Beloved friends,
With registration afoot for my autumn Workshop for Living: Love on the Inside, I want to share some of what happens in those events! So today's essay is a talk that I gave as we neared the end of the summer workshop. Summer sessions always have a looser weave than other seasons because life is so full of time outdoors and travel and such in summertime. I plan for this in the structure, but sometimes folks nevertheless judge themselves for not taking advantage of as many of the options as they thought they would. What follows is the lecture I gave on that topic, which I believe you'll find widely applicable to human living as well as a good taste of my approach toward spiritual mentorship. If you're considering the workshop, I'd love to hear from you.
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When we near the end of an offering, people often express their evaluation of their participation. If you’ve studied with me for a while, you’ve seen me persistently, kindly, offer positive reframing when people make negative evaluations of their participation in an event.
Once in a while someone signs up, pays, and then never participates at all! I still wonder about the person I'd never met named Window who signed up for a retreat years ago and did not arrive for it. I truly believe that signing up for that event was still a part of their practice. In this workshop, I’ve been using the word practice a lot. I’ve been trying to expand the definition and experience of practice. I’m teaching a particular practice, a style of meditation; also, I’m encouraging you to think about tiny moments as practice.
In our Fifth Circle I made a list of small ways you can weave practice into your everyday living. In the Sixth, we discussed using the little pause between the inhale and the exhale, the exhale and the inhale – the little pause that happens while the breath is turning – as a moment of refuge and practice, a space of meditation. That space is 1-2 seconds.
Most of you have also been here as I’ve restructured these offerings over the past few years to offer more experience of connection and community. My aim is to make it easier to participate and harder for people to feel they have failed. Here is why: I don’t care if you only watch the Saturday Gatherings and never read the discussion Circles, or the other way around, or if your Circle post this time was jotted off in a hurry. Yes, everything I am teaching is precious. Yes, the more of an offering you participate in, the more you may experience and learn. Those are true statements. But the overarching thing I want to share with you is not how to do a meditation in which you clarify the boundaries of your relationships or how to sense into your body to shift your emotions as we’ve explored in this workshop. It also isn’t how to find an angle for your knees in downward dog to best serve your spine or how to help your back stop aching in yoga. I could not care less whether you ever touch your toes. The point isn’t how to touch someone else so that their back stops aching with energy work or massage. I cherish all of these things: meditation and yogic movement and energy work and bodywork. All of them are important – and none of them are the point, though meditation is closest to the point.
I originally called these offerings Meditation Courses, then Home Meditation Courses, then Workshops for Living which morphs sometimes into Workshops for Loving. Do you see the flow of the change there? What I want to do is invite you to live a spiritual life, by which I mean a life whose fundamental ground is not a consensus reality mired in capitalism and a billion hierarchies of oppression. I am inviting you to a life whose fundamental ground is love, curiosity, and wonder, a life of awe and kindness, a life about being and doing rather than having.
When I hear you judge your practice, I often offer reframing because while showing up and participating in any of the ways we can do that helps, it isn’t the point. The point is to live a spiritual life, to know yourself as a being living a miraculous existence, and a life which aims to be good for ourselves and everyone/everything else.
In our fifth Circle, L. expressed some disappointment with her participation and I responded: “What pleases me as a loving support and guide for you is hearing your tone – you sound gentle, light, not that common, heavy “Oh no, I am not doing what I thought I would here!" which is so often followed by “which proves I am lacking in some way.” You sound curious, compassionate, gentle, present, observing – I hear in your attitude toward your participation exactly what we hope to cultivate together and I am beaming with delight for that. I hear the unconditional loving regard, the curiosity and compassion, taking deeper root in you over time. That is my truest goal for you; all of the practices are in support of that. So on my end? Very satisfied for you.” I said there "attitude toward your participation” and I woke with that in my head this morning, this little idea of meta-practice which sent me out of bed to my keyboard where I’ve been pouring this out ever since. I keep looking at the clock as I write, looking to see how long is left before I deliver these words to you, and I’ve decided to show up unbathed, tear-streaked, so that I can work this out as best I can.
The core of what I want to say is: my loves, what I want to do is to share with is you a good life, a life focused on living in love, curiosity, and wonder, a life in which we feel connected to the whole of being, a life focused on living our truest values and best wishes for all that is. That is what I know as a spiritual life.
One of the yogis who taught me simply said: "Be good. Do good." Not good in the sense of obeying – this is more likely to be good in the sense of defying unethical norms; and now I’m now hearing that great wisdom from the absurd movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure: "Be excellent to each other."
In consensus reality, in common culture, it is a terrifying time. The desire to oppress and plunder is being celebrated, openly, and enacted in our political and personal realms with gusto. We who do not wish for this, we who are able to be in touch with love, who are well enough to wish the best for all beings everywhere and in all times, we need our spiritual foundations more than ever. So, okay, you did or did not show up here a certain number of Saturdays. Beloved, I don’t care. And I don’t care because you taught me it doesn’t matter. I used to teach the way I was taught by the monks: I would encourage you to always show up, to read everything, to sit in formal practice daily. But I watched over long years as people showed up more or less, did what worked for them – and consistently, at any level of participation – experienced growth and grace, found comfort, transformed, became kinder, wiser, gentler, stronger, calmer, more powerful, both softer and louder. You taught me the practice isn’t about the practice. It's about how it affects our living, our expression and experience of being human.
