leaps of faith

The self-help books warn that when your child takes one step forward, she often takes two steps back. Acceleration in one area is often paired with regression in another. So it seems to be with spiritual development. After days of feeling like I am one with all of creation, I have a moment of confrontation and lapse into an old pattern of behavior that sends me backwards on my path. And in that moment, all I have learned seems to evaporate. And the questions arise. Have I really progressed at all? Have I been pretending to be someone I'm not? What does it matter anyway? And my efforts to hold onto karma and emptiness seem feeble and useless. What now?

First, get still. Why is it hardest to meditate when it is most essential? The most important thing to do when you lose your balance is to find some stillness. Find the breath. Being thrown off balance is akin to losing firm ground. If you're wavering and wobbling, all of your energy is going downward -- digging in. So get grounded. It's impossible to elevate if you're not grounded.

Second, zone in on the feeling that prompted the reaction. Go through some of the flavors of emptiness. Consider: 1. This feeling is a changing thing. It will not last. 2. I can't control the fact that feelings arise; I can only control how I act because of them. 3. I had this feeling (as opposed to some other feeling I could have easily have had in relation to the same event), because I have provoked this feeling in the past. At some point, I planted the karmic seed that gave rise to this feeling. 4. There is more than one way to view this interaction. And how I feel about it depends on the label I give it. Changing the label can change the experience.

Third: Take care of other people. On Saturday, I brought Mariel in to Penn Station to take the train to Baltimore to visit a friend at Johns Hopkins for the weekend. When she went down the escalator to the train -- I had such a feeling of sadness. This was her first big trip alone, and seemed to foreshadow the fact that she is leaving for college in August. The feeling of loss and of change -- even though I know she's ready and it's time -- felt overwhelming. So I sat down. I wished her well on her journey -- may she be safe, may she be happy, may she be well. I thought about all the other parents who are experiencing their child leaving for college for the first time, and the fact that this feeling is shared by us all. I then looked around me and one by one, sent a prayer to every person bustling through the station: May you get to where you're going safely; may you be happy; may you be well. Just stopping to remember that everyone around you is striving to be happy and safe and is wishing for the happiness and safety of their loved ones is so reassuring.

Sometimes our faith gets shaken. But really, it is the only mode of transportation to happiness. I think that's why it's called "a leap of faith." Because when you fall off, you just have to leap back on board. There's a book I used to read to Mariel -- We're Going on a Bear Hunt, about a group of kids who go off looking for a bear and face all sorts of obstacles like mud, tall grass, a dark forest, etc., along the way. The book has a soothing repetition to it as the kids meet each obstacle -- "oh no! MUD! Sticky, gooey mud. We can't go over it. We can't go under it. We've got to go through it!" And that's how it is. We have to use every single event in our lives to find a way through. As my teacher Manorama says: It's not whether you hit the wall, it's how you climb over it. Going one step at a time, you can cross many mountains."