Bringing the Sacred Back To Into Everyday Life
I’m here with the fourth installment of my series, Consciously Engaging with the News (And Our Lives). If you’d like to revisit the first three parts, you can find them here.
When we learn to turn away from the noise, turn away not to blindly ignore, but to consciously choose to engage with the present moment, we invite something powerful back into our lives.
Every morning when I wake up, there’s a moment that I don’t want to get out of bed. Sometimes it’s a long moment that feels so challenging. Sometimes I lie there for 15 minutes and watch the mind lament the idea that I need to rise and face the day. Other times it’s quick and my body moves and there I am, feet on the ground, pouring a cup of coffee in the kitchen.
It is a special, important moment each day when we wake. It’s the moment we have the possibility of choosing where we put our attention for the first time upon waking.
So when we wake, it’s this moment of choice: where am I going to put my attention? Am I going to put it on worry and dread and fear, or am I going to put it on the feeling of my feet hitting the floor of my bedroom, the smell of my home, the opening of a door, the closing of a window? It’s definitely a time to NOT reach for your phone or the news. Let yourself BE.
And it’s here I’ve often found great peace in bringing sacredness in through words.
Thank you for this perfect day.
Truth and love point out the way.
Calm and exalted each morning I say,
Thank you for this perfect day.
-Madora Kibbe
This is one poem I recite in the morning. It’s a way that I choose where to put attention, rather than letting unfettered thoughts and feelings pull my attention towards them.
It took me many years of meditation and presence practice to be able to do this consistently and eventually constantly – choose where to put my attention– because the pull of our minds’ thoughts and the negativity bias therein is so prevalent. It’s inside our own minds, but it's also in our conversations and interactions with the world around us, which is why we must find our own discipline in where we put our attention.
It took me many years of meditation and presence practice to be able to do this consistently and eventually constantly – choose where to put my attention– because the pull of our minds’ thoughts and the negativity bias therein is so prevalent. It’s inside our own minds, but it's also in our conversations and interactions with the world around us, which is why we must find our own discipline in where we put our attention.
I was awestruck and this simple moment of getting water from a stream became a prayer: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
When we bring back the sacred back into our lives, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. All of it! Even the parts that are uncomfortable, even the parts that are obnoxious: traffic jams, road rage, inconvenient deliveries, death. All of it is sacred. Garbage, compost, sacred.
A part of the meeting of our own impermanent existence, part of the meeting of the existential crisis, the fact of being a human, which means that inevitably one day we will no longer be in this form, is meeting our own fear. And that too is sacred.
So in this final installment about conscious engagement with the news, I invite you to meet every feeling that arises in your life with your full present self, including your own fear about what might happen or what might not, and then bring that attention right back here to this sacred moment, right in front of you, around you and as you.
Turn away from the phone, the tv, the computer and bring your attention instead to
The sound of a child sleeping.
Your neighbors walking their dog down the street.
The feeling of a warm car seat on the backs of your bare legs on a hot day.
The smell of leaves falling, the sound of water running.
This is enough, the noticing, to bring gratitude back, for when we pay attention from Presence, we are grateful. In this noticing we find a quiet satisfaction, gratitude, love, peace, contentment, and a joy. And this truly is the antidote to the frenzy of the thinking mind, the frenzy of the analyzing of events, people, places, the frenzy of the anticipation of doom that we receive when we engage with both the news, but also so many facets of our everyday lives.
So the journey becomes again about sitting still and being present. And perhaps in these moments of stillness, you might find, as I have, a prayer coming from your lips. Maybe it’s a prayer you learned when you were little, with your family, or maybe it’s a prayer you’ve never heard before. Simply a “thank you. Thank you.”
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