Early Sacred Texts

A ways back there was a poster contest for children at my local public library. The theme was on the importance of reading books, and the winner would have his or her poster printed on the library bags that a patron could purchase at the circulation desk.  That year there were a lot of creative and insightful submissions, and the winner ended up being a little girl who made a poster of a book and a heart that was titled “Reading Makes Your Heart Grow.”

Isn’t that lovely? It has always stayed with me.  Probably because it seems that little girl depicted a less talked about truth of learning and education. A truth that may even be as important, or more important than academics, that reading and books can be sacred.

This past weekend I had some very old and dear friends over. Women I’ve known for about 30 years.  And over the course of our long conversation that went well past our dinner,  the topic turned to books.

The conversation was initially prompted by my toddler taking all of my books off my bookshelf and carrying them one by one to my friends.  We all thought it was quite amusing, but then my friends began to ask me about the spiritual and religious books that have made an imprint on me.  The books that really spoke to me that I might recommend to others.

For me, this was a great question and a great conversation, but very personal.  Like the little girl who won the library poster contest, books hold a very special place in my heart.  I can remember the time and place I was in in my life when each significant book took my mind and perspective in a whole new direction.

The photo above is a stack of a few books that made such a mark on me towards the beginning of this journey.  These are some of the books my toddler was pulling of the shelves- jacket covers and all!

They include (and this is in no particular order):

The Place That Scare You by Pema Chodron

A Chosen Faith by Forrest Church & John Buehrens

The Spiritual Emerson edited by David M. Robinson

When the Heart Waits by Sue Monk Kidd

Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott

Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat  Zinn

Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore

Christian Meditation by James Finley

Living Your Yoga by Judith Lasater

A Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield

The New American Spirituality by Elizabeth Lesser

Yoga and the Quest for the True Self by Stephen Cope

Reflecting on this list, that for me is sacred and holy text, brings me back to the early beginnings of my spiritual awakening. 

For many, me being no exception, spiritual and/or religious journeys often begin with a book. Recently I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of Fr. James Martin Sj who is a Jesuit Priest and Author. He says his awakening began with Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain. Go to Social Researcher and Author Brene Brown’s website and you will see a list of her “Favorite Books” which consists of a section on “Whole Hearted Reading” that includes some of the authors I’ve listed above (Anne Lamott, Sue Monk Kidd, & Pema Chodron).

I think the books that primed me for a life with books at the center of my heart were two children’s books and any and all books by Japanese author Banana Yoshimoto. 

I was actually not a big reader in childhood until I was about 17 years-old.  Though I was fortunate to have been read to by my parents when I was a small child, I got jaded with the forced reading of the 80’s in elementary school that included a lot of sterile Americana sentences like: “Jane and Dick see Spot run.”  This reading did not make my heart grow in the slightest.  But two earlier books that made a very deep impression were the classics: The Little Engine that Could and Ferdinand the Bull, and later, when I was in high school and working at my local library on weekends, I encountered the book Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto.

Kitchen was the first book that I ever read on my own that truly spoke to my heart.  It is a small book, maybe a couple hundred pages, and it includes 2 stories about young women who are moving through phases of grief and loss in the context of a modern world.  As I read this book, multiple times actually, my heart actually swelled as I felt, for the first time in my life,  a sense of kindred spirits and not being alone.  It allowed me to understand the empathetic value of having my own experience mirrored before me- a lessen I still hold true now as a psychotherapist.

Then came the first more overt spiritual reading that has opened up doors in my imagination that I did not even know existed.  It started with the book When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron.

The year was 2003, I was a 26 year-old, and I was in my 1st year of psychiatric social work training .  One day, early in the year, my supervisor Rebecca, who identified as Jewish, Buddhist and gay, recommended I read When Things Fall Apart.  Being the over-achieving-wanting-to-please-my-mentor-gal that I was, I went out to Barnes and Noble that very same day and bought my first book that touched on anything spiritual and religious.

