The value of having a spiritual practice or two

      

      I’m currently in the middle of a six month house sit for a friend of mine. For years I’ve lived without cable TV and done the streaming thing. The house I’m taking care of has Direct TV. For a couple months I watched a lot of TV because it was there and got a good reminder of just how addictive that form of space out and shut down can be.

    For the past month or so I’ve been turning the TV off by 7pm or not turning it on at all and writing or reading instead. The difference in how I feel reminded me again how important regular spiritual practice is.

    I have friends who meditate, do yoga, teach yoga, dance and practice mindfulness. Spiritual practice comes in a myriad of forms but the aim of all these practices is very similar. Spiritual practices connect us to our inner world and to Self. That’s big self, not the little personality self. Ultimately spiritual practice is about authenticity. It’s about learning to come from a more inward centered place in our daily lives.

     For me that’s about walking my talk. When I’m in authenticity I am congruent with myself. How I feel, what I say and what I do match. When I’m not congruent I can feel “no” or “maybe”, say “yes” and then procrastinate because I don’t really want to show up for what I said I’d do. I don’t like how I feel in my own skin when I find myself doing that.

    Authenticity is a process. Being completely congruent with me all the time is an ideal. I’m a work in progress. I don’t hit it all the time. I may never be able to do that but staying in the process of getting there is important to me. Having regular spiritual practices is a vital part of that journey to authenticity.

     Finding a spiritual practice that fits for you can be a bit like a treasure hunt. In my early twenties I learned a couple different forms of meditation. I learned, not because I was really drawn to meditation but because I had friends who meditated. It seemed to work for them so I decided I should go learn to meditate.

     After learning a couple different forms of meditation I learned something infinitely more important….meditation doesn’t work for me as a practice. I dreaded doing it. I came up with all kinds of excuses for not doing it. When I did meditate I spent most of my time wondering if I was doing it right. Nothing about meditation resonated with me deeply enough to push through those internal obstacles. (I had a similar experience with yoga. Just not my thing.)

     My experience with mediation gave me some vital info about my assumptions around spiritual practice and about what I needed in a practice. I’d looked at a spiritual practice as some defined thing that had a name, a lineage and could be given to me by someone else. While there are spiritual practices that fit that definition, a lot of them don’t.

     Spiritual practices that are heavily structured and rule based don’t work for me. I’m not oriented that way as a person. For me sitting cross legged every day for 20 minutes at 7am with my hands in a specific position facilitated rebellion and monkey mind, not connection.  I needed to find practices that were more open and fluid. For some people the structure provides a framework for connection. I’m just not wired that way.

   The most important thing I learned from my mediation experiment was that I needed to find something that resonated with me rather than trying to fit myself into a practice that worked for others. While that may seem obvious, looking for someone to teach me to meditate was looking outside myself for a practice rather than going in first to see when I felt connected. I began paying attention to when I felt the most connected, present in the moment and at home in my skin.

         I felt that when I drew, wrote or took a walk outside in nature. So those things became my first spiritual practices. That led me to discovering other places where I felt connected. I also checked out a whole lot of things that I was curious about or felt drawn to. Some fit, some didn’t. Some fit for a while and then didn’t so I moved on to something else.

     I’m pretty eclectic and so are my spiritual practices. When I engage in a practice, I want to do it consciously so having a number of them to choose from works for me. If I try to repeat the same thing every day, it’s easy to slip into functioning on autopilot. I pay attention better when I mix things up. Having multiple practices also lets me go with what feels right in the moment. Some days it’s 5 Rhythms dancing and a gratitude list. Other days I might draw and go to a sweat lodge.

      When I’m really present in a spiritual practice, I step away from the mundane bits of daily life. I leave the “do” list, email, phone and give the practice all my attention. Over time, as I continue to engage in connection to the deeper parts of me and the interrelationship between me and the Universe, that connection grows stronger. It's easier to come back to that centered place in daily life, even when the proverbial crap hits the fan.  When I do get knocked off center, I know how to return to that place.

     In addition to those benefits, the allopathic medical community has begun to recognize the physical health benefits of spiritual practice. An article on spirituality from the University of Maryland Medical Center states:

      Spiritual practices tend to improve coping skills and social support, foster feelings of optimism and hope, promote healthy behavior, reduce feelings of depression and anxiety, and encourage a sense of relaxation. By alleviating stressful feelings and promoting healing ones, spirituality can positively influence immune, cardiovascular (heart and blood vessels), hormonal, and nervous systems.

