by Sarah Bowen
Supporting recovery one cup at a time: I have a theory that every person is born with a certain amount of drink tickets. When they are used up, well, that’s that. Some of us use our tickets faster than the rest of you, and find ourselves in church basements drinking a ridiculous amount of coffee. Frank Kerker, founder of Sober Joe Coffee, combines his love of coffee with his desire to put a dent in the epidemic of addiction. The resulting “coffee with a cause” raises money for sober living houses, is run by people in recovery, and helps to destigmatize addiction through in-store product demos.
DISCOVER DEEPLY
• Find inspiration or post your own #dosomethingfornothing on Instagram or Facebook @ dosomethingfornothing.
• Read The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty by Peter Singer.
• Watch the award-winning documentary Kinshasa Symphony, about the power of music in an environment of poverty.
• Watch the inspiring documentary Waste Land about the transformative passion of art in a community of Brazilian trash pickers.
NOTES
* Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, didn’t start out as the children’s author through whom many of us learned to read. Originally an illustrator for Vanity Fair and Life magazines, he also spent a fair amount of time creating advertising campaigns. Ten years later, his first foray into children’s books, And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street, was rejected by over 20 publishers. After Mulberry Street’s very successful publication, he went on to author over 60 books, illustrate more than 400 World War II political cartoons, create The Seuss System of Unorthodox Taxidermy, and paint fantastic dark artworks with intriguing titles like Cat from the Wrong Side of the Tracks.
Sangha Sunday
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WEEK 2: DO DEEPENING YOUR TRIBE
As I became increasingly interested in spiritual things, I quickly overwhelmed my husband. In true Trekking Thursdays spirit, I spent an entire summer hiking to different sacred texts. I’d come home—my speech zooming at 3x speed—to share all the stuff I’d learned that day, all the dots connecting to other things I knew, expecting, of course, that he would be just as intrigued.
For many weeks, Sean listened patiently, with an appropriate amount of “Wow” and “Cool!” utterances. Then one day, he was full, I guess, and told me, “I love you. And I’m interested. But seriously, you need to go find your people.” And he was right. But I didn’t know how to do that.
Technology to the rescue. I signed up for a meditation group, nature lover hike, book club, and (possibly too many) spiritual retreats. One day, I attended a lecture on Advaita Vedanta, one of the classic Indian paths to spiritual realization (I admit I signed up only because the name sounded exotic). The speaker was late. Super late. And I started chatting with the woman next to me about my journey, mentioning recent online classes and a burgeoning need to be connected to people in real life. I bashfully admitted thoughts of enrolling in an academic program to study spirituality further. When I mentioned the program name, she revealed she was on the staff. I loudly blurted out, “No shit!” which seemed to resonate forever through the quiet yoga studio.
A few weeks later, I enrolled. On the first day of the program, I remember simultaneously thinking “I’ve found my people” and “No one here likes me.” It was as if I was transported back in time to the first day of junior high school, an insecure 12-year-old.
Fast-forward, and I can confidently state that I have found many of my people (much to Sean’s delight). True, I didn’t find one group that perfectly fit my needs. My people are spread across many spaces and places, which sometimes, but not always, overlap. It’s a motley sangha for sure: spiritual rebels, light-workers, Earth warriors, spiritual gangsters, peace warriors, spirit junkies, sacred healers, and yes, even a few pious religious folks and a couple of atheists. I went from being religion-phobic to belonging to an expansive spiritual tribe that transcends any particular building or specific religion.
Auspiciously, the lady from the lecture, Robin, eventually became a cherished mentor. Once, when thanking her for getting me started, I voiced gratitude for these flourishing relationships. She offered, “You find the people you can mud wrestle with—metaphorically. The people you can get in there with and companion down to the depths of one’s beingness.” (Or, as I like to irreverently translate: get in there and get dirty with!)
Robin’s comment reminded me that spirituality is not always bliss, love, peace, and rainbows. I don’t only need mere acquaintances, or an impressive group of followers on social media. Sure, those are nice to have. But I also need deep friendships and a strong support network. Author Anne Lamott, in her book Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, elaborates on this idea, “One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day.”
My friend Sarah Matteo took a smart tack to gather people after a loss, life upheaval, and move to a new state. Wanting to avoid becoming isolated or sinking too far down into the hole that is grief, she set off on an ambitious, creative project: to meet people and collect their stories. To start, Sarah printed up small cards. Whenever she met someone she wanted to find out more about, she struck up a short conversation and handed out a card. On the front were the words “I’m so glad we met!” On the flipside was an explanation: “Hi, Person: Based on my unproven impressions of you and the nature of our random or fated encounter, I believe you have a story to tell that I want to know about. I’m directing a creative project and I’d like to interview you. Please get in touch.” A link to her contact info and website followed.
Sarah met with anyone who contacted her, buying them a cup of coffee or tea. Each time, she started the conversation with one simple sentence: Tell me about your journey. “I wasn’t looking for money or some sort of validation,” she told me. “I didn’t want to impress people or meet people to sleep with. I didn’t want to make business connections. I was coming from a place of curiosity, and just found that people really want to be heard.”
