by David Kundtz
“I read my sacred writings, hiked, kept notes, cooked on my camp stove, and changed my life,” he said. “When I'm sixty, I'll forget a lot about these years, but I know I'll always remember that time alone in the mountains.”
Around the world
Ann had worked her way up to marketing director in a small company. She had graduated from a prestigious college and through mentoring, native intelligence, and experience had gained wisdom that was at least equal to a graduate degree. She was doing very well. Then, just like that, she quit. She spent three months traveling the world, working as she went, “to get in touch with herself.” When she returned, she got work as a marketing director for one of the biggest companies in her field. Her Grinding Halt brought her clarity and, ultimately, a better position.
Canceled workshop
Susan tells of her unexpected experience of a three-week Grinding Halt. “The instructor became ill and a long-anticipated workshop was canceled. I was on a small island—a mile by a mile and a half—off the coast of Maine, so I just stayed there. At the time I was mad at my boyfriend who went to Europe without me, so it was a weird context. But what happened for me is that the power of nature took over. It was incredible. I was by myself, and yet I was with nature.” She wandered the island and visited the many artists there, looking at their work. “I noticed the weather change, from cloudy to cold to sunny. My body rhythms and the rhythms of nature became my clocks.”
As with many, Susan's Grinding Halt led her to appreciate the natural world. Think for a moment of what she did: three weeks essentially alone while wandering around a small island and being aware of the changes and rhythms, subtle and dramatic, of the natural world.
Illness and death
Sometimes Stopping is in response to a life event that is overwhelming. Barbara is a fifty-nine year old woman who had been married thirty-seven years and had one child, a thirty-fiveyear-old married daughter. She wrote to me, “Three years ago my husband, Jerry, became quite ill and, after five miserable months of doctors and tests, was found to be HIV positive. Three days later he was hospitalized with PCP (Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia)—an AIDS diagnosis. Five days after that, I found I was also HIV positive. Jerry recovered slowly from the pneumonia only to fall ill again and again until he died a year and a half ago.”
Soon after her husband's diagnosis and after several attempts to find an appropriate counselor, she found an understanding and helpful priest. “I remember saying to him at my first visit that I wanted more but I really couldn't say what it was I wanted more of! My future seemed to open before me like a black abyss—and I was very much afraid.” She decided to do something about it.
“My husband's religious tradition has rather elaborate funeral services including a forty-day memorial service. Right after that, I retreated. I closed myself off from as much of the world as possible. My daughter brought me groceries. I went nowhere but church. Six weeks after his death, family and friends began to get on with their lives, and I was left to my own devices, as it were. During this time I was not lonely. I had plenty of time to read, ponder and mind-wander, meditate, experience, and work through various stages of grief and pain.
“Surprisingly what came out of all this was the most marvelous enlightenment of one very pure, simple fact: God loves me unconditionally! My whole life had changed. My focus was crystal clear.
“I firmly believe if I had not had this opportunity of Stopping when I did, this great revelation, this enormous gift from God, would not have come into my life. I was able to open myself to it not even consciously knowing what I was doing or why. How long has this been going on inside my soul?
“Now I feel my life is just beginning. Wonderful things have happened and doors have opened.”
So, what are you wondering about Grinding Halts? Are you drawn to the idea? Or maybe you are put off by it? Perhaps just somewhat neutral? Maybe you have, in fact, already done a Grinding Halt. If you are drawn to do one, then things will take care of themselves and you probably will. If you are put off or neutral toward the idea, my request is only that you remain open so that if you become aware of the need for a Grinding Halt, you won't miss it. You'll recognize what you need and be able to respond.
The way to do is to be.
LAO-TZU
22
Growing “Like Corn in the Night”
Just how does Stopping—whether Stillpoints, Stopovers, or Grinding Halts—work? Earlier I used the metaphor of a computer and the internal scanning that it does. When we are Stopped, the scanning happens on its own; we give ourselves time for anything that needs attention on some level of our consciousness. The fascinating thing about the process is that it does not have to be conscious. You don't have to analyze your way out of anything. All you have to do is put some space and time around yourself, and your marvelous mind and soul will sort it out.
Henry David Thoreau has another, more earthy image to tell us how we grow during Stopping. Here are his words from Walden, which could well be described as the key American document from the 1840s, to support the Stopping I am encouraging a hundred and fifty years later.
First, he describes one of the wonderful moments of his two-year experiment of living alone at Walden Pond in Massachusetts in order to “live deliberately” and awake:
“I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window . . . I was reminded of the lapse of time.”
This is a wonderful description of a contemplative kind of Stopover: “from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie.”
Then he tells us how he grew:
“I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. . . . I minded not how the hours went . . . it was morning, and lo, now it is evening and nothing memorable is accomplished. . . . I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.”
