Spiritual Alignment With Mindfulness

Lately I’ve been exploring what it means to be in (or out of) spiritual alignment.

Spiritual alignment is not something I have really contemplated before, but after a couple of months of yet another period of feeling ungrounded, I’ve begun to wonder if it may have to do with the fact that I live my life, for the most part, like this:

(bbc.uk.co)

Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957) wrote:

I fear nothing; I hope for nothing, I am free.

And I believe that he was right.  I’ve just never experienced it for myself.

When I step back, I am able to see with greater awareness and clarity the way in which lam constantly leaning just enough into the future, whilst I hang on to the past, which effectively leaves very little of me actually grounded in the present.

And while as I sit here at my computer writing these very words, what is problematic about this future-oriented stance toward life is glaringly obvious from a spiritual perspective, I have to say, this very same future-oriented stance is also what probably led to the majority of my successes and accomplishments because even before I had finished one project, or graduation, or committee, I was already on to the next one in my mind- if not in real time as well.

As someone who has spent a lot of her time as a behavioral psychotherapist, I am able to see how this future-oriented mind-set has had an important function in my life. 

I am also keenly aware that this mind-set, or behavior,  was heavily reinforced by my environment because I was rewarded greatly for my goal-directed ability to complete consecutive tasks.

So then, why is it problematic?

Let me answer that with an anecdote.

The other day my 8 year-old was going on and on about the XBOX that two of his friends have, and the trip to Great Wolf Lodge that someone from his class  went on, and his thoughts about how much better our lives  would be if we had a second shower/bathtub in our house (our shower was broken at the time).

It was at this point, regretfully, that I snapped and  found myself using my “mom voice” to shame him by ranting about how grateful he should be for the electronics he does have, the trips he has taken, and the shower/bathtub we do have (even if it was broken).

No, not my best parenting moment…

However, there is a silver lining.

Because mid-rant, I did have an A-HA moment, where I saw in technicolor how I was the pot calling the kettle black.

I too get caught in envy and desire, wanting and needing the next thing.

I too take on this feeling of always being slightly dissatisfied with the present moment because of the possibility of what could be more, better or next; I even secretly wonder sometimes if the label I've taken on of "seeker" is not just another extension of this same behavior.

And the science backs it up.

In 2010 Harvard University researchers Daniel Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth published an article called “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind” in Science Magazine.

The article summarized how it used modern day technology (an  iPhone app) and 2,200 study participants to test if mindfulness truly does increase happiness.

At the completion of the study, the researchers concluded:

A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost…

Unlike other animals, human beings spend a lot of time thinking about what is not going on around them, contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or will never happen at all. 

Indeed, ‘stimulus-independent thought’ or ‘mind wandering’ appears to be the brain’s default mode of operation.

Although this ability is a remarkable evolutionary achievement  that allows people to learn, reason, and plan, it may have an emotional cost.

Many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and practitioners are trained to resist mind wandering and ‘to be here now.’ These traditions suggest that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

It would seem they are correct.

Since it was over three hundred years ago French scientist and Catholic theologian Blaise Pascal wrote his observation that:

The unhappiness of a person resides in one thing, to be unable to remain peacefully in a room.

And another 2 thousand years before that, Buddhist teachings introduced and taught the First and Second Noble Truths which are:

1.)    In life there is suffering, and
2.)    Suffering manifests from craving (future) and clinging (past).

An antidote to this cycle of suffering that me, my son, and the study participants get caught up in, is one critical aspect of mindfulness which is presence, or aligning yourself with the present moment.

I call this process: spiritual alignment.

When I practice spiritual alignment, I move from a mind-state of leaning forward into the future and/or reaching into the past, to one of “now” that would look more like this:

Where I am intentionally abiding in the present.

Because this process of spiritual alignment is so difficult for me (I am absolutely one of those people in the research article who’s default mode is "wandering mind"), on occasion I will use imagery to help me with this spiritual task.

