Spiritual Practice
“’Come tell us what is saving your life right now,’ he answered. It was as if he had swept his arm across a dusty table and brushed all the formal china to the ground. I did not have to say correct things that were true for everyone. I did not have to use theological language that conformed to the historical teachings of the church. All I had to do was figure out what my life depended on.”
Barbara Brown Taylor
An Altar in the World
“One of the paradoxes of spiritual practice: we need a path to travel where we already are.”
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
I woke up this morning earlier than normal with the blog on my mind. I looked at stats last night and saw that on a good month, there have been as many as 158 hits on the site and on most months, many fewer. I asked myself once again, “Why am I doing this?” I ask that question a lot. So I wanted to answer it for myself as much as for anyone else who might read it. Writing this blog is my spiritual practice.
The world is so voluptuous and seductive; filled with so many things and people, it draws us away, and sops up all our time and energy. It is easy to just go with the world and forget that, “Bidden or not, God is always present.” (Carl Jung) Stepping into the action of the day is akin to stepping into a whirlwind. We are instantly caught up body and soul. I find it important to set aside a modicum of time each day to adjust my attitude, preferably before the world has gotten its claws into me. Like meditation, writing brings me fully into myself and into the present moment. When I’m writing, my brain is not in one place and my body another, as often happens. (This morning I was so absorbed in my blog-thoughts, that I put the coffee pot into the refrigerator instead of back on the heating element!)
Spiritual practice, regardless of what it is, is a way to acknowledge the role of soul in one’s daily life—and daily life, the present moment, is where we live. Spiritual practice helps us to ‘place the mind’ at a particular wave length that will remain throughout the day. Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche has written about this, saying, “When we place our mind on something, the mind absorbs its qualities, because we are becoming familiar with it.” As we become familiar with it, we become like it in our thinking and our behavior. For example, if we set our mind on anger, we absorb the qualities of anger and behave in an angry way. If we set our mind on peacefulness, likewise, we become that. Practice means we do it daily until it becomes habit. We choose our habits, whether good ones or not, and practice makes them ‘perfect.’ This spiritual practice of blog-writing is saving my life right now. I hope it is enriching yours, too.
In the spirit,
Jane
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