Why "Motherhood" in the Spiritual Life?

People have asked me why I included “Motherhood” in the title of this blog: Meditation, Motherhood, Mysticism & More.

 

So on the 2 Year Anniversary of this Blog, I would like to answer that question with one of my favorite Zen Sayings:

Before I was enlightened, I chopped wood and carried water. 

After I was enlightened, I chopped wood and carried water.

Or in my case:

            Before I began to awaken, I read bedtime stories and changed diapers.

            While I continue to awaken, I read bedtime stories and change diapers.

Making the decision, and I do consider it a decision, to intentionally engage in spiritual and religious practices during young motherhood absolutely shaped, and continues to shape, my mystical journey. How could it not? These two life game-changers happened simultaneously.

One could try to argue that my career, the field of psychotherapy, could be substituted in for the word “Motherhood” in the title of this blog.  Because, for certain, my spiritual life is integrated into my professional life and craft in any number of ways, and vice versa.

The thing is, aside from the fact that "Psychotherapy" does not start with the letter "M," in August, 2014 I had a 9 month-old infant and a 5 year-old son in addition to a career as a psychotherapist, and at that time I knew my experience as a mother was going to shape my spiritual life and my spiritual life was going to shape my life as a mother more than, at that time, my life as a psychotherapist (or wife, or friend, or daughter, or sister, or citizen, or social worker, or any of the other hosts of hats that we all may wear).

So I believe it was a knowing, a piece of intuitive wisdom if you will, that told me motherhood was a key that would unlock something inaccessible to me thus far (and unknown), and I wanted to honor that experiential awakening in the title of this blog.

The title was also a reminder.

I wanted a visible reminder of the reality that it is my belief, like others, that there is no outcome in a spiritual life.  There is no goal to attain.

However, as a goal-oriented Type A, this is something that is very hard for me to remember, so I need the reminder, daily.

Susan O’Brien, a Meditation Teacher at the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, MA who I was fortunate enough to have at a 5-day Silent Meditation Retreat said in one of her Dharma Talks called Hoping, Fearing, Seeing the Truth:

We can find, sometimes, this desire for paradise in our efforts.  Wanting something other…

But what if we shift our perspective a little bit?  If we are holding enlightenment out here, as something distant, something so distant, so perfect, so paradise, as to make it un-attainable. What if we trusted that our very nature is enlightenment?

And that our job here on the cushion and in our lives is to see what obscures that.  What covers it over.  What blocks it- that natural state of awake, being, that we are.

Twentieth century Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki talked about the need for this very same reminder in his classic book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.

He wrote in his chapter called "Right Attitude:"

"I have often talked to you about a frog, and each time everybody laughs. But a frog is very interesting. He sits like us, too, you know. But he does not think that he is doing anything so special.  When you go to a zendo and sit, you may think you are doing some special thing. While your husband of wife is sleeping, you are practicing zazen! You are doing some special thing, and your spouse is lazy! That may be your understanding of zazen. But look at the frog. A frog also sits like us, but he has no idea of zazen. Watch him. If something annoys him, he will make a face. If something comes along to eat, he will snap it up and eat, and he eats sitting. Actually that is our zazen- not any special thing."

For all those parents out there like me who are also currently raising young children and live with a spouse who does not also practice daily (like the frog, no judgment), then you know as well  as I do, that our time to practice meditation, prayer or yoga may feel like sacred, set aside time for you, but it is certainly not off limits to our beloveds.

By putting "Motherhood" in the title of this blog, I was reminding myself that my spiritual and religious life would be in the context of my chaotic, messy family life- as it should be.

Shunryu Suzuki said: "When you become you, Zen becomes Zen. When you are you, you see things as they are, and you become one with your surroundings."  My surroundings where I practice daily is the company of my young children.  To not include them would be to deny my reality.

The last reason I wanted "Motherhood" in the title of this blog was because, for me, motherhood turned on a light switch of awakening inside of me, but the awakening did not bring me to any different place (externally or internally) than I already was. 

For some Type A’s (me) that can be a tough one to swallow.

