Spinning

"The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to silence the mind." — Caroline Myss

“There is a place of peace within you that is untouched by the world. Return there often." — Amma (Mata Amritanandamayi)

"Go within every day and find the place where nothing is impossible." — Kirpal Singh

---

When I was a little girl, I loved to spin. I'd stretch my arms out as wide as they would go, throw my face toward the sun, and spin in circles until the whole world blurred around me. Faster and faster I'd go until I became so dizzy that I'd fall onto the grass laughing, waiting for the earth to stop moving before standing up and doing it all over again.

I loved doing the same thing on swings. I'd twist the chains tighter and tighter until they couldn't twist another inch. I can still remember that moment right before letting go. Then everything would unwind at once, the swing spinning wildly while my feet kicked up little clouds of dust beneath me. Back then, spinning was pure joy. I decided when to begin and when to stop.

Adult life doesn't always give us that choice. This has been one of those years where life seems to be intent on spinning me. Professionally, it has been one of the hardest years I've experienced in software sales. Deals haven't closed like I expected them to. At the same time, I'm so close to finishing my Ph.D. that I can finally see the finish line. Then, on Tuesday, I learned I'd reached the new federal funding limit and would have to find another way to pay for the last part of the journey.

There was a fire at my home. I learned that my mother had passed away. People I love are facing serious medical diagnoses. Another loved one is facing yet another surgery. My rheumatologist, who has cared for me through more than twenty years of lupus, just retired. My daughter, who also lives with lupus, has now begun treatment for lupus nephritis which is impacting her kidneys. And none of those things happened one at a time. They seemed to arrive together, each one demanding attention before I'd caught my breath from the last.

Eventually my body started telling the story too. For weeks I wasn't sleeping the way I normally do. A migraine stayed with me in the last couple of weeks for nearly ten days. My lupus reminded me that stress never stays in my mind for very long; eventually it finds its way into my body. Then the cycle begins. Stress aggravates the lupus. The lupus creates more stress. Lack of sleep makes everything harder. Around and around it goes until it feels as though I'm spinning right along with it.

On the news, almost every day there's another image of forests burning somewhere in the world. Europe. Western Canada. The western United States. Entire communities watching flames move toward them while the rest of us watch from thousands of miles away. Sometimes it feels as though the whole world is spinning faster than any of us were ever meant to live, and everywhere we turn there's another headline inviting us to become anxious about something else.

I wish I could tell you I've moved through all of this with perfect peace. I haven't. There have been moments when I could feel anxiety rising almost before I was aware of what was happening. Moments when I wanted to fix everything, understand everything, or somehow make the world stop spinning long enough to catch my breath.

After all these years, though, I've learned to recognize those moments for what they are. They're usually my invitation to stop looking outward and turn deeply inward instead. So I go to my meditation chair. I repeat the holy names. I bring my attention back to the point between my eyebrows and quietly think of my beloved Kathy. And within a few minutes something begins to change. Nothing outside of me has changed. But I have. And over the years I've come to believe that's where the real work begins. I've often thought about what Kathy taught us over the years. Most of us think of surrender as something we do because we have no other choice. We grit our teeth, accept what we can't change, and call that submission. That wasn't what Kathy lived. She taught us, by example, to embrace and to love God's will.

If I'm honest, loving God's will is easy when life unfolds the way I want it to. It's easy to be grateful when the people I love are healthy, work is going well, and the future looks the way I hoped it would. It's something altogether different to bow your head and say, "Thank You," when none of those things are true. I'm not talking about pretending difficult things don't hurt. They do. I don't believe God asks us to deny our humanity. Grief is real. Fear is real. Illness is real. I've cried this year. I've worried. I've woken gasping at one o'clock in the morning with my body filled with anxiety. But somewhere in the middle of all of that, I've started to understand the difference between accepting God's will and loving it. Acceptance keeps one foot planted in the life we wanted. Love lets go.