      Stepping away from the busyness of daily life to engage in spiritual practice opened me to finding practices I can incorporate into my day-to-day routines: gratitude, saying “thank you”, mindfulness, stopping to be fully present with others rather than multi-tasking and giving them only half my attention. Bringing those practices into the day-to-day bridges the illusory gap between the secular and the sacred. That is another step toward authenticity.

Divinity in Freefall

   

       I’ve been reading Gabrielle Roth’s Maps to Ecstasy and finished the book last week. In the next to last chapter I found a sentence that stopped me in awe. “After you jump and before you land there is God.” Initially I took this as a beautiful description of a leap of faith. As I moved with the sentence this week I realized she’s talking about something bigger, freefall.

    I’m talking about the times when significant portions of your life come unglued and begin to fall apart apparently of their own accord. You didn’t consciously choose to jump off the cliff, but you’re suddenly in mid-air…like the old Warner Brothers cartoons where Bugs Bunny runs off the cliff and his feet scrabble furiously in the air.

    We’ve all experienced falling physically numerous times. But for most of us the distance between the fall and the landing was too short to really get a sense of what freefall feels like. Skydivers know that feeling. Although I haven’t yet been skydiving, I did once jump off the top of Rooftop Quarry outside Bloomington, Indiana.

   I was eighteen and had just moved to Bloomington to attend Indiana University. A few friends took me out to Rooftop to swim. Between swimming and hanging out on the rocks with my friends I watched lone swimmers climb to the top of the cliff and jump off, counting the seconds it took them to plummet into the water. As they emerged from the water their yelps of exhilaration were matched by cheers from groups of swimmers on the rocks.

     I wanted to jump; wanted to know what falling for that long felt like. It took me a few hours to work up the courage to make the climb. Once at the top of the cliff I wasn’t sure I could jump. The sixty-five foot distance between the cliff and water seemed much bigger than it had when I was on the ground. After a few minutes of standing at edge with my heart crashing in my chest, I ran off the edge.

    Thirty years later I still count that freefall as one of the peak experiences in my life. I fell six and a half stories, terrified and euphoric at the sensation of untethered freedom. It was amazing!

     Whether the plunge comes from taking a leap of faith, cliff jumping into a quarry or finding yourself in a dive because your life is falling apart that freefall space is the magical territory of the Divine. Freefall is an exquisite and ferocious confluence of destruction and creation. This is the duende of holding life in one hand, death in the other and dancing across the tension between them. What comes out of this freefall is completely up to us.

    Fear of falling is a natural human fear. Most of us have it. Our immediate response to a physical fall is to do something to stop or break the fall. We usually react the same way to metaphoric falls. When a significant part or parts of our lives begin to unravel we usually scramble like Bugs Bunny. We run around desperately trying to prevent further collapse and get what’s already fallen apart back in place without questioning whether or not that’s really possible.

    Those desperate moments are born of surrendering to the fear of dissolution and possible loss. As soon as we begin to scramble, we take ourselves out of being present with the freefall. Yes freefall is terrifying, but as I learned when I jumped off the top of Rooftop Quarry, it’s also a lot of other things. Freefall is freeing, open, exhilarating, exciting and ripe with possibility. All it takes is a breath to pause and chose to surrender to something other than the fear. Simple, but not easy.

    That doesn’t make freefall any less scary. The deeper choice is really about what we decide to feed with our attention: the fear or the possibilities. This is where divinity enters. Being untethered, internally and externally, from the boundaries we’ve set up for our lives creates an enormous open space. In that space could be anything. It’s ours to fill.

     The divinity comes not so much from some external force appearing with a net for us to fall into but from what we allow to arise in us. When we’re pushed beyond the edges of who we believe we are, we have the opportunity to find out who we really are. Those chances to meet the divine spark within and let it resonate with something larger than ourselves are pure magic.

    Divinity calls to divinity. When we’re able to stop scrambling and go with the falling apart, we invite in synchronicity, grace and creation. Yes there is grief, anger and loss but freefall is big enough to hold both destruction and creation. Flying is just falling up.

Going with the flow...

     In keeping with practicing gentleness with me, this is a very short blog post. There’s been a lot of unexpected and random this week. I realized early in the week that getting a blog post up on Thursday would mean writing it either late at night or super early in the morning. A few weeks ago I would’ve pushed and done it anyway. I often find the healing response in a situation is to do the opposite of what I’d normally do. So after some internal debate I decided to be gentle with me and put up “I’ll be back next week” post. My plan was to do that yesterday….but the Universe had other ideas.

