A Moment of Bliss at Lake Tahoe
The following reflection was originally shared with my
Merton and Me email list on January 31, 2024
Meditation is key. Silence and solitude are golden. Physical activity is a must. Proper diet, essential. A good prayer life is crucial. Healthy, supportive relationships are vital. News consumption and social media limitations are recommended. Cell phone use should be… LESS!
Now just how in God’s name are we to balance all these things…?! Is it even possible?
How well balanced do you feel your life is?
What do I mean by balance? That’s a good question, and given that my experience with imbalance seems to have advanced in recent years I may be fooling myself into believing that I can write anything meaningful on the subject, but I would like to try.
March 23, 2024 will mark exactly four years since the first symptoms of my most debilitating bout with Covid (I have had it two/possibly three times…), and I have been engaged in a war with myself ever since. That war has taken on many fronts and I have sought to fight it in many different ways as the opening of this reflection might indicate. Many times I have found myself seemingly right back where I started. Yet all the while there has been a lesson that I learned during that frightening and tenuous time circulating beneath the service, trying to break through my hard-headed, ego driven self and change the way I live and breathe each day.
When I was laid up with Covid a very strange thing happened to me, the chronic tension that I hold in my body EVERY DAY and the inordinate amount of PRESSURE I put on myself EVERY DAY to “heal divisions and make the world a better place,” to “discover who I really am,” to “get my body right once and for all,” and even to “grow closer to God!” it entirely disappeared. Not the wish for all those things to come to fruition mind you, but the PRESSURE associated with my daily, determined attempts to carry them all out, right now! I was being increasingly suffocated by double pneumonia strewn throughout my lungs like cobwebs yet I simultaneously felt as if an interior straight-jacket that had been restricting me my entire adult life had mercifully been removed.
I was FREE, from myself...
We are our own worst enemy…
So how did this pressure and tension disappear when I was so sick? First, I simply didn’t have the capacity to hold onto it! My energy was so depleted that it had no way of living in my body. We expend an extraordinary amount of energy holding tension in our bodies and we have no idea that we are doing it, it is entirely unconscious. One of the most relaxed acting performances I ever shared with an audience was when I was sleep deprived and exhausted. Why? I simply didn’t have the energy to get in my own way. To PRESS, PUSH, TRY SO HARD TO BE GOOD, GET IT RIGHT, MAKE THEM LAUGH! I couldn’t HOLD THE PRESSURE. The joy and creativity I felt doing what I loved to do was actually able to flow more freely because I couldn’t HOLD THE TENSION.
So how can this apply to our everyday lives when PRESSURES and TENSIONS are consuming us? Do we just force ourselves to stay up all night and hope we get sick?! Probably not a good idea…
Herein lies the second, essential component to this newfound level of freedom I was graced with while sick… I was forced to pay attention to my breath.
It may be difficult to understand for some (though I’m confident an asthmatic or anyone else who suffers from respiratory problems can relate), but just THE THOUGHT of sending a text message, responding to an email, taking any action at all, so labored my breathing that I was left with no choice but to recognize my breath for what it truly was, the Breath of Life. It demanded that I pay attention to it and honor its role in my life or else suffer the consequences… This combination of factors, recognizing the direct impact that my thoughts had on my breathing and actually becoming aware of my breathing from moment to moment was an enormously important experience for me. And yet an admittedly short-lived one. I distinctly remember saying to my wife, “I bet the tension will all come back when I ‘get better…’” And it did, in spades…!
But what is finally beginning to crystallize for me is that all those things I referenced above which are indeed essential in my life and perhaps yours: meditation, silence & solitude, physical activity, proper diet, prayer life, healthy relationships, news consumption and social media limitations, cell phone use, they can all be more easily balanced when we grasp the real time impact they have on our thoughts and our breathing. Our bodies/minds are capable of communicating to us when we’re overloading on something or not getting enough of something else, we just have to stop being our own worst enemy… It’s not an endgame of course, the quest for equilibrium, for a more peaceful, balanced life is fluid and ongoing, but we can learn to play this joyful and challenging game of life with so much more grace and poise than we’re likely accustomed to.
So what are your sources of daily pressure? What impact are they having on your physical, mental and spiritual well being? Pause for a moment to reflect on them. How is your breath reacting right now at just the thought of those pressures? Is it accelerating? Can you catch yourself holding your breath? How might these pressures create obstacles in your work and personal relationships and interfere with what might be your very sincere intention to live a healthier, more peaceful, even holier life? How can you go about creating more balance in your life?
I encourage you to come back to these questions and allow yourself the time to begin to taste and see the intimate and dynamic relationship between your thoughts, your breath, the activities in your life, and your well being.
I’ll end with a quote from Thomas Merton’ book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander that resonates with me deeply,
“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence.”
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