Compare & Persevere

I’ve heard Jesuit Priest and Author James Martin say “compare and despair.” What I believe he means by this statement is that our thinking about how we don’t measure up to the person next to us (e.g. their job compared to my job, their body compared to my body) is a pretty sure fire way to feel lousy. I use this reminder sometimes in my work with patients as a psychotherapist because I think Father Martin is correct that many people can very easily slip down this rabbit hole.

Interestingly though, for me, comparison has never really been like that.  I am someone who is quite easily inspired by others- like, ridiculously inspired.  Put a good ESPN sports montage in front of me set to Kelly Clarkson music, and I’m in tears.  I think it’s because comparison is a strategy I use to figure out how to survive something, or less dramatically, to get through something difficult. For example, how I incorporate marathon swimmer Diana Nyad’s motto, “Find a Way.”

Diana Nyad is the woman who at age 64 swam from Cuba to Florida in 2013. “Find a Way” was the mantra she said to herself over and over during the 53 hour, 103 miles of crossing.

In an interview with CNN afterward she said during the swim she just kept repeating to herself in moments that she felt she just could not go on, "You don't like it. It's not doing well. Find a way.” She added in the interview, “We should never, ever give up.”

I have moments of wanting to give up or quit.  Not anything specific per se, more like just a general sentiment during times of adversity and feeling defeated.  Recently I was driving with my husband to a hospital to visit a family member and I said to him “I quit.” And he calmly responded, “Quit what?...” And I said, “I don’t know, but something.” It’s like I am that little blue engine in the children’s book The Little Engine That Could, but instead of saying “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.” I am saying “I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t do it anymore.” Fill in the blank for the “it” because god knows it is a movable target.

During times such as this, someone of the Hindu faith might begin to pray to Ganesh (the god in the form of the elephant) because he is the remover of obstacles. But as a non-Hindu, I just try to recall stories, like that of Diana Nyad.

I try to remind myself that Ms. Nyad did not cross The Gulf of Mexico on the first try.  She did not have a linear path toward her goal.  Her crossing in 2013 was the 5^th attempt since 1978, and the 4^th since turning 60, and in the same CNN interview she referred to these tries as “gut-wrenching setbacks.”  Even during the final swim, Ms. Nyad said she would stop swimming (but not get out of the water) and tell her coach, who was traveling alongside her in a boat, that she just could not go one mile further, and the coach would say just swim till sunrise, just till then; or the swimmer would rest in the water and sing herself lullabies to relax the emerging tension.

I find stories such as these deeply inspiring.  But also reality checks that the paths that I am walking are not straight and narrow.  These paths are filled with obstacles of all shapes and sizes, and there will be times when I just need to sit down on a bench alongside the path to rest for a while. A time to catch my breath, maybe talk to a “coach,” and have a drink of water, before I can gather my strength again to get back up and keep walking.

The photo I attached to this blog is one I took 14 years ago when I was traveling in southern India.  The balancing boulder in the center is nicknamed “Krishna’s Butterball.” I go back to this picture every so often when I need a reminder to persevere.  When I need to continue on a path that feels as impossible as balancing this gigantic boulder on top of a mountain made of stone. When I need to “Find a Way.”

How do you find ways to persevere during times of adversity?

"I live my life in widening circles"

I live my life in widening circles. This first line from a poem by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke has been reverberating in the echo chamber of my mind.  I’ve been imagining these words as applied to my sense of the spiritual life stages that I wrote about a week ago which led me to draw the picture above. I imagine each stage, or circle, like this starting from the center and moving outward: I am: A Return to Self; You Are: A Return to God; We Are: A Return to Community; Inter-are: A Return to Oneness.

 

And since you are here, and Rilke is so breathtaking, here is the rest of his poem just because…

 

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I have been circling around God, that primordial tower.
I've been circling for thousands of years
and still I don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

Nourishing the Masculine & the Feminine

I've come to believe that I might be one who straddles the spiritual line between feminine & masculine, yin & yang, being & doing, right brain & left brain, emotional & reasonable, heart & head, relational & individualistic.  I can equally imagine myself on a Paulo Coelho-like hero's quest for enlightenment as I could sitting in Anita Diamant's The Red Tent with the little known women of the Bible Leah, Rachel & Dinah. But what I'd enjoy most would be a life blended with both. Content to worship god in front of a sprawling ocean and singing from a hymnal in the wooden pews on Sunday.

I'm not sure if this is the norm for most people, but I can't help but wonder if we'd all be a little better off if we could do these 2 things: 1.) avoid boxing ourselves and others into only one spiritual path of masculine or feminine  and 2.) intentionally develop models of spiritual development that help us to nourish both aspects of our soul. 

