Spiritual practice describes both the conscious intention and the planned action to bring the spiritual, the transcendent, into the forefront of our lives, to create our lives around and as an integral part of the unseen yet all powerful spiritual realm.

Sometimes we are inspired towards spiritual practice by a teacher or a piece of inspirational writing, a powerful penetrating nugget of wisdom from the past. Sometimes a present-day personal crisis brings us to our knees; all else fails us and all we have left is the spiritual, some vague and fragile hope that there is something beyond this present depression and despair that will hold us like a tender and reassuring lover, who whispers endearments that offer tiny candlelights in the dark night of the soul, presaging the dawn. Unexpectedly, the whispers come from our own throat, emerge from our own mouths like an infant’s first sounds, at first perhaps unintelligible but such a clear sign of life! By thinking, breathing and speaking we become the creators of our own lives. “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.” The Dhammapada

When asked how he felt in his spiritual practice, Ramakrishna replied, “I feel like a fish released from a pot into the water of the Ganges.” From a raindrop into a mighty flowing river, we have joined Creation, as Andrew Harvey writes, “the ultimate adventure, claiming complete responsibility for our own spiritual development.”

When we are just novices with only a little understanding, we can know that when we enter into any kind of spiritual practice, we quickly join all those people, ancient and modern, ancestors and neighbors, who have themselves entered spiritual practice. Suddenly we are not alone, not separate in our despair, nor in our ecstasy, but together, part of a community of practitioners.

To practice means to engage regularly, to create an hourly or daily pattern of behavior, literally to act, to engage energy, whether it is interior or exterior energy. Just like practicing to play the piano, or tennis, regular spiritual practice builds skill and offers reassurance of our home in the Universe. I remember 40 years ago beginning to practice meditation early in the morning. I walked over to the “Little Kids’” building at Collins Brook School and sat on the sun warmed carpet. All the other times since then, from joining 1000 early risers in Rashneeshpuram, Oregon, to sitting on the Marin Headland’s cliff overlooking San Francisco, to sitting in solitude in a cabin on Great Duck Island, Maine, to these last years in the Chime office/classroom on Thursday mornings, a familiar grace and comfort are recreated as both my body and soul remember the peace and stability available, anytime, any place, no matter what else is going on.

Some spiritual practices are quite private: saying a mantra or the Rosary under your breath, imagining God inside you, beside you, creating a field of white light around you. Some are public: sitting with others in meditation, marching in protest, serving food to the hungry, praying together in a church congregation. Either form of spiritual practice is about change, outright and universal, acknowledging, waking up to the change going on, inside and out, and sharpening the conviction we are also that which never changes. Wayne Teasdale says spiritual practice is “the work of our transformation, and is ultimately about inner development that reaches fruition in selfless love, compassion, mercy and kindness.” These are the qualities that never change.

Through this conscious process of transformative spiritual practice, we become what we already are, mystical and enlightened beings.

Rev. Jacob Watson, Abbot
Chaplaincy Institute of Maine
March 1, 2008