Category: Practice

Positive change takes effort and intent.  Small persistent steps can move us forward over great distances.

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The Power of Deep Dive Reflection

I usually see my path as it advances, eyes forward, looking to see what insights might be waiting up ahead. Every so often, it is helpful to look back and see the distance traveled. I recently did a deep dive reflection that included this question:

“Has there been a time when something you believed about God, the Divine, spirituality, or the meaning of life changed profoundly? What happened, and what emerged from that experience?”

Memories come flooding back.

I see the small-town church where I was raised. It was a loving place. There was no fire and brimstone, only the Gospel preached by a mysterious rabbi who wandered the plains of Palestine, imploring people to be more forgiving than resentful, to care for the stranger, to love their neighbor. I marveled at his courage and wisdom, and tried to follow the path he laid out. I believed; I was confirmed; I was active in youth ministry; I felt held and loved. This was where my spiritual yearnings were first awakened.

That life was my foundation, and so when the belief scaffold began to crumble under the weight of reason, it was a hard fall. I could not reconcile the inner presence I felt with Christian tenets that said salvation required specific beliefs. Jesus told me to forgive transgressions continually, not seven times, but seventy times seven. How could such boundless forgiveness be a commandment if God could not abide a person’s honest convictions? The contradictions mounted. I asked questions, but the theological answers I was given were dry, detached from the experience of love I had thought was the heart of Christianity.

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Deep Listening

The way we frame things changes how we see. I’ve recently started viewing my spiritual practice through the lens of listening, and I have been surprised and enriched at the many layers.

Because I’m a visual and mental person, listening shifts my attention to a different mode, less used, underappreciated. A stream of thoughts is always running in my mind, flowing at different rates, but pausing to listen can slow it to a trickle. The pause makes room for my perceptions to widen, to gather jewels I would normally miss. At any point in the day, I can stop and pay attention to the sounds around me. Even in the most urban environments, I can hear the notes of birdsong, or the whisper of a breeze. Underneath the melody of a song I’ve heard a hundred times, there is a rolling bass line I’d never noticed. When I tune in, there is more.

Or in conversation, if I concentrate on listening instead of drafting replies in my head, I pick up tone and nuance that paint a fuller picture. For any of us, there is more going on inside than we can express with words. Listening puts me in touch with the person behind the words, and it is the person, after all, I want to understand. It is as if I bring a part of the person inside myself. If I listen well, the other person feels heard. The intimacy between us deepens.

In meditation, my listening begins as auditory, hearing sounds in the room, or the sound of my breathing, but usually shifts to placing attention on my beingness. Listening turns inside itself, an organ or perception that is not physical, an entry into other worlds. The curtains of my inner life rustle. The lesser spaces that are normally unnoticed come into focus and flourish, responding to my attention like plants to sunlight. The physical and nonphysical start to merge. My breath, drifting in and out of my chest and belly, aligns with energies that were hidden. I listen to find what is here, what these energies want to do, if they want to move or remain. Rolling tide or spacious calm; magnetic force or gravity at rest; a fountain of sparks or silence. Moments come when listening is not an action I am doing, the verb and noun collapse, there is only pure curiosity. I sense anticipation, but without the forward leaning I usually add – the urge to know what will arrive and compare it with my expectations.

My identity, which depends so heavily on my need to know, loosens. My self-image was always a bubble, a mental construct that kept essence at a distance. But essence keeps tapping my shoulder, reminding me that my need for certainty is not a need, but a choice. Deep listening leaves me wide open. It is not that the window is fully open, it is that there are no walls to hold a window.

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When Virtue is Lacking

Some days, I feel I’ve been dropped into someone else’s dream, a world I do not recognize.

Leaders with the judgment and appetites of adolescents wage wars for the sake of ego. Aggression and naked power are rewarded. Respect for the rule of law, even a sense of basic fairness, is eroding. Personal values like character and integrity are mocked as naive. The fever of greed is growing into a cancer. The structures of society are warped when they no longer serve society, but are manipulated to funnel obesity to a few while millions scratch out a bare existence.

And these could be the early days. It sickens me to watch humanity’s slow descent into moral madness. We are capable of being so much better.

