From Your Minister
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Times that are hard require more spiritual practice for me. This past year, I’ve been hard at work strengthening my spiritual systems to create more resilience. For me, stronger resilience requires building flexibility, love, agility, and willingness.
How do I build these component pieces of resilience? Each one takes attention and time.
When it comes to flexibility, I’ve realized that I need to have more of it physically, emotionally, spiritually. It’s hard to admit, but I can get kind of set in my ways. Fluidity can freeze up, often from judgments petty or large which I silently render, ranging from The Correct Way to Load the Dishwasher to What it Means to Be A Good Person.
In this year of challenge and difficulty, I ramped up my environment to build in more flexibility. I took up physical practices to increase my flexibility—deep-water aerobics and yoga. But more than that, realizing that I was beginning to feel orderly to the point of controlling in my home, I invited in roommates, including a young woman with a baby and a seven-year-old kid. They altered my landscape in many ways, including letting go of neatness and order. What’s wrong with a floor covered in Legos and tables covered with mashed rice? It keeps me flexible.
Love is central to resilience, and I also invited in new housemates to increase the love flowing in my household. What makes you ooh and ahh more than a baby playing peek-a-boo? Well, maybe kittens. So I got a couple of them, too. They mostly get along with another roommate’s dog. Having a diverse household, in terms of species and all kinds of other things, makes love bigger and keeps my heart open. My spiritual practice is to ground myself in love and I don’t get out of bed in the morning until I feel my taproot touching deeply into love.
Some days that is much harder than others. I look at the news in the morning, and afterwards I am often angry at the greed or indifference or cruelty that I see reflected in the world. I do not feel in the least bit loving. I want to strike back. And, though I am committed to taking strategic action to stop greed and cruelty, doing so with the goal of punishment doesn’t work any better in the big world than it does in a family. The retribution of “I want you to feel as bad as I feel so you know how it feels” has never moved life forward. It’s different energy to say, “What you are doing is hurting the world and I am going to do what I can to stop you” than to say “You should suffer for what you have done.”
After reading the news, I meditate on a reading that centers me in love. My taproot of love grounds me with the centuries of resistance around the world, often by indigenous people, poor people, people of color, vulnerable, marginalized people. I ground myself in the strength of the massive numbers of people who resist tyranny daily. Only when I am there do I feel the strength to face another day with love and humility.
Developing agility means that I need to be able to pivot, on a moment’s notice, to adjust to what is happening. Things change quickly. My best weekly practice for this is my improv class, where rule #1 is to say Yes to whatever is happening—whatever the other improvisers offer up. I might be acting under the impression that a scene I’m in is taking place in the middle of a forest in Germany, but when my improv partner indicates that we’re in downtown London—I go to London without looking back! Improv is a way to playfully build agility, but I have many opportunities to do it in other ways each day.
Agility’s pivot may mean offering a sincere apology for making an assumption or using language that is hurtful to someone. It may mean realizing that I am over my edge, so I abruptly turn off media and go to bed. It may mean stopping a conversation I am in the middle of, when I cannot proceed in a way that is kind. Agility allows me to stay awake to the truth each moment offers and not ground my identity in the belief that what is true in one moment will be true forever.
Finally, resilience means being willing. Being willing to get up and try again after being knocked down; being willing to try another door when door after door is locked; asking again when the answer has been no, no, no, no, and no. I do not always feel willing. For me, remaining in a willing posture is an ongoing practice of coaxing myself, sometimes bribing myself, sometimes pushing myself hard, sometimes allowing myself to say Enough and stop.
And if willingness isn’t to be found without violence to myself or others, I respect that. But a simple willingness to show up, day after day, is central to resilience. As Woody Allen said, 90% of life is just showing up.
Flexibility, Love, Agility, and Willingness. We’re not going to do any of them perfectly. That’s why it made me laugh to find that the concepts I view as central to resilience spell “FLAW.” Accepting that we are flawed, that we will have days when we don’t want to come out from under our security blankie, and others where we feel we can leap tall buildings in a single bound, gives us compassion not only for ourselves but also for everyone else who is struggling to stay human in an often inhumane world.
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