Kathy used to describe the coverings over the soul as delicate strands of silk caught in a thorn bush. You can't just yank them free. If you did, they'd tear. They had to be loosened patiently, tenderly, one thread at a time. I've always loved that image, but I don't think I really understood it until recently. Maybe the difficult seasons are part of that gentle loosening. Maybe the disappointments, the diagnoses, the losses, and the uncertainty aren't interruptions to the spiritual path. Maybe, painful as they are, they're part of it. Not because God enjoys watching us suffer, but because every time life refuses to cooperate with the story we've written for ourselves, another thread begins to loosen.

We spend so much of our lives trying to hold everything together. We cling to plans, identities, careers, relationships, even our ideas about how God should work. Then something happens that we never would have chosen, and suddenly our hands can't hold on as tightly as they once did.

Looking back over this year, what surprises me isn't what happened. Difficult seasons eventually come to all of us. What surprises me is how quickly I found my footing after each wave. That certainly wasn't because I'm unusually strong. It's because I've spent years practicing returning to center.

I've learned that meditation doesn't end when I get up from the chair. It changes the way I try to move through the rest of the day. It reminds me to take care of the body God entrusted to me, especially when stress is trying to convince me that I don't have time. For me, that means eating the foods that help me feel my best. It means going to the gym, even when I'd rather stay home. It means taking long walks, getting a massage when my shoulders have been carrying too much, and keeping the appointments that help me feel like myself again. It means fresh flowers on my kitchen island, Kathy's music filling the house, and stopping whatever I'm doing long enough to hug Sascha Khan and Sirius Rose, who always seem to know when I need to slow down. None of those things remove the spinning. They simply remind me that I don't have to spin with it.

The world isn't going to stop spinning. Tomorrow there will be another deadline, another diagnosis, another unexpected bill, another heartbreaking headline. Somewhere another environmental disaster will impact people. Someone else will receive news that changes their life in an instant. We don't have to look very far to find another reason to be afraid.

For a long time I thought peace would come when life finally settled down. I kept waiting for the day when everything would fall into place, all the loose ends would be tied up, and I'd finally have room to breathe. I'm not waiting for that day anymore. The older I get, the more convinced I become that peace was never meant to depend on my circumstances. If it did, most of us would experience very little of it.

Meditation has slowly taught me something I couldn't have understood any other way. Beneath all the spinning around me, there is a place within me that has never moved. The deadlines don't reach it. Illness doesn't reach it. Loss doesn't reach it. Even fear can't stay there for very long. It's the place the mystics have pointed toward throughout history, not because they wanted us to escape the world, but because they knew we would never find lasting peace by chasing it outside ourselves.

Sometimes I picture myself on a surfboard. I don't control the waves. I never will. Fighting them only leaves me exhausted. The wiser choice is to learn how to ride them, trusting they'll carry me where I need to go. Other days I picture the seabirds I've watched resting on the ocean. The waves rise and fall beneath them. Storms pass overhead. Yet somehow, they remain remarkably still, floating on something much larger than themselves.

Then my thoughts drift back to being a little girl, laughing as the world spun around me. Only now I notice something I never could have understood then. The earth was spinning too. It always had been. The planets were moving. The galaxies were turning. Long before I was born, the Sufi mystics were whirling in remembrance of God, not because they wanted to become dizzy, but because they were searching for the still point at the center of all that motion.

Maybe that's what this year has been trying to teach me. The spinning isn't the problem. The problem is believing I have to spin with it. Kathy didn't simply teach us to submit to God's will. She taught us to love it. There's a world of difference. Submission can still carry resentment. It can quietly whisper, "I wish things were different, but I suppose I have no choice." Love says something else entirely.

Love trusts that whatever God allows into our lives is somehow working for the good of the soul, even when we can't see how. It doesn't make suffering enjoyable or erase grief. It simply refuses to believe that anything is wasted in God's hands. When I think about the silk caught in the thorn bush now, I don't see something being torn apart. I see something being set free. One delicate thread at a time.

Maybe that's what this year has been doing. Maybe that's what all our difficult years are doing. They loosen our grip on the life we thought we wanted until, almost without noticing, our hands begin reaching for something infinitely better. As children, we spin because it's fun. As adults, life spins us for reasons we rarely understand. But maybe, years later, we discover it was never spinning us apart at all. It was patiently spinning us loose from everything that kept us from remembering who we really are. And maybe that's been an act of love all along.