I can’t help thinking this is not the game I came to play, that I am living in the wrong time, one not suited to my talents and temperament. My talents are collaboration, friendship, warmth. I am here to foster good relations, positive regard, mutual respect. My temperament is accommodating, inquisitive, willing to overlook false exteriors to see where goodness is hiding. My soft skills seem wasted in a landscape so harsh. I want to call out to the Gods, “Why am I here at this time? What is being asked of me?”

I want a thunderclap, but there is only silence. So I sit with my questions, and my longing, and my aching grief. Silence, actively encountered, is not nothing. It is a void, but it is fertile, a place worth visiting. When I slow my mind, gaps appear. Fresh insights sneak through the cracks, sprouting among my complaints, like this: Perhaps what is being asked of me is to grow.

Our evolution, both personal and cosmic, has never advanced in times of ease, but only in the heat of friction, where our vision of what can be abrades against the world as it is. I have a talent for words, an ability to describe events that sheds light into the corners. My temperament is steadfast, willing to endure. The bag of tools I carry may be exactly what is needed to show what decency looks like, more striking in its contrast. The mirror may arouse kindness in hearts where it lies dormant. The modeling of virtue by people of virtue is its own kind of power.

We are going somewhere. An intuition deep in the grain of my being tells me we are on a path of progress, that our current times are not a devolution, but a temporary backslide, and that we each have something to give that adds momentum to the good. Why, then, would I consider retreating? How can I expand the limits of virtue if I don’t pursue it, if I fade in the face of difficulty to tend my bruises and abrasions? When virtue is lacking in the world, it is needed most from me.

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To See What’s Here

My throat is easy. Cool air falls inside, fills me, then expels. My arms and neck begin to relax just from noticing the sticky points. I am sitting with no other purpose than to see what’s here, to feel the shape of my body as it meets the shape of a living moment. I feel my clothes, my feet. I feel a flake of dust in my nose.

I remember sitting at a retreat years ago in a tired building, dust on the curtains and the sills, dust floating in the light from the window, beautiful but musty. My nose itched, and I was afraid I would sneeze, violating the silence, a bother to everyone around me. How embarrassing for the newbie.

I realize my mind has wandered. I bring it back. Watching my breath, I’m struck by how physical the air feels as it slides along the physical passage of my throat and lungs, a moving volume with substance, brushing against my own substance, my body more real, overly real, because I am aware of the movement. In truth, this is just my body as it always is, but it is a physicalness I usually ignore. To pause and soak it in by concentrating my attention is hypnotizing.

How would I describe this hyper-physicalness? Who would be interested? There is a friend I know who would enjoy the conversation. We would talk about the newness, the freshness, the way our bodies become more alive when we take the time to feel them. We share words, descriptions, an eager back and forth, a conversation about the body that makes me forget my body.

I realize I have wandered again. I come back from the conversation that never happened, all imagined cinema. It appeared real while I was in it, but when I stepped out, it collapsed. The contrast is startling, between the movie in my mind, flat and weightless, and the vibrant fullness of my body when awareness is present. I return to the warmth and weight of my body. I feel my lungs mingling particles of me with the cool air, creating each new breath, alive for a moment and then passed on. The words and descriptions in the movie are still here, floating like dust in the sunlight, but they no longer compel my attention. Even the words I am writing now seem removed, hanging in the background. Awareness has absorbed me – grounded, palpable, vivid. A feeling of pure presence fills my body and the space around my body, expanding outward, brimming, boundary-less. My body is still. My mind is still. The volume, still.

I feel an icy pinprick. My throat catches, my blood runs quick. Something is afraid, a piece deep within me shouts a warning to pull back before I am lost in this uncontained spaciousness. I am confused. The expanding volume is peaceful, blissful, but unfamiliar, and the fearful piece has been trained to treat anything foreign as a danger. I stay. I watch the confusion, I feel the fear, I let it grow. I expect a firebomb, but it pops like a firecracker and is gone.

The volume settles back. I invite the fearful piece inside, she needs attention. I sit with everything – the peace, the weight, the fear, the physical intimacy, the breath that seems to occupy the fullness of it all. Time moves unsped, as if through water. I feel no need to strive, to bring about something different. I am suspended in direct experience, unfiltered, conscious.

It is a morning, like other mornings. When I get up to go about my day, this heightened perception will linger. Tomorrow will be different. I will sit again with no other purpose than to see what’s here.

