Which Holidays?

I grew up in a family that celebrated Christmas, and I was under the mistaken impression that Hanukah was pretty much just like Christmas, except that kids in Jewish Families got presents for 8 days instead of 1. In fact, while the Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus is a major holiday for most Christians, Hanukah is a relatively minor holiday in the Jewish calendar. It celebrates the re-dedication (hence the name from the root meaning “to dedicate”) of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem which had been seized by the Syrian-Greek military and used to worship Zeus. At that time practicing Judaism was punishable by death – so in one sense this holiday is about religious freedom.

Along with our traditional holiday customs, I'd like to suggest that this year we add a spiritual practice of openness. What would it be like to make space in our hearts and minds for family and neighbors who are celebrating a different holiday, or who celebrate a familiar holiday in a different way? According to a NY Times article by Naomi Schaefer Riley, about 45 percent of American couples married since the year 2000 are interfaith. Even among the Christian faiths there is variety of traditions; Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, do not celebrate Christmas at all. Chances are, someone you know has a way of celebrating the winter holidays that is new to you. And while this interplay of faith traditions can be challenging, it can also be a great opportunity to learn more about the people we care about and their beliefs and traditions.

As part of your practice this Holiday season, I invite you to open your minds and get curious about the great diversity of religious practice. Here are some starter questions to ask this Holiday Season:

• What holidays do you celebrate?
•  What are your favorite holiday traditions?
• What do those traditions mean to you?

Maybe you will even have the opportunity to participate in a different tradition. I often light a menorah with Jewish family or friends, or go to Christmas Mass with my Husband’s family, though neither of those are part of my own tradition. If you are invited to be part of a celebration from your friend or neighbor’s tradition, feel free to ask questions like:

•  Is there anything I need to know to participate in this tradition?

Ask yourself:

• How does it feel to experience my friend’s tradition?
• How is this different from my own traditions and how is it similar?

Sharing religious traditions with family and friends is a privilege -- to witness someone reaching out to the divine is an intimate and sacred thing. That reaching out we share is a common ground we can cultivate. By opening myself to new experiences, I may come to understand something about the world, about my own faith and about the Spirit of Life which is always as close as our own breath.

Oooo that makes me so mad!

What can we do with our anger?  If we are consciously trying to live in the spirit, how can we handle this anger in ourselves and in the world? This is one of the great challenges of being human.

On the one hand, our emotions are important teachers about ourselves and our world. Anger lets us know we are feeling threatened. When we try to avoid our own anger, sometimes it pops out in unexpected and often unhelpful ways. On the other hand, anger has a strong energy to it- like a cup of coffee or those endorphins we feel while exercising. Anger makes us feel powerful, and so it is easy to get stuck in anger. How can we walk that balance between ignoring our emotions and letting them overwhelm us?

The next time you notice anger rising in yourself, here are a couple of practices you can try.

1) Breathe. Take deep, smooth, even breaths. Notice your anger. Breathe into it. Be compassionate with your anger as you breathe. Let your exhale be slightly longer than you inhale. Breathe until you feel your muscles begin to soften and release their grasping. Once your breathing is smooth and steady, discern whether you need to respond to the source of your anger in word or action. We are likely to make a wiser choice by first paying attention to our breath.

2) If you have a prayer practice, I encourage you to take your anger to prayer. Open your anger up to God. Invite God to show you how you can be present to your anger in a compassionate and ethical way.

3) If you are open to an even more challenging practice, pray for the object of your anger. If a person or an organization is causing us anger, we are often tempted to pray either that something bad will happen to them, or that they will change to match our own desires and expectation. Instead, can we offer a prayer without judgement? A prayer that remains open to the mysteries of life and of the Spirit? Consider offering a prayer such as “May this person be open to the wisdom and compassion of the spirit,”

Whenever you experience anger coming from other people in your life, the practices I just listed useful in that situation too. If we can breathe and remain centered despite the anger of people around us, our presence can be like the rudder on a boat, keeping the community upright and sailing in a healthy direction.

I want to offer you a final practice called Tonglen, from the Buddhist tradition, in which we can breathe in the suffering of others and breathe out peace. So if I am overwhelmed at the anger I see on my Facebook Feed, or on the news, I can imagine breathing in that anger, and breathing out peace. This is considered an advanced practice, so be compassion with yourself as you try Tonglen. As you try any of these practices, try to relax your inner judgements – simply notice what happens in yourself. That non-judgemental noticing is important in any practice you explore.

