“If God said, ‘Rumi, pay homage to everything that has helped you enter my arms,’ there would not be one experience of life, not one thought, not one feeling, not any act, that I would not bow to.” – Rumi
Sometimes life is a lot
Have you ever hesitated to answer honestly when someone bounces up to you and asks, “What’s new?” thinking to yourself that perhaps your real answer would only dampen their mood? You’re not alone. Life gets that way sometimes. In fact, it does so regularly enough that I suspect this is where the expression “When it rains, it pours” comes from.
Looking back over my twenty years as a spiritual director, I cannot count the number of times good people like you and me felt beat up by life. Felt plagued by loss upon loss, or medical issue after medical issue, or frustration piled on frustration. Truly, life can sometimes be enough to bring you to your knees.
As someone who’s been there – down on my knees and sometimes flat on my face – I’m here to tell you it’s not always such a bad place to be. In fact, it is because when we’ve been knocked to our knees and are finally grappling with the fact that maybe we don’t “got this” after all, that God is most likely to catch our attention. And, if the poems and scriptures I’ve read from many world traditions are right, all God really wants is our undivided attention so that we can be lavished with divine love.
Sometimes what’s a lot it not actually life, but us
It’s the undivided attention bit that is so hard for us humans. Something happens (or looks like it’s going to happen) and we’re off to the races – making plans and contingent plans and fallback plans and unmaking all the plans we already had in place. Where is our attention? It’s certainly not on God. And it’s not on whatever is happening (which is our life, by the way) either. We haven’t even allowed ourselves a split second to feel it. We have dashed immediately away from what is really happening into the world of what may happen or what we want to happen.
In the yoga sutras, Patanjali describes this state as antaraya[1]. This Sanskrit word means challenge or obstacle. In her book on the sutras, The Yogi’s Roadmap, Bhavani Silvia Maki breaks down the word in a helpful way. Antar means “between, interval, gap, break.” Aya means “moving towards, create.” And the extra ya at the end comes from the word yah which means, “really, yeah!” Antaraya, then, describes that which really (!!) comes between you and your undivided attention.
Nine times out of ten, just before we hit our proverbial knees, what is distracting us from what is really happening in our lives, is — you guessed it — us. It’s our mad dash to fix everything that has happened or is going to happen or might happen. Why do we do this? Mostly because we don’t want hard stuff to happen!
What if life – all of it – is exactly as it’s meant to be?
But what if the hard stuff is what is meant to happen?[2] What if the hard stuff is not in the way of our regularly scheduled life but is, in fact, the life we are here to live? What if, to borrow from Rumi, we should be paying homage to it all – the good, the bad, and the ugly. Could you and I find a way “to bow to” every single one of our experiences?
It depends on where we find ourselves when we’re on our knees. Do we feel somehow held? Have we entered God’s arms on our way to our knees? Before you start rolling your eyes, let me get real here. For me, at least, this is rarely an immediate or obvious sense.
Sometimes, the certainty that I am being held doesn’t come over me until I realize that I really should be in total collapse, but, somehow, I’m not. Sometimes it doesn’t come until I do collapse (in the form of the flu or COVID or …) and life carries on thanks to the generous souls who step in to carry the burdens I’d planned to carry. No matter how long it takes me to sense it, it always comes with the realization that I’ve been held all along. Even the hardest parts of life have been chances to glimpse Love.
Every bit of life is filled with meaning when we look for it
So, the next time you find yourself feeling like life is more than you can bear – and way more than you certainly should share when someone asks, “What’s new?” – take a breath. Remember that one thing that most world traditions agree on is that the reason we’re here is to find meaning in it all. Nothing in this life is outside of God (or Love, or the Universe, or whatever word lights you up).
Pay homage to it all – the stuff you love, the stuff that annoys you, the stuff that breaks your heart. It’s all here to help you keep your undivided attention on this wonderful, spectacular, wild and special life of yours and the love that sustains it.
[1] In Yoga Sutra 1.30, as he is describing our path to a quiet, focused way of living, Patanjali lists the nine obstacles or challenges (antaraya) that distract us.
[2] The second chapter of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are all about the practice – what we can do to live a more focused, meaningful and fulfilling life. Before he even gets started with what we’re meant to do, Patanjali tells us what’s going to happen. Obstacles are going to arise. We are going to struggle. These obstacles and struggles are not pushing us off the path – they ARE the path. YS 2.2-2.3