If you're anything like me, you might be acutely aware of the fickleness of the human will when it comes to spiritual practice. Saints are inspiring, books give renewed passion, dharma talks and webinars set your sights to shining visions of spiritual heights.
"And yet," you might think as you look back at your life's attempts at fecundity...
"spiritual practice is a bitch."
There is much to be inspired about. But because there is much to be inspired about, there is much to fail at!
There is a point in the spiritual journey when your practice sets you squarely in front of parts of yourself you'd rather not look at, or difficult suffering in your life, or the fact that you're tired of this whole spiritual life thing. Many wisdom elders will say this is the time to lean into your practice. But if you suffer from unrealistic idealism and perfectionism like I do, this can be tricky. "Lean into it." How? Just keep going, like the little engine that could? Grit your teeth and fill yourself with visions of the hero's journey? Or does "leaning into it" mean that we fundamentally change how we have related to our spirituality thus far?
For some, the ego can kick in here. At one extreme it flexes its "will muscles." At the other, it flexes its "mind muscles." "Will muscles" secretly like to show off when confronted with challenge...even in solitude! We can show off to ourselves to tell ourselves of what great masters we are; to make sure we know that "we got this." On the other hand, the "mind muscles" think up all kinds of reasons why it doesn't really matter if we keep going. "Mind muscles" can even use spiritual literature to abstract our experience and justify a kind of "beautiful despair." At one extreme, we hide the vulnerability of our experience from our consciousness ("will muscles"). At the other extreme, we idealize false grace with a cathartic surrender to sloth and justify it as beauty ("mind muscles").
I'd like to propose a different vision of spiritual practice, one that I've learned from teachers like Jack Kornfield, Ram Dass, Thomas Merton, and Pema Chodron. We let the heart break.
The elders say that fruitful spiritual practice should return us to our present moment. But the present is fragile and impermanent. It is the energy of the heart that attunes to this fragility with openness to whatever it might bring. If we bring this energy into our spiritual practice then the heart breaks. The heart is the connective chakra, the "axis" and center of our spiritual energies. It is in the heart where both "higher" and "lower" energies can transform, alchemize, and be sent into the world with love. It is a powerful energy within us, yet our culture values either disconnection from the heart, or a superficial affect of its energy.
The softness that comes from the broken heart is not sentiment, but a powerful presence that lets the depths of both pain and joy be fully present.
So, we remain faithful to our spiritual practice. We move closer and closer to the present moment of our experience. But if we are not attentive to the heart, we won't know how to hold the pain of the beautiful. We will unconsciously use spiritual technologies, spiritual thoughts, spiritual insights to veil our experience from our consciousness, closing our heart to the present and using only the energy of the mind or will to decipher our experience. In doing so, we close our heart to the world. And we close our heart to our selves.
When we confront our less-than-ideal selves in spiritual practice we are confronting the tenderness of heart-energy. We have slowed down enough for the ego to see that the self is not the self-sufficient spiritual guru it would like to be. It sees that unmet needs from childhood are at the helm, even when it thought it was making its own "free" decisions. It cannot hold itself tenderly in all of its pain, incompletion, doubt, and joy because it knows that its own solidity as a separate self, with a separate identity, as a being that "owns," "consumes," and "lives" is not real.
But there is a surprising truth behind all of this. When the heart opens to the present, all of the above truths do not magically disappear; they become the fuel and fodder for spiritual joy. We realize that we would never want them to disappear because only by their power (yes even the power of pain) does the present moment open up before us.
It remains true that the self is not some "thing." So the heart opens to a being-ness that is transcendent and that will never die. It neither tries to make itself real ("will muscle") or idealize despair ("mind muscle") but finds a “third way,” a way that both transcends and includes human life. It remains true that the self is not the ideal version of itself, so the joy of laughing at oneself bubbles up. Idiosyncrasies and neuroses become tender companions of individuality. One does not try to cut them off ("will muscle") nor define "grace" as a way to ignore culpability ("mind muscle"), but one simply notices them, relativizes them, holds them with awareness and integrates the power of gentleness.
In other words, the heart expands. We never knew there could be so much joy in suffering. We never knew there could be so much hope without a plan to make our dreams come true. We never knew that our dreams are right here, waiting for our hearts to open to the preciousness of our own lives. And for that matter, we never knew our lives could be so precious, not because they will go on forever in paradise, but precisely because how we experience them now will end.
Opening to the present moment breaks the heart.
Let it break. The hard, outer shell only kept you from the awe-inspired wonder of your present precious life.
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