What a momentous occasion that was in the life of my spiritual journey! And yet, when I took that book home, opened it up to the first page, and began to read “bodhisattvas” this and “bodhichitta” that, my first thought was “Why in the hell did Rebecca want me to read this?!” Followed by my second thought “I’m going to need a translator for this book…”

It’s funny now, 12 years later, to see the very same book as one of my core spiritual texts.  It reminds me of the beginning of movie and musical The Sound of Music when Sister Maria is just starting to teach the Von Trap children how to sing, and she starts with the scales.  Sister Maria knows if the children are familiar with the scales, memorably sung in the form of the song “Do a Deer,” then any more difficult songs to come will be more possible because they’ve been studied in the basics.

I feel the same way about my early spiritual reading.  I  think of some of the books that I go back to again and again when I feel alone and confused, and it is like revisiting my touchstones.  Suddenly I don’t feel so lost, and I have a compass to point me once again toward true north.

What books represent your early spiritual texts? What books formed the early foundation of your spiritual and/or religious awakening?

Let's Take a Mindfulness Walk in Nature

Pilgrimage to Walden Pond

Caring for the Soul by Bringing it Home

Sometimes I feel like Humpty Dumpty from the Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme when I lose that sense of being an integrated whole.  Every so often, this can be  “a great fall” which can look more like the classical existential dark night of the soul. But most often it is just a series of stumbles at various times during the day when I just don’t feel like my body, mind, and heart are in the same place at the same time.  Both require my attention however.  Both require what I call soul hygiene, or author and Jungian Thomas Moore calls “care of the soul.”

It is in these moments I am reminded of the quote I posted above by Pierre Teihard de Chardin: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience” because attending to, caring for, and nurturing my soul in the Humpty Dumpty moments (whether large or small) for me requires an experience of coming home.

Hunter Patch Adams, the protagonist played by the late Robin Williams in the 1998 movie Patch Adams says this about “home”:

“All of life is a coming home. Salesmen, secretaries, coal miners, beekeepers, sword swallowers, all of us. All the restless hearts of the world, all trying to find a way home. It's hard to describe what I felt like then. Picture yourself walking for days in the driving snow; you don't even know you're walking in circles. The heaviness of your legs in the drifts, your shouts disappearing into the wind. How small you can feel, and how far away home can be. Home. The dictionary defines it as both a place of origin and a goal or destination. And the storm? The storm was all in my mind. Or as the poet Dante put it: In the middle of the journey of my life, I found myself in a dark wood, for I had lost the right path. Eventually I would find the right path, but in the most unlikely place.”

I totally get that. 

A week ago my son asked to stay home sick from school. He had some early cold symptoms of runny nose, sore throat, and a cough, but being the last week of school, I pushed him to try to go.  By 8:10 (school starts at 8) I got the phone call from the school nurse asking me to pick up my son to bring him home.  So I left work and went to the school.  When I got to the nurse’s office my son looked up at me and just plainly said “I want to go home.”

For my son, like most children though unfortunately not all, home is a place of safety and security.  A sanctuary.  A place to be cared for and protected when you are feeling vulnerable.  It is a physical metaphor for the feeling of safety and security garnered by parents.

But for adults, “home” can be many things. It can be one of mere  geography-- the place where I lay my head at night-- but it is also biology, psychology, mindfulness, and spirituality.  The common denominator between children and adults is the need to “go home” when you are feeling lost and vulnerable.  When Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall and needs to be put back together again.  Sometimes this can be required on a small scale multiple times a day, and this is soul hygiene.

I’ve often wondered if this need may be the unspoken, unwritten, intention behind Muslims praying 5 times a day or Catholics and Baptists going to church multipe times a week. I'm probably romanticizing things—I tend to do that—but isn’t that a nice thought though?  To think some ancient tribal elder out there was considering all these spiritual practices as a way to care for the souls of all of the rest of us? Specific practices to help us to come home when we are lost and vulnerable. When our souls need to be brought into the fold for an experience of remembrance that the soul is safe and secure and whole. So when we go off line there is a path to get back online.

I've read that the Mung people, a small Asian ethnic group living in small communities all over the world, have a ritual for bringing home a soul (and as I understand it one individual can have several souls housed in one body) that has gotten lost or strayed from the human body. In this ritual a shaman may be called in to invite this lost soul back home.

