I have intimate experience with both segments of that sentiment, as I suspect we all do. When I am in a space of simple, open-hearted presence, I open to life just as it is, recognizing it as a gift, a holy thing. Yet I also often become ensnared by life's messiness and lose sight of that truth.
This human existence is such a whirlwind, a wild swirl of emotions, longings and needs that ricochet off the emotions, longings and needs of others. And the demands of those to-do lists just keep coming. Yep, that's a whole lotta muddle to contend with. No wonder we lose perspective.
What's a person to do? How can we extricate ourselves from the muddle, so we can see something valuable, even holy, in the day-to-day ordinariness of it all?
Spiritual traditions offer suggestions, even direction, and though the specifics vary, they are not so different at their core.
On the most basic level, they all remind us that we have a say as to where we place our energy and our focus. We need not see ourselves as hapless victims of life, helpless in the face of what comes our way. We can choose our response.
My husband and I have begun listening to online guided meditations, with psychologist and Buddhist practitioner Tara Brach having become a favorite. Though her orientation is different than Sister Joan's, they do have much in common.
"Whatever we practice will get stronger," Tara's Tend and Befriend meditation begins, "so if we keep on living out our survival brain habits of judgement, resentment, blame, (and) othering, it just strengthens the circuitry of the limbic system. It locks us in."
That certainly captures the muddle of life and what happens to us when we give it full sway. We become entangled, lending our own energy to further what is harmful. The beauty of this phenomenon, though, is that we have a choice. We can choose differently.
We know all too well the limbic system's response of fight-flight-freeze. It is one of the main expressions of our brain's mission to keep us alive. While immensely important, it is a primitive reply to life's challenges, not best suited to the nuanced world most of us inhabit.
The research is clear that it is also not suited to an optimal experience of life. The fight-flight-freeze response that comes with chronic stress is bad for our bodies, bad for problem-solving and brain function, bad for relationships, and bad for our overall quality of life.
In place of fight-flight-freeze, we can practice something different. We can cultivate our tend-and-befriend capacities. This response is also part of our brain's apparatus, one that soothes the nervous system and strengthens our ability to engage positively with the world.
Tara's meditation takes us through ever expanding circles of tending and befriending. Beginning with ourselves, we greet whatever is occurring inside us without judgement or critique. We simply hold what we notice—perhaps anger, hopelessness, or fear—with a friendly compassion.
We next extend this same acceptance toward others in our lives, before looking further afield to strangers or groups that appear to be much different from ourselves. We practice looking beyond those surface appearances to the commonality of our shared human experience.
"When we learn to pause and deepen attention," Tara concludes, "...there's a shift and we open out of the survival brain trance and reinhabit more wholeness." Awakening in this way allows us to approach the world very differently.
The muddle may still be there, but we are not quite as captured by it. The beauty is smothered no more, and we are no longer a stranger to it. The sacred is freed up to shine through, and we can perceive the sacrament once more.
Our attention is the key, and we can learn to use it to unlock what is life-enhancing, what is good for our bodies, good for problem-solving and brain function, good for relationships, and good for our overall quality of life. We can unlock love, again and again and yet again.
On a recent drive to the hot springs, Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy) came on my Spotify station. That's the song in which John Lennon sings the famous line, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
Life happens within the muddle of the mundane, but we don't need to smother its sacrament. We can choose to return to the moment-by-moment, open-hearted awareness that allows us to know the mundane as holy. And in perceiving it as holy, we make it so.
Happy tending, my friends!
Leia
Tara Brach's free Tend and Befriend meditation can be found here, and a quick google can find many others.
