As we saw in chapters 4 and 5, our research suggests that engaging in a daily practice of some form or another will help you integrate transformative expe-riences into your everyday life. Indeed, engaging in a daily practice can aid you in ways fundamental to your sense of balance and emotional stability.
Transpersonal psychologist Charles Tart summed this idea up eloquently, describing transformative practice as a form of spirituality: “In general, if you have any kind of even moderately strong spiritual practice, that practice
gives you an anchor in turbulent times. It gives you something to keep you more steady when the winds of change are buffeting you” (2003).
Catholic priest Father Francis Tiso reminded us how practice can help you stay on an even keel during what can be a turbulent journey:
Committing oneself to the spiritual path, although we may be seeking peace, actually … seems to put us into huge fluctuations of anguish and ecstasy.
You can see there is peace, there is mystical absorption, there are all kinds of wonderful samadhis and states. But there is also this huge fluctuation of emotion and feeling and intensity.
Many spiritual practices—like penitential practices, the practice of humility, the practice of self-abnegation—although they sound like they are contrary to a self-esteem ideology, are actually designed to keep you on an even keel when you are going through those things. Because you are going to go through them. If you do yoga, for example, you’re sensitizing your whole body-mind complex so that your pleasures become much greater, as well as your pains. You can become quite attached, even to the physical pleasure of yoga. That’s why you have to learn to keep on an even keel.
We need to be more courageous in embracing the suffering aspect of the transformative process. Happiness is not found in evading the rough patches of the journey, and cannot be identified with little surges of happy hormones in the brain. That is not happiness, it is addiction!
Thomas Merton … talks about the fact that Cistercian-Trappist liturgy—the chanting and so forth—is designed to not let you go too high or too low, but to keep you in the middle. It gives you the kind of psycho-physical stability that you need to cope with the fact that you are going to have highs and lows. You can get trapped in either heaven or hell; this [stability] brings you back, keeps you human.
There are many anecdotes about [the importance of stability, of staying in the middle] and we don’t appreciate it enough perhaps, when
Life as Practice, Practice as Life
149 we’re being told, “Come back down to Earth.” But in fact, there is wisdom in this practice and attitude. (2002)
Many transformative practice traditions have built-in ways of helping you keep a relatively even keel during the transformative process.
Transformative practices such as prayer, meditation, ritual, and many others have been designed in part to help you deal with the kinds of fluctuations Tiso describes. Having guides, a supportive community, a daily mind/body practice—all of these are engineered to both transform you and help you tolerate the challenges of the transformative journey.
Likewise, Stanley Krippner, another transpersonal psychologist, used the metaphor of an anchor this way:
I like the saying: “By their fruits, you shall know them.” If the person is a better worker, a more loving, happy, joyous person to be with, sure, that’s good enough for me. Psychotherapists use the term anchoring—you take the epiphany and you anchor it into your everyday experience. You find ways that you can put it to work in your daily life. Many people go to church, or temple, or synagogue, or whatever. They go one day a week and it’s completely divorced from the flow of their life. They make a big show of their religious piety, but it’s not anchored to anything… This is something you have to work on. You take these insights from these epiphanies and you find something in your daily life that you can hook them onto and you pull the rest of your life along. (2002)
As both Tart and Krippner suggest, transformative practices can help ground you in the face of new ways of being in the world. As you journey along the transformative path, it’s often helpful to have practices that can help you integrate new ways of being into your everyday life.
As we also saw in chapter 4, studies on brain plasticity tell us that the more you practice something, the stronger new neural pathways become—
and the easier it becomes for them to be stimulated. Whether your practice is daily meditation, periodic fasting, journaling, attending worship ser-vices, positive affirmations, walking in nature, or praying, practices foster
the integration of transformative experiences. Practice serves as a reminder of a larger set of possibilities than you may experience on a routine basis.
Practice connects you repeatedly to the sacred, numinous, or divine. And practice also stimulates further growth and transformation.
Daily practice can provide a strong scaffolding for the transformative process. As Michael Murphy (2002), cofounder of the Esalen Institute, put it, practice acts like the stake that supports the growing vine—you!
Andriette Earl, reverend of the East Bay Church of Religious Science, con-siders daily practice akin to keeping your foot on the gas pedal as you drive uphill (2006). Practice thus fuels your transformative journey, supporting you as you seek to grow and blossom.