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Tending My Most Precious Resource

The quality of my attention guides the trajectory of my spiritual growth. It’s the beating heart at the center of any practice – watching the breath in meditation, feeling the body stretch and find new shape in yoga, searching inward during prayer. My ability to direct and sustain my attention is what opens all possibilities. Without it, I’m adrift, bouncing between events, controlled by old patterns that no longer serve me.

As I experience it, the major obstacle to shifting the seat of my consciousness are my patterns of past conditioning. I spent my early years learning the wonders and terrors of being a physical being in a material world. My ego learned how to navigate life at the level of survival and acquisition, avoiding what hurt and pursuing what I desired. These ego skills were useful, necessary steps in my development, and I am grateful for them. But they created internal structures of belief that spring into action automatically. I have to encounter and redirect these patterns in order to grow. And I can’t do that if I don’t see them.

My attention is like a tender plant with deep roots. It needs my care. With water, it blooms. Neglected, it withers. All it takes is for me to use it with awareness, to place attention on whatever I am experiencing and let it instruct me. When I do, new worlds step out from the ordinary. A flat curtain opens and the scene gains depth. Colors become colors because I notice. Details share their fullness. Immediate. Intimate. But when I am caught in the old patterns, I lose touch with my attention. My senses retreat, details flatten. Life skims along the surface in a dull, repetitive motion. The sacred evaporates.

In a world of constant distraction, my attention is always at risk. My screens are never far away, calling to me, promising rich experience. But they are engineered by those who know well the patterns of my past conditioning and how to tickle my addictive vulnerabilities. The screens are happy to have me stay, devouring my attention for as long as they can. Luckily, the roots are resilient. It doesn’t take much to strengthen them. Radical abstinence is not needed, there is great value in small steps. Moving the rudder, even slightly, changes where the ship ends up.

I have been trying small steps lately to reduce my screen time. I avoid going to my devices first thing in the morning. I spend the first hour of the day enjoying the analog world. Everything I need will be there later, but the first light of morning will be gone. I’ve gone back to wearing a wristwatch so I don’t reach for the phone to see the time. When I feel an impulse to open my laptop, I spend a moment paying attention to the urge itself. Sometimes I find the need was not so important, that it was more out of habit.

I have not mastered these steps, it’s a work in progress. I try to remember that everything is practice. My response to every occasion leaves an impression, a thumbprint history of my experience. I hold on to as many of the good ones as I can, and let the stale ones fall away.

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The Currency of Truth

There is a beauty in our common connective tissue. Even though we are distinct, each with a unique personality and purpose, we share a common ground where our perspectives overlap. We don’t always see it, distracted by the noise and busyness of life, but when the lens opens, we see something in each other that we recognize as us. In that flash of recognition, a live current flows between us, closing the gap. The current feels true.

I’m concerned that our common ground is eroding because we are losing the ability to discern what is true. When any image, video, or newsfeed can be faked, whole landscapes of reality fabricated, we become disoriented. I fear we are fragmenting from each other, reality fading into a blurry background where truth is whatever volume of opinion is shouted loudest. We risk losing the fragile beauty of our human connection, a loss that is hard to replace.

We need to step back and consciously assess how we value truth. In our chaotic times, it‘s natural that we grasp for any handhold to understand what is going on. Unfortunately, the sources of information we reach for are the ones being manipulated. Our screens have become so useful, so embedded, we turn to them instinctively, hoping they will answer our questions and our worries. There is useful information there, but it is awash in an ocean of debris. I want to stay informed, but information is not enough. I need to find the deeper currency of truth that not only guides my actions, but refreshes my humanity. For me, this means developing an inner way of knowing, a complementary faculty to fact-finding and analysis.

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Choosing the Stance of Love

During my short ride on this planet, I want my efforts to add weight to the sum of goodness. At the deepest bedrock, I sense that life is more than a competition for possessions and comforts that feather my nest at the expense of others, that I am here to help shape a world that is better for my having walked here. I want my basic orientation to be one of service, helping, and healing. I would call it a stance of love. I am not alone. Most people share this desire, want to know they are contributing to something bigger. The drive to foster love is a human fundamental.

