As a psychotherapist who works with accomplished yogis, yoginis, meditators, and committed seekers and practitioners of all kinds, I have come to discover with my clients just how easy to use spirituality to hide from life – from intimacy, from our feelings, from our tender vulnerabilities, from our unresolved wounding around love, and from our immediate embodied experience in any of its moment-by-moment unfolding. We can deny, stuff, shut out, repress, and abandon our very real feelings of hurt, anger, disappointment, and jealousy because on some level they have been deemed very unspiritual, unacceptable, or further evidence of our own unworthiness. Or, we will act the feelings out—indulge, identify, and fuse with them – believing we are making actual contact, while spinning around their surface and doing whatever possible to discharge the disturbing energy which is seething underneath.

Depending on our specific, historic core vulnerabilities – which arose intersubjectively in our families of origin, as part of a relational matrix – certain feelings were simply not safe to embody, as they triggered anxiety in our caregivers, or otherwise led to their withdrawal of love, affection, mirroring and attunement. As young children, it was an act of kindness and creativity to split off, dissociate, and disconnect from material we were not developmentally capable of digesting and metabolizing on our own. We are wired to do whatever possible to maintain the tie to our caregivers, even if such tie is precarious, misattuned, or ultimately not in the interest of any sort of self-cohesion or integration.

As we engage over time in these strategies of denial and acting out – both pathways ultimately of fundamental aggression and chronic abandonment—we often find ourselves wondering why we are not feeling alive, connected, and truly able to open to others – why things just aren’t flowing for us in the ways we long for. We wonder why we don’t feel worthy of love, why we don’t know in some fundamental sense that we are loved or lovable exactly as we are. But a part of us senses that it is only in intimate and direct contact with our vulnerabilities, in all their forms, that we will know this aliveness and be able to truly take the risk that real embodied love will always demand.  As long as we are using spirituality to avoid intimacy, contact, and the depths of our own being – as long as it has become yet another means by which we can avoid our unlived lives – we will feel lonely at our core, disconnected, and split off from love.

As we start to discover the ways we are using spiritual ideas, beliefs, language, jargon, exercises, teachings, and practices to avoid relationship (with self and other), with as much kindness, space, and compassion as possible, we can return our attention into present, embodied experience. We need not shame ourselves in this discovery or deem it some evidence of our failure or unlovability. But rather use it as an opportunity to be curious about the strategies we’ve brought into adulthood to get away from very disturbing, survival-level panic and anxiety. And begin to open our hearts to this movement as the best way we’ve known to care for ourselves until now. For it is only radical kindness and space that will melt the wounds and tangles of love.

Like any defense mechanism, this relationship with spirituality has served an adaptive function and we can honor it for the help it has provided us at a particular point on our journey. And we can start slowly and with a mighty presence and compassion, to allow the protective function to dissolve, to reclaim full experiential responsibility for every feeling and emotion we’ve intelligently split off from, and step into the mandala of integration and wholeness, which is none other than our true nature. As we journey on the path of the heart and that of metabolization by love, re-owning and re-embodying to the entirety of what we are, we weave a sanctuary for the light and the dark within. And in this we become a holding environment for ourselves and others, more and more transparent and more and more translucent to the activity of the beloved in this world.

Art by Gonkar Gyatso – “Buddha in Modern Times” 

How do we stay truly present to whatever is happening in our lives?  How do we practice living from the deep gratitude that each of us has experienced in fleeting moments?  How do we remember, with every breath, the miracle of simply existing, the miracle of this body that sustains us from the moment we come into human form until the moment we go out again—while remembering also that our true being is not confined by the body, did not begin with birth, and does not end at death?

Truthfully, for me at least, it’s hard to navigate daily life from this place of grateful remembrance.  It’s hard not to get caught up in bills and deadlines, irritations and disagreements, until life begins to feel like a series of problems to be solved or tasks to be crossed off the to-do list.  Sometimes it takes the shock of the unexpected to open us again to a truer sense of who and what we are.

A month ago, my Uncle James came down with what he thought was bronchitis.  By Thanksgiving, he’d been given supplemental oxygen to cart around, but still no one knew what was going on.  A week ago, with breathing an increasing struggle, he went to the hospital in hopes of finally getting an accurate diagnosis.  After a series of biopsies and CAT scans, the news came back: idiopathic interstitial lung disease.  There’s no known cause and no treatment.  In fact, idiopathic means simply “arising spontaneously from an obscure or unknown cause.”  I guess one could say the same about life itself.

Today, my uncle is headed home to enter hospice care.  He’ll be surrounded by his sisters and brother, his nephews and nieces, grand-nephews and grand-nieces.  His kindness and his humor remain intact even as his body fails.  He’s not afraid, he says, of death—only of dying.  I have been through this before, with my father.  I know the strange stew of thankfulness, sorrow, love, regret, joy, loss and celebration that comes with the imminent loss of one you love.  In times like this, it’s easier to be absolutely present, knowing it might be the last moment we spend with someone dear to us.

But every moment could be the last moment, and every breath along the way is cause for celebration.  It’s an absolute miracle that we’re here at all; that there’s something rather than nothing.  These bodies, these lives, these relationships we have with other beings—all of it is miraculous.  That being pours itself unceasingly into existence to experience all this—as earth, sky, stars, wind, water; as you, as me, as my Uncle James—is miraculous.  And when we can remember this, even in the midst of the most ordinary tasks, then we really live the miracle of our own being, and know how vast we are.  Through all our losses, nothing is lost. Through all our changes, what we are is unharmed, unchanging, eternal.  The great German modernist Rilke captures this sense beautifully in his poem “Autumn”:

We all are falling. Here, this hand falls.

And see—there goes another. It’s in us all.

   And yet there’s One who’s gently holding hands

 let this falling fall and never land.

Whatever life brings, may we not forget those gently holding hands.

Postscript: James Mitchell passed away on Friday, December 27, surrounded by family.  He was 67 years old.