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?
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