    Despite Taos being a tourist destination, it’s small and fairly remote mountain town. We have one main line that connects us via cell service, internet and wifi with the larger world. Yesterday the line got cut, for the 3^rd time and we had mini black out day. No cell service, no internet.

    So after all that debate about being gentle with me, even if I’d had a longer blog post ready I couldn’t have put it up. Ha!   

Befriending wild cats and other disowned things (pt. 1)

     

Henry

     Since last December I’ve been working a couple days a week at Stray Hearts, the local Taos animal shelter. I work with the cats. Part of my job includes socialization, helping cats who’ve had either negative interactions with human or little exposure to them get used to people. This is a long, slow process that’s a good exercise in patience. It’s more about befriending than taming.

     From befriending these unsocialized cats I’m learning a new way to befriend the unsocialized parts of me. We all have ostracized and disowned parts of ourselves. Those parts can be strengths, longings, fears or other emotions. The common denominator is that each of these parts holds a wounding of some kind.

     None of us woke up one morning and randomly decided to disown some aspect of who we are. That choice is mostly unconscious although it is intertwined with how we relate to the difficult parts of life. If we’re in the habit of staying in our comfort zones and avoiding or ignoring the hard stuff, that pattern can make it easier to automatically disown the hard parts of ourselves. We tend to disown things that feel too big to deal with and/or threaten our safety in some way.

    When we ostracize part of ourselves, we cage it, shove it onto our shadow and hope we don’t have to see it again. That works about as well as thinking my left big toe is going to disappear if I ignore it.

    Those things we cage don’t stay confined. They erupt in behavior we often feel ashamed or embarrassed about later. They slip in to sabotage our intentions and derail our longings when they brush the edges of what we’ve disowned. In our journey of becoming our wholeness depends on being all in with ourselves. That means befriending what we’ve rejected in us.

    That starts with the magic moment when a disowned bit surfaces and we’re able to see it rather than unconsciously shoving it back into the dark corners of us. At that point we have a choice: engage and integrate or push it away. If we chose to engage, how do we do that? How do we befriend those ostracized parts of ourselves?

     For the past couple months I’ve been working with Henry. He’s a big stripey, green eyed guy. When he first came to the shelter, even walking past his cage scared him. He’d shrink back as far into the cage as he could get. His eyes got huge. His pupils dilated. He bristled with the readiness to either get out of the way or attack to protect himself.

     Henry being fed and safe in the shelter didn’t predispose him to being friends with those of us who work with him. Likewise, just because I’m aware of a part of me that I’ve disowned doesn’t mean that part wants to have anything to do with the rest of me. I’m the one who pushed it away over and over. It has no reason to trust me.

    Befriending Henry began with talking to him. I’d grab a stool, go sit next to his cage and just talk to him. I kept my voice low and gentle. I told him how handsome he was and how much I loved his green eyes. Sometimes I just told him about my day. For a couple weeks Henry shrunk back in his cage, staring at me with saucer eyes while I talked to him.

    Slowly he began to relax as I kept talking. His pupils returned to normal size. He stretched out a bit, laid down and even half closed his eyes. Then I began talking to him with the cage door open. His immediate response was to default to shrinking away in alarm. After a couple weeks of that Henry began to relax. Then I opened his cage, put my hand in and talked to him….and we repeated the same process. Henry got alarmed. I was gently persistent. Henry got used to my hand. I began offering treats and resting my hand a couple inches away from Henry. He got alarmed. I was patient and moved slowly. After some time Henry began eating treats out of my hand.

    During this process with Henry I attended a 5 Rhythms workshop. In the workshop a disowned part of me surfaced. I kinds knew it was there but hadn’t really seen it. The next time I worked with Henry I had an “ah-hah” moment where I saw how he would’ve reacted if I’d come at him the way I often go after disowned parts of me once I discover them.

    Once I get past the “oh shit” reaction to discovering some piece of me I’ve ostracized I’m usually pretty pushy. I want to dig that part up, chase it down and integrate it right now. While that does work, it amounts to a cross between stalking and a full frontal assault. If I’d approached Henry like that by say reaching in his cage and scooping him up…yikes! I’d have terrified Henry. I’d end up losing some skin. Henry might still be shrinking in his cage whenever someone walked by.

    With Henry I knew I needed to be gentle and move slowly. When I’m dealing with myself I’m not so good at slow and gentle. Time for a new strategy. What happens if I treat the disowned parts of me like I treat Henry?