces that may reveal growth and development.”

“The central polarity in my life that I’m working with now is: I am doing, and I am being done. Things are happening through me. If I just think back to all the things that I think I did, it actually just happened and I attached myself to the fact that I did it. It’s opening up something in me of just trusting more of what is happening and what will happen—and of course attempt to do as wisely as possible but never to forget also that I am being done.”

0️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)

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🤔 Living the Questions

Nice reminders in this podcast from Krista Tippett, founder of On Being, about living the questions and not rushing to answers:

“I take ‘living the questions’ as a spiritual discipline. ‘What is my work to do in this world right now in this time ahead?’ You can literally assign yourself that question to live with—not to answer, but to live with. You can have it as a contemplative practice, and as a life practice, to walk around with that question through the ordinary interactions and see what directions it points you in, see what it turns you away from—and don’t rush it.”

“I’m interested in the animating questions that gave rise to the (religious/spiritual) traditions, and they are actually the ancient, enduring, human questions: What does it mean to be human? How do we want to live? … In this century, the question of what it means to be human is really inextricable from the question of who we will be to each other.”

“When to rush to an answer would be to deny the gravity of the question before us, then what we’re called to do is hold and love and inhabit that question itself and have it be our teacher and our guide … We waste so much time when we rush to fixes and answers that do not meet the complexity of what is before us … We’re pretty much living vast, aching, open questions right now. We have very, very few answers.”

1️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)

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✍️ The Purpose of Poetry

Building on the newsletter section above, here’s a great conversation between Krista Tippett and poet-philosopher David Whyte, who also happens to love living the questions:

“A beautiful question shapes a beautiful mind. So, the ability to ask beautiful questions—often in very un-beautiful moments—is one of the great disciplines of a human life. A beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it as it does by having it answered. You don’t have to do anything about it, you just have to keep asking. Before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn’t even have seen before.” — David Whyte

I ended up curating 50+ David Whyte Quotes on Poetry, Identity, Vulnerability, Regret, Honesty, Aloneness, & More. Here are some favorites specifically about poetry:

“Poetry is language against which you have no defenses … The surprise you feel in good poetry is that physical arresting—it arrests the whole body—stealing you for revelation.”

“Poetry is the verbal art form by which we can actually create silence … One of the greatest arts of poetry is actually to create silence through attentive speech—speech that says something in such a way that it appears as a third frontier between you and the world, and invites you into a deeper and more generous sense of your own identity and the identity of the world.”

“The marvelous thing about poetry is you only need to read one line. One line a day—truly read—has an enormous affect on grounding yourself in reality … It’s meeting this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you—which is where all the real stuff happens.”

2️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)

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🧘 The Art of Inwardness

Let’s keep connecting newsletter sections together with this conversation between Krista Tippett and philosopher-poet John O’Donohue, who was good friends with David Whyte:

“If you look at the educational system and you look at most of the public fora in our culture, there is very little time or attention given to what you could almost call learning the art of inwardness or a pedagogy of interiority … No one else can look out for your inner life but yourself … If you don’t look out for your inner life, nobody else can.”

“The beauty of being human is that we are incredibly, intimately near each other, we know about each other, but yet we do not know or never can know what it’s like inside another person … Behind every face, there is a secret, hidden, inner life … There are no two humans that inhabit the same world. We all inhabit the same world physically, but internally each world is completely different. No one else sees the world the way you do.”

“(In America) it often seems to me that a person believes that if they tell you their story, that that’s who they are. And sometimes these stories are constructed of the most banal, secondhand, psychological and spiritual cliché, and you look at a beautiful, interesting face telling a story that you know doesn’t hold a candle to the life that’s secretly in there … What often happens is that people reduce identity to biography … But, in actual fact, your identity is infinitely more complex, nuanced, sophisticated, and mysterious than your biography—or than anything that could ever unfold in your biography … There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. The intention of prayer and spirituality and love is, now and again, to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.”

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☯️ Dissolve into Infinity

The previous newsletter featured Swami Sarvapriyananda’s book What is Vedanta?, so we’ll continue on the same theme and highlight another one of his books Dissolve into Infinity (Summary). This one covers four verses from the fifth chapter of the Ashtavakra Gita titled ‘Four Ways to Dissolution’. The first three verses delve into the depths of nonduality, and the fourth one is the consequence of the insight gained in the first three.

If you aren’t familiar with Swami Sarvapriyananda—who I’d consider one of the best living spiritual teachers out there—here are 50+ quotes on Advaita Vedanta, Reality, Self, & more.

“The Ashtavakra Gita is the most profound thing that has ever been put into words. I have read the sacred literature of the East and the West, and there is nothing that quite compares to this text … This book speaks to something within us which goes beyond the understanding of the mind … While reading this, we must try to understand what is being said, but what is most important is recognizing, appreciating and noticing that it is the truth in our life.” — Swami Sarvapriyananda

4️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)

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From Vernon Howard:

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All the best,

Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww

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