The image I use is quite simple: I imagine myself in a small row boat on a river.

The image is borrowed from the Zen tradition, and the row boat is the present moment; the river is time; and I imagine myself being safely held and carried in the row boat as it moves down the river.

What I have found, is when I use this image I am not only brought into spiritual alignment, but I also often feel a greater sensation of serenity or peacefulness because I am relieved of the efforting that is involved in that constant (unsustainable) leaning forward into the future that I do, while holding on to aspects of the past.

It enables me to experience what academic, author, and Transpersonal Psychologist Jorge N. Ferrer writes that:

Embodied spirituality views all human dimensions—body, vital, heart, mind, and consciousness—as equal partners in bringing self, community, and world into a fuller alignment with the Mystery out of which everything arises.. 

Perhaps you too may find benefits of spiritual alignment with mindfulness practice as well.

May it be so.

What is a Spirtual Warrior?

A while ago I received a cute card from a very old friend that said this:

Bee A Spiritual Warrior

"A spiritual warrior..." What does that mean?

I don't feel like I have a good definition from the secular world for this label, but in the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism (sometimes referred to as Tibetan Buddhism) there is a term called: Bodhisattva.

A bodhisattva is an individual who is dedicated to a spiritual path or enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. 

Or, in other words, a bodhisattva is someone who believes their life is inextricably tied to the lives of all others so that s/he cannot find true or ultimate spiritual freedom without others having the same experience of liberation.

These folks wholeheartedly believe the old saying: No one is free when others are oppressed.

This devotional path resonates very deeply within me, but sometimes I have a hard time conceptualizing what this path would actually look like in the concreteness of our human world. 

Therefore, sometimes I find it helpful to educate myself vicariously through the biographies of others in order to grow in my own wisdom. (This was something I learned from my mother.)

So when I try to think of a model for this type of personhood and life commitment of "spiritual warrior," the person who comes to mind is 19th century American abolitionist, Harriet Tubman.

For those of you around the world who may not know this great American, Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in the state of Maryland, and Ms. Tubman's own mother was captured in Africa and brought through the Middle Passage to slavery in America. 

However, at the age of 27, Ms. Tubman escaped slavery to the city of Philadelphia, and for most people that could and would have been enough.  That is already a heroine's story. 

But not for Ms. Tubman.

Though still a fugitive herself, standing only 5 feet tall (just like me!), and with a sum of $40,000 on her head for anyone who caught her, she made at least 19 raids into the south to rescue other enslaved men, women and children, and then led them, literally through the woods/wilderness, to freedom in New York and Canada.

Ms. Tubman's biography is of course already compelling and awe-some left here.

But for me, when I look deeper into the aspect of her faith, her spiritual life, there is another dimension of her path to enlightenment  that is revealed.

In Stephen Cope's 2012 book The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling, Mr. Cope writes:

Tubman came to believe that she would be guided by God at every step along the way. The images she used in talking about her 'journeys' were saturated with spiritual archetypes. She used bible stories of the Exodus to create a context for her journeys. She used the great spirituals as cues for 'troops' to move or stay put, to show themselves or hide themselves away.  She prayed regularly with her fugitives...

Tubman viewed herself as an instrument of God. She trusted in the power of prayer, and in the individual's ability to seize her own destiny. She believed that any person who sought to could be guided by God's hand- just as she had been.


Any person who sought to could be guided by God's hand. 

I love the egalitarian idea of this model that anyone can be a spiritual warrior, or bodhisattva, or in the case of Ms. Tubman, a Christian based in Black theology.

Anyone.

And thinking about Ms. Tubman's profound connection to god, and it's role in her life as a renegade abolitionist, has led me to consider what my relationship with god could be in  my own life as I strive to be present in this world with the same sense and embodiment of interconnectedness with all life around me.

Perhaps you may as well.

May it be so.