“Like corn in the night” is a wonderful image that is full of power. Can you place yourself inside a cornstalk on a moonless night? Can you imagine being inside the growing ear, absorbing the nutrients from the earth, having retained in your flesh the warmth of the day's blazing sun, drinking in the moisture of the dew, and combining it all to create the miracle of the bright, yellow food? That's how we grow when we're Stopped. It happens on its own, we don't have to do anything.
To search out the deep truth of life,to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets . . .
MARIA MONTESSORI
23
Freeing and Finding Your Truth
I hope that by now you see that Stopping—in all its forms— works because it allows for and facilitates truth, your truth, to have its way. In fact Stopping can't fail; it can't be wrong because there is nothing to be wrong or right—no content, no doctrines, no dogma, no beliefs, and no system of adherence— only a clearing away of whatever is cluttering up your truth. And when your truth is freed, identified, and given wings, your life will be enhanced, deepened, and enriched. So Stopping is a way, a very simple way, to get to your truth.
I want to encourage the freeing of truth that is most essentially you, the identification and answering of your calling, because I believe that is the most important accomplishment in life, and that is how you most clearly discover and develop the values and meanings of your life.
What you encounter during Stopping will be unique to you. It is also noble, worthy, and life-enhancing, even though it can bring to consciousness painful or difficult issues. The most significant fact is (oh, what a different world it would be if we all believed this truth!) there is nothing wrong with you. An important goal of Stopping is knowing that fact, not hoping that it might be true, not thinking that it is sometimes true, but knowing that there is nothing wrong with you on many
different levels: through knowledge, facts, and feelings in your mind, in your body, in your heart, and in your soul. And this is true even though you (like most of us) can think of many areas where you need improvement: times when you are less than wonderful and even moments when you are downright terrible. Those are things that show that you are human, that you are not God.. There is nothing wrong with you! (If this is a sticky point, see Cheri Huber's book in the bibliography for help.)
But Stopping also involves another dimension of encountering truth, one that balances and fulfills the process of freeing. It is finding your truth. By that I mean the need we all have to get out of our own way, to get over ourselves, to go out from ourselves, and to find that something else that adds a special dimension to life.
The ultimate goal in finding truth is discovering one's purpose or calling. They are blessed who know, at least to some degree, the primary reason for their existence and the answers to, “Why am I here?” But equally blessed—if not more so—are those who are aware of the questions and are attentively searching for the answers, even if their attainment is ultimately illusive. It is precisely in the searching wherein lies our nobility. Stopping's purpose is to serve the search.
So Stopping can't go wrong even if it brings challenges and pain and messes. Much more likely to go wrong are the projects and plans you undertake before you are ready to undertake them and the search for purpose that will lead you far in the wrong direction because you are inattentive—before you are Stopped. And, perhaps more to the point, what will likely go wrong are the valuable projects and plans you will never undertake because you are not Stopped enough even to recognize them.
When you are actively engaged in both processes, freeing your truth and finding your truth, then life—no matter how frantic—is right.
We must find some spiritual basis for living,else we die.
BILL WILSON
24
Everyday Spirituality
At this point it is evident that Stopping is essentially a spiritual process. Spirituality is a challenging word. Many folks don't like it because it is too general, bland, and loaded with so many meanings that it can end up meaning nothing. Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham ask, “What is spirituality?” in their book Spirituality of Imperfection. They say, “to have the answer is to have misunderstood the question,” precisely because it can mean so many different things. While acknowledging this problem, I have been unable to find a satisfactory substitute for the word. So rather than throw it out, I have formed a broad, working definition based on a description by theologian David Griffin and on an idea from psychologist James Hillman:
“Spirituality is the ultimate meanings and values by which we live our lives, both on the peaks and in the vales.”
That is, spirituality consists of what we sacrifice for, what we put first, and what we would let go of last. It is our answers to the big questions of life, and it is our deathbed truths. It is the meanings and values that influence how we live from day to day, from decade to decade, and for a lifetime. Our morality is based on our spirituality; the rightness or wrongness of how we understand our actions is based on what we value and where we find meaning.
I like to call this definition everyday spirituality because it is useful for the speeded-up kind of lives we actually live. Everday spirituality is accessible for literally everyone, all the time: for those within a belief system or religious affiliation with very otherworldly values, and for those who, without such a system, hold very worldly values, or any combination of the two. This allows a wide range: from the strict orthodoxy of an ancient, organized religion to a personally created system that involves music, reading, exercise, and volunteerism to any combination thereof. God will not be limited. Grace knows no bounds. For those with the eyes to see, everything is sacred.
