Spiritual head-scratching: good at tasks but...

[icarus]

Spiritual head-scratching

Apparently I'm good at "tasks" but not good at taking care of myself spiritually.

What does that mean?

Immediately I tried to set up a task list of things I needed to do to take care of myself spiritually. Which, I think, lol, was the point.

Okay, maybe I'm kinda task driven. I have to-do lists, plans for the future, daily little check-boxes of stuff I did and didn't do.

I beat myself up about the tasks when I don't do them -- or do them late, or sketchily -- and now I wonder, how productive was that mental tongue-lashing I gave myself for being lazy? How beneficial was it to check off the task ... and then consider my Buddhist responsibilities done for the morning, task accomplished?

When I consider the idea of spirituality, I think of it as Work. As opposed to Play. And it's a different type of Work than my Job. So when I think of watching my mind and Doing Buddhism 24/7, my first response is horror. One can't Work 24/7 without going insane!

I also consider Buddhism (Work) to be the opposite of fandom (Play) and feel faintly guilty when I skip a few Buddhist check-boxes to go write fanfic.

But this idea of "taking care of yourself spiritually" is different. It's a totally different way of looking at it, more like what I'm trying to do with my cleaning my apartment every week--developing healthy habits that keep me happy, that keep me from going "aaaaaargh!" with all my Buddhist checkboxes and responsibilities because I can't stand how far behind I get at home.

It's more like taking care of the planet by changing my shopping habits and driving habits and living in a walkable neighborhood so I can so I can take care of my body by walking more, driving less. It's more like my goal of living sustainably.

How does one create a sustainable Buddhism?

I'll have to create a list.

No. Wait....

Comments

[mrshamill]

Yer so funny. ;-)

I think I'm a lot like you in this sense, but for me it might be because I haven't been spiritual in so many, many years. I don't remember what it felt like to 'like' myself, and I think that may be key to being spiritually healthy.

Buddhist Churches of America has a class at their main temple in Berkeley, "Crossing Over to Jodo Shinshu" that's primarily focused on people like me, who grew up in a Judeo-Christian family and never felt the love in it. I'm seriously thinking about going next year. One guy in my Temple did and he talked about how profound it was to be with people who grew up Buddhist and never had that... I don't know. Connection?

That didn't make a lot of sense, did it? ;-)

[elf]

I've spoken with Feri people, vaguely and incoherently because the language is clunky around this concept, about it being problematic to use the word "work" as a label for what we do, and how new Feri are, erm, brought in (inoculated? infected? enticed-and-transmogrified?).

The word "work" has baggage. It is what you do for a goal--usually, to eat and keep a roof over your head, but sometimes for other purposes. It is something you *don't* do without a goal. When something is done entirely for joy and personal fulfillment, we have trouble calling it "work," even when there is pay attached.

Fanfiction is not considered "work," except sometimes when it is goal-oriented. (E.g. "I have a lot of work to do on my Yuletide story.") School assignments are "work" because they have the goal of a grade; the same tasks, taken voluntarily without direct external validation/pressure, are not considered "work." (Writing blog posts is not considered work.) Knitting a shawl for pay is "work;" knitting a shawl in one's leisure time (another problematic concept) is not considered "work." (Sort of. I hope I'm being clear enough here.)

The problem is that we have no substitute word, especially for religious activities--English, firmly a product of the Christian church that dominated it for so long, considers "work" a virtue; goal-oriented tasks assigned by an outside authority are considered morally superior to those you choose for yourself, for your own purposes and at your own pace.

I've tried finding other metaphors for spiritual activities. Gardening, perhaps... it's widely understood that gardening can include arduous tasks but can be done for reasons that have nothing to do with a paycheck or any kind of external validation; the joy of seeing clusters of flowers blooming in their season is enough reward for many people. (But I have a black thumb and little practical knowledge here, so my ability to use this metaphor is limited.)

I would compare it to parenting except the U.S. has *whacked* concepts about parenting and they're getting more whacked by the day, and those who aren't parents often have very little connection to children. A hundred years ago, pretty much everyone knew how child-raising worked; now, those who aren't directly involved, often don't. This makes using parenting as a metaphor for other activities extremely difficult.

However, I'm coming to hate the metaphor of "student/teacher" for new would-be members of a religion and those who assist them in that goal; the education metaphor is all tangled with our notions of school, which don't fit how religions work. (Insert several rants here.)

I have used cooking as a metaphor with some success. (Possibly rather more than my actual cooking successes. Me and the kitchen, we are not good friends.) Cooking does lend itself to task-focused, list-based activities... but it also, unlike "school," does not have a single identifiable end-goal. You are a good chef when you can cook to your satisfaction and pleasure. There will always be more you could learn and new ways to practice, but there is no "best" way. Even a very bad cook could make one or two meals that everyone agrees are terrific. And while there are hundreds of ways to prepare an egg to make it a tasty, nutritious food, there are also plenty of ways to fail at that--"there is no one right way" doesn't mean "there are no wrong ways."

All this is further confounded by what we (Feri/Pagan people) wind up saying about the annoying "groupie" types, who announce that they are Pagan or Wiccan or whatever other label they've latched onto, without any awareness of what that means for people who've made the religion their life's path. "They won't do The Work," we sometimes say--they buy some jewelry and read some of the poetry, maybe attend a few public rituals, but refuse to do meditations or cast circles themselves or learn the history of the Craft, or anything that shows any real attachment or commitment.

I am tired of calling those things "The Work." When I was "in training" and did them daily, it didn't feel like work; it felt like I was changing myself into the person I needed to be. It felt like "work" the way good sex feels like "work"--sure, there was effort, and I was sometimes too tired or not in the right mood for it, but at no point, did it feel like something I was doing for someone else's idea of it being The Right Thing To Do.

I have doubts that calling religious activities "The Sex" is going to catch on, though.