Lately I’ve been reading many of the existing models psycho-social-spiritual development, and comparing contrasting these models with my own personal experience of the spiritual life stages that I wrote about in this blog a week or so ago.  This has been very helpful for me to locate myself in a larger context and to learn how others have done things before me. But at the same time, what was also somewhat disheartening to me, was to learn that many of these models are still largely superimposed by ideas defined by gender and sex, rather than that of masculine and feminine sensibilities that reside within all of us at varying degrees. 

Firstly, it remains true that many of the traditional models of psycho-social-spiritual development are written by men with the arrogant and ignorant supposition that this quite masculine, linear, individualistic approach to god is a one size fits all deal. This, of course, is not surprising since that is what centuries of power and top down dominance will do, cause you to forget that your own narrow way is not The Way. The exact same argument could be made for the major religions of the world proselytizing their paths to god on the rest of us as The Way rather than embodying the Unitarian Universalist 4th principle which suggests an allowance for "a free and responsible search for truth and meaning."

On the other hand, there are also more recent models that pitch themselves as by women, for women.  But for me, the models are equally problematic as they remain too narrowly focused toward the feminine.  Referring to these differences in models of spiritual development based on gender or sex in A Woman's Journey to God Joan Borysenko writes sentences like "one way is no better than the other, just more suited to us by biology and development."

I have to say, I read that statement and I think, "what an unfortunate and overgeneralized statement to make" because it lessens the value of the feminine (not female) ideas for spiritual growth that would be beneficial to both men and women. Ideas like this also taken from A Woman's Journey to God:

"the circular process is more unplanned, unexpected, intuitive and irrational. It leaves room for God to change our path at any time and suggests that we are not always the 'doer.' Unseen forces and circumstances can provoke sudden transformation that comes through us, rather than from our own will." 

Such a great statement...and don't you know both women and men who'd benefit from such a spiritual path?

It seems we have few role models for such a spiritual life that combines an intentionality toward the masculine and feminine, and I think that is because mistakes were made when these dualistic paradigms were attached to gender and sex- that just sold everybody short for centuries upon centuries up to and including this day. 

So what can we do now?  Four practices I do to nourish both the masculine and the feminine aspects of soul include:

1.) My yoga practice. I try to intentionally do yoga asanas on both sides (meaning if I do triangle pose on the left side, then I also do it on the right side). I try to blend poses that  to me feel more masculine like Warrior II, Plank, Crow and Handstand with others that tap my feminine resources like Tree, Camel, Squat and Goddess. And then at the end of yoga I like to bring my two hands together in prayer and simultaneously touch my third eye and my heart.

2.) I try to balance moments of being and doing both at work and at home.  I think sometimes working parents can default to the belief that doing (or masculine) is work and being (or feminine) is home family life.  But anyone who  has tried to get 2 children ready in the morning for daycare knows that that is certainly a myth.  The trick, I think, is to have times (even if only for a brief 30 seconds to take in 3 long breaths) of both being and doing at work and at home each day. 

3.) I'm working on leaving space for a nondualistic  "other" which transcends the masculine and feminine.  I recently went a professional training that talked about the importance of three modes (rather than two) when practicing psychotherapy (my personal vocation) of: Being, Doing, and a third, Flow.  This suggestion has stayed with me as I try to remember that undoubtedly we as human beings are still at the very beginning of our own awakening to all that our species is capable of;  masculine and feminine may be antiquated thinking in not that long a time.

And 4.) I like to read the spiritual autobiographies of others' and continue to research various models of spiritual development that define themselves as simultaneously earthy, intuitive, circular, and relational with space for the individual, the quest, and enlightenment.  Then I like to try them out for myself. 

I recently re-listened to an NPR radio interview with Joanna Macy, a self-described  philosopher of ecology and a scholar of Buddhism who has published translations  Rilke poetry; she is 86 years-old. In the interview she shared a part about her life when in her young 20’s, with small children, she was living abroad in Germany working for the CIA and she came uponThe Book of Hours by Rilke. She said, “I identified completely with it and I saw — it was just eight lines in that poem — that it could redefine that I was on a spiritual path.”

There are many aspects of  the spiritual autobiography of Joanna Macy that I love, but I’ll describe just a two.

One aspect I admire is the simple fact that this an 86 year-old wise woman talking about her life as a “spiritual path" while also being a working mother. We absolutely need more role models, particularly female role models, who self-describe life in such a way, at least I do.  

Which brings me to the second, I love that even though she is a woman who has had a spiritual awakening, her journey is not compartmentalized into simple dualistic boxes of masculine & feminine only. She described a career that she defined as "service," she was a parent, and she was open to a spiritual journey, all at the same time! Amazing!

There is also a sense of adventure in this woman’s life that combines the adventure of relational experiences like mothering 4 children, spending  summers with grandparents on a farm in upstate New York, going to antinuclear weapons protest rallies with her adult son, as well as the adventure of living and getting educated in Europe, working for the CIA, being a Peace Corps Volunteer working with Tibetan refugees in India, and fighting nuclear power as a fierce activist. What a fantastic example of blending of masculine and feminine sensibilities!

