Your spiritual practice is more essential now than ever before.
Recently, someone told me she was so riled up about our current political climate that she can’t meditate. She’d grown increasingly irritated, angry, and despondent, and now, after the unspeakable violence in Pittsburgh, the pipe bombs that mercifully failed to go off, and the daily vitriol of the midterm election campaign, she says she is so agitated that she can’t settle down, and she feels so compelled to hear the latest news that she won’t take the time for a valued practice she’d been doing for more than twenty years.
“I can’t turn within with so much going on and so much at stake,” she said.
My response was, “You have it backwards. At times like this, you want to meditate more, not less.”
To those who appreciate the value of spiritual practice—not just meditation, but also devotional rituals, mindfulness exercises, yoga asanas, breathwork, prayer, contemplation, etc.—are not things to do only when you have time to spare, like hiking in the woods; not merely an occasional uplift like going to a museum; not just therapies to obtain when needed, like a massage. They’re all-purpose disciplines, ideally performed on a daily basis, with immediate value in the moment and transformative impact over time as their effects on the mind, body, and spirit accumulate.
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I’m so wound up at the moment that the last thing I can do is to meditate but I do understand what is being said. I managed yoga on Wednesday last but the effect wore off before I had been home more than half an hour.
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