"10,000 Joys & 10,000 Sorrows"

Hearing about the deaths of more children (and educators) due to mass gun violence has left me in an emotional storm of deep sadness, fear and outrage.

And unfortunately, this dis-eased mind state, moves me toward old own primal instincts to crawl up and into every “false refuge” that western Buddhist teacher Tara Brach reminds us to train ourselves out of.

So instead, as I dropped off my own children at their designated schools yesterday and today, with my chest tight and my heart pounding, I merely said a silent prayer that they may be safe and protected, and I proceeded to work.

For me, this was one step out of false refuge, in order to shift my direction toward "true refuge."

But I want to go further.

I want to understand how the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows can possibly coexist in our paradoxically fragile, yet resilient, human lives.

Listen to most dharma talks or read books and interviews  by western Buddhist teacher and author (and PhD clinical psychologist) Jack Kornfield, and at some point he will refer to the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows .

In an interview with The Huffington Post in 2014, Mr. Kornfield said:

We’ve been given the extraordinary privilege of incarnating as human beings — and of course the human incarnation entails the 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows, as it says in the Tao Te Ching — but with it we have the privilege of the lavender color at sunset, the taste of a tangerine in our mouth, and the almost unbearable beauty of life around us, along with its troubles. It keeps recreating itself.

The Tao Te Ching Mr. Kornfield refers to in this statement, is an ancient Chinese text which is estimated to have been written in the 6th century BCE, and is comprised of 81 short verses that represent the basis for the philosophy and religion of Taoism.

This text, most often attributed by historians to a Chinese man named Laozi (also known as Lao-Tzu)though there is debate about this, the breathtaking wisdom that comes from each verse of the Tao Te Ching is worth your attention.

I find it helpful to read just one verse at a time in order to let its essence really penetrate me.

Lately though, I find myself just contemplating over and over what a tall order it is to actually ask the human psyche and the human heart to hold so much beauty and so much tragedy in one single lifetime at the same time.

Some examples from my own life.

When I was 12 years-old I was in a bad accident that landed me in the hospital with some pretty severe internal bleeding, and it looked like I was going to have to have surgery.  I was terrified.

I was also alone.  Neither of my parents or other family members were with me.

The doctors decided to observe me overnight, and make a decision about surgery in the morning.

Of course under those circumstances, I did no sleeping that night- with my vitals being checked every hour and my nerves being through the roof, so what I did instead was talk to Julie.

Julie was the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. nurse covering me that night, and she kept me company.

But she did so much more than keep me company.

She reassured me. She comforted me. She was kind to me.

You know that very famous Dr. Maya Angelou quote:

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Yes. 

I remember how Julie made me feel (safe and protected) when I was also scared, sad and alone.

10,000 Joys & 10,000 Sorrows.

Of course since that time (and before) there have been many other examples where life juxtaposed joy and sorrow at the same time.

Like when my best friend of 10 years ended our relationship at the same time I started to date my boyfriend turned husband.

Like losing my stepdad to AIDS in the first month of my freshman year of college.

Like having a family member take an overdose in the same month I got married.

It is, of course, also difficult to hold the dialectic of having horrific national or international tragedies occur during our most joyful moments.

Like watching the chaos and death of Hurricane Katrina in August, 2005 on the television during my honeymoon.  Or learning I was finally pregnant on the same day of the Boston Marathon Bombing.

10,000 Joys & 10,000 Sorrows.

As I was doing a little bit of internet research for this entry, I encountered a 2008 book I had not been previously familiar with called: Ten Thousand Joys & Ten Thousand Sorrows: A Couple's Journey Through Alzheimer's, and I almost immediately thought to myself: That makes total sense.

As I've written before, my father-in-law has early-onset Alzheimer's Disease, and now with his more advanced symptoms, each time I share a laugh with him or he takes me in for a big hug (he's a huge hugger!), I feel the whole complexity of all that joy, and all that sorrow, all at once.