Yet, somewhere between the 3^rd consecutive hour of walking my crying baby up and down the hallway to soothe him, calling out of work on a very busy day to stay home with a toddler with a fever, cutting costs in the family budget to cover daycare costs, I ended up getting a lot of practice in deep spiritual lessons off the cushion (and the mat, and the sanctuary) of:

v  discipline,

v  patience,

v  non-attachment,

v  self-awareness,

v  compassion,

v  empathy,

v  right speech,

v  right action,

v  resistance,

v  sleepiness/fatigue,

v  non-judgmental stance,

v  focused attention,

v  sympathetic joy,

v  among others like impermanence, inter-being, interconnection and understanding ego.

What’s more, the parenting equivalent of “chopping wood and carrying water” was and is paradoxically both the practice and the fruit.  There’s a koan for you…

Spiritual memoirist and novelist Sue Monk Kidd comes to mind again (I’ve been quoting her a lot lately…) as she has written and talked in interviews about the very idea that the spiritual life is extraordinary in its oh-so ordinary nature.

In an interview where Ms. Kidd described a moment awakening that she once had on the way to the post office she said:

It's so ordinary. That's what I love about the spiritual life, is that it's so utterly ordinary, and it should be really. It's both extraordinary and ordinary. Sometimes those moments of awakening or knowing can come when we least expect it.

It certainly was unexpected for me, that’s for sure. 

If someone had told me in my twenties that I would begin to consciously walk a spiritual life in my thirties, I would have thought: “You are nuts! You obviously don’t know me at all!”

Well, it turned out I didn’t know me- a part of me anyway. 

I was still asleep to the spiritual being inside of me.  It’s like she was lying dormant until I became a mother and that light switch turned on.

Swiss Psychiatrist, C.G. Jung, described the possibility of this latent True Self the following way in his writing  Man and His Symbols with the metaphor of a Pine Tree Seed.

The seed of a mountain pine contains the whole future tree in a latent form; but each seed falls at a certain time onto a particular place, in which there are a number of special factors, such as the quality of the soil and the stones, the slope of the land, and its exposure to the sun and wind. The latent totality of the pine in the seed reacts to these circumstances by avoiding the stones and inclining toward the sun, with the result that the tree's growth is shaped. Thus an individual pine slowly comes into existence, constituting the fulfillment of its totality, its emergence into the realm of reality. Without the living tree, the image of the pine is only a possibility or an abstract idea.

Perhaps for me, motherhood contained just enough of those “special factors” to awaken a spiritual seed inside of me that was already there.  And for that, I am infinitely grateful.

What special factors prompted your own awakening?

Spiritual Cloud Coverage

One week ago I took a train right up into the clouds.

It began like fog, but as the train continued to climb up the mountain past the 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 foot mark, I was officially in cloud territory; where I could not see more than 50 feet in front of me.

Some fellow travelers on the train were quite upset.

After all, we had just paid good money to view a mountain range that would have been spectacular had it not been for the fog and cloud coverage.

On any other day I probably would have been disappointed right with them; grumbling about my idealized mountain summit experience being ruined. 

But this time, I wasn’t.

No, for me, the external landscape of fog and clouds was in absolute synchronicity with my internal landscape.  And on this day, the generous mirroring of my inside and outside geography was deeply cathartic.

Every so often one my children will be crying and deeply upset, but when I ask them: “what happened? Why are you upset?”  They can only just barely sputter out between breaths “I-don’t-know,” and it seems the “I-don’t-know” part is just as distressing and confusing as the upset part.

I am in one of those times right now.

Not the upset and crying side of things per se, but rather the reality that I know I am in a deep space of emotion, yet I can’t seem to put together the “why” or even find the “right” words to accurately and articulately describe what I am feeling.

This is making me crazy.

I’ve heard novelist and memoirist Dani Schapiro say that sometimes she does not know what she is thinking or feeling until she writes it.  But what if you can’t even do that?

I found this poem recently by German Rainer Maria Rilke that seemed to brush against this current experience inside me. (Leave it to Rilke to find the right words…)

It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.
I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.

