BoomerGirl Diary

Right now this column is found under the sub-heading of "Spirituality" under the heading of "Be well." Everybody wants to be well. In the short term a lot of folks manage to achieve it. In the long term, nobody does.

I guess I’m well most of the time, but I don’t really know how it happens. I have my little routines and do stuff that I think helps (until some study shows that no it doesn’t help in fact it makes things worse — remember hormone replacement? vitamin E?), but none of that guarantees anything. In the short term, yes, we can improve the circumstances of our lives a bit, but in the long term we can’t. Ultimately, we don’t control our life.

Everybody knows this, but nobody wants to believe it.

Which is why some Catholic monks and nuns have skulls sitting on their desks, and some Tibetan practitioners meditate in graveyards. Because when you pretend that you can control everything, that’s when you get really miserable, much more miserable then you’ll ever be sitting up all night in a graveyard or looking at a skull sitting on your desk and realizing that another one just like it is temporarily located between your skin and brain. It’s called reality. If you run around in a dream, sooner or later you’re going to stub your toe on a really big rock and it’s going to hurt. A lot. If you run around awake, sooner or later you’re still going to stub your toe on a really big rock and it’s going to hurt. But you won’t be all whiny about “how could this happen to me!” Which is a huge improvement, not just for you, but for the folks around you.

Now it’s an undisputed fact that things like prayer and meditation do, in fact, help us be well. They do great things for the heart and circulatory system, they reduce stress, they reduce anger and general crabbiness. When you start serious spiritual practice you really notice this.

But if that’s all there is, ultimately it isn’t much. There’s a plateau. You get used to it. And there’s no guarantee that practice will keep you well anyway, in fact you’re guaranteed that eventually it won’t. It becomes harder to maintain — think of every diet you’ve ever been on and then off. It becomes just another trick in the bag of tricks that we accumulate in our lives.

Buddha didn’t sit under a tree for six years (so the story goes) in order to be well. The great women mystics of the Middle Ages didn’t live lives of austerity in order to be well. They did what they did because they wanted to see through the stuff that usually distracts us. What you call it — waking up, or union with God — doesn’t matter. But there is a fundamental realization that our lives aren’t what we conventionally think they are, that the universe isn’t what we think it is, that our very being isn’t what we think it is.

We knew this when we were little. But when we asked the big questions, most of us were given comforting answers or simplistic answers or told the questions were silly or otherwise discouraged from looking further into them.

Spiritual practice means taking those questions out of storage. It means finding a methodology — some kind of prayer or meditation — that helps us dispel our fog of certainty. It means attaining a fundamental understanding that goes past the boundaries of language and brain. And it means living lives that are rooted, not in ideological understanding, but in that kind of fundamental understanding.

Then when we are well, that’s okay. And when we’re not well, that’s okay too.