Do I Need A Spiritual Practice?
I am one of the 21% of Americans who considers themselves “neither spiritual nor religious” per a 2023 Pew Study. Though I was raised going to Catholic church every Sunday and was also in a four-year relationship with a Christian Scientist in my Twenties (this is a whole other story, I tell ya), I never considered myself religious. Going to church was just something we had to do because exposing one’s children to church was likely one of the things a parent must do, according to my parents’ generation. But there was a time, particularly when I was with the Christian Scientist–whose religion I tried to understand and still remain a bit baffled by–where I joined a lefty Presbyterian Church in the Washington D.C. area (although props to the Christian Science Monitor for publishing some excellent journalism). I also attempted during that time to develop some kind of spiritual practice.
But in the wake of that ill-fated relationship, I kind of gave up on it all. I was in grad school and working full-time and going through a break-up and keeping up some kind of spiritual practice is a lot of damn work. And so I just let any kind of relationship with spirituality slip away. And then eventually after I met my now husband, I found myself busy with other things and then later trying to figure out how to raise a kid. There was always something that kept me away from any kind of spiritual practice.
I go through periods wondering if I should get into meditation. Usually these happened during heightened periods of anxiety. But then I started Lexapro, which helped tone those bouts of anxiety down quite a lot and the idea didn’t occur to me as much. That is until I started delving into the ideas of climate grief, climate anxiety, and restoring my connection with the planet.
Soon after starting my book proposal, my writer-friend sent me a report from The Mindfulness Initiative which released this report in 2022 which explores how mindfulness practices help to strengthen a person’s feeling of connection to the world, to each other, and other beings around them and how it helps to foster greater resilience and motivations to take climate action. The concepts intrigued me so much and made absolute sense in that they are resisting all of the mechanisms of disconnection in our modern society that make us believe that happiness is rooted in growth, wealth, consumption, etc. Yet, as I review this report again two years after it was published, I realize how little progress I’ve made in the mindfulness approach in my personal life.
I was reminded of this recently when I participated in a really lovely discussion with others committed to this work in a podcast discussion hosted by
–a fantastic journalist whose Substack – about a podcast series she helped produce, We Are The Great Turning. The podcast is a conversation between Jessica Serrante–a climate activist, coach, and trainer–and her mentor Joanna Macy who has been a climate activist for decades and created “The Work That Reconnects,” which is, according to her bio “a globally celebrated framework of practices that has helped leaders and activists for decades to serve the healing of our world in a more powerful and effective way.” I quote her bio because I’m still trying to understand all of what The Work That Reconnects is. This podcast feels it’s almost an introduction to all of that.What is made clear through Jess and Joanna’s discussion is that The Work That Reconnects is deeply rooted in spiritual practice. Not one practice in particular, but a combination of Buddhist and Indigenous principles along with systems thinking and “Deep Ecology.” Joanna Macy has something figured out that only a woman who has cultivated a spiritual practice over her 95 years on this earth can truly possess. And one of those elements of which I’m in awe of is her ability to recognize the emotions she’s experiencing, acknowledge them and their use, channel them in some way, and then move on from them. She notes that it’s important to feel the pain we’re experiencing and recognizing that it’s rooted in compassion.
Jess tells a story of a conversation she had with Joanna when she was going through a particularly difficult time in her life and she remembers Joanna saying this: “Let your suffering connect you to the suffering of your world. Can you see how your heartbreak connects you to a mother in Yemen who's just lost her child to hunger? Or to a farmer in India who lost their crops to flooding or someone who has just received a cancer diagnosis.”
“She wasn’t equating these experiences,” Jess goes on. “Every loss is not exactly the same, but she was saying we are all connected in that our hearts break.”
While in our podcast discussion we acknowledged that this kind of leaning into the pain might not be safe for all people depending on where they are in their own mental health. But for many who it is safe for, this pain is useful. It is a way to get us out of our numbness and connect ourselves to the people we might hear about.
I think about those moments of sadness I have for no particular reason. Those moments where I’m sad just because. Those moments are useful in that I can sit with that pain and connect myself to the mother in Gaza who is rocking her shrouded, lifeless child. While I still cannot imagine the unbelievable pain that mother is experiencing, I can connect to her in that moment through compassion. And that is useful because it ignites a sense of action.
I had to pause writing after typing the above paragraph. Every time I think of the scenes of mothers rocking their shrouded children, my heart breaks anew for them. It’s important to feel that pain. It is a pathway to connection. There’s only so much I can do, but what if we all felt the pain of others? And this goes for the pain for the planet?
The truth is, I don’t always sit with the pain. What I feel is numbness. I imagine it’s a coping mechanism. What left me in awe listening to Joanna is her ability to move between pain and love and hope so fluidly. And to feel it so deeply. Specifically she expressed her rage and anger–so deep it brought her to tears while she was talking–at the powers behind the Willow Project which will tear apart one of the last truly wild spaces in the world.
It was so hard for me to relate to her rage. True, I get mad at the very few people and corporations who are responsible for our future, but rarely do I think about them with such passionate anger. But why not? That can surely be useful.
I’m still trying to figure out what this all means in the grand scheme of climate action. In fact the act of writing this is me trying to process all of what I listened to, so it probably is coming out a bit jumbled. But what I do know is that I want a bit of what Joanna Macy has. I want a deeper connection to people and the planet. I don’t want to feel numb about all of it. I want to be in it. And so, that brings me to the question the title poses: Do I need a spiritual practice?
I think I already knew that I definitely do. But in a way, I maybe need to convince myself to make that effort. Because it is work.
Have any of you cultivated a spiritual practice? Tell us about it in the comments!
And also, you all should check out Anya’s Substack
and listen to the We Are The Great Turning podcast.