So yeah, it is good to try to prioritize what we share in your living so that you can show up, but the reason that I’ve invited you to text each other daily about what your practice looked like and to be radical in your definition of what that might be, and the reason I think that registering for an event they never attended was a part of Window’s practice is because it’s all just about how this helps us to live.
We vary a lot here in our beliefs about existence. I’m teaching a nondenominational spiritual practice. I try to honor and name all of the many faith and healing ways I have studied and to find something simple and human that lies amidst them all. We are agnostic and atheist. We belong to all of the Abrahamic faiths; folks are Christian, Jewish, and Muslim. I think that in this particular course the most well-represented group of really devout practitioners is witches; we’ve got two witches among the 12 of you. We come at this from many places.
I call myself Priestess of the Mystery. I mean the mystery of existence, which I love to view through both spirituality and science. All I want to do is to support you in your living, help you know yourself as the glory of the life of the universe, dancing, help you grow closer to your own beliefs in all of this, whatever that may be. Along the way, I share tools. I share things I have been taught from the great human wisdom traditions. They are all beautiful things. They are all a means toward a good life for you and a healthier world for all of us. This is why it is more important to me that you view your participation with friendly curiosity and compassion than that you tick every box on my menu. Because it’s not about any of the specific practices. It’s about love, and living well, and making the world a better place for everyone.
That’s the metapractice. That’s living a spiritual life. A life of belonging and commitment to the good of all beings.
May you know peace and wholeness
freedom and belonging.
May our nurture of these
help them to grow within
and spread beyond us
to serve the good of all.
May all beings everywhere
know peace and wholeness
freedom and belonging.
May it be so.
May it be so.
May it be so.
Resources
Living a Good Life
Psychological research has long pointed to two paths to a "good life". One is a happy life, the other a meaningful life. Recent research has suggested a third path, "a psychologically rich life, marked by novel experiences, perspective-shifting insights and complexity, but also more discomfort and challenges than a happy life or a meaningful life." This resonated for me, as someone who has given up more than one beautiful life in the flow of my living. I was moved, too, by the personal roots of this research, which arose from the midlife reckoning of the lead researcher; how good it is that we have normalized letting our researchers share that their motivations lie in their hearts. Powerful contemplation in this complex time in our history, and so related to my words above! WaPo gift link.
Dreaming New Dreams
A couple of weeks ago I shared writer Pierce Brown's list of science fiction books intended to see people through dark times. (NYT gift link) I'd read all the books on it except one: Kameron Hurley's The Stars are Legion. I said that I'd bought it and promised to report back. I'm currently reading it for the second time because it was one of those books that I finished and then turned back to the start to begin again. "Kameron Hurley has done it: she's written a true space opera with no men in it....In a genre filled with generic portrayals of space, Hurley's take is one of a kind: equal parts love story and revenge tale, mixed with adventure science fiction and body horror." - The Washington Post. Everyone in this universe is female, and everything is alive. Dark, beautiful, and filled with hope for redemption.
We Are Not Alone
Perhaps you've noticed that this little subheading is one I use for science that shows that more-than-human creatures share with humans things that we once claimed were uniquely human. In this case, research released late last year recognizes cumulative culture in chimpanzees (NYT gift link). "Most chimpanzee populations do not use a complex set of tools, in a specific sequence, to extract food. But some regularly do. And these groups are likely to be genetically related." That is a a wonderful finding in and of itself, but the mechanize of transmission, oh, is even better: "Sexually mature female chimps may be culture bearers, the researchers posited. They migrate to other groups to reproduce. That has made even distant populations related." Yes, friends: females seeking novel sexual/breeding opportunities are bringing with them culture in the form of skilled tool use.
Webbing
This week's opening photograph is a classic Cascadia: moisture from the morning damp gleaming on the webs of an evergreen in spider season. The bushes lined the path from the back patio of a restaurant I'd visited to hug a student-friend in town for the Wood Boat Show to the front sidewalk where James was greeting dear friends visiting from Bainbridge Island and Northern California. Webbing, webbing: it's all connected!
Resistance
My seasonal tithe of 5% of my earnings for summer went to a local organization: JCIRA, Jefferson County Immigrant Rights Advocates. They serve folks in Washington's Jefferson and Clallam counties and people being held at the Northwest Detention Center. People in these parts are lit with outrage after Border Patrol agents arrested two firefighters working the 10,000 acre Bear Gulch fire which has been stinging my eyes and lungs from about 75 miles away for weeks now.
The next NO KINGS rallies will be taking place on October 18. If you are feeling low, friend, get thee to a rally! People will sing in the streets, wear costumes, and you will be surrounded by people avidly sharing your values. Political protests are often some of the most joyful places on Earth.
Want to do more? Jess Craven's Chop Wood, Carry Water newsletter is a great source for daily actions, with lots of handholding: sign here, call this. Or step up and volunteer: to walk your neighbor's dog, to be a mentor to children, to bring soup to a sick friend, to take a shift at the soup kitchen. Every good cause needs more people as funding is cut. Your time can do good, and it will fill your heart. As Anne Lamott says in her essay, "Get a manicure. Sing Monty Python. Be happy. You’ll drive the Trumpists crazy", "If you want to feel hopeful, do hopeful things." or helpful things! Thanks to Lisa.
Sustaining the Sustenance
I invest a half day of writing in creating this newsletter each week, for which I currently earn $36.75. I want to keep this up! So far I am simply making everything available for free, no clickbait baloney, and asking that you support me so that I can support you. I hope you'll consider it! You can upgrade to a paid subscription for as little as $5/month. If you tried that when the link was broken, it's been fixed! Thank you for your support.
