Tag Archive for: The Book of Awakening

HAPPY BIRTHDAY NUN TUCK (A LENTEN JOURNEY)

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It’s been a year this week since I began this little exercise called “Nun Tuck’s Almanac.”  I can’t believe it, it started off fast and furious with posts almost everyday and gratefully, much traffic.  Then life did it’s little John Lennon thing, you know the “Life happens while you are out busy making other plans” thing as it is wont to do, and so this little venture has been gradually being whisked out to the fringe of my daily activities.   

But whenever I am away for a week or a wee bit more, I miss this kind of spiritual writing and more importantly, thinking about the essence of who we all are, attempting to draw out with the use of language, feelings and understandings  that we all share deep down where the heart resides.  In addition, it continues to be my pleasure to share what little I know about world religions. Islam seems to be the one most people want to learn about and there is no surprise there, world events rapidly unfolding as they are.       

Birthdays and anniversaries of various kinds are great milestones for us to take stock.  And we Christians (Unitarian ones included!) are in the first steps of our annual Lenten journey; another invitation for us to engage in more self-reflection and to employ discipline, not as a punishment, but rather as a tool that chips away at the excesses, compulsions, and indulgences that lead us away from our truest selves. 

Thomas Merton, a well-known modern mystic and Trappist monk, spoke these words which have been resonating or more aptly, percolating with me for a  time now: “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.  The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his or her work for peace.”

OK, wow and ouch.  No one has categorically summed me up so succinctly before…you can just put a ribbon on it and there you go.  The three words in particular that shout out in neon to all those with an addiction to doing  to PAUSE or HALT or STOP are “FRENZY” and “VIOLENCE” AND “NEUTRALIZES”.  

As Mark Nepo in “The Book of Awakening” writes, “Merton wisely challenges us not just to slow down, but, at the heart of it, to accept our limitations.  We are at best filled with the divine, but have only two hands and one heart.  In a deep and subtle way, the want to do it all is a want to be it all, and though it comes from a desire to do good, it often becomes frenzied because our egos seize our goodness as a way to be revered.” 

So when I ask myself what is at the root from my seemingly inability to say no to another great cause, event, another tug on my time and resources (even while the endeavor may be a great one), it is the sneaky ego. People who have difficulty saying no, often say that it is because they don’t want to let anybody down.  So then I ask question, why don’t I want to let anybody down? Is it because  I don’t want anyone to think I am less than this wonderfully compassionate human? 

Being compassionate enough is (in cases of the activist) probably more than enough.  Saying no to one more thing is self-compassion and self-care, which allows one to walk in the world PRESENT to it.         

Pray daily for all the worthy causes out there that you would like to grow and flourish in their goodness, but devote your time to the one or two that speak most closely to your soul…for today.  The old adage to ‘do one thing and do it well’ applies here.  Wherever I cannot bring my entire being, I am not there.      

What a remarkable gift I have received on this birthday edition of Nun Tuck, to take a day to reflect on my pursuit of the good, to choose to pour my energy into the redemption of my own heart, and then I can perhaps help the rest of the world a little more effectively, and that is to say, more peacefully.

Blessed be.

STOP RUNNING

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For many years I had been obsessed with running…a little too obsessed is what friends and family members had hinted over the years.  I ran in any weather, like the postman, through rain, sleet, and winter’s snow.  I was out there.

Partly it was simply a well ingrained habit, like teeth brushing. And on those days when I was exhausted and blown out, pushing myself to “just do it”, I often returned with a renewed sense of energy…a clearer energy.

Lastly, lacing up those Asics and taking to the streets was a ritual akin to meditation for me.  The rhythm of my breath and the sound of my sneakers hitting the pavement always took any remaining frenetic energy down a notch.  Mindful running- a time to think and to not think…both realities of meditative practice.  Sometimes, I spent the first two miles or so simply repeating to myself, “one, two, one, two.”  Often, returning to work feeling calm with the added occasional bonus of gleaning some insight on a problem that has been bedeviling me for a while.

That all sounds good, right?  This is all reasonable and healthy…right? (bad knees notwithstanding).

But there was a fly in the ointment that only the sweetest, daffiest little lady that used to walk her dog as I ran could see.  Smiling wisely as I run past, shouting, “Good morning, can’t talk now, gotta run” and her kindly reply, “What are you running from today?”

What are you running from today?  Good question.  There was often a sense of urgency that I had felt for much of my life. Perhaps you too have experienced this at times, or more times than you can count?

What a shock when this urgency is unmasked as a terrible illusion.  When feelings or situations APPEAR too hard to face, when being in our body is more than a little uncomfortable, this is when we need to stop running. The only thing that will allow for transformation is letting all of it…all those monsters real and imagined… just BE.  To sit still, to allow painful emotions, whatever is there to wash over us like waves, while we sit like the mountain, like a Redwood, like the Buddha.  This is where peace resides.

Mark Nepo, in The Book of Awakening, speaks to our instinctive flight or fight responses, ” The doorway to your next step of growth is always behind the urgency of now.  Now more than ever, when all feels urgent,  you must cut the strings to all events.  Now more than ever, when the weights seemed tied to your wrists, you must not run or flail.  Now more than ever, when each decision feels like the end, you must believe that each question is a beginning.” He continues, “In this way, pray to have your True Self inch through your turmoil.”

I have been taking this advice for a time now. Renewed courage and expanding compassion bubble up from where my True Self resides.

Of course, in accepting my own human frailties, there are moments when I don’t dip that proverbial bucket down deep enough in order to access that well where ease and wisdom exist eternally.  Again and again, I need to be reminded to go back to the well, to tap it.  It is a well that never “runs” dry.

I’d like to close with a quote for the day (haven’t done that for a while!):

“All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.”  – Blaise Pascal