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 3rd 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?
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