varieties of spiritual experience
Boring, tedious, knees-aching, monotonous, mind-wandering-heavy-flighty, fuck this how many more minutes meditation practice - among other things
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The longer I practice, the less I come to expect big moments. Or maybe I’ve tempered my expectation of what a spiritual experience “should feel like”. I’ve learned that my processing happens quietly, slowly, with gaping moment after moment of silence. It’s not very sexy but it is far more sustainable than the alternative, which I imagine to be an addictive, compulsive spiritual-seeking search of sorts.
My spiritual experiences look like this: thoughts parsed through via voice note, the hypnic jerk between wake <> sleep, book, journal, pen and coffee placed atop a blanket placed atop park-grass splitting the difference between sun and shade, muscles contracting in sequence while pedaling - when moving into downward dog, burning the candle and mangling Swahili in attempts at connection, pesto made from scratch, spring churning and steadily making its way toward us. This mandarin, a fractal of my altar and an altar itself. An altar to my daily practice. These altars are everywhere. Every moment is a spiritual experience.
I’m collecting observations on our expectations of spirituality (to what end, I’m not sure).
The Big Book talks a big talk about God-consciousness coming through like a thunderbolt, waves of certainty washing over the former alcoholic and barriers built over years being swept away. A falling to one’s knees if you will. This is walked back a bit in the appendix, “Spiritual Experiences” where they explain that while the chapters describe sudden revolutionary changes, this is not the rule, that most spiritual experiences are of the “educational variety” because they develop slowly over a period of time.
Amanda Knox recently wrote in
detailing her prison epiphany and the accompanying sadness that paradoxically gave her the strength to endure being wrongfully convicted.I knew something deep down that I hadn’t known before, and I spent the next several months peering into that epiphany, trying to consider all of its implications, like watching the ripples spreading out from a drop in a pool of water…I’d thought I was in limbo, awkwardly positioned between my life (the life that I should have been living), and someone else’s life (the life of a murderer); I wasn’t. I never had been. The conviction, the sentence, the prison—this was my life. There was no other life I should have been living. There was only my life, this life, unfolding before me. The epiphany itself didn’t feel good or bad. It just was.
Spiritual experiences can be quite neutral. It can be kind of boring.
Earlier this year while traversing familiar depression and withdrawal someone suggested to me that I start chanting. I explained to them that I have a long-standing meditation practice that included chanting and bowing. They kind of clucked their tongue. They say “It isn’t working”.
I am grateful for the grain of salt, for the wisdom to take what serves me, leave the rest and to know for me, it isn’t like that. Chanting, meditation, prayer, ritual, anything that you experience as spiritual is rarely as 1:1 as doing practice = transcendence. “Working” or “Not Working” is relative to the discipline of daily return to my meditation seat. Boring, tedious, knees-aching, monotonous, mind-wandering-heavy-flighty, fuck this how many more minutes meditation practice. Each return to the cushion stacks upon the last, building solidity of self that allows my view of the divine to widen, my viewfinder sharpening.
My prayer today is that I not bend and twist myself out of my own wisdom. I pray I do not fall into the trap of thinking that my spiritual program is a prescription to some form of success, that I am owed an outcome or feeling. I pray for commonplace, where we have an invitation to find the divine, the spiritual, the altars, the sacred.
When I find that I have been looking into the middle distance for 30s - 1minute and pull myself out of a fantasy or thought spiral. Spiritual experience. When I pull out the cutting board and knife and garlic and lay them on the counter. An altar. Tripping as I leave the party and I twist my ankle and it could have been worse but I caught myself and a stranger lunges out his upper arm to catch me as well and I still caught the A train home. Spiritual experience. Three friends in Doc Martens touching their toes together. An altar.
What is the variety of your spiritual experience? Where are your altars appearing?
xo Jessica
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