The Power of Practice, Part 1

 I have always been drawn to trees.  As a child I climbed them.  I like to draw and paint them.  I have hiked through them more times than I can count.  And I have surrounded myself with them in places I have lived.

So it comes as no surprise that I was attracted to the tree as a metaphor for spiritual practice.  Someone once shared a graphic with me that illustrates this metaphor.  I find it useful in thinking about spiritual practice and in explaining it to others. It comes from a web site called contemplativemind.org.

Since I don’t have the actual graphic to show you, here’s where your visualization skills come in.  Imagine your favorite tree for a minute.  Imagine its largest branches.  In this metaphor, those large branches represent the types of spiritual practices available to us.  There are seven: creative, activist, relational, movement, generative, ritual (or cyclical), and stillness. 

Now visualize one of those large branches and the smaller ones that extend from it.  The smaller branches in this metaphor represent the subcategories of practices within a larger category.  For example, stillness practices include various forms of meditation and prayer, or simply quieting the mind in silence.   

The activist category includes things like pilgrimages to areas where there are known social justice issues. It includes certain types of work and volunteering, vigils and marches, and the act of bearing witness.  

On a separate web site, spiritualityandpractice.com, there are 260 distinct classic and informal practices described.  There’s something available for all of us it seems – all personalities, interests, and temperaments.

But consider for a moment…why engage in a spiritual practice in the first place?  Clearly, there are many other ways to spend one’s time.  

I bring you back to the visualization of your tree.  Picture the roots.  It is here that we understand the purpose for practice – the why.   For each of the 260 practices I mentioned, there is only one common purpose:  To gain awareness of and connect to something larger than the small egoic self.

 What this “something” is will be perceived differently from person to person.  Some perceive it as God, Source, the Divine, All That Is, a Higher Power, or a Universal Intelligence. Others perceive it as one’s higher self, humanity, all sentient beings, the natural world, or Consciousness.  I’m sure I could add more to the list.  Think about what that “something” is -- or could be -- for you.

 How do we gain awareness of this larger something?  We simply start to pay attention.  Our practices help us do that.

 “But what about the ‘connection’ part?” you ask.  “What the heck is that?”  Well…that is something experiential.  If you haven’t already, I invite you to give spiritual practice a try… and discover for yourself.  For me, given my own experience, I am convinced a connection is possible.

 There are three suggestions I can offer to help you start (or restart) a spiritual practice.  First, bring an open mind to the possibility of connecting to “something larger”.  

 Second, bring a commitment to regular practice, daily if possible.  Starting small is always a good idea.  A few minutes a day is better than none.  I found it helpful, initially, to set a specific period of time for trying a new practice.  When I first started meditation, for example, I aimed to practice, daily, for forty days. That jump-started the practice I have today, many years later. 

 The third suggestion I can offer is to practice from the heart.  Get out of your head.  To illustrate, I once questioned whether a practice I was doing was “working” to achieve what I had hoped.  My wise teacher counseled me that if I was using practice as an intellectual strategy to achieve some result, I was missing the point.  Practice is heartfelt, divorced from pre-conceived outcomes.  

 Which leads me to my closing thoughts…

 I must share one addition I would make to the tree metaphor I presented.  I base it on personal experience with spiritual practice and from the experiences others have shared with me.  

 Again, visualize your tree.  Picture the leaves it produces.  These are natural byproducts of healthy growth, beginning at the roots and moving upward and outward.  As long as the tree is connected to its roots, and is tended well, the leaves emerge naturally – over time.  

 It is not promised, but so it can be with spiritual practice.  The leaves on your tree could represent the emergence of new, more expansive qualities of heart.  A dedicated, practice, conducted over time, often leads to these shifts, to fresh growth:

 From anger to inner peace.

From resentment to forgiveness.

From pessimism to empowerment.

From greed to generosity.

From conflict to serenity.

From scarcity to abundance.

From apathy to compassion.

From fear to love.

 May it be so for all of you.  Amen.

Post Author: Anna Cuyler, Certified Spiritual Director