I find this idea quite intriguing, and makes me consider how mindfulness practice could be a means to call my own soul back home when it feels lost to me.  Because though I may conceptualize the experience differently, undoubtedly when I engage in one of my own spiritual practices, like getting enveloped in the natural world, I feel like all my tiny Humpty Dumpty pieces are gathered up together again by Mother Nature to be put back together.  Like my body, mind and heart are realigning to be in the same place at the same time.

I suppose the more scientific way to think about it might be in terms of the Autonomic Nervous System and our neurobiological responses to calming stimuli.  In the 8 week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction class I took last fall the teacher, Kate, talked to us about what happens to our biology when we are mindful and when we are not mindful of our body’s dysregulation.  Kate  presented a formula to us that went something like this:

Mindful Attention + Connection + Self Regulation + Order = Ease

Versus

Unmindful Inattention + Disconnection + Dysregulation + Disorder = Disease

I experienced Kate’s formula just this past weekend when I revisited the famous Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts with some very old and dear friends. 

My friends and I were taking turns watching each other’s children as we each individually took long swims to the center of the pond.  When it was my turn I immediately took a deep dive into the bottom of the pond and swam along the bottom for as long as I could hold my breath.  As is my tendency, I kept my eyes open so that I could see all the variations in light in the water below, and I reveled in the sensation of being enveloped by nature.  Engulfed and consumed. Held and protected. Home.

When I got back to the shores of Walden Pond after my swim, I returned to my small tribe of children and sisters of the heart, and I noticed I felt totally refreshed and renewed. My head and heart had dropped back into my body. It felt like, in the most vivid of ways, that my body, mind, heart and soul were actually back in synch and in the same place at the same time- Humpty Dumpty no more.

It makes me wonder, is that how the Mung people feel after the shaman retrieves their missing soul? Or perhaps that is how my 6 year-old does when he comes home from school feeling under the weather? Or, is that just my neurotransmitters giving me a huge dump of dopamine into my pleasure center of my brain?  What would have Henry David Thoreau, author of the classic book Walden about his experiment of living next to Walden Pond for one year, have thought?

I don’t have any answers to these questions…But I will say that being at Walden Pond last week I had Thoreau’s words whispering in my heart as I swam to the center of the pond…

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

Maybe for Thoreau that one year in the woods was the only time he was ever “at home.” A time when his Humpty Dumpty nature felt put back together by the natural world and mindfulness. When he was actively caring for his soul and felt fully aligned within himself.

I think the lesson for me in the life of Thoreau it that I require daily maintenance, soul hygiene.  Because I go offline multiple times a day.  Not in really big ways, but offline nonetheless. And it requires, no it deserves, my loving attention to get back online again.  So yes, one consecutive year would be lovely, but for me, rather than following in Thoreau’s footsteps, I will instead follow the suggestion of Buddhist teacher, author and activist Thich Nhat Hanh who writes and talks extensively about daily mindfulness practices like walking to come home everyday.

In that spirit, no pun intended, I have attached some pictures of my recent pilgrimage to Walden Pond and photos from a mindfulness walk I took with my daughter by a river right down the street from our house the week before. Times to go home.

How can you care for your soul today? How can go home when you are vulnerable?

Meditation & Perfectionism

Hello. My name is Claire.  And I am a Recovering Perfectionist.

Hello Claire.

Being a spiritual seeker who is also a recovering perfectionist can be a tricky tight rope to walk sometimes.  It requires a vigilance to be sure that my habitual nature to mold and shape myself into some version of worthiness and adequacy (that’s what perfectionism is about after all…) is not spilling over into my spiritual life and practices.

Perfectionism is pretty insidious though, and sometimes it can slip in without even the most astute observer being the wiser. This is especially true in spiritual development because on the outside what the person is fine-tuning in themselves generally is agreeable and even likable to most others that no one (even sometimes the individual herself) notices that the spiritual virtue has been lost on a larger, over-riding goal for perfectionism of the ego to create a sense of self-worth.

Take for example compassion.  It is said that a regular meditation practice can yield a greater capacity for compassion.  In fact there is a researcher named Dr. Richard Davidson who is the founder of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds (CIHM) at the Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison who has looked at the neurobiology of compassion in the brains of regular meditators.  You’ve probably heard of him; he’s one of the researchers who has been studying the brains of Tibetan monks while they are meditating.  Read any of his articles about his research and I guarantee you will be meditating the next day- it is that compelling.