(my underline)

Rilke’s offering of the “solid rock” image has profoundly resonated with me. The sensation inside me is like a cement boulder locked inside my chest, impenetrable. Yet I do not feel heavy, weighed-down or tired as one might expect.  And this sensation has left me preoccupied with so many unanswered questions. Like:

ü  What the hell is it?

ü  Is it something that wants to be born? Or something I am holding on to?

ü  Is it something to do with my soul? Or something to do with my ego?

ü  Should I put in more time and effort to explore it? Or just let it be?

ü  Does this experience warrant a move toward mystery or insight?

ü  Is this experience reflective of faith or ignorance?

I’d like to tell you that after several weeks (yes, weeks!) of this I have come up with some brilliant answers, but I gotta confess, I got nothin’.

And even though the famous Swiss Psychoanalyst Carl Jung said: “Man, as we realize if we reflect for a moment, never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely.” I still find it so aggravating!

Personally, I like my boxes nice and neat, preferably with a bow on top. I like movement toward extravagant finish lines that have trophies and t-shirts for the winners.

So for me, not having answers can feel like spiritual mess and confusion which is just so, messy…

Not to mention, it feels like being painfully stuck; like watching the most esoteric, philosophical, black and white documentary- in slow motion. 

Like I said, painful.

What then, at times like these, helps one get through?

Well, for me, this time around, I have found 2 things very helpful both independently of each other and inter-dependently together: 1.) Imagery and metaphor and 2.) Women’s spiritual stories.

In the 20^th century Carl Jung re-awakened the role and value of imagery and metaphor in Western Consciousness in the form of symbolism.  In Man and His Symbols he said:

It is the role of religious symbols to give a meaning to the life of man. The Pueblo Indians believe that they are the sons of Father Sun, and this belief endows their life with a perspective (and a goal) that goes far beyond their limited existence. It gives them ample space for the unfolding of personality and permits them a full life as complete persons.

I love this idea that a symbol could create “ample space” inside of us- especially when we are feeling particularly cramped and constricted, and paradoxically for me, the fog and clouds was the very symbol to do this.  Unlike words or spiritual practices that seem to require intellectual vigor or else time and effort on the part of an individual, what is elegant about an image or metaphor is the very grace of it because all that is required is allowance.

In one of her interviews after writing The Invention of Wings, novelist and memoirist Sue Monk Kidd said:

We have to acknowledge sometimes that this moment is enough. This place is enough. I am enough. It's okay. And if I never seek another thing, it's enough. And it grounds us in our own being. It grounds us in home. Home.

Being in the fog and clouds, embracing their gray, misty cover as metaphor, was extraordinarily grounding for me (and spacious)- leaving me with the sense that the world and I were just where we should be without any effort on my part at all.

Which brings me to my second helpful tool during times of spiritual confusion and stuckness: Women’s spiritual stories.

There are times when Mr. Carl Jung (and Joseph Campbell and Thomas Moore and even Rainer Maria Rilke too) and I must part ways.  Times when I need to see pronouns like “she” and “her.” Times when I need to read the words “feminine” and “heroine.”  Times when I need the real life, how-do-you-do-it spiritual stories of mostly modern women who are imperfectly walking a spiritual path, and are brave enough to share their awakenings and pitfalls with others.

During these times I choose to re-read spiritual memoirs and spiritual texts by women that I’ve read already once or twice before, listen to, watch interviews and/or visit (when possible )women who I call “Marys.”

“Marys” are elder women who are wise, funny and smart role models, and spending with them--in word or en vivo--is most therapeutic for me.

And last of all, a way I connect with women's spiritual stories is through conscious, mindful,  contact with the mother of us all, the natural world.

So in these past weeks, to help me tolerate this “solid rock” in my chest, I have re-read Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith and Sue Monk Kidd’s The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine which were just pure joy to read again.

