Stop Being So Serious

Spirituality is about not taking myself so seriously. The more I grow spiritually, the more I see the joy and humor in many moments of life.

Where I’m at Today

When I first started the spiritual path I thought that once I reached a certain point there would be no pain. The best example of my thinking was an experience I had with a priest in a social setting. We shared a mutual friend and all went to dinner where the priest was talking about a young nephew in his charge that was making bad decisions causing the priest much sadness and pain. I was shocked that priests, people who in theory are exceptionally spiritual, still experience negative human emotions. Just goes to show how much I had to learn.

For some reason this week has been increasingly difficult for me. I’ve been having feelings about the pregnancy we lost about a month ago and two other disappointing things. The challenge seems to be that my analytic mind tells me I should be past these things, especially since I’ve had large chunks of time where I don’t think about them and feel fine. In the times I feel good I start to believe that I’m past the difficult feelings, which makes their return all the more surprising.

The answer is simple. I just need to accept the fact that I still have uncomfortable emotions around some issues and must allow myself to feel them fully. That is, I need to be fully present with the feelings. I need to stop forming opinions, or judgments, about whether or not I should still be having feelings around these matters. It is what it is and that is all. What I’ve been doing this week is adding suffering on top of pain because of my desire to think the pain shouldn’t be with me.

The progress I’ve made is that if I was feeling this way around the time I started this blog I would have wondered what I was doing wrong. My practice has taught me that no matter how far one progresses on the spiritual path the human emotions are still part of the experience and always will be. In fact, the negative emotions are where we learn our greatest lessons and discover new aspects of ourselves. That is why it is inaccurate for me to call the emotions of sadness, pain, fear, etc. negative. All emotions give us gifts and are simply part of the human journey.

The Power of Pausing

When we take time to pause, particularly when someone says or writes something that bothers us, in that pause we create space for God to enter. Suddenly we shift from a place where we react to a place where we respond. The reaction is fear-based and weak. The response is spirit-filled and strong.

In that pause we may ask ourselves, “What is going on here? Why does this bother me?” These questions reveal whether we feel threatened, scared, uncomfortable, or simply misunderstood. Knowing the answer we can respond in a way that leads to a solution to the problem. If we react, the underlying problem still exists while creating a second problem because a negative reaction from one usually leads to a negative reaction from the other.

Why is the pause so powerful? In essence, it is a prayer without words.

Feeling Like We Should Be Doing Better

At times our practice is challenging because as we walk the road of spirituality we get glimpses of what's up ahead, which sometimes makes us wish we were further along. The key is to remember the progress we have made already.

More often than not we’re doing better than we think.

Why Give Up Our Attachment to Things

Our attachment to things is a physical manifestation of our attachment to our thoughts. And our attachment to our thoughts is an attachment to the belief that we know what is best. When we think we know what is best we don’t leave enough room for god’s will in our lives. We are limiting our lives to our experience and knowledge only, rather than opening it up to god’s great potential for us.

Giving up attachment creates more space for the power of god’s goodness to work in and around us. Being detached keeps us from wanting things to be a certain way so badly that we let better things and opportunities pass us by. So, when we give up our attachment to things we are saying that we accept and trust god’s will to place us on a dynamic life path.

Plus, giving up our attachment reminds us that we are not defined by the size of our house, the kind of car we drive, or the amount of money we possess. These are things simply to be enjoyed and used for service to others. They do not reflect our character.

My Own Judgments

I’ve worked hard to recognize that I have no control or influence other people’s judgments of me. To paraphrase the title of a popular book, “The opinions others have of me are none of my business.”

And although I know I also should not judge others, somehow I retain the belief that my judgments have value. My judgments reveal important insights into others, provide me with key information, and allow me to assess interactions. However, I recently realized that if other people judgments of me are unimportant, my judgments of them must necessarily be equally unimportant. My ego likes to believe that my judgments have relevance, but the truth is that my judgments hold no more weight than any other person’s judgments. If I am to disregard other people’s judgments of me, then I also should disregard my judgments of others. Instead I should encounter each person (even those I know well) with an open mind secured in the knowledge that I lack sufficient information to really know someone enough to judge them. After all, I’ve known my wife well for over 14 years and she still continues to surprise and amaze me in ways I never could have anticipated.