But here’s the trapping for a recovering perfectionist like me, rather than viewing this compassionate mind training research as just another advantage of a meditation practice that has long ago proved beneficial to me (and those around me), I could twist this information into a reason to mold and shape myself into a better version of me in order to make myself more useful and productive in the world- or in other words, more worthy.

Now, the wise part of me of course knows that growing compassion is not an exercise in perfecting ourselves.  Though in meditation the analogy is often used of sea glass, we are not smoothing out the rough edges of the glass through day after day of sitting meditation because those edges are bad or wrong in some way. We are doing it because it allows for a smoother ride. It is like putting shocks on a car that has none, and I have personally found that to be true.

Yet having said that, as a recovering perfectionist, if I am not mindful, I can easily fall back in to the habit of engaging in anything, in this case spiritual practice, to nurture my fantasy of what a new and improved version of myself would be rather than growing in self-acceptance and authenticity, which is ironically what compassionate mind training teaches us.

There is a principle in the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain tradition of nonviolence toward all living things which is called ahimsa. I’ve heard this concept applied to us recovering perfectionists who have been caught using our spiritual practices, like meditation or yoga, as a means to change ourselves into something good enough or better.  Buddhist teacher and author Pema Chodron describes this pitfall as a micro-aggression toward the self, and remembering the principle of ahimsa to avoid the loss of the integrity of a spiritual discipline.

I must point out the paradox here as well. Despite what I just told all you perfectionists out there to look out for in order to maintain your commitment to having a healthy meditation practice, I will say this, I find that if I keep my perfectionist habits in check, my meditation practice can be an antidote of sorts for the perfectionism itself.

At the last mindfulness retreat I attended the group leader quoted paraplegic yoga teacher and author Mathew Sanford who says that you cannot practice yoga regularly and not become more compassionate. And to this, I would say the same thing about a meditation practice.  I just don’t think it’s possible to sit through minute after minute, hour after hour, week after week, year after year of meditation practice and not become what Buddhist teacher and author Jack Kornfield says Ram Das calls “a connoisseur of your own neurosis” that is embedded in compassion for self and other.  Meditation practice and compassionate mind training are one and the same, for me anyway.

It is like the poem by Derek Walcott calledLove after Love.

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life. 

I think what is hard for the recovering perfectionist to remember too is that this meditation practice that yields increased compassion, and in turn is the antidote for perfectionism, is not effort. It is a discipline, but not effort.  In fact, it is effortless. It is grace.  If you show up and engage in the practice, the rest will take care of itself.  And as a recovering perfectionist, I can tell you that that is a very tough one to buy into.  We think everything requires 150% effort. We think if we did not get the results we wanted then that is because we need to try harder, do better, work more.

During these moments, however, we need to remember the words of 20^th century Psychologist Carl Rogers who said, “"The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

How has your meditation practice impacted your perfectionist habits? Has meditation increased your capacity for compassion?

Releasing Attachments

In these past weeks that I have not been posting in this blog I have been facing some hard lessons in the area of attachments.  Life has handed me a series of opportunities to look at the way I cling.  The way I cling to people, places, ideas, plans, material stuff, agendas, itineraries, relationships, and then some.

Yup, I’m a clinger.

I suppose if I was a more enlightened gal, this post would therefore be all about my gratitude for these recent lessons.  Words would flow about how I see the beauty and synchronicity in the perfectly timed obstacles put forth by the universe to challenge me in the areas of myself that warrant growth and transformation- like for instance, my tendency to cling.

However, regrettably, I am not that gal.  And most recently, I must humbly admit that I was more like the 2 year-old you see in the grocery store stomping her feet and yelling “But it’s not fair! I want what I want, and I want it now!  I want it my way!”

It’s not that I want to be behave this way.  In fact, I can list a bunch of disadvantages to this clinging behavior right here on the spot:

1.) It doesn’t help, 

2.) It makes you feel all miserable and yucky inside (a.k.a. suffering),

3.) It doesn’t make for great company with others,

4.) It gives the sensation of feeling stuck in life, 

5.) It is the main behavioral contributor to the “poor me’s” which is never good.