There are so many passages from these 2 books that I love so much but just to remind you of a few:

–Anne Lamott

v  “I’m a sucker for a great resurrection story.”

v  “The bad news is that whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you.”

v  “The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it, like a nicotine craving, I would discover that it hadn’t washed me away.  After a while it was like an inside shower, washing off some of the rust and calcification in my pipes. It was like giving a dry garden a good watering. Don’t get me wrong: grief sucks; it really does. Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life, of the now, of a sense of living spirit.”

v  “When you’re on the high wire, you have to use every ounce of grace and skill and awareness and loyalty you can muster just to get to the other side. But that’s the gift, to have to use that kind of attention and focus, and it shows up around your eyes.”

v  “I was desperate to fix him, fix the situation, make everything happy again, and then I remembered this basic religious principle that God isn’t there to take away our suffering or our pain but to fill it with his or her presence…”

-Sue Monk Kidd

v  “In a way my whole life has been about waking up and then waking up some more.”

v  “There had been so many things I hadn’t allowed myself to see, because if I fully woke to the truth, then what would I do? How would I be able to reconcile myself to it? The truth may set you free, but first it will shatter the safe, sweet way you live.”

v  “Perhaps it’s possible to forgive in one grand swoop, but I didn’t experience it that way. I did it in bits and pieces, one stage at a time…You forgive what you can, when you can. That’s all you can do. To forgive does not mean overlooking the offense and pretending it never happened. Forgiveness means releasing our rage and our need to retaliate, no longer dwelling on the offense, the offender, and the suffering, and rising to a higher love. It is an act of letting go so that we ourselves can go on.”

v  “My body had recognized it as the truth even before my mind could allow it.”

I could have re-read any number of other spiritual memoirs by women (books often devalued in the media and popular culture as “chic lit” or “self-help,” but that is a soap box for another time) or spiritual texts written by women, but these 2 sufficed this time because each woman was able to tell and retell the story of a spiritual heroine; a story that is deeply nourishing to me even though I cannot completely articulate all the reasons why.

Seeking out “Marys” to lean into the spiritual lives of women has also been very helpful in the past few weeks. 

Two quick examples.  One, is I chose to visit a great-Aunt of mine who is 86 years-old. 

She’s a fantastic woman who stands a mere five feet tall like me, actually she may even be shorter now due to a little osteoporosis, but remains sharp as a tack and quite a spit-fire.  I could listen to her tell stories all day long- definitely a “Mary.”

The other “Mary” example is re-listening to a radio interview with author and environmentalist Joanna Macy.  Ms. Macy is also 86 years-old just like my great-aunt, also sharp as a tack, definitely a spit fire, and full of so much wisdom. 

Here are a couple of nuggets from her interview just to get a taste:

v  “You're always asked to sort of stretch a little bit more, but actually we're made for that. There's a song that wants to sing itself through us. We just got to be available.”

v  “You become what you love.”

v  “We are called to not run from the discomfort and not run from the grief or the feelings of outrage or even fear and that, if we can be fearless, to be with our pain, it turns. It doesn't stay static. It only doesn't change if we refuse to look at it, but when we look at it, when we take it in our hands, when we can just be with it and keep breathing, then it turns. It turns to reveal its other face, and the other face of our pain for the world is our love for the world, our absolutely inseparable connectedness with all life.”

The last way I’ve tried to help myself bear this recent weather pattern of spiritual fog and clouds is by bathing myself in the feminine during my encounters with the natural world- which has included many hours of weeding my vegetable and herb garden (in fact my garden has never looked so good). 

Always a go-to for me.  Never lets me down.  One could argue, the natural world is my Mother Superior of all the Marys. 

Therefore, each time I watch a gray heron flap her wings across the blue sky, each time I sit quietly listening to the leaves move in unison on the tops of the trees, and the one recent time I met a box turtle on my bike ride along the New England Rails to Trails, I “relax my heart” (to borrow a phrase from author, psychologist and Buddhist teacher Tara Brach), and come home to the present moment with a profound sensation of interconnectedness.

Whether through symbol, imagery, metaphor, women’s spiritual stories or whatever you find most helpful, I pray that you may also find a way to skillfully maneuver through whatever “solid rock” lies lodged in your own heart space.

May it be so.

A Little Kindness Goes A Long Way

Last week I watched my neighbor’s house burn down.

