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Welcoming the Storm: Practicing Presence in Challenging Times · Infinitely Precious

• 0:00
  Intro: Welcome to the infinitely precious podcast produced by infinitely precious LLC. Your host is James Henry. Remember, you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are.
• 0:12
  James: Hello, beloved. It's me, James. And recently there's been a lot of things going on in my world and maybe the same for you. When things get challenging, I still remember the old adage which unfortunately I don't think holds true which is when the going gets tough, the tough get going. It implies that challenging times are smooth sailing and easygoing and being tough is what will get you through those moments.
• 0:52
  And, toughness, my biggest concern about the use of the word toughness is toughness has been idealized or perhaps personified in the tough, strong, physically fit, determined, willful approach to the difficult and challenging times in life. And I want to suggest to you that perhaps there is another way to look at the tough and challenging times. Now, I'd like to say that it's the first approach that comes to my mind when I'm facing the challenging times. It is not. It has been challenging in my life from various personal in the process of moving, in the process of changing jobs, the death of my father, time trying to help mom get back on her feet after dad's death, my mother-in-law is facing some challenging times.
• 2:04
  And all of that coming together poses a challenge and actually feels kind of stressful if we're really honest with each other. Moments like that when there is a convergence of many challenging things in life, one or two, okay, but you add a number of them and it feels like you're slowly sinking underwater. So, what I want to suggest is what occurred to me this morning while I was washing dishes. Of all things, I usually make breakfast in the morning and then, depending upon how busy any of us are, sometimes I'm the one who washes dishes after breakfast and so I was washing dishes and I realized as I was standing there looking out the back window into the backyard, the sunshine and the trees and I realized that challenging times are an invitation to once again take seriously our personal spiritual practices. I talk a little bit about spiritual practices on this podcast occasionally but it's worth revisiting.
• 3:29
  Now I'm not talking about spiritual practice that will measure you as to how good you are, how bad you are. It's just not a morality game where you're trying to measure up to some divine measure of you. What I do think it is, is the opportunity to step back and say, alright these times are tough. How have I made it through the tough times before? And I'll be very honest, in the tough times where there was really only one or maybe two major challenges in my life, what I did is I returned to my meditation chair.
• 4:07
  Now, by returning I don't mean that I wasn't doing it already, but I turned to the lessons of my meditation life, my meditative life, my contemplative life to help me journey through the challenging the challenging moments. So this morning as I was looking out the window, I slowed the washing of the dishes, turned off the water and just stood there for a moment looking at the backyard. Several sparrows landed in the backyard looking for food. I saw a robin, a pair of robins in the backyard. I noticed the red bright red male cardinal on one of the branches of a tree in the backyard and I just took a moment to catch my breath.
• 5:11
  And in that moment, some of the stress that seemed to be manifesting itself in my tight shoulders and in my own mind, those manifestations slipped away. Well, not completely away, but they lessened. I smiled. I found myself smiling to myself because here I am a spiritual teacher, an encourager, and a practicer, and the idea of spiritual practice seemed alien to me in my time of greatest need. It's because sometimes when we practice anything for a long period of time, we start to take it for granted, we start to do it out of a sense of rote.
• 6:12
  This is what we do every day. This is how we do it, and it almost becomes a sense of achievement of checking off a box. I've sat in my meditation chair for twenty five minutes this morning. Check, and I move on to the next thing. But the actual practice itself is not about achieving some kind of spiritual enlightenment necessarily.
• 6:38
  It's not about breaking through. It's about calming. It's about perhaps suddenly being ambushed by what is real in life. All of these other kinds of challenges that are part of my life that are spinning me up, sometimes quite regularly, are once again invitations to just take a step back. When I feel those things rising much as when I'm sitting in my meditation chair, when I feel them rising, I can recognize them, see them and breathe through them.
• 7:25
  It doesn't make them go away. It's not about ignoring it. It's not about trying to spiritually bypass the pain of grief and the challenge of new endeavors, the challenge of letting go of old endeavors, it's not that at all. It's not trying to get past it. It's recognizing the pain for where it comes from naming it and recognizing it has a place.
• 7:53
  It has a place at the inner table of my life. I don't have to ignore it, just let it build up inside of me, let the tension overwhelm me. There will be moments when the grief or the tension do overwhelm me despite practice, but that's an invitation to simply continue practice. Not to practice better, not to practice smarter, not to practice more necessarily although any of those might I suppose work. It's an invitation simply to recognize in my limited personhood, in my finitude, in your finitude, in your limits that sometimes we have to ask for help, sometimes there's nothing that can be done, We can't just pull ourselves up.
• 8:50
  We can't just easily fix things even if our propensity is to want to do that. Sometimes we just have to ride out the storms and part of it is learning to name what the storm is, to see it for what it is and as we feel the adrenaline perhaps start to rush or the overwhelm of emotions, let those emotions come while breathing into the emotions. Not to feel ashamed of or guilty about feeling emotional, about feeling sad or overwhelmed or grief or frustration not to feel, not to, you know, not to name those as bad, but to name them, to recognize they have a place at the table, that they're coming from somewhere and that sitting with them for a moment might give you some clues about who you are. Occasionally in this life of ours we come to believe we have arrived. We don't ever quite get there, I don't think.
• 10:07
  We're good and we're good enough in this moment, but arriving at whatever that point is for as long as we're breathing, we have the opportunity to grow, to learn, to see the world more clearly, to see reality as opposed and juxtaposed to the many lenses through which we see reality which distorts reality for us, all of the learned ways of seeing the world that assumes I'm seeing it exactly the way that it is as opposed to letting those lenses fall away. It's an opportunity to say, I haven't arrived yet. As much as I might thought have thought I have arrived, it's an opportunity to step back. So, I'm thankful this morning that as I was washing some dishes, I was reminded that the best thing I've got is to practice and practice may not feel like it's working. In fact, it may feel like it's failing and you still feel overwhelmed on the far side.
• 11:13
  Your heart's still beating fast, the adrenaline is still pumping, You've slowed your breath but you still feel a bit of the overwhelm. Sometimes that's an indication you need to ask for help outside of yourself. Sometimes that's an invitation to just keep practicing. Sometimes it's an invitation to do both or perhaps some other third way that I have yet to mention that doesn't come to my mind in this moment. But no matter what, in the midst of the challenging parts of our lives when they arise in us, it can be an invitation to us to step back to recognize this is a challenging time and that I can learn what this challenge is teaching me.
• 12:10
  I can try to stretch myself into it. I can just feel the pain as it's rising. I can just feel the frustration as it's rising. Don't have to act on it. Can feel it, sit with it, recognize it, learn from it and perhaps in so doing, let it become a part of me and welcome at the table in a way that it loses some of its power.
• 12:39
  Those are my thoughts about facing challenging times. I'd be interested in hearing any of yours. You are certainly welcome to respond to this podcast and let me know what you're thinking. But until the next time, and these podcasts are going to be a tad bit more sporadic in the month of June as I'm in the process of packing and transitioning and moving and all that kind of thing so they might be a tad bit more sporadic but in the midst of these reflections remember you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are. Until the next time I speak to you.
• 13:21
  Wish you all the best.