In the same 2014 Huffington Post interview, the journalist asked Mr. Kornfield:

It’s easier for us to feel grateful for things that make us happy and that make life easy for us. But how do we learn to be grateful for life’s '10,000 sorrows'?

Mr. Kornfield responded by saying:

I remember my meditation master in the jungles of Thailand who would ask at times, Where have you learned more compassion? Where have you learned more? Where has your heart grown wiser — in just having good times, or going through difficulties? There’s a Buddhist-oriented therapy in Japan called Naikan Therapy, and one part of that training is to review your life and begin to remember all the things you have gratitude towards, even the things that were difficult and taught you lessons. Or even the people that were difficult, sometimes in your own family — [remembering] the gratitude you have for family, that they’re even there.

Well, for me, that may be advanced practice spiritual training that is beyond my kindergarten level of spiritual development at this time.

[Though, I must say, it makes sense.]

So for now, the true refuge I'm relying on the most as I try to hold these 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows is, as they say, an oldie but a goodie: the famous Ram Das phrase Be Here Now.

Be Here Now for the good, the bad, and the ugly.

I have been absorbing these words, and it's message of mindfulness, by listening (and re-listening) to the Ray LaMontagne song "Be Here Now."

The song is just over 6 minutes, has beautiful but minimalist lyrics, and has been the perfect refuge to wholeheartedly absorb the news of another mass shooting in our country.

I hope that you can find your own true refuge as well.

May it be so.

A Skeptic’s Exploration of Mystery

I often wonder if mystery really exists.

As someone who is ridiculously pragmatic, guided by universal laws like cause and effect, willing to take in, and integrate, new information through my 5 senses, and wise enough to know that I am beyond limited in my understanding of the universe in its entirety, I find the concept of “mystery” to be a little bit like Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, and The Tooth Fairy.

I realize this analogy may offend some- actually, it has, including some very close friends.

Though that it is not my intent.

I just can't stomach the word "mystery" being used as a synonym for "magic" when, as we all know, there are always concrete, logical explanations for even the best magic tricks, we just never learn what that explanation is- and I'm very okay with that.

On the other hand, I do think the word “mystery,” as a word to cover a broad spiritual concept that may include: a panacea for when we feel vulnerable and scared,  a name for the (currently) unexplainable and the (currently) unknowable, or even, sometimes, as an out when we are just too tired to dig any deeper, is definitely convenient and possibly necessary.

The “mystery” of the universe.  The “mystery” of the human brain. The “mystery” human interaction.

In fact, I love my Unitarian Universalist church services, and you can’t get through a Sunday without mention of the word “mystery” at least half a dozen times because, as far as the function of shared language goes, frankly, it works.

Except, when it doesn’t.

Sometimes, people too casually use the word “mystery” as an endpoint.  A conclusion.  The final word. 

"It's just a mystery," they'll say, "that's all there is to it," implying there is no need for us to seek or push this any further in an honest search for truth.

It reminds me of a column I read a few months ago about use of the word “evil” after a man shot and killed over 50 men and women at a country music concert in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The title of the piece was called “The Mental Bargain We Make When We Use the Word ‘Evil” by author and activist Courtney Martin.

In the column Ms. Martin writes:

Evil literally means ‘profoundly immoral and malevolent.’ In our current moment, it seems to carry a sort of metaphysical seriousness. When someone does something that we find truly inexplicable and horrible and that, importantly, we want to absolve ourselves of any responsibility for, we jump to call it evil…

We grab for the word ‘evil’ when we feel overwhelmed with the human capacity for death and destruction. When we feel grief that doesn’t know where to land. When we feel horrifically vulnerable.

That makes sense to me. We want an act like this to be considered off the understandable spectrum of people damaging one another.

The irony is that our grab for the word ‘evil’ seems all the more desperate when the suffering we’re witnessing is random. It is so uncomfortable to think that your brother or daughter or friend could die like those 50+ victims have — at any given moment, with no warning, while experiencing joy. It is even more uncomfortable, on some level, for us to admit that we could have prevented some of that death.

