Oh, Yes—The Highest Spiritual Practice*
A Moment in Nik’s World
Oh, friends. I don’t know about you, but, oh, how I have tried to get you to like me. It was the driving force in my life for so many years. I’m not saying this behavior is forever-gone. But it clearly isn’t a driver of my personality, or the force behind so much of my behavior like it used to be.
Does anybody out there identify yet?
I was, and still am, a Lone Wolf (capital letters fully intended). Because of my stuttering, coupled with my wild crushes on the young women around me, separating myself from the group, whatever the group might be, made total survival sense.
My speech just was not reliable. At any moment, a syllable, a sound would deny me its support. School trauma- having to say vocabulary words aloud in high school Spanish class with Mr. Manno, having to call out our test grades in Mr. Shorten’s history class- shattered me. So many moments of literal terror.
I became an escape artist, looking for ways out of the moment, ways to separate from you and dive into my own silent world, speechless, keeping my fantasies about Audrey Hepburn (one of the loves of my life) a secret from you.
Both stuttering and wanting to kiss girls felt deadly—stuttering in school was a death, after death, after another death. And I knew if you knew about my fantasy life, I would clearly die.
Born from these old patterns emerged a super-people-pleasurer. Once I figured out it was more fun with you than not with you, that being part of the cool people made me cool (a life goal), and once drugs and alcohol were part of the picture, I was off to the races.
I would get you to like me, damn it. I would tap-dance and sing, be funny, flatter you, be who you wanted me to be. I would think what you thought. Whatever it took. Etcetera. Etcetera. Etcetera.
And as we say in 12 Step, time takes time. I think I just outlived the pattern. I’m too old, too tired to be that busily involved. I literally don’t have the energy to pursue you in the same way—ha! This makes me laugh.
Why am I talking about this? What is possibly and hopefully relatable about this? A Kripalu Legacy teaching is coming, I swear it is……..
Once I was old enough and sober enough to see my behavior, I had to outlive my shame and self-disappointment about it. As Swami Kripalu said, “Self-observation without judgment is the highest spiritual practice.”
Take that in.
Self-observation without judgment.
He didn’t say, wrap your leg around your neck.
He didn’t say, spend every waking moment with God.
He said cultivate the capacity to notice your behavior. Cultivate the capacity to not judge it. And to lean in the opposite direction. Opposites bring balance.
I am pretty darn sure that a massive obstacle to sustainable behavior change is judgment. It shuts the door on energetic shift, on energetic support, on transmutation. Thinking we should be doing it differently? Not the direction.
But/and, noticing behavior, offering kindness to ourselves—practicing a favorite mantra of mine, PERMISSION TO BE HUMAN, FULLY GRANTED. And then, leaning in a new direction, absolutely opens the possibilities of sustainable and new behavior.
What do you think? Have you noticed your behavior shifting? Changing? What helps you do that? What supports it? What hinders it? Please let me know.
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Music! Music and Aging. It was a funny week—I got totally confused about how old I was, wondering if I was turning __ or had already turned __. I had to get the calculator, figure it out. It turns out, I am already the age, okay, 77, turning 78, which sounds closer, damn closer to that Giant in the Sky, 80.
So, I’ve been nostalgic about music this week. Here is one of my favorite oldie-but-beyond-goodie songs, Diamonds and Rust, written by Joan Baez, but most wonderfully, performed by her and Judy Collins in 2016, at Joan’s 75 birthday concert in NYC. Look at these two, my heroes, ten years ago—aging nicely, wouldn’t you say? Please enjoy as I share them with you:
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Let’s together request
Courage and strength
To keep showing up,
First, for ourselves,
Then for each other.
And kindness!
Let’s request kindness,
To wrap around ourselves
So we might
Offer
It
To
Each
Other.
May all beings benefit from our shared words.
Blessings,
Aruni
*Swami Kripalu quote—The highest spiritual practice is self-observation without judgment.