“Great love and great suffering are the normal paths of transformation.” – Richard Rohr
Contemplative practices come in many shapes and sizes. As most of you know, for the last 20 years I have devoted myself to my own contemplative practice and to sharing that practice with others. For me, it’s always been yoga mixed with a handful of other ways that afford me the space and the quiet to turn inward. My passion for practice comes from deep amazement at how it changes the way I live my life and from my hope to help others find their own transformative path.
Great love
When I look back to how I found my way to my first yoga mat, I see that Richard Rohr is right. Great love – love for my children – brought me to yoga. This might seem counterintuitive, as going to yoga classes required me to leave said children with a babysitter. And, while for the first month or so, having an hour to myself was indeed the whole point, the reason I stuck with the practice was that I saw that it was changing how I was when I was with my kids. I watched my irritable, frustrated temper dissipate in equal proportion to the increased contentment I felt within the messy chaos of life with three pre-school kids.
Without a doubt, love inspired my first steps on the transformative path of practice. For many, many years thereafter, I practiced because I knew it was good for me and good for those I loved. I practiced because it centered me. I practiced because it became a space of quiet that allowed me to feel connected to something greater than myself. I practiced because it helped me to learn about myself – my habits, fears, beliefs, abilities, and limitations. I practiced because it gave me a daily opportunity to explore my faith in a tangible and real-world way.
Great suffering
My teacher, Jim Finley, likes to say that “God sustains us in all things but protects us from nothing.” My practice, which is my way of connecting with God each day, sustained me for a long time. But as promised, it is neither’s God’s intention nor my practice’s job to protect me from life. For the last two years, great suffering became my path to transformation. Within less than a year, both my mother-in-law and my mother died of protracted illnesses. My husband and I spent his mother’s last year deep in caregiver mode for her. No sooner had I lifted my head from the grief of losing her than my own mother’s long journey with dementia slid into crisis mode and stayed that way for the next eight months until her death.
Loving these two women at the ends of their lives became, in a way, my practice. At the same time, my contemplative practices shifted to become times of oasis, times of quiet – sometimes the only minutes of the day that I was entirely present to myself. During these two years, being on my yoga mat felt good and settling, but it also felt incidental. Showing up and participating in these two women’s illnesses and deaths, on the other hand, felt deeply meaningful.
The amazing thing to me is the certainty I feel that I would not have been able to show up as I did if it were not for my contemplative practice. I can see now the truth in both Rohr’s and Finley’s messages: great suffering has been both the most painful and the most transformative thing I’ve ever experienced. My practice, and the way it kept me connected to God, sustained me through it all while protecting me from none of it. And this is a good thing, because without the suffering, I would not have changed the way I did – seeing my drive for productivity and success dissipate as love and connection became my purpose. This is change that I pray to hold on to.
Change can be fleeting
Rohr also teaches that the transformation that occurs from great love and great suffering typically does not last. Anyone who lived through 9/11 felt the amazing unity and connection that welled up in the aftermath of that horrible, shocking tragedy. If you felt that, you also felt the slow, subtle shift back to “life as usual” that happens after any loss, even one as massive as that one. But even as we slip and fumble our way back toward everyday life, even as the sharp clarity about what really matters that is grief’s greatest gift begins to fade, something in us remembers those feelings and that clarity.
Practice can make change more lasting
For those of us with contemplative practices, that remembering pulls on us deeply. We yearn for those feelings of connection, unity and clarity. An unseen fruit of our practices is that we have developed the eyes to see, the ears to hear, and the hearts to sense a great abiding Love within even the darkest, struggle- and fear-filled days. The weeks, months, or years spent practicing give us deep, strong roots that allow us to experience great love and great suffering in a way that leaves us changed. And change or transformation – the act of becoming what we are not yet, to borrow a phrase from St. Augustine – is the whole, entire point.
Practice, whatever form it takes, can begin the process of transformation. The beginnings of change are rich and good. As I found during the years I raised my kids, they are enough – and will be enough, hopefully, for a very long time. But when life happens, as life always does, and you and I are thrown head over heels into the upheaval of transformation by great love or great suffering, because of our practices, we will be ripe if perhaps not ready. (Remember, not even God will protect us from life). Thanks to our practices, we will be able and willing to allow life to do what it will do to form us into the people we have always been becoming.
The practice of yoga will be firmly rooted when it is maintained consistently and with dedication over a long period. – The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali 1.14 (Chapter 1, Verse 14)