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?