The second part of the definition has to do with the use of the words soul and spirit and I can think of no better way to understand their differences than by using the metaphor of James Hillman: peaks and vales.
Hillman identifies soul as residing in the vales, the low, fertile valleys of human experience. “Soul is always tethered to life in the world,” says psychologist and best-selling author Thomas Moore, commenting on Hillman's idea. “It can't be separated from the body, from family, from the immediate context, from mortality.” Soul can often be messy and dark. Soul is what grounds us to the world; it gives warmth and moisture to life and to our meaningful relationships with other people.
Spirit, on the other hand, tends “to transcend these limitations of the valley,” notes Moore. Spirit focuses on the “afterlife, cosmic issues, idealistic values and hopes.” It resides in the higher, drier, and more airy peaks in the sky. Its focus is transcendence— clearing the limits of the body and the other darker, messier tendencies of human nature.
But—and here is the point I want to emphasize—when the spiritual transcends the earthiness of the soulful to the point where it becomes split off from the soul and receives no influence from it, the resulting spirituality readily “falls into extremes of literalism and destructive fanaticism,” as Moore notes. So a spirituality that separates spirit from soul will lead to only half the truth, to serious one-sidedness, and to deep trouble.
When I use the words “spirit, spiritual, and spirituality,” I include both the peaks (transcendent and selfless aspirations) and the valleys (earthly struggles of delight, confusions, and muddling through); both the crisp, silent, clarity of a moment of isolated and absorbed contemplation and the experience of intense erotic pleasure with your beloved; and both the isolated monk disciplining his human nature in order to achieve a higher union with God and the mother who, with love and humor, handles way too many messes in the valley of family life.
I shall never forget a hallowed moment in my life that included both spirit and soul. I was sixteen and was on a canoe trip with a dozen other kids and our guides in the lake-studded wilderness of northern Ontario. We had made camp early that day and chores were done. It was the time between evening and night which at those northern latitudes is so blessed with a unique and amazing light. I took a canoe out on the lake, alone.
For some reason I stopped (yes, Stopped!) in the middle of the lake and lay down in the bottom of the canoe and kept very still. I heard (I can hear it now!) the water gently lapping at the sides of the boat, the faint, occasional sounds of my follow campers talking and laughing far in the distance, and the silly laugh of a loon at the other end of the lake. I saw only bluegray-rose sky. I felt the coolness of the water against my back through the canvas skin of the canoe as well as the hardness of the canoe's wooden ribs. At that moment I knew something utterly important—even though it is still most challenging to put it into words. It was something like: everything is right and I am part of it. I feel profound gratitude for that moment.
As is often the case, that transcendent peak was quickly transformed into a messy valley. I paddled quietly back and, as I was arriving at our camp, the guide began to yell at me, “Never do that! That is a very stupid thing to do! You should know better!” An empty canoe in the middle of a lake, he explained to me, is an immediate alarm signal for anyone seeing it. Of course, I knew right away what he meant. He saw me leave and, at some point, he happened to look out and saw only what appeared to be an empty canoe and no me. But I hadn't thought of that.
A moment on the peak, a lesson in the valley; both are necessary and holy.
The other point to remember about spirituality, as Kurtz and Ketcham point out, is that we all are spiritual whether or not we are religious or call ourselves spiritual. We all have values and meanings by which we live our lives, in the valleys and on the peaks, whether they are examined or ignored. In this sense, spirituality is like health. We all have health, well or ill or attended or neglected. So with spirituality. The important question is not whether we have a spirituality or not but whether our spirituality is leading us to integration, knowledge, and wholeness or not.
Often sp
irituality and religion are confused. Religion is the form or structure, which at its best fosters and feeds human spirituality and at its worst kills it. Spirituality, however, is a process of maturation toward the fulfillment of your meanings and values, which lives outside as well as inside religion.
I believe it is good for everyone to have a specific spiritual practice. That is, a way composed of specific teachers, events, rituals, moments, habits, customs, readings, sayings, doings, works of service, traditions, celebrations, icons, works of art, artistic expressions, places, spaces, times, symbols, words, images, sounds, colors, acts of kindness, and so on, almost endlessly, or any number of these in any combination
Having a spiritual practice is important for at least two reasons. First, it acknowledges that you are living both on the peaks and in the valleys and that you have desire and grace not only for the peaks, but also the humility, humor, and practical helps for the valleys. Having a practice encourages your spirituality to be useful; it supports an everyday spirituality.
And second, because it will help you in your Stopping; Stopping is essentially spiritual—that is, it deals with meanings and values. If you already have a spiritual practice as you cultivate Stopping into a habit, you won't be unprepared for its results. You will have ways that you have developed to process and develop your Stopping experiences.