But I don't think all of our lives have to be of a Joanna Macy-like scale to set the same intention. About a year ago I read Joan Anderson's spiritual autobiography called A Year by the Sea in which she shares her story of a more masculine solitary retreat to Cape Cod--not the CIA in Europe though she did also do the Peace Corps with her husband in Africa--that was steeped in individuation. But this very same masculine moment of spiritual unfolding was embedded in the feminine life cycle of midlife- in fact the subtitle is "Thoughts of an unfinished woman"-and it included earthbound moments like feeling a baptismal sense of return to self while swimming naked and alone with seals in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and being guided throughout the year through the wisdom of a Wise Woman.

I think sometimes it can feel daunting to imagine lives such as these, and it might even feel easier to just fall to one side of the masculine-feminine paradigm and say "that's just who I am." But I challenge you around this: just because it is difficult, don't ignore that piece of yourself that yearns for a deeper expression of itself.

For instance, if you find you are more drawn to or comfortable with (those are 2 different things!) the masculine spiritual practices, also be mindful to intentionally include the feminine, and vice versa. And of course if you are a woman, look out for not considering or pursuing what might be considered the masculine leg of the spiritual journey just because you imagine it as somehow ruled out or off limits. And for the men, be cautious that you don't act aversively to a stint on the feminine path just because of fear around internalized stigma and stereotype about what it means to be a male.

I mean, imagine if a woman named Cheryl Strayed had not followed her masculine calling to take a solitary trek on the Pacific Crest Trail after the death of her parent and her divorce as depicted in the book The Wild which was recently made into a movie with Reese Witherspoon. Or on a larger scale, imagine what a loss it would have been if Ralph Waldo Emerson had only followed his friend Henry David Thoreau's more masculine spiritual journey of building cabins in the woods to live alone for a year, and had not participated in what I'd describe as the more relational feminine gathering of The Transcendentalists'  Society which regularly brought a group of like-minded friends together (men and at least one woman named Margaret Fuller)  for a time of being (not doing) in an exchange of ideas and comradie- aka a modern day women's Bookclub. 

Now, I don't mean is not to imply that this balancing act of the masculine and feminine must be a 50-50 even Steven, as my grandmother used to say, split. Not, I will spend exactly 30 minutes doing something to cultivate my masculine side followed by 30 minutes on my feminine side, as we might in Pilates. It is more like a see-saw. There will be times of 80-20 or 60-40 or 99-1. But both are always present, always there, requiring varying amounts of mindful love and attention at any given time.

For example I love to imagine poet Mary Oliver in her self-described practices of spending hours upon hours walking the sandy dunes of Cape Cod by herself, notebook and pencil in hand, allowing herself to be enraptured by nature as it presented itself to her in the form of a heron, a field, a flower. To me this is a beautiful tapestry of masculine and feminine spiritual sensibilities. 

I recently heard a musical term called counterpoint. In my non-musical laywoman's understanding, it is a musical approach that says you can combine more than one independent rhythm into the same piece of music that will also weave into an interdependent harmony.  In other words, how much more interesting and dynamic could a piece of music be, or an individual life, if we cultivate and bring together these separate & unique threads, rather than trying to make everything just sound and look the same? We need masculine. We need feminine. We need both in our spiritual lives and development to embody god, who for certain is not limited to our oh-so-human tendency to put ourselves in teeny tiny boxes, I being no exception to that rule. 

But let's agree to not do that- to try anyhow. We could be so much more if we allow ourselves to be as god made us, dualistic and all. 

I am always looking for more ways of embracing the masculine and the feminine, what practices do you find helpful?

Expanding Communion

A week ago today I was sitting at a funeral at a Catholic Church and watching with interest as individuals took part in the ritual of the Eucharist, or Holy Communion.  As a non-baptized non-Christian, I did not take part in the ritual myself (as so instructed by the priest as well), but I did watch carefully, and grew more intrigued by this fascinating word “communion.”

Defining Communion

Do a quick Google search on the word “communion” and a variety of definitions present themselves including Greek, Latin and Biblical roots of the word.  Below are some that I found just today:

*Communion literally means "sharing." It's breaking bread together.

*The word "communion" comes from King James Bible translation of the Greek word for "sharing."

*The Latin root is com-mun'-is, meaning participation by all. The same root is used for the words common, community, and communicate.  

*It's supposed to bring everyone together as one body.

*A communion is an intimate connection. 

*Many people enjoy hiking in the woods in order to have a sort of communionwith nature.

*When you connect in a meaningful way with something, or intimately share your feelings with someone, you experience a communion. 

*The word implies a deep connection, particularly a spiritual one.

