Practice

Out of Travail

What God really wants from you is not study or prayer but the sighs of your heart which is breaking because the travail of gaining a livelihood hinders you in the service of God. 

~ Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim

I’ve had a meditation, prayer, contemplation practice of some sort all my life. It is deeply idiosyncratic and has been designed and re-designed over the years to suit my own peculiar, pathentheistic and contradictory beliefs, altered to fit my stage of life and the challenges in front of me.

There were years when the compelling tasks of my life – surviving a chaotic home, forging an identity, managing anxiety and post-trauma, raising children, caring for elders, making a living  – offered me only stolen moments to remember that I was a small part of something larger. I learned to meditate for five minutes between clients, ten minutes while a child was napping, the length of time standing long line at the bank or post-office, or a twenty-minute subway ride with my eyes closed on the way to meet my mother at the emergency room.

In the space after my identity and work-life had consolidated a bit and before children I allowed myself thirty whole minutes of journaling, a full hour of silence and an hour long walk. Every day. As if I could keep that practice in place, for the rest of my life. I mean, I needed it, right? I remember telling that to an older woman at the Quaker meeting I also attended on weekends, and she just laughed and laughed.

When children came, I knew I would need to find my quiet outside of the house. My husband and I arranged to each take an hour each day. I used mine to walk laps around Cadman Plaza, or practice bagua tai chi in my own claimed corner of the park, wearing a dirt circle in the grass. I’d spend the last fifteen minutes sitting on a specific bench, watching the birds, listening to instrumental music to block out the noise of the city.

Sometimes, during intense crisis, times of abject terror, when someone I loved was sick or dying or in danger all I could do was silently repeat a song lyric, or a line from a poem - a spontaneous mantra – over and over in my head to hold myself together.

After I had buried too many people I loved, my meditation practice was basically taking long walks while talking to dead people and weeping, sometimes bawling my head off when there was no one around to hear. I (mostly silently) railed at my dead, enraged that they had left traumatic images of their final suffering in my head, when I wanted to remember their love and laughter. I mentally yelled at them for leaving too soon or too late, or begged them to go away or come back, demanded that they take responsibility for the mess they left behind. Sometimes I implored them to tend to my children’s grief and safety, to comfort my own sorrows, to send me a sign, or just give me strength to face life without them.

When I was sick, I didn’t pray to stay alive or to be cured. My fox-hole prayers focused on asking the powers that Be to help me face all outcomes as consciously as possible.

I’ve been able in the past several years as the kids became more autonomous, to structure a life, yet again, that could offer the possibility of more time for formal study and prayer than I have had for decades. But I find that it now just “built in” to my daily activities more often than not.

Simply accepting that I do not know what will happen in the next moment is probably my central meditation practice.

A good friend once told me that she thinks of all the sentences that people type out and send up and out into the ether through their social media accounts as prayers. And ever since when I log on and sift through the postings (my own included) I can only hear all the cries for help, for justice, for vengeance, all the pleas for intercession, the yearning to be heard and held, the moments of celebration as calls to some god or another to fulfill a heart’s desire or heal a wound.

Reading, underlining sentences, writing, journaling, sharing this silly newsletter are contemplative practices for me.  Meeting with individual clients, leading groups and teaching classes are prayerful practices: I organize a lightly held intention, I sit down and breathe myself open and see what emerges in me and in others. What comes up almost always surprises me – whether it disappoints, delights, soothes, or breaks my heart.

I don’t “sit” anymore. I don’t “focus on my breath” for more than a moment or two. Sometimes I sit and stare at the horizon thoughtlessly. Other times I take long hikes and watch my thoughts as they doodle along, circle about – and I examine the patterns and tracks they have left behind once they have wandered off.

And there are still days weeks, months where the “practice” is simply clinging white-knuckled to the tail of Life itself as it storms and charges about up and down and tries to shake me or someone I love off, immersing me in mandatory “to-do’s” tasks, crises, events, labors demands,  - urgencies  -  that leave me with no time or energy to write or read, to walk or wonder, or even notice that the story has swept me up into it, assigned me a job and a role that I must execute with my whole being, that demands all of me, that requires that I surrender any scheduled or formal approach to What Is.

And this Hasidic tale crossed my path at the right moment, as such tales often do – reminds us that true prayer does not happen when we step out of life, but when we are immersed in it, even as we are consumed by the labors of living.

And that even the time I can take to release a sigh of the heart is not only all that is asked of me, but also more than enough.