Ceasing judgment means giving up the fantasy that I have all of the answers. By not having all the answers I create enough room in my mind to see the miracles of the Universe working all around me rather than shrinking my experiences to fit within my limited perspective.

Pain vs. Suffering

Many people practice spirituality because they want to cease feeling negative emotions. They think that if they grow enough spiritually they can transcend pain, anger, sadness, fear and the other negative feelings we experience as human beings. When after a period of significant spiritual growth they still find themselves experiencing the difficult emotions they become disheartened believing they must be doing something wrong. In fact, they are. Though, the mistake is not with their practice it is with their expectations. Spiritual practice simply promises that we can cease to add suffering on top of the negative emotions. Take for instance losing a job. I was laid-off once and the experience was painful and scary. Those feelings should have been enough except that I added suffering on top of it by thinking I’m a complete failure, that my fiancé will not marry me now, that I’ll never find another job, that I’ll run out of money, etc. I stopped living in the present and started making countless projections about the future. If I had just felt the feelings and stayed in the present the experience would have been far easier because in the end I realized I’m not a failure, my fiancé didn’t leave me and we’re now married over four years, I found other jobs, and just when I was about to zero out my checking account I received a paycheck.

In more practical terms Carl Jung calls this experience “neurotic suffering.” To illustrate imagine that we have a project to complete that we don’t want to do, like washing dishes. We’d rather be enjoying other things so we avoid doing the dishes, but we can’t fully enjoy the other activities because we know we’re procrastinating. If we just washed the dishes we wouldn’t be happy about it, yet when it was complete we would be free from the task. By procrastinating we not only still have to engage in the activity we don’t enjoy (pain) we can never be fully free until the dishes are washed because we’re feeling irresponsible (suffering).

In Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths it says that life is suffering (the first Noble Truth) and that there can be an end to suffering (the third Noble Truth). Many people misinterpret this to fit the idea that life is painful, difficult, sad, scary, etc. and that there can be an end to pain, hard times, sadness, and fear. However, we cannot know the positive emotions without also having the negative ones as well. The only way we stop the negative feelings is to stop being human. Our spiritual journey is not about becoming a superhuman being that no longer experiences emotions. It is about no longer making the negative emotions more painful because of the baggage we put on top of it. To live in a spiritual state we simply feel the pain fully without the addition of suffering.

Quiet Time

Clearly I’ve been on hiatus for a bit. I needed to just be quiet in many respects. In the last three months we got pregnant and lost the baby after two months, started a renovation with a contractor and completed it (though the final details and delays of the project were painful), and I started a new job. For most of it I was able to maintain a good spiritual condition, but my nerves were starting to fray. Negotiating a salary and terms with the contractor were incredibly draining especially with the anticipation of a new baby – as exciting as it was. Then we went in to see the baby’s heart beat only to learn that there was none and the baby stopped growing. Sure miscarriages are common, though I never heard people talk about how difficult they are to go through. For the first few days I focused on the spiritual principle of truly feeling the pain. “Leaning into the sharp edges,” as Pema Chodron would say. It worked, then unexpectedly I simply grew tired of feeling the feelings. I simply wanted the pain and difficult time to be over. I had enough. Soon after things fell apart with the contractor. Everything they “fixed” needed to be fixed again because of other problems that they created. I grew tired of poor quality work in the home we care about and the contractor grew tired of me. I did my best to practice love, patience, acceptance, and compassion. Again this grew tiresome. I definitely did not handle this last month as well as I would have liked. I didn’t feel very spiritual during this time because all of the meditating, praying, and acting with kindness took so much effort and it felt like work rather than being something I really enjoy. However, the truth is that I handled the last few months better than I ever would have before I started meditating and expanding my spiritual practice. I was calmer, less angry, and didn’t let the down times dominate my emotions. My wife and I still laughed a good amount during that time.

Now we’re on the other side. Just yesterday my wife got a healthy report from the doctor, the renovation came to an end and I’m settling into the new job. To be a bit dramatic, I feel like a survivor. It was hard to deal with all of my challenging emotions, be supportive of my wife, and be a decent employee in a new role. It is worth noting that throughout these last few months there were many clear indications that a higher power was looking out for me and my family with small coincidences and events that just happened to be exactly what was needed.

The old adage is true: This too shall pass. Funny how in the moment difficult times feels like they are going to last forever. I guess it just proves that feelings are not facts.

I wish you much peace and abundant love.