When I talk to people about their spiritual practice, one of the big complaints I hear frequently is “how do I integrate my practice into my daily life?”
I hear this from meditators, but also from other types of spiritual practitioners – it’s as if we have two lives, our spiritual lives and our regular going to work, taking care of kids, doing grocery shopping and sitting in traffic lives.
On a level everyone knows that’s not true, that it’s all the same – but we experience it as separate. It’s not that nuts then to want to integrate things together, to be able to hold that peace of practice (whatever it is) – as we move through the world. I mean, isn’t that the point?
Since I’ve been practicing deep meditation, I’ve discovered that the “brain” portion of this is actually clicking into place. I’ll find myself able to tap into flow states in traffic, or at work, or in times of stress to help keep me level. However, as that’s been getting stronger and deeper, I’ve noticed that there’s more to life and being an integrated human than what’s going on in the brain. As much as I love meditation and think it’s the cure for most of the worlds conflict, there’s more to life than flow states and energetic trips – we have to be able to walk around and interact with others too.
As we move through the world, we’re experiencing three primary spheres of influence: Mind, Body, and Earth. I’m beginning to realize how the yogis and indigenous spiritual practices have always had it right (duh) – and the trick of spiritual integration is having a practice that covers all three spheres of influence. When they are off balance, we don’t feel fully integrated, no matter how deep and profound our spiritual practice is.
Sphere of Mind
The sphere of mind encompasses all of our mental and emotional regulation practices. So meditation, psychotherapy, positive self talk etc. I’m a bit biased to this one for obvious reasons, and I really firmly believe that so many of the worlds problems are created by people not cultivating these practices enough. As Shinzen says:
When the aliens come, and find a desolate planet earth, they will put up humanity’s tombstone. It will read “They were done in by subtle emotional sensations they did not understand.”
Sphere of Body
I’ll drop some new age overused analogies on you! Our bodies are our vessels, our altars, our skin sacks through which we experience the world (maybe not the last one)
This one is about the physical body in regards to taking care of it with food and movement, but in my imaginings it goes beyond that.
This sphere also covers things like healing practices, energy work, beauty rituals, and of course cultivating self respect and acceptance of our bodies as they are. Sphere of Body also deals a lot with our fear and anxiety around aging and death, and how we relate to those experiences.
Sphere of Earth
This is a very broad sphere – so broad I might decide to break it up into smaller pieces later on!
This covers everything outside of ourselves, with a focus on our environment and the world around us. This does not necessarily mean the natural world – this is any environment or bit of earth we find ourselves in. Big cities, rural country, forest, dive bar, cubicle, you name it. Earth encompasses all of it. I believe a lot of our sense of a disjointed spirituality comes from the feeling that manmade things are inherently unspiritual – but we have to get over that!
The monastics have enlightenment easy – they just sit and meditate all day right? But they don’t. They have work, and chores, and daily tasks too. They have times that they struggle with practice. Many of them have a habit of putting themselves in the way of suffering through grueling trials (living in a cave for 100 days! Hiking up and down a mountain every day for 100 days! Fasting! Etc!), as a way to accelerate practice through suffering. As normal people, we don’t have to do those extreme things. We have modern and urban life. We have big cities and busy jobs as our daily trials, so fortunately we don’t need to hike up mountains or starve ourselves to have the same experiences. What if the challenge of living in a city away from the natural world was our practice? What if our practice was finding that peaceful spiritual connection to the cities we live in? It’s there, we have just been conditioned to believe that we have been cast out of eden – we haven’t. We just need to modernize our idea of eden.
The other aspect of Earth that’s super important is our relationship with other people, and all the living things ON the earth. This primarily manifests in our interpersonal relationships – but it’s also how we treat all living things. When you start to see your interpersonal relationships as a channel for your spiritual practice, life begins to get much easier. Conflict is reduced, and the boundary of a separate self gets a bit mushier.
There’s more to say on all of these, but I think this is a great sketch to get started.
Next up – Spiritual Technologies!
the Good Heretic 