Choosing to pay attention to and work consciously with our anger can be an important spiritual practice. When we open up our anger to our breath and to the Spirit, it can be a powerful part of our own spiritual journeys, and can help us find a balance that will serve the larger community as well.

Is this what a spiritual person looks like?

What does a spiritual person look like? Somehow I got the idea that spiritual people were always calm, always compassionate, always patient. I assumed that when I was angry I was on the wrong path. I thought emotions like anger and fear and impatience were keeping me from being close to the spirit.

We know that all humans have emotions. We are hard-wired to have emotions; they evolved to help us care for our children and our families, and to protect us in times of danger and threat. But because some emotions are uncomfortable, over the course of my life I have often tried to avoid them. It seemed like if I could just “stay positive” that I could be more productive, and wouldn’t have to worry about being an emotional burden to my friends.

One of the things that happens during our spiritual practices, whether that be prayer, meditation, a quiet walk in the woods, or artistic pursuits, is that emotions will arise. Our natural instinct is to push those feelings away, but people wiser than me suggest that if we can acknowledge the feelings, then feel the feelings, and then let them go whenever they have run their course, this creates an inner freedom.

Recently, as I was on retreat and sitting in prayer, I was struck by some very overwhelming emotions. It occurred to me that the feelings weren’t coming between me and the spirit, instead the spirit was present right there in those feelings. If I shut the door on my feelings, I would be shutting the door on the spirit. If I couldn’t be present with my own feelings, then I couldn’t be fully present to other people, or with the divine.

Our desire to avoid dealing with our feelings can lead us to actions that hurt others. We demand that our partner to make us feel better when we are sad. We are angry so we lash out at the customer service rep at our gate who tells us our flight has been canceled. We are impatient so we rush a toddler who wants to put on her own shoes. When we give ourselves the time to honor and take responsibility for our own emotions, it may prevent us from accidentally unloading them on someone else.

Being present to our emotions is an important spiritual practice that helps us be truer to ourselves, and more self-aware in our relationships with others, including our relationship with the divine. So the next time you feel a strong emotion I encourage you to stop what you are doing and just breathe- slowly inhale, slowly exhale. Acknowledge the feeling, feel the feeling, and then let it go.

Can you hear me now?

Have you ever realized the person you are talking to is not really listening? A friend stares down at her phone while we talk “really, I’m listening” she says. You can tell your uncle is composing his own thoughts and can’t wait until you get done talking so he can start. Or worse- he just starts talking right over what you are saying.

Maybe you don’t mind, because that’s the way of the world. Or maybe what you are trying to communicate is really important to you, and you wish your friend would just put down her phone for a moment, that your uncle would just let go of his clever idea, and they would really listen.

What does it mean to really listen? It means to give your full attention to the person who is speaking, even if she pauses for a moment to collect her thoughts. It means letting go of your own agenda and your own story to listen to the story of another. It even means setting aside what his/her story means to us, and asking “what does his story mean to him?”

When I was being trained as a spiritual director we practiced listening. The more we listened deeply to one another and experienced others listening deeply to us, I realized how rare and precious a gift this is. It seems like a small thing, but giving the gift of deep listening has a surprising power, a healing power.

Listening is a form of kindness, a form of generosity, but it is also an important spiritual practice. As the Christian Scriptures say “where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” I have noticed that when I am listening deeply, it does feel like a spiritual experience, it does feel like the spirit is present in that conversation with us. Have you ever experienced something like that?

I encourage you to try deep listening as a spiritual practice. You may find that when you do listen, you wonder if you should do more than just quietly nod and take in their story. We want to give advice. We want to tell them we understand by offering a similar story from our own lives. We want to ask questions about things we are curious about. All those things are part of normal conversation in our culture. But they many not help the person who is sharing his or her story feel heard.

For example: a friend tells you she had a rough day at work. You sense she is upset about this. So you put down what you are doing, and let her know you want to hear more, with your presence and your words -- “Wow, that sounds like a rough day. What happened?” When she gets done telling you about the mean thing her boss said, you might be tempted to give advice --“You need to get a new job” or “have you talked to HR about that?” You might be tempted to begin your own story -- “that’s just like this one place I worked years ago” or to ask questions that lead her away from her story “Do they still make widgets? I always wondered what you do with a widget.” Instead try saying something that shows you really heard her such as “it sounds like your boss really hurt your feelings when she said that” or even just “I’m sorry that happened to you.” And here’s an advance technique- allow a moment or two of silence before you say anything at all. You can listen just as deeply to a silence as you can to words.

