I’ve always had faith, but never had peace. I have felt a strong connection to a power greater than myself since my earliest memory. But I simultaneously felt disconnected from other people. I’ve always admired people who demonstrated unconditional love for and kindness to others – people like Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day and Jesus. But I haven’t always been a very nice person. While I like to read about religious philosophies and practices and attended religious ceremonies, I never had the discipline to truly pray, fast or meditate. In fact, I’ve never met a religion, pseudo-religion or generic spiritual path that I didn’t like. I like some more than others, but I find them all fascinating and interesting. It all began when I was a lonely child in a chaotic circumstance with no one but God to talk to.
I constantly sought reconciliation of my personal experiences of God with a spiritual tradition, to the chagrin of friends and family. My mother warned me that a friend of her’s had lost her husband to those “crystals and things.” And in college when I went on random Sundays to chant with the Hare Krishnas, my roommate would say, “don’t eat or drink anything, and if you’re not home in three hours we’ll come get you.”
But alas, their fears were unfounded, as there was no prescribed spirituality that I could stick to. I have to go to church every Sunday morning? Chant how many rounds of those beads daily? Sit on the meditation cushion and think about nothing for how long? I would get bored just thinking about it and look for something new.
Lest you think I’m bragging, I’m not. It’s a problem, and it has affected more than just my spiritual life. When I was diagnosed with ADD at 44 years old, my whole messy, flitting around life finally made sense!
It then dawned on me that sadly, the reason I’m not susceptible to joining a cult is because I just don’t have that kind of discipline or capacity for that kind of commitment. I could get up at 3 a.m., take a cold shower and perform chanting and breathing exercises for several hours in the name of enlightenment. I would definitely be willing to give it a try once to see what it’s like. But honestly, the odds that I’d do it two days in a row (let alone adopt it as a way of life) are just not that great. Even if the clouds part and the Blessed Virgin Mary, Herself, tells me she loves me the most of anybody. Even if I experience total oneness with the universe and unspeakable bliss… I still probably won’t get up and do it again tomorrow. I’ll be eternally grateful for the experience, but I’m just not one to get carried away. Moderation – that’s a kind of discipline, isn’t it?
But something changed on April 27, 2016 (yes, I wrote down the date because I knew it was a pivotal moment). The culmination of my poor life choices and mental afflictions came crashing down on me. In 12 step programs they would say I hit rock bottom. Pema Chodron perfectly captured my state of mind when she wrote about herself, “my world had become the size of a postage stamp.”
There was a disconnect between the person I wanted to be – believed myself to be – and the person I was. And between the life I knew I came here to live and the life I was living. On that day I found my salvation, as they say. It wasn’t instantaneous – it’s an ongoing journey. But I finally discovered and embarked on the path to the open heart, inner peace and quiet joy that I had always read about, talked about and longed for.
I committed to completing a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course. I hoped it might help me find my way out of the hole I had dug myself into. It was an 8-week non-religious program. Each week I watched videos, read, and practiced a mind training exercise. I spent 30 minutes per day practicing the mind training exercise – various guided, sitting and moving meditations. I was desperate to heal and surprised to notice I felt better in certain ways almost immediately. So I devoted more like an hour to my meditations every day. I tried the new ones while also continuing what I had learned the previous week. I continued to develop my practice after the program concluded, because I was so amazed by the results. And while I may not quite be the Buddha Master, my life has been transformed. I wrote a book about it – you can read it here!
Before we get started, I know you’re trying to judge whether or not we’re compatible. So I’ll try to sum up my philosophy (at this point in time). While I often refer to God as “he” or “the father” (as Jesus did) and talk to or about personalities like the Blessed Mother, Ganesha, the Buddha, angels, my dead family members who I know are here with me and so on, I don’t believe that any of those distinctions are ultimately real. I see God as greater than a pronoun, a gender, and greater even than our ability to conceptualize all that God is. Above all I believe in unity. That all that is seen and unseen proceeds from the vast, all-knowing, all-powerful, eternal love that some of us call God. The distinctions we see are illusions, and the ability to see the One and not just the many is the truth that sets us free. I’m here to share my journey and unpack all of that, with humility and humor – may it be of benefit.
And one last note – I do know how to write using the basic conventions of the English language, but WordPress does not. So please bear with me while I figure out what magical tricks I need to perform to reliably indent the first line of a paragraph, and resolve other annoying formatting issues. I’m at least as smart as the average bear – I’ll get there eventually.