I feel momentum behind this stance, a wind at my back. It is more than an accumulation of separate people, however numerous, making individual moral choices. Taking a stance of love seems to align with forces flowing through the fabric of existence, like the gravity that pulls the planets through the heavens. Every act that furthers love is rowing with the current; every act in opposition struggles against the waves.

How do I know this? I take a reading from my internal compass. When I give or receive a kindness, I feel the flow, a palpable warmth surging through me. Conversely, I recoil from unkindness. My compass recognizes what is alien, a foreign body my spiritual immune system must reject.

But what about that other human fundamental, the drive for survival that runs on fear and warps our minds? In its more distorted phase, we could call it evil. Here is the sticky point, the question I cannot answer: if the cosmos is built on an architecture of love, why does cruelty seem to flourish? How can weeds of poison, noxious and rotting, grow from a soil meant to flower? I want to believe in the underlying stream of empathy, compassion, and care that calls to me. But I am enraged and repelled by heartless acts of brutality, war, and genocide, suffering at a level that pierces my soul and leaves me bleeding. How can I act with love toward those engaged in greed and power? What does loving action look like in the face of evil? To do nothing seems weak, an act of apathy or acquiescence. The anger in me wants to meet fire with fire, but I know if I pick up a hammer forged in that furnace, it will burn me. The flames will only grow.

Over the years, I’ve learned I can’t argue myself into an answer with these impossible questions. The process is not mental. Thinking just spins me in place, screwing me deeper into nowhere. I have to call upon a different faculty to suss it out. As best as I can fathom, a stance of love requires meeting the world with an open heart. Not a metaphor, but an actual feeling of warmth and receptivity in the center of my chest. Curious. Alive. It is wicked-hard to remain there when I want to scream or cry. So I scream or cry, but stay as open as I can. As I do, the warmth gets stronger, fresh insights offer up.

My choices are always wiser when my heart is open. At a local scale, people around me can sense that I am loving, not hateful, and the chance for something new increases. At a global scale, I hope my small opening widens in the stream, gathering with others, adding to the flow. If we are connected in the ways that I believe, then I have done my part by dampening the flames, not stoking them.

Am I right? How can I be sure I’m not placating my fears with pleasant dreams about a universe that is loving at its core? More questions to which I have no answer, but I’m not sure I need one. I’m willing to allow an open heart to be my guide because it’s working.

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Gold in the Mine

The friction of daily life keeps me skimming at the surface, a skipping stone that can’t settle long enough to sink. Practice reminds me there is another way to be, a way that leads to peace.

I enjoy my practice. Usually. The days vary. Yesterday, my meditation found a corner of my mind where the noise filtered out and only the weight of quiet remained. This morning was like listening to the static of a broken radio: the residue of an argument, a lingering image from the news, a hovering dread I couldn’t name. These things put peace at a distance. But I continue to practice regardless of the day’s effect, drawn by the belief that there is gold in the mine.

I confess, I prefer the peace of the former. I want meditation to reduce my stress, but for me, meditation is more than a wellness practice, it is also a spiritual practice – it aims to connect with the sacred. And for that, it has to be honest, expanding my self-awareness into a deeper sense of this “self” that is seeking to connect. I am training my mind to observe itself, to uncover what is there, cracks and all, and slowly shed the layers of who I think I am. Which can be uncomfortable. So, I carry the internal tension of wanting both peace and growth.

It makes me wonder, what is the gold I am mining? It can’t be the direct pursuit of peaceful feelings, which would lead me to refine away the uncomfortable bits. Gold as it comes from the ground is not always pretty. It carries the residue of a million years of pressure, heat, and dirt. Spiritual practice works at the root, unsettling the layers above it. There’s another peace on the other side of honest examination, discarding what no longer serves me and integrating the lessons of what remains, until it can carry its own quiet weight.

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Spirit in the World of Form

I sometimes wonder if we are fallen angels, emissaries bringing spirit into form, enrolled in a vast experiment to see if our vibration can sustain itself within the density of matter, and whether, given conscious choice, we humans would destroy ourselves or save ourselves.

It would explain a lot. We seem to be constantly expressing two contradictory forces – one coming from our base elements centered on the needs of our small, egoic selves, and another from a higher source centered in the larger context we are all embedded within.