This thought prompted a big aha! for me. Countless interactions are about being seen. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say we might just be the most visually documented people in history. Each social media platform has increased the prominence of imagery, with words taking a back seat. Images (and videos) are filtered, edited, and altered to put our best look forward: Does it fit my style? Does it support my personal brand? Is my lighting okay?
Algorithms step in to decide what we see in our feeds, determining who we will see and how frequently we will see them. We can quickly begin to chase our tails trying to figure out how to best be seen by presenting what people most like, letting other people’s opinions weigh more heavily than our own. Even our apps for connecting—for friends or hookups—ask us to filter our preferences, assuming we know what traits are perfect for us.
Although Sarah is likely choosing the people she interacts with based on some internal filters (conscious or unconscious), she told me she sought random encounters. “Everyone is a messenger,” she stated. I agreed and added, “Through inspiration rather than algorithm!”
Some of Sarah’s chance encounters were single occurrences, stories collected in moments to treasure. Others have led to lifelong friendships. Through her curiosity, creativity, and holy listening, Sarah connected and deepened her tribe.
Today take a depth check on yours.
HOW IT WORKS
1. Close your eyes and visualize a couple of interactions with your people.
2. Ask yourself these questions, waiting for an honest answer from within yourself:
• How often am I fully present, giving people 100 percent of my attention (instead of multi-tasking or staring at a screen)?
• Do my relationships feel balanced regarding terms of giving and receiving?
• Do I respect people with views that differ from mine?
• Am I trustworthy? Do I keep confidences?
• Am I comfortable with growth and c
hange in my relationships?
3. Feel the answers. Connect with how they feel physically, emotionally, spiritually, and energetically.
4. Take some breaths. Inhale and exhale slowly.
5. Now ask these questions:
• Does anything feel lacking in my relationships/ groups?
• Are there any people I’ve met that I’d like to connect more with?
• Is there anything blocking me from getting to know people more deeply?
• Are there any relationships/groups in which I feel more nourished or nurtured?
• Are there any relationships/groups with whom I’d like to spend more time?
• Are there any people that I might benefit from spending less time with?
6. Take another breath. Inhale and exhale slowly.
7. Jot down any ahas about future actions you might like to take as a result of these reflections.
REBELLIOUS VARIATIONS
Call someone you’ve never actually spoken to: Texting, messaging, and emailing have edged out phone conversations. Yet sometimes voice-to-voice interactions can help heighten the connection, as you focus on a single sense: hearing. Call someone with no agenda other than to ask, “Hey, could you tell me your story?”
Text to know you better: Start a Q&A chat with someone. Consider one of these openers from Conversation Starters World:
• If you didn’t have to sleep, what would you do with the extra time?
• What do you wish you knew more about?
• What’s something you like to do the old-fashioned way?
Gather your tribe: Start a book club, game night, volunteer day, sleepover weekend, or destination getaway to mingle your people and get to know them better
Get help for overdoing it: If your drinking, smoking, snorting, eating, gambling, shopping, or sexing is bringing you more trouble than joy, consider joining a 12-step or alternative recovery fellowship for help.
DISCOVER DEEPLY
• Get probing chat starters at conversationstartersworld.com.
• Check out Eventbrite, Facebook events, or Meetup for group activities, causes, or communities near you.
• Read The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks.
• Watch Seth Godin’s “The Tribes We Lead” on TED.
• Research full-time sangha living opportunities at ic.org.
WEEK 3:
Expanding
The deeper we move in the mystery of our soul,
the closer we come to hearing the beat of the cosmos;
and the more we expand our awareness into the vastness of the universe,
the closer we come to knowing the unbounded Presence
at the heart of our being and every being.
…the microcosm and the macrocosm are one.
JOHN PHILIP NEWELL
* * *
You were formed out of stardust.
Sure, your parents had something to do with it. But 99 percent of what makes your body was formed initially in the heart of a star.
When you were born, you had no idea you were separate, no sense of yourself as an individual. You didn’t even know your feet were yours. In fact, it took a few months before you realized you were an individuated being. As you grew, you were taught how to be an independent, how to be you. Learning words, ideas, and concepts your sense of self evolved as you chopped the allness you once felt into youness and otherness. And you might have rejected some of the people around you based on this perceived otherness, which was too different from your youness.
Much of the spiritual journey is digging back through the youness to that space beneath everything you think of as you. The beingness beneath the sense of self. Although parts of you may change—your height, weight, hair color, likes, dislikes—there is a spiritness that remains.
Paradoxically, that youness is part of the allness. Nine out of 10 people I polled agree: from a spiritual perspective, there is no otherness. (There’s always one guy who goes against the grain.)
Everything is interbeingness. You are the allness, the isness, the oneness. You are not only [insert your name here], you are that.
Hold on to your hats—or your space helmets?—my friends. This week, I invite you to stretch into spiritual movements, ask a bunch of profound questions, and expand your perspective even further.