It was before 5 a.m., and my husband woke me up with a start by the sharp tone of voice he used to call out my name.

I jumped out of bed immediately and ran over to the window of our bedroom where my husband was standing and looking out to the street.

To my shock, I saw red and blue swirling lights going by our house by the dozens.  Police cars, fire trucks and ambulances were speeding up our street and parking on our lawn. Volunteer fire fighters were jumping out of their personal vehicles parked haphazardly on the street, dressing in their gear as they ran up the street to the fire. 

One firefighter parked his vehicle in our driveway, and didn’t even slow down enough to shut off the engine or close the door to his truck.  He just slipped out of his flip flops and dressed for the fire right then and there.

I have to say, it was both overwhelming and awe-inspiring to watch these tragic events unfold.

My husband and I watched as neighbors who lived on either side of the fire run out of their homes with their pets and children with worry that the fire might spread to their homes as well. 

While other neighbors whose homes were in safe distance from the fire began to bring out bottles of water to the families and emergency personal as they worked over a period of hours to stop the spread of the fire. 

Meanwhile, my husband and I fearfully reminded each other how extremely dry this summer has been in our neck of the woods, leaving the grass, bushes and trees partially dead and very susceptible to fire.  

I found myself just repeating over and over, “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.” It was like I just could not find any other words at that moment. No other words would fit.  

My plea to god only began to slow down when we learned from a police officer who was standing post at the edge our yard that the entire family and their 2 dogs had made it out of the house safely. 

Now fast forward to last night.

My family and I were taking an after dinner walk around the neighborhood together, and we ran into a member of the family who had lost her home in the fire. 

The woman was taking her two dogs for a walk, an activity she’s done hundreds of times, but last night she looked and sounded different; the kind of different that only a before-and-after-type of traumatic experience can do to a person.

We stopped and spoke briefly to her while my 2 year-old daughter pet her little black dogs. 

She told us how the fire had taken all of their belongings. She told us that the renter’s insurance would not cover the cost of housing while they looked for a new home.  

We told her to please let us know if there is anything we can do- though our words felt small and not enough.

But then, she surprised us.

This woman, who had rescued her 2 daughters and 2 dogs from a burning fire while her husband was finishing his 3^rd shift job and it was still dark outside, said she was “overwhelmed by the kindness” showed by our neighbors and her church. 

She said that for the month of August she and her family would be staying for one week intervals at the homes of people in the community who were away for summer vacation.  Folks who already had plans to be out of town for the week offered their home to the family who’s house had just burned down, thereby covering the cost of housing at least until the time school starts again.

As the woman told the story, her usual confident and efficient face looked incredibly soft and vulnerable.  She was visibly moved by the expression of care and concern from others.  I was moved as well.

When I got home from the walk that night, I thought of the American poet Naomi Shihab Nye who wrote the poem “Kindness.”

In an interview with NPR, Ms. Nye shared that the poem was written in a moment in time when she had herself been made vulnerable involuntarily. 

At the time the poem was written the poet said she and her husband were traveling in South America, and they had found themselves robbed of all their belongings including their money and passports.

Ms. Nye said the poem came to her after she was approached by a local man while sitting alone and vulnerable on the side of the road without her most important possessions.  

Her poem, “Kindness,” goes like this:

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.”

What’s also interesting about the poet’s story, is that in this case, the local man did not offer any tangible goods to the poet.  And he did not offer money or a ride to the embassy to get a temporary passport.  No, what the man offered was hisempathy and kindness. 

As the poet told it, the man, the stranger, simply said in Spanish, “What happened to you?” And then he listened, and looked visibly sad as the poet shared her traumatic experience of being robbed and in fact witnessing a murder as well of another passenger who had been riding the bus with them.

When Ms. Nye finished her awful story, she says the man just sincerely said, “I’m very sorry. I’m very, very sorry that happened,” and then continued on his way.

I like this poem, and I like the story of the origin of this poem. 

It reminded me that there is value to kindness that goes far beyond the concreteness of goods and services (though these things are extremelyimportant too).  Listening to my neighbor tell the story of watching her house burn down, and then scrambling to get basic needs met for her and her family, while simultaneously experiencing an out-pouring of generosity, was both terrifying and uplifting all at once.