But how do we release our attachments?  What is the step by step guide to this spiritual endeavor? Where can I buy a copy of “Releasing Attachments for Dummies?”

Well, I’ve recently been enjoying some reading of Ignatian Spirituality, and they offer some suggestions.

St. Ignatius  Loyola was an early 16th century Christian founded the Society of Jesus or the Jesuits, of which the current Pope, Pope Francis, is a part of.  And from this order came something called Ignatian Spirituality. Though I am not a Christian myself, I have found two concepts from this religious order to be quite helpful as I try to pry my quite controlling fingers off the wheel of my car of life.

One idea, as I understand it, is to look at what Jesuits call my “disordered attachments.” These are any and all of those same people, places, ideas, plans, material stuff, agendas, itineraries, and relationships that interfere with me having direct relationship with god.  It means considering, for instance, my habit of seeing myself as an island unto herself who will often decide “to just do it myself” because I somehow make myself believe that that is the easier path, which of course, it isn’t.  

Ignatian Spirituality suggests that the gift of releasing my disordered attachments is not only greater closeness with god, but also the “F” word- Freedom. 

Now I must say, dangling the “F” word right in front of my nose is absolutely a carrot to encourage me to take the less comfortable road that yields greater spiritual fruit.  The hope for freedom is what attracted me to Buddhist practices as well.  I just have to make sure that my hope for freedom does not turn into a craving or another idea to cling to- in other words, a disordered attachment.

The second idea I’ve taken from Ignatian Spirituality recently is called “Agere Contra” which means “To Act Against.”  My understanding of this practice is to act opposite to the urges or the behaviors that I want to engage in that hold me back from being free.

Some Cognitive Behavioral Psychotherapists might look at this concept and say: "There's nothing novel about this practice. That's good ol' fashion exposure therapy which we do all the time to treat Phobias."

As a psychotherapist myself, to that remark I would say two replies. One, Ignatian Spirituality came about centuries before CBT, so maybe a respectful nod of thanks toward religion might be warranted. And second, to say that Agere Contra is the same thing as Exposure Therapy is like saying Dr. Martin Luther King was just taking a walk with friends the day he marched from Selma to Montgomery in the famous Civil Rights March a half century ago. The two are just not the same.

I think it is one thing to intentionally engage our minds and our behaviors, but when we make it a trifecta that includes our heart or our souls, something miraculous shifts inside of us that forever changes the way we relate to life as a whole. 

Most of us have at one time or another lived within the narrow confines of our own comfort zone because, even if it wasn’t comfortable, it was familiar.  During these times we were meeting our needs for safety and security.  But then, we found that rather than being served by the comfort zone, we were hindered by it. Now, the comfort zone is no longer helpful because we are actually hiding out there because of doubt, insecurity, willfulness, and rigidity.  We are keeping ourselves stuck in a self-made bubble that allows for no oxygen to breathe in new life.

Agere contra is an Ignatian practice that helps us to move in the opposite direction of our comfort zone in order to release those attachments that prevent us from experiencing spaciousness and  freedom in our lives.

This is not to say that we don’t respect our own limits.  The goal is not to become unglued and too overwhelmed that we are unable to keep putting one foot in front of the other.   Safety and security remain critical.  They remain the foundation of Abraham Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs.  

But what I’m learning is sometimes a preoccupation, or disordered attachment, with one area of our lives prevents us from nurturing another area.  And in this case, beginning to release our stronghold grip on that person, place, idea, plan, material thing, agenda, itinerary, or relationship could be just what the doctor ordered, or at least god anyway.

Where I continue to get stuck is when I think my attachment is perfectly healthy and serving me well—like a specific vocational goal I have for myself—and then god swoops in with completely different view.  When I think I am going to move myself in exactly the direction I want to go in, in the exact timeframe that I want to move in.  Then suddenly, god suggests I practice Agere Contra in order to become free from my well-designed (and desired) attachments…

So it goes…I suppose that’s why spiritual practices are so humbling.  They reveal all of the juicy, smelly, tender parts of our humanity.

How do you release attachments? What practices help you to do this?