* A Communion, with a capital C and also called Holy Communion, is a Christian religious service involving consecrated bread and wine.

*The Latin root of communion is communionem, meaning "fellowship, mutual participation, or sharing."

*Communion may refer to: Eucharist or the Lord's Supper, the Christian rite involving the eating of bread and drinking of wine, reenacting the Last Supper

*A group of persons having a common religious faith; a religious denomination:

*Association; fellowship.

*Interchange or sharing of thoughts or emotions; intimate communication.

*The act of sharing, or holding in common; participation.

*The state of things so held.

I must tell you, I love several of these definitions and associations with the word communion (more of that in a bit), but my initial response is one of irony because as I sat at that funeral and cried with my friend who had lost her beloved grandmother, and felt great empathy for all of the 7 children, 14 grandchildren and another 14 great-grandchildren, I know I was in a larger state of communion (small “c”) by any number of the definitions supplied by my Google search.  And yet, by the priest’s very narrow definition, I was absolutely not included, or a part of my Catholic friend and her Catholic family as they participated in the very specific and exclusive Holy Communion (capital “c”).

Please do not misunderstand me, I am not opposed to groups of individuals having their own rituals and rites.  That is part of what groups people together and helps us realize the common threads that bind us together in fellowship, another definition for communion.  For many years I went to Al-Anon meetings, and what linked us together was having a family or friend who was alcoholic.  That was the criteria for determining who could come to an Al-anon meeting. So does that exclude? Sure it does.  But the exclusion was not the point. The point was the creation of a special space of inclusionfor people with the same shared experience in this one regard.

Maybe this is one of the paradoxes of this captivating word communion- that it could be so broad and all encompassing (as in the definition “the state of things so held”) and so narrow and specific (the Eucharist).

On a personal level, I wrote in this blog a few days ago that I believe I am currently in a spiritual life stage where the task at hand is to focus on connection with others in the creation of beloved community. I had made the analogy of spiritual life stages as similar to 20^th century psychologist Erik Erikson’s psychosocial developmental stages where he identified a specific internal crisis that needed to be resolved before one could move on to the next stage (e.g. Trust vs. Mistrust or Identity vs. Role Confusion). Along the same lines, in this spiritual life stage that I am in now, the crisis to resolve would be Communion vs. Vulnerability.

Communion as an Act of Courage

I move through most hours of the day, most days of the week with a veil between me and the world.  It’s like there is a space or a moat that surrounds me.  A distance small enough that I am able to reach across the divide to receive nourishment from others, and vice versa, but far enough to keep me safe from hurt and harm thereby allowing me to mitigate the intense discomfort of vulnerability that I carry with me everywhere I go.

I wasn’t always this way.  In fact, I can visually see in photographs of me over the years when the veil began to go up, and, as I’ve worked on this in more recent years, I can visually see in photographs as I’ve gotten older when and where this veil comes down. 

I was recently looking over a new Blog site called Brain Pickings by Maria Popova, and she wrote a very interesting blog about the autobiography of a neurologist on whom the Robin Williams movieAwakenings was based, Dr. Oliver Sacks.  In it, Ms. Popova quoted Dr. Sacks’  reflection at 80 years-old on his own relationship with others, a.k.a. capacity for communion. He said:

“I am shy in ordinary social contexts; I am not able to “chat” with any ease; I have difficulty recognizing people (this is lifelong, though worse now my eyesight is impaired); I have little knowledge of and little interest in current affairs, whether political, social, or sexual. Now, additionally, I am hard of hearing, a polite term for deepening deafness. Given all this, I tend to retreat into a corner, to look invisible, to hope I am passed over. This was incapacitating in the 1960s, when I went to gay bars to meet people; I would agonize, wedged into a corner, and leave after an hour, alone, sad, but somehow relieved. But if I find someone, at a party or elsewhere, who shares some of my own (usually scientific) interests — volcanoes, jellyfish, gravitational waves, whatever — then I am immediately drawn into animated conversation…

Reading this passage was in and of itself a moment of communion for me, as defined above as an experience of deep connection.  In it, I spotted a fellow weirdo like me, who was hanging his freak flag proudly!  Someone who probably understands why activities like people-watching in Harvard Square, sitting in a Unitarian Universalist pew at church on Sunday, snuggling with a 23 pound black and white cat named George, reading 13^th century poetry by a Sufi theologian, deeply listening and witnessing the lives of my dear patients, and even writing this small blog (by my pseudonym!) would all be acts of communion for me.

I remember in particular a moment of deep communion with a complete stranger that lasted for all of 30 seconds.  It was a few years ago and winter time.  We had just gotten a fresh snow the night before, and we were having one of those perfect-blue-sky New England days where the sun is reflecting off the snow so brightly that you needed sunglasses, and  I was out in one of my favorite game reserves cross country skiing.  

