Today I am inviting you to rediscover spiritual ease. I say rediscover because often our first personal encounter with the Spiritual brings relief, whether we are wide-eyed young children or adults in struggle with ourselves and life around us. Spiritual realization brings awareness of a larger field that our lives take place in, often with a sense of Grace. There is new support, comfort, guidance, and meaning to light our way. We begin to search further, pulled by that first awakening. Whatever path has revealed itself, eventually calls us to re-align our actions, feelings, relationships, thoughts and words in congruency with our beliefs. At times the social order seems to welcome this, yet also simultaneously obstructs and rejects our Way. We struggle with ourselves, our relationships, relatively small events and big collective ones. Life is movement, which means as we live, situations and circumstances are in motion, they shift and our lives shift with them. In those shifts, stirred with both a host of spiritual teachings and basic human resistance, our emotions overload, and our minds spin on conflicts and complications.
Sometimes, the simplest prayer or affirmation is the sharpest instrument to cut through and steady our course. I recently heard a powerful one: "God, show me how EASY this is." It's a great companion prayer to another of my favorite ways of cutting through frustration or overwhelming pressure: "God, show me where my answers are wrong." The human mind is an amazing instrument, but it can busy itself with false assumptions and unnecessary demands. The mind, hit with emotional storms, can create enormous complicating factors with no real substance in the larger world, let alone in in a larger spiritual view.
This past week brought me an "impossible" transportation situation involving everyone in the family--all of us needed to be somewhere else, outside the usual weekday routine, in completely different directions, in the vast complex territory of L.A. County transportation. All time frames unexpectedly overlapped and we had two cars to get 3 adults and 3 kids when and where they needed to be. I was wracking my brain the night before with unsatisfactory possibilities and unacceptable plans. Then, I remembered the prayer. In meditation mode, I quieted my thoughts with the prayer as a mantra: "Show me how EASY this is." Amazingly, laughably, the complicated grid dissolved and its puzzle pieces fell into place. The solution, a mini-awakening freed from the choke hold of my "solutions", was so obvious--three quick phone calls the next morning (to a dentist and 2 schools), brought peace and freedom to all.
If the spiritual life does not bring ease, what is its value? Suffering is far from the point of Life. Yes, of course there are times of struggle and painful life events, but we do not have to add our misguided expectations and rules of order to those times. Yes, there are times of deep struggle to find our way to Light; ultimately that is our struggle to give way, to surrender to the Unknown. But God, being God, doesn't struggle. As we grow in our faith and surrender, we can affirm the Ease of God. And we can extend that Ease as a Blessing to others, beyond the frame of ourselves. As Chuang Tzu reminds us below, this is not about trying to make things easy, but accepting the Gift. Have an Easy day. (Susan Nettleton)
for poetry: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/.../high-flight...