Perhaps that is the grace of kindness. 

Like her shadow counterpart, grief, kindness seems to show up at the most paradoxical and bewildering times, leaving us to only humbly marvel at the mystery of reality and the hopeful possibilities for our own human evolution.

May you be graced with kindness today.

Prayer, Food & Interconnection

I confess, I forget all the time, multiple times a day.  (Even when I really, really try,)

I forget all the time that I am inter-connected with all others and all of life.

It’s like I need to have 20^th century Physicist Albert Einstein’s famous words stapled to my forehead as a reminder that I am not alone.  I am not separate.

And just in case you have “forgotten” those celebrated quasi-Dharmic words, they go as follows…

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.

This habit of forgetting my interconnection has begun to bother me.  I felt like I was talking the talking, but not walking the walking.

In a talk I heard Author, Buddhist teacher and Clinical Psychologist Tara Brach refer to this "forgetting" as a trance or illusion.  She suggested one of the benefits of a meditation practice or a prayer practice is to decondition the trance of the small self or the egoic self- the self that thinks we are an island unto ourselves.

[Of note: It you are  like me with more than a few perfectionistic tendencies, there might be a tendency to approach this practice with some frustration with yourself, or maybe even harshness.  To this I will add a few more words by Tara Brach who has written about her own journey deconditioning this trance of unworthiness. She reminds us: "while separation is an illusion, it is a very powerful illusion." So if you can, try to stay compassionate and tender toward yourself as you work with this form of inner resistance.  I will too.]

So what was I to do?

I wanted to a strategy to at least begin to decondition this habit of mine that, at times, could feed feelings of loneliness and disconnection.

In Ms. Brach's second book True Refuge, she writes in more detail about prayer as a spiritual practice.  She writes:

Your formal exploration of prayer creates  the grounds for weaving shorter prayers into your life. Remembering to pray in the midst of daily activities will help you become aligned with the kindness and wisdom of your heart. [my underlining]

My longing for a greater sense of interconnection led me to begin a new spiritual practice at mealtime.  The practice, in this case a prayer, was meant to be a portal for increasing my awareness and moment to moment experience of interconnection.

And, as Ms. Brach suggested, the practice was quite simple: before each meal, I’ve decided to pause before I begin to eat. Some might call it a prayer.

Now, I grant you, elegant people and soulful cultures have been taking a moment to pause or pray before a meal, often as a family or a community as a whole, for millennia.  But for me, this is new. (What can I say, my family and cultural lineage were not all that elegant or soulful…)

In these moments, at breakfast, lunch and dinner, I pray specifically to remember my interconnection with, clichéd though it may be, the web of life.

I start by looking down at the contents of my plate.  Or as Buddhist teacher and author Thich Nhat Hanh says, I “look deeply” at the food.

Then I apply all those ‘ol mindfulness skills to bring into my heart all of the individuals, animals, plants, and organizations that were a part of the creation of, and transportation of, that dish. 

I’ll tell you what, depending on what you are eating, it can actually take quite a while.

When I’m done, I say a quiet “thank you” in my mind to those very same individuals, animals, plants, and organizations who contributed to the nourishment of my body, and I hold sacred space for the interconnection between us.

After several weeks of praying before each meal, I can tell you I like this new ritual. 

It feels right and good.  Like the embodiment of these two poems by the 13^th century Sufi Persian Poet Jalaladdin Muhammad Rumi:

…When the soul lies down in the grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn’t make any sense.

---------------------------------------------------

…There’s nothing to believe.

Only when I quit believing in myself

did I come into this beauty…

Day and night I guarded the pearl of my soul.

Now in this ocean of pearling currents,

I’ve lost track of which was mine.

Now let’s see if my new practice can help me to forget a little less that my perspective of myself as separate and alone truly is, as Mr. Einstein asserted all those years ago, just an optical delusion.

How do you remember your interconnection with all others?  What spiritual practices and rituals help you remember that you are not separate and alone?