Mindful Monday
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WEEK 3: ENJOY THE SILENCE
For me, the first gateway to experiencing allness is silence. In fact, I admit—and proclaim—I just spent an hour in a massive chamber drenched in eucalyptus scent called The Green Steam before writing this section. Because sometimes I must take drastic measures to get silent.
I knew I needed to because the thoughts in my mind were coming too fast and too furious for any real clarity to be present. In my life, I’ve tried several things to relieve this state—always outside of myself. Good wine worked for a while until it didn’t. Escaping into a riveting postapocalyptic movie sometimes works. Spa visits soothe my mind, but often rip a hole in my wallet. Fortunately, when I learned to go inside of myself—with the help of silence—I found a free, accessible, source of calm. In his book Seeking Silence: Exploring and Practicing the Spirituality of Silence, the late Anthony Strano illuminated this sublimely. “When we are surrounded by a world of sound, we are not always aware of all the noise we generate inside our minds,” Strano wrote. “Silence helps us to tap into the neglected spiritual reality of the self—an invisible but dynamic reality that flows inside each one of us.” (Although Seeking Silence is currently out of print, it’s worth finding a used copy or reading it on Kindle.)
But silence can be scary if we’re not used to it. After signing up for a silent meditation retreat, I freaked out. How was I going to avoid talking for four entire days? Wouldn’t it be boring? A waste of time? I thought I must be nuts for thinking I could do that.
Surprisingly, as the retreat started, my jitters began to ease, a sense of serenity came over me, and I felt chill. True, I cheated a couple times. I asked my roommate where the hairdryer was (she couldn’t understand my pantomime on the topic). Automatically, I yelled Gesundheit across the silent lunchroom, when someone sneezed. And I called my husband-then-boyfriend once. Okay, maybe twice. Definitely not more than three times.
The point of this (lengthy) confession is to assure you that if you’ve never intentionally tried getting silent, 1) it is possible, and 2) don’t be too hard on yourself in the process. Our world is increasingly noisy. Everything pings, dings, and rings. Our subways, cars, and planes talk to us. Our elevators, restaurants, bars—and even spas—have background music. We leave the TV or music on “for noise.” When leaving the house, in go the earbuds or on go the headphones.
The silence we’re going to search for today is not the absence of sound. It’s not the absolute quiet of solitary or an institutional padded room. We’re looking for the sound of natural silence. (Don’t get me wrong, I love technology and tunes. But I also appreciate the natural quiet that occurs when they are absent.)
By stopping our own personal noise, we can hear more clearly what is going on around us. When we stop using our mouths, our minds can focus on other things—rather than “What am I going to say next? Aren’t I clever?” Once we are silent, we become still in mind. And from this place of stillness, we can be aware and at ease.
Entering silence through the door of mindfulness can be helpful. By tuning in to where we are and what we’re doing at each moment (rather than hanging out in the past or future), we decrease our habits of reactiveness and overwhelm. Removing the need to judge—or have an opinion on—things happening in our minds or around us, we learn how to live with equanimity. Think about your social media feeds for a minute. Each post begs for a response: a thumbs-up, a heart, a laughing emoji, a mad emoji. To be mindful is to see each moment of our life as it happens, but not feel compelled to react. Each minute in time just “is.” Period. Not “is good�
� or “is bad” or a million other judgments we could make. Just “is.”
Mindfulness can be done anytime, anywhere. Once you cultivate it, it becomes a skill you can whip out whenever you need peace of mind. It can even become the way you move through the world on a daily basis. Today our goal is not to shut the mind off completely, but to refocus it on awareness of the present moment, giving us opportunities to expand our consciousness.
HOW IT WORKS
1. Silence your phone, computer, or anything around you that might ring, ding, or vibrate.
2. Still your body. Let it rest. You don’t need to be rigid, just still.
3. Take a couple of slow breaths. Sink into your surroundings.
4. Gently say, “I am peace” aloud, then sink into nonspeaking.
5. Keeping your eyes open, look around you. Unlike some other meditation styles, in this practice, we keep our eyes open to see, feel, and sense the environment.
6. Observe, but do not absorb. Let your thoughts roll by as if playing on a screen. Try not to attach to any opinions or judgments. For example, let’s say it’s raining outside. An observation is: “It’s raining.” Let go of any opinions (“I hate rain!”) or judgments (“Rain is awful!”). Learning the difference between observing and judging takes practice. And of course, don’t judge the judging. Quick tip: If the thought qualifies for an emoji, just let it pass right by.
7. If your mind wanders, gently pull it back to the present. If the thought has to do with the past or the future, just let it pass right by and repeat your phrase. Other options include “I am peaceful” or “I’m so chill.” (If you want to get exotic, try Shalom or Om Shanti. Sometimes using syllables with which you are not familiar can bring a soft release of the mind.)
That’s it. That’s a basic mindfulness practice. You may find that you feel a sense of spaciousness in your mind that wasn’t present before (which often expands with more practice). Perhaps you feel a connection to something bigger or something beyond. Maybe it just takes the edge off your day.