It’s Just Ordinary

I was happy for my friend.  I’ve known him for a long while.  Now in his forties, he began to practice meditation a few months ago.  After a few weeks, the leader of his meditation group invited him to attend an eight-day silent retreat focused on meditation practice.  My friend was eager to go.  “I know it will change my life!” he told me. 

After the retreat, he shared that it was difficult for him.  “Everyone was really into it,” he said. “But I had trouble sitting the way other people did.  It was great to be off the grid and observe the silence.  I mostly slept.  I don’t feel any different after the retreat than before I went.”

My friend’s experience is not really unusual. While many people have very positive experiences when making a retreat or engaging in similar kinds of spiritual practices, there are also many people who are like my friend: they expect some sort of deep experience, but it turns out to be pretty ordinary.  I suspect that he faced a few challenges for making his first retreat.  First, he was new to meditation.  It was as if a beginning swimmer who just learned how to float in the water was thrown into the deep end.  Meditation is a practice.  Much like running, it takes practice to run in a marathon.  Second, his expectations were quite high.  He thought the retreat would change his life. I’ve been on lots of retreats in my life.  Looking back, I wouldn’t call any of them “life-changing.” Some were very positive.  Others were…well…I observed the time of retreat and it ended.  They were just ordinary.  That’s okay.

The development of the spiritual dimension of our lives is much like the development of any other aspect of our lives:  it’s not the result of one intense or compressed experience like an eight-day retreat.  The development of the spiritual dimension of our lives takes place day after day with regular practice.  In terms of meditation, that means a regular practice – even if that is three days each week for 15 minutes in a sitting.  That’s where we all need to begin.

What happens when we’ve done some work on the spiritual development of our lives?  Surprise!  We have to do more and more practice.  A so-called “more advanced” stage of spiritual development is merely recognizing that with each task of our daily lives, in each moment, with each conversation or encounter with others, we always need to refocus our awareness on the spiritual dimension. Yes, it’s a continual practice. For some, that’s maintaining a focus on compassion.  For others, it may be about looking for Christ in the other.  Or it could be attempting to embrace each person or situation with love.  In whatever way we describe the process of attempting to maintain our focus, it’s essentially nurturing the same kind of awareness and attention.

When we move toward developing awareness of the spiritual dimension of our lives in each moment, that’s when our lives do change.  We experience ourselves, others, and all of our activities differently.  It’s all enriched with something more than was obvious to us in the past.

Perhaps my friend will attend another retreat someday.  But what I hope most for him is that he comes to understand that the development of the spiritual dimension of his life takes place day-by-day, moment-by-moment.  It’s really no different from developing other aspects of our lives. It’s just ordinary.

Photo source:  Marco Trinidad from https://www.pexels.com/@marco-dng