If it was evil, then it was inevitable…

In other words, we would rather live with the belief that evil could kill us at any moment than with the belief that we could have prevented a murder (or 50) yesterday…

‘Evil’ is a cop-out. It distances us from asking hard, important, and specific questions about how this could have been prevented and what each of us can do to save lives — actual human lives — in the future…

If there is evil here, it is complacency, and it is collective.

I want to say again, I realize even exploring the word “evil” in the context of exploring the word “mystery” may have again offended some.

As I said though, that is not my intent.

My point is to illustrate, as Ms. Martin did so well, how we must be mindful of language that leads us in a direction of narrow, reductionist explanations for our human existence- especially in the realm of our spiritual lives.  Language that puts an end to our conversation rather than encouraging more searching and seeking for transparency, authenticity and honest connection.

Language that yields the finite as opposed to the infinite.

So what, if any, room have I made in my life for “mystery,” though not in the sense of magic? 

Well, there are actually two, so far, and I’m pretty sure they over-lap in some way: consciousness and soul, and to explain, I’m going to take you to the movies.

[A side note, though not surprising I’m sure, I’m also not a fan of the words “consciousness” and “soul” either because both feel just too darn small for what they try to capture, but they are all we’ve got- for now…]

Recently, while lying sick in bed for several days, I re-watched the 2016 Australian film Lion--such a great movie, if you haven’t seen it yet, please do--and I was struck by the quantity of the movie that so elegantly conveys the depth of the internal life of a human-being non-verbally, without words.

Scenes without dialogue. Scenes of pure emotion and imagination in which the main character Saroo (an Indian boy separated from his family at age 5 who lived most of his life with his adoptive family in Australia) is seen dreaming, wandering, fantasizing, obsessing, willing, visioning, pacing and retracing the piece of himself that was lost to him over 2 decades ago, and to me, this is a gorgeous visual depiction of the mystery that exists between brain and mind, or consciousness.

In 2015 journalist Oliver Burkeman wrote an article for The Guardian newspaper called “Why Can’t the World’s Greatest Minds Solve the Mystery of Consciousness.”

In the article, which largely explains the work of author, academic and philosopher David Chalmers, Mr. Burkeman writes:

The Hard Problem of Consciousness [is] this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how does the brain manage it? How could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your skull give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being that pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached?

All great questions for which I have absolutely no answers.

But I do marvel.  And seek. And wonder, and aren’t all these words really just the verbs that we use to describe what many call “mystery” in its most expansive, inconclusive way?

Another film.

When I was 8 years-old my parents took me to see the 1985 film Cocoon.  Though not really a kid movie in any way (my parents were known to do that sort of thing), I actually loved the movie for all sorts of reasons.

But the reason that pertains to this reflection on the concept of mystery was the way the Antareans (those were the aliens who had come to earth in this particular plot) were depicted as beautiful, sweet, non-verbal, yellow/white handfuls of pure energy with “lifespans” that crossed millennia, and something inside me felt more kinship with this illustration of “humanity” than the actual human characters in the movie or in my own life.

Even as a little girl, though I did not have language for it at the time (words like “soul” were definitely not used in the secular home of my childhood), that visual depiction of the Antareans, to me, looked like the mysterious spiritual quality of “soul.”

Now, fast forward 32 years, and I still feel that mysterious truth each time I look into my son’s “beautiful, sweet,” almond shaped hazel eyes: the truth that “he” existed before his body was here, and “he” will exist long after his body is gone.  As will I.

Some might call that “soul,” and if that is not a mystery in its most infinite sense of the word, I don’t know what is.

So that's all I've got (for now) on the topic of mystery: consciousness and soul.  But remember, I'm a seeker, so the topic for me is wide open.

Is it for you too?