I had been contentedly skiing alone in the woods for quite some time when I came upon a fellow cross country skier coming from the opposite direction. The skier was a woman, about my size, so as we glided by each other we were able to see eye to eye.  At the moment of passing, my fellow skier made eye contact with me, smiled broadly and said sweetly, “aren’t we so lucky?”  It was a bliss-filled rhetorical question that absolutely mirrored my own internal experience so closely that in that oh-so-very-brief encounter I felt kinship with this stranger.  I felt communion.

So maybe what defines communion is not as concrete as the actual elements (the who, what, when, where) that come together, as much as the quality of that experience. In other words, communion could come in all shapes and sizes, but thecommonality is the experience of deep abiding connection where, for a moment or a lifetime or anything in between, you feel a part of something larger than yourself.

Communion as the Antidote to Vulnerability

Now, however, I want to take that a step further.  With the intention of leaving behind this veil that I continue to carry with me, similar to Harry Potter’s invisible cloak he inherited from his parents, I would like to extend myself further into the terrifying realm of vulnerability.

Some ideas I am carrying with me as I embark on this spiritual life stage toward communion include: metta and mutuality. 

I recently heard Buddhist teacher and author Sharon Salzberg, who has written and talked extensively about the practice of Loving Kindness Meditation, define the Pali word “metta” as either friendship or connection.  Ms. Salzberg has said she spent many years solely practicing Loving Kindness Meditation or Metta Meditation which leaves me eager to find out for myself if this practice could help me to let go of my security-blanket-like-attachment to my veil so that I may swim deeper into the waters of vulnerability.

The other idea to help me with communion is mutuality.  I have been keeping an ear out for folks who describe their vocation as one of mutuality.  Thus far, the list has included yoga master Seane Corn, classical musician YoYo Ma, and Jesuit Priest Greg Boyle who works with former gang members in Los Angeles.  Whether it be their yoga student, their audience, their mentee or parishioner, it seems these individuals have found the give and take of energy between them and another has both enhanced their craft and nourished their own needs for oneness and community. This seems a respectable path to follow, and these ideas, drawn from the wisdom of others, seem notable strategies for communion for me as well.

How about you? How do you experience or cultivate communion? In the act of communion, how do you let down your veil to expose vulnerability

Spiritual Life Stages

I recently picked up a book again that I read toward the beginning of what I would now call my spiritual awakening.  It is called Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd.  It is a spiritual memoir, which if you read my blog you already know I am a total junkie for spiritual memoirs, and it chronicles the author’s road from being an active member of a Christian church to being a faithful devotee of the divine feminine.

 

Now, you must know from the get-go, I love all books Sue Monk Kidd from her novels like The Invention of Wings and The Secret Life of Bees to her spiritual memoirs like Traveling with Pomegranates and When the Heart Waits.  So, re-reading one of her books is like visiting with a dear friend.

 

It’s interesting though to reflect on the changes inside of me since  when I first read this book, Dance of the Dissident Daughter in 2011, to now.

 

One that stands out to me, as I write this is now, is that I feel a much greater sense of ease about being in the midst of a spiritual unfolding. 

In the beginning, it was almost a little scary.  I found myself craving a framework to understand what the heck was going on with me.  Never before had I been reading books and articles about religion and god.  Never before had I been wishing for more time in my day to dedicate to a spiritual practice or discipline. 

 

To be honest, I felt a little crazy. A little off my rocker; which initially led me to keep the whole thing very private, on the down low.

 

I wish I could go back to that earlier version of myself and say some kind and reassuring words.  But I know that is not how it works, and that is probably a good thing. 

The truth is, to take a leap of faith probably requires a small combination (or large depending on how rigid and controlling you are, aka: me!) of confusion, feeling lost, and desperation in order to  thrust you into a new direction that otherwise would have been off limits to you.   Not because a fence or a wall kept you out, but because you never would have walked through the wide open door.  Maybe because you didn’t know the door was even there.  Maybe because of fear of what might be on the other side of the door.  Maybe because the spiritual life felt like something luxurious or extra.  Something to do when I get all that free time into my schedule when I get all the real important stuff accomplished.

 

For my experience, I was the one who didn’t even know the door was there.  As some of you know, my upbringing was a secular one without talk or mention of god or spirit.  Which now I find so interesting because just the other day I was reading Marianne Williamson’s thoughts on the necessity for making time for god at the start of the day, and I thought, “that makes complete sense.” She says: 

 

"Most of us wouldn't think of beginning our day without washing the accumulated dirt from the day before off our bodies.  Yet far too often we go out into the day without similarly cleansing our minds...It would be ludicrous to say, 'I'm just too busy. I had to give up showers.' And yet 'busy-ness' is a common excuse for why we do not take the time, or give the time, to meet regularly with God."

 

It is hard to believe that in just a handful of years my relationship with god could have become such a central part of my life and priorities, and yet it has.

