Secular Spirituality

Photo by Bernard Hermant

Guest Post by Tobi Holloway, CMT-200

I am skeptical by nature so spirituality isn’t something I automatically embrace. Fortunately, I have found that I can find sacredness in the ordinary, connect to something beyond myself, trust the bigger picture, and live a meaningful life. The recipe that I have found so helpful and supportive includes mindfulness, contemplative practices, teachers, and community.

Finding the Sacred In the Ordinary

For me it starts with concentration practice. I like to tune into physical sensations during a body scan or through the feeling of relaxation that happens with each exhale. Learning to gently rest my attention allows me to find some stillness and my mind begins to settle. While there is a danger in having expectations that meditation should be calming and relaxing, my experience has been that it often is. The trick is not to get ahead of myself. Like many things in the world of mindfulness, there is a balance and a paradox between having a motivation to practice and having a willingness to take it one step at a time and an openness to see what happens. When I find that balance, by the time I am done with a sit, I can appreciate how peaceful and restorative it was.

The first piece of my spiritual puzzle is this capacity to show up for myself through these concentration practices. It’s best when I do them regularly even if I’m feeling fine without them, but I can also turn to them during challenging times, specifically to help ground me. When my mind has some stability, I can be aware of my thoughts and sensory experiences, and it feels like there is room for all of it. There’s a pleasant purity in feeling whatever I’m feeling without busyness or struggle. In the context of spirituality, these moments of stillness and quiet and purity feel sacred.

Of course, that sacred mental state isn’t limited to times when I tune inward. It is available when I tune into something outside of myself as well – the second, and very important, piece of the spirituality puzzle.

Connecting to Something Beyond Myself

Tobi gardening with Guinea Hens

Sense and Savor practice is ideal for me to tune into nature and experience joy and awe. I love to look up through the leaves and see blue sky and gently moving clouds. It feels vast and spacious, and maybe a hint of vertigo – if there is a pleasant version of vertigo. This is also my favorite practice to do on group retreats because it is such a build-your-own-adventure. While I am looking up at the sky, another participant is crouched near a tiny insect, absorbed by its hard work and vulnerability, and someone else is drinking in the aromas of the soil and reflecting on all the trillions of microorganisms within. Then when we come back to share anything about our practice, someone always brings up how much joy they found simply by getting the instruction to follow their interest, explore whatever calls to them. We so rarely do that in our modern lives.

Many contemplative practices work incrementally with regular reinforcement, but for me, some practices have given me aha experiences the very first time I tried them. One example is the Four Elements Practice. It is an exploration of the air, water, earth (solids), and fire (energy) within our bodies and the ongoing exchange of these elements with the world around us. It’s not a supernatural thing, it’s just what happens. I already knew this conceptually, but something interesting came up for me when I paid attention to it. I experienced for myself the dynamic flow between what is part of me and what is outside of me. It is constantly changing. We (you, me, the universe) share these elements. None of them belong to any of us in any permanent, stable kind of way. Enjoying that exchange connects me to the bigger picture and feels spiritual to me. However, it also highlights how removed our modern, sanitized lifestyles are from the natural cycling of these elements. It’s easy to live a distorted fantasy that our food comes from the grocery store, our water from the faucet, and our waste goes away. The Four Elements Practice woke me up and reminded me that we are nature and belong more directly in the cycle.

(As a bit of a digression, the four elements do not exit our bodies the same as they enter them. They are all transformed. For example, the air that I inhale has more oxygen and less carbon dioxide than the air I exhale. Transformation happens to all four elements. This remarkable but natural process of receiving one thing, transforming it, and sending out something different, is the concept I use to wrap my head around Tonglen practice, but I think that is a subject for another blog.)