It’s as simple as that. Just listening, and letting the other person know you heard them. And yet it is a rare thing to experience in our culture. I often forget to do it- so caught up am I in all the related stories from my own life that I want to tell. But when I remember I have found deep listening it to be one of the most profound spiritual practices I know.

Low Battery Warning Again?

If you have a cell phone, you have probably experienced that moment when you needed to make a call, but as you reach for your phone you see that it is totally dead. I am always forgetting to charge my phone, or realize it needs to be charged when I am far from a charging source. Maybe I’ll plug it in for a few minutes before I rush out the door, and all day it gives me that “low power” message.

It occurs to me that this is a great metaphor for how our spirits get low when we forget to give them enough time to recharge. This season

I was feeling like my I was in “low power mode” and realized that our emotional and spiritual selves are kind of like a cell phone battery; we often forget to change them until they are giving us low battery warnings. And sometimes when we do stop to recharge, we don’t leave ourselves enough time, so we never get really filled-up- we never have quite enough power for what we want to do.

I was complaining one day that my phone was out of juice again, and my friend asked “why don’t you plug it in every night before bed?” I agree- that’s probably a good idea both for our phones and for our spirits. We could, as my friend suggests, have a time every day when we reconnect to our source, and feed our spirits. And like with our phones, it takes as long as it takes. We can fight against this- because we are busy and have so many cares and concerns, with our spirits as with our phones, but when our spirits are low they must be renewed.

As with our phones, even a daily habit may not be enough if we are using them hard. “Half an hour's meditation is essential except when you are very busy. Then a full hour is needed” writes Saint Francis de Sales. If you are going through a crisis, or a challenging transition, even a daily practice may not be enough- you may need a day or even a whole week devoted exclusively to recharging- to connecting with something larger than ourselves

Only you know what restores your soul; perhaps it is prayer or meditation, or perhaps it is a hike in the woods. It may be a morning spent weeding your garden, or time with your watercolors or a block of clay. It might be time spent in worship, or time with your children or grandchildren. Only you will know how much time you need and what it is that restores you to yourself.

The more you pay attention, the more you practice, the easier it will be to tell when you are in “low power mode” and when your spirit is fully recharged. A day faced with a fully charged phone and a fully charged spirit is one where all our gifts and talents are available to enjoy life and to be of service.

How did I get here?

Have you ever sat down at the computer or pulled out your phone for a quick little chore, say confirming a meeting time, and before you know it 15 windows are open and an hour has passed? You shake yourself and wonder- what am I doing? As you close the windows one by one you see the crooked path that brought you to this moment: watching cats try to fit into boxes, updating your car insurance, buying shoes, learning the 10 reasons people have trouble sleeping. Finally you arrive where you intended to be…my meeting is at 3:00. I can close all these other windows and get back to my life. This is the power of intention-- to help us navigate the river of distractions and arrive on the other side with what we really want and need. Having a clear intention defends us against the metaphorical click-bate and pop-up-adds of life.

As you read this, I encourage you to ask yourself “what is my intention for today?” Maybe you already know that after you finish reading the paper you plan to weed the garden. But if an intention doesn’t come to mind quickly, take a moment to consider- what one thing would I most like to get out of this day? The intention you create does not have to be something from your to-do list; I often set intentions like “spend time with my son” or “enjoy the spring weather.” Sometimes I regret not having finished a piece of work on time, but the true heartbreak comes when I realize it is my son’s bedtime and I missed my chance to spend time with him. Some intentions are not actions at all – “remember to be grateful for the gifts of life” or “practice patience” are intentions that can follow you throughout your day. When I can’t think of something I really want or need I’ll often set “listen for the spirit” as my intention.

Later today, if that sudden panic hits “isn’t there something I was supposed to be doing?” your intention reminds you whether it’s time to turn off the cat videos and finish balancing your checkbook, or perhaps it’s time to stop balancing your checkbook and go blow bubbles with your grandchildren… as you intended all along. It’s a simple way of making sure the life you live is devoted to things you truly care about.