 

I’ve come to see my spiritual journey as chapters.  Not in an overly compartmentalized way, but more like, periods of time when I was really steeped in a particular spiritual life stage.

You remember the famous 20^th Century psychologist Erik Erikson who, with his wife Joan Erikson, developed the stages of psychosocial development over the course of the lifespan? It started with the Stage of Trust Vs. Mistrust in Infancy and went all the way to the Stage of Ego Integrity Vs. Despair in old age. Well, I think of spiritual life stages akin to the same theory of development, but for the purpose of the soul.

 

Despite what I am writing here oh-so-authoritatively, please don’t believe that I think this is the only way or path.  For certain, god is far too diverse and vast for such a narrow road to awakening that would be one-size-fits all for all 7 billion of us human beings on the planet.

 

For example, in Sue Monk Kidd’s spiritual journey, written about in Dance of the Dissident Daughter, her stages of spiritual development are described as: Awakening, Initiation, Grounding, Empowerment. Whereas writer and spiritual teacher Joan Borysenko has written about a bio-psycho-spiritual model of development called The Feminine Life Cycle in terms of 4 Quadrants with death as described as “The Ultimate Act of Renewal & Growth.”  In Ms. Borysenko’s book  A Woman’s Journey to God she borrowed from the biblical stories to describe the spiritual life especially for women as more of one of “dancing Sarah’s circle” than “climbing Jacob’s ladder.”

 

Nonetheless, I will share my path, so far, in the hopes that it may be helpful to one of you as well, or maybe for someone that you know who appears in the midst of a spiritual unfolding.

 

I have conceptualized my spiritual life stages in 4 Acts, like in a play. No Act is more important than the another, but they are sequential.  Meaning, Act II could not have preceded Act I.  I don’t mean the second Act could not have preceded it for anybody, it just couldn’t have for me.  Like in college, I needed to take Sociology 101 before I could take Sociology 201, or otherwise 201 just would not have made any sense.  So for me it has unfolded like this:

 

Act I: I am.  In this stage the spiritual task is a return to Self.

Act II: You are. In this stage the spiritual task is a return to god.

Act III: We are. (This is where I believe I am right now, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to be here for a while.) In this stage the spiritual task is to connect with others in beloved community (to borrow a phrase from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.).

Act IV: Inter-are. Now, this is just a guess because I’m not here yet, but I’m borrowing Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept here for the possibility of an even  deeper sense of oneness that would be an echo of physicist Albert Einstein’s famous quote: 

 

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

 

I have described these spiritual life stages as sequential, but in my mind, sequential is not quite the same as linear.  Because linear, to me, suggests a path that is direct, like an express train from New York to Boston with absolutely no stops along the way.  Sequential though, is more like this passage I recently read in Becoming Who We Are by Jesuit Priest James Martin: "God writes straight with crooked lines." In other words, it’s not the “right way” because it is some perfected formula. Instead, it is just a way that works, for some but not all, because it just does.

 

As for what happens after my Act IV guess, I don’t know.  But then again, Joan Erikson, wife of the psychologist Erik Erikson, lived longer than her husband, and she believed there was actually another life stage after Ego Integrity Vs. Despair that was never developed by her late husband.

 

I myself don’t pretend to know what all of my spiritual life stages will be which is probably why I gravitate toward the word “unfolding.” That word was first introduced to me when I became a mother.  I was told that motherhood “unfolds.” In the beginning I had no idea what on earth that meant.  Kind of like how I had no idea what was going on when I first felt the beginning of the spiritual awakening several years ago like an earthquake inside of me.  But now, 6 years into motherhood, I think “unfolding” is the perfect word to describe the experiences of both motherhood and the spiritual life. We’ll see what unfolds next…

 

I would love to hear from you as well…How do you conceptualize spiritual life stages, if at all?

 

Shifting in to Spaciousness

Lately I've been enjoying spaciousness which I experience as a vast opening in my mind that ripples into the rest of me. The relief I feel in this experience is like going into the shade on a hot and humid summer day in July.  It is why people use bold words like freedom & liberation to describe the potential fruits of having a meditation practice at all. For me though, it feels like an unexpected gift. It feels like grace.

I remember when reading the cofounder of The Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts Sharon Salzberg's book Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, she described the image of spaciousness as being like the clear blue sky in this photo above from my backyard by the lilac bush. That image is so very helpful to me, and I've internalized it in a way that I can call up the image when I am struggling.

The difficulty comes for me though, in what Ms. Salzberg describes in her book, with my tendency to lose my focused attention on the spaciousness of the sky, and instead, I zoom in on one single bird or cloud.  Which, in meditation terms, would mean I get distracted by my thoughts, feelings or body sensations (though the latter is a less common distraction for me).  Or in other words, I can't see the proverbial forest for the trees.