I recognize these two forces in myself. Life in the material world has real consequences. Like every living thing, I share the primal urge, honed over hundreds of millions of years, to preserve my physical well-being. The survival instinct is self-centered, protective, ever fearful of pain or loss. When aroused, it will fight for what it wants without mercy, capable of great power and unthinking cruelty. I cringe to remember the times I have hurt others out of reactivity or selfishness.  

But life as a spiritual being has real consequences too. There is within us, as primal as our survival instinct, a natural impulse for empathy and connection. We have the capacity for profound acts of kindness, compassion, and forgiveness, even in the face of cruelty. When the power of love is aroused, we are capable of sacrifice, foregoing our individual interests in service to something greater. I have felt this urge too, and have been guided at times by the better angels of my nature.

For a long time, I’ve viewed these forces as being in opposition. I hate the cruelty, I want to increase the compassion. I believe that this is where the experiment is taking us, and I want my choices to help it along. I’ve shaped my spiritual practice around this effort, training my perception to see when I am operating from ego and reorienting toward spirit. Each has a distinct energetic signature. In moments of awareness, I can feel the switch happen. I see my small self and I do not want to participate in his fears and addictions, his petty grievances, and I move away, glad to leave the lower and gravitate to the higher.

Recently, a growing intuition has been whispering that this isn’t quite right. Moving toward one means turning my back on the other, a subtle rejection of the parts of me that most need my attention. It is a type of escapism, a retreat from the very premise of the experiment. It’s not bringing spirit into form, it is substituting spirit for form.

This insight has brought a new sense of self, with its own energetic signature. I still recognize the forces of ego and spirit, self-interest and common good, separation and interconnection, but they feel joined, more closely aligned, traveling together. Now, in moments of awareness, I don’t experience it as a switch, it is an expansion that includes both. My awareness settles in place. The flavor is ordinary, fresh, accepting. The whole of me is fuller.

I am playing with this new multifaceted, unrejected self as I go through my spiritual practice and my daily activities. It feels more honest, less driven by perfection. The tension on the tug-of-war rope has eased. Surely this points to the heart of the experiment – can I learn to live in the world of form, with all its brutal requirements, and bring my higher vibrations of wisdom and compassion to each occasion, embracing all, abandoning none.

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My Evening Practice

There is a practice I do in the evenings, not every evening, but many, where I sit and invite the troubles of the world into my presence, with the hope that by being with the pain of it, a process of amelioration might begin. You could call it a prayer practice.

It’s not comfortable. It brings up fear to encounter the suffering of others. Sometimes, I invite the troubles of people I know who are facing a health issue or other painful circumstance, or I might invite the devastating troubles of geopolitical conflicts or disasters. I try to stay in a type of engaged neutrality, to sit with, not collapse into. I don’t consider it witnessing, which implies a distance. I bring it close. For me, this is not an intellectual exercise, it’s an embrace of suffering to experience it and somehow transform it. I bring it into my body, allowing the people and their emotions to meet me at the center of my chest, even when it feels like poison, a contagion that will harm me.

I see value in doing this, in bringing the sorrow of others into myself and being with, not turning away. I don’t pretend to know the mechanics of it, it makes no logical sense, but the logical parts of me are not what I am engaging in this practice. I am exploring the outer boundaries of empathy where I tap a faculty beyond the personal and the physical.

It differs, but it can be like this. I might start by settling and seeing where my mind is noisy and where it is quiet. I ask that I be open and allow others and the brutal facts of their lives to enter. If parts of me recoil, I wait. I extend care and concern to those I am with, and to the places in me where the burning wants to stick. Sitting, watching, feeling, being with, cause the scene to change, gain texture, become real. My receptivity puts us in relationship, not by effort or control, but by surrender. When I reach the spot where I fall through, my consciousness spreads across the space between, so that there is no between, only space. The field is big enough to hold it all, pain and fear and feeling and care, our embedded connection so obvious it becomes the governing principle. Our joint holding is somehow bearing this burden and sharing this sorrow together, metabolizing ugliness at the root. Release is possible, the hollow ache in my chest replaced with fullness.

Feeling, processing, and releasing the pain of others, I am sure, is cleansing the unknown sticking points in me. I am better after – humble, grounded, somber, realistic, hopeful. I have given care and felt the care returned. I am more filled with peace, which may be the opposite of pain.

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