Another first-time-whammy practice was Just Like Me. I was invited to bring to mind a person who barely made my radar and didn’t strike me as someone with whom I could connect. Then as I visualized this person, I was given phrase after phrase of things we have in common. “This person was once a baby, small and completely dependent, just like me.” “This person experiences a range of emotions, just like me.” “This person wants to be happy, just like me.” The powerful impact of these phrases is not in these words here on the page, but in gathering my attention on each one in turn and knowing the truth of them for this individual I had easily dismissed. “Sonder” is a neologism for the profound feeling of realizing that strangers have complex lives, and the Just Like Me practice gives us a method to experience sonder intentionally. This is an important awareness from the perspective of spirituality because it brings our common humanity to light and lowers my inclination to separate myself and others.

Photo by Terry Boynton

Reflection and analytic practices can further contribute to my sense of my place within the bigger picture. For example, when I notice something difficult about myself, some pattern in my thoughts or behaviors that I struggle with, I can reflect on how I share this pattern with my sister, a parent, a grandparent, and likely ancestors before them that I never met. This reflection does several things for me: 1) It makes it less personal. Of course this pattern would show up in my life! 2) I feel connected to my ancestors through this pattern that is 100% alive in me now even though they are gone. 3) It invites me to begin to heal a pattern that has been passed down for generations. As I practice my restorative and loving practices, I may be able to make this one thing a little easier for the generations to come. 4) This is a gift to myself, my history that predates me, and my legacy after I am gone and forgotten. 5) I belong to something bigger than myself that extends generations backward and forward.

While those reflections were in reference to difficult patterns in my life, I can make the same case for positive qualities. I’m thinking about things like love, courage, creativity, and joy. I believe that these capacities exist within us because they have contributed to the survival of our ancestors. They evolved over time and across many species which eventually brought them here and now for us to tap into and grow in our own lives. These qualities are accessible and trainable. Through contemplative practices like Loving-Kindness, Compassion, Gratitude, Generosity, and Vicarious Joy, we can deliberately develop our own patterns of wellbeing. That’s a big deal.

Finally, there is my definition of “spirit” that has arisen through these practices. Through an embodied awareness of impermanence and how causes and conditions give rise to different outcomes, I started to pay attention to how I show up differently in different contexts. The more mindful I am of that, the more it blurs my sense of a permanent, stable self. For moments at a time when I choose to tune into it, I experience myself as emerging from the combination of my genetics, my conditioning, my immediate physiological state, my surroundings, and the interactions with those around me. My spirit is what emerges in any given moment, and my spirituality is my devotion to do my best to create the conditions for love and wisdom to emerge.

As I mentioned in the intro, the causes and conditions I have learned to lean into include mindfulness, contemplative practices, teachers, and community.

Trust

Photo by Artem Maltsev

If I were religious, I would take comfort in knowing that a benevolent omnipotent power has it all under control. I can imagine the relief I would feel if I had absolute faith that it’s all going according to plan. So far that hasn’t been the path for my skeptical self, so what is a secular alternative? Teacher talks and contemplative practices have helped shape the answer for me. An alternative to a belief in an omnipotent power engaged in the day-to-day activities of humankind to execute a master plan, is a recognition instead that the outcome isn’t predetermined. It is being synthesized, dynamically, all the time.

But how do we cope with the uncertainty? Again, contemplative practices can help. We have Don’t Know practices that guide us into the relief that we can experience when we just admit that we don’t know. Not only that we don’t know, but some things are just unknowable. We can warmly feel how much our minds resist that notion, and warmly welcome the realization that the resistance doesn’t make it any less true. Don’t Know practices can be like the stages of grief. For me, there is a pleasant shift when I finally let go of the insistence on certainty, accept the uncertainty, and turn toward how I want to show up for whatever happens next.

For me, contemplative practices are all about training for how I show up. Other people have different motivations, but that is mine. I do not believe I have the power to show up in some new way because I decide to, or by requesting divine intervention, but I can build habits with practice. I can learn from teachers and books and apps about what has worked for others, and then I can explore to see what is true for me. I trust the process because I have gained confidence in it through experience.

…when the mind is silent,

everything is sacred.

like the spiral

like the lotus

like the waves

like the trees

like the stars,

we were meant to unfold.

-Drew Dellinger, excerpt from Carolina Prophet: Poem for Thomas Berry