In the last few weeks I had noticed more and more of this, both in and out of meditation.  Less spacious sky, more birds and clouds.   In fact, in the midst of a emotional meltdown several weeks ago where I was thoroughly steeped in my dilemma du jour, a good friend kindly asked me: Have you been meditating regularly?

Which of course I hadn't been, not consistently anyway, and I'm someone for whom frequency and consistency matters.  Not because there is any heightened moral value to being a well-disciplined meditator. It does not mean anything good or bad about me or my behavior. What I do notice though, and after 4 years of having a meditation practice apparently those around me notice as well, is that I become more rigid and overwhelmed when I am not meditating regularly.  It's like a tightness begins to take hold.  I easily get fixated or preoccupied with small and large problems, and it is more difficult for me to clearly identify solutions.  In other words, the spaciousness feels lost to me.

Then, to make matters worse, I react to my reaction.  Rather than having a warm compassionate response to my growing suffering and difficulty, I can become quite critical of myself- harsh even.  Which in turn leads to more preoccupation with those birds and clouds and less focused attention on the vast open sky. It can be a quite a vicious cycle.

I heard Sharon Salzberg refer to this critical internal response to ourselves as akin to Lucy in the Peanuts comic.  She said this in a YouTube video of a talk she gave in New York City that I listened to during my commute to work.  The comic strip went like this: Lucy walks up to Charlie Brown and says, "You want to know what your problem is?" "What" Charlie Brown responds (so innocently, as always, waiting for some great insight, but not considering the source). And Lucy replies in her ever so curt manner, "You!"

As Sharon Salzberg tells it, her Lucy voice has never entirely gone away, even after 40 years of a meditation practice.  However, Ms. Salzberg's response to her Lucy voice has changed, dramatically. After years of practice, Ms. Salzberg says she now can calmly, humorously, say, "Chill out Lucy."

It makes total sense of course.  If you are already wound up tight like a spring, why on earth would you go in with a sense of mean-spiritedness? I wouldn't do that to someone else. I wouldn't kick someone when they are already down, but I sometimes do it to myself.  I did a few weeks ago in the midst of that meltdown.  And I notice I definitely do it more when I am not engaged in my regular meditation practice.

In Sylvia Boorstein's book, That's Funny, You Don't Look Buddhist, she says in her chapter "Silence is a Fence for Wisdom," that having a disciplined meditation practice can cultivate  what she refers to as the natural mind, and she asserts that "the natural mind, unclouded by tension, reacts to pain with compassion. It just does."

I love this assertion.  Because it is saying that by engaging in the practice of  meditation, or what I've heard Sharon Salzberg call "skills training" which is very appealing to the psychotherapist inside of me, I might have increased capacity to locate that "unclouded" or spacious place inside of me on a more regular basis- the fruit of which will be a surge of compassion toward self and other. 

Doesn't that sound like the perfect remedy for the vicious circular cycle I just described above?  Not a way out of the cycle, but a way through.  A way to step off of the merry-go-round. And then do it again, and again, and again. Until I have a new habit of warmly responding to my wandering attention, that has shifted away from the clear blue sky and onto that single (or whole fleet) bird moving across my scope of awareness, with a kind and soft touch. 

I imagine it like the opening scene of the movie City of Angels where the angel, played by actor Nicholas Cage, is seen gently putting his hands on the shoulders of a airport control operator when the worker's mind has wandered away from the important task at hand of safely landing planes to his own  personal problems.  But with the touch of the angel, the controller's attention shifts back to the space in front of him, versus the distraction.

So for me, with the gentle nudge of my friend who asked: have you been meditating regularly?, that very next day, I got back on the saddle again, and I took the photo above to remember it is possible to shift back  in to spaciousness with compassion.

How do you experience spaciousness? How does compassion aid you in this endeavor toward spaciousness?

Mastering the Art of Work-Life Balance

In the last several weeks I’ve been grappling with the difficulty of work-life balance which has left little to no time for much else, including writing in this blog.   As you working moms and dads know, the work-life balance is of course always a challenge.  But lately, it’s been even harder.  So hard in fact, that I had to step back and do what they call in the cooperate world, system-wide “reorganization.”

I won't bore you with all of the details,  but suffice it to say I had to come to terms with the reality that my work-life was out of balance when in the very same week my supervisor talked to me about being behind in my paperwork and my son's school called me to say there was no one there to get my son off the school bus because I had forgotten that my daycare provider went away for an out of town wedding. 

Now I have to say, both of these events, among others that were equal illustrations of the work-life imbalance, were unpleasant and not my proudest moments. But, if writer/poet Maya Angelou was correct that every cloud has a rainbow, I would say this difficult process of reorganization has led me to contemplate and question the very core of what it means to have work-life balance.  What is work-life balance anyway? And more specifically, what is it for me?  Both worthy questions no doubt. 

The work-life question reminds me of a 2007 film starring Catherine Zeta Jones called No Reservations in which the main character Kate, played by Zeta Jones, has her whole life changed in the blink of an eye when her sister dies in a car accident leaving Kate to be caretaker for her grade school age niece.  In one day, she goes from being a single working woman, who is a control-freak and married to her work as a chef, to being a working parent, and suddenly her life is unrecognizable leaving her priorities, values and lifestyle to be challenged in uninvited ways.  In other words, this film depicts the essence of the work-life balance struggle, Hollywood style.

I love this movie for lots of reasons (one being all the aesthetic beauty of food!), but what I’ve been thinking about lately is this bit of dialogue at the end of the film between the character Kate and her therapist:

Kate: I wish there was a cookbook for life, you know? Recipes telling us exactly what to do. I know, I know, you're gonna say "How else will you learn, Kate." 

Therapist: mm. No, actually I wasn't going to say that. You want to guess again? 

Kate: No, no, go ahead.

Therapist: Well what I was going to say was, you know better than anyone, it's the recipes that you create yourself that are the best. 

You’ve had that wish too, haven’t you? To have a cookbook for life. A recipe. A formula.  A how-to instruction book.  I have. In the midst of being torn in 2 (or 3 or 4) different directions, I have searched for the “right” answer. 

Like two weeks ago.  Two weeks ago I was begging for a book to tell me the "right" answer.  It was 5 a.m. and  my baby girl had come down with a low grade fever in the night. My husband and I were laying in bed with the baby sleeping between us while we discussed back and forth the schedule of the day each of us had had planned ahead of us.  We reviewed which one of us had called out of work the last time one of our children was sick. We reminded each other of the impact on each our colleagues, and how our supervisors and clients can be when we call out of work. We tossed around the impact on the in-laws if we sent our baby to them with the low grade fever. 

And of  course, like all working parents, we ran ourselves through the guilt-mill for even having had these conversations at all.  For not just saying first and foremost: we will always put our time with our children ahead of work.  Yes, on that early morning, I wanted a clear, simple answer.

There is a church that I drive by each morning on my way to work that keeps a sign out front with words to ponder as you go by.  Currently the sign reads: “Right. Wrong. Choose.”  In the example I gave above I think to myself: if only it were that easy in making work-life balance decisions.! If only these overly-simplified, one-dimensional black and white words were applicable to an area of decision-making that is far more messy with no single truth awaiting our recognition.

I think the trick of the work-life balance, or at least what I've come up with for now, is the latter part of the dialogue between Kate and her therapist in the film: "It's the recipes that you create yourself that are the best." Use the cookbooks as a guideline only to get you started, then find the mix of ingredients, the right temperatures, to best lengths of time in the oven that work for you and yours.

In the middle of the 20th century an unknown chef named Julia Child co-wrote a cookbook called Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The purpose of the book was to bring the exquisite beauty of French culinary cooking to average, middle class American housewives.  In writing this book one could argue that Julia Child was telling us exactly what to do in the kitchen to make the food exactly as she did.  But to suggest that excludes the reality that Julia Child herself was making an interpretation of French cuisine.  An interpretation that she felt would best suit her very specific American audience. Therefore, it stands to reason that there was an expectation that each individual woman, in the comfort of her own kitchen, with her own things, and her own family to feed, would as well shape and create something to be uniquely her own based on the solid guidance and suggestions from those who have gone before- in the kitchen that is.

I recently picked up a book by a Jesuit priest named Reverend James Martin SJ called Becoming Who You Are: Insights on the True Self from Thomas Merton and Other Saints.  It is a small book, a meditation really, but it is filled with wisdom about living at home in your own skin. 

One line in particular has stuck with me as I've been navigating and negotiating the work-life balance: "it is holy to be your true self."  That just summarizes it all doesn't it?  At the end of the day it is not about judgment, it is about compassionately trying (day in and day out) to line up your outsides with your insides so that you can take wise actions more often than not. 

But remember fellow travelers of this work-life balance road: we will not be perfect.  God does not expect us to be.  It can take years of practice to begin to live our lives from a starting place of our true selves.  As the rocking horse says to the stuffed rabbit in the old children's story The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams:

"[Real] doesn't happen all at once...You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.  Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.  But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Yup, that describes working parenthood, doesn't  it? 

When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer I was told my time serving would be the "toughest job you'll ever love." Well, they were wrong about that, working parenthood trumps Peace Corps Volunteer for that award, no question.

But I have hope.  Insights from films, theological books, memoirs, children's books, cookbooks and any other likely and unlikely spots of inspiration are all like little bread crumbs that help me to continue to move forward on this path of work-life balance.  Where I learn to make it my own. Where I worry less about doing it "right." Where my true self is calling the shots.

What helps you retain work-life balance? How do you remain hopeful that it is possible?