A Deep Spiritual Practice: Minding Your Own Business

   

When the world is spinning off-center, a very deep spiritual practice is minding our own business.

 

Yes, that sounds self-centered. But who is the Self, and what does it really mean to be "centered?"

 

During desperate times, we tend to project our anxiety by becoming busy-bodies, crusaders, trying to save the world, to solve everyone else's problems but our own. Here's a humble suggestion: we might better respond to the chaos, not by minding other people's business, but minding our own, very lovingly, very carefully, very gently.

 

Minding our own business can profoundly affect others, like a flower that enhances the whole garden by releasing its peculiar essence, its unique beauty. When we learn to be wholly authentically ourselves, we radiate the quality of wholeness to others. Wholeness is a resonant field, as real as gravity or electromagnetism. The energy of a centered soul can center a community. This is not just the work of a Guru or a Master, it is your work and mine.

The work of centering happens wherever you are, changing someone's tire, balancing accounts for a mom and pop business, or washing the dishes. The mother who darns and patches an old sweater for her child knits the whole world back together. You don't have to go out of your way to serve. The stranger you greet in the present moment, on the next step of your personal path, embodies all humanity. The outer form of charity is less important than the inner radiance.

When time itself is spiraling out of control, our primary vocation is Being, not doing. This work happens deep beneath the busy-ness of the marketplace, the chaos of the streets, in a field of silence where Christ-consciousness repairs, re-weaves, the tattered threads of community.

 

This work is Alignment, which is another name for Yoga. Not alignment with religious and political ideals, imposed from above by some authority, but alignment with your own Self, your heartbeat, your breath, the very cells of your body. Your alignment generates the field where others can more gracefully come into alignment. 

 

Sometimes, you do all that you can for the world simply by returning to your aching heart.

Sometimes, it is enough just to be you. 200% you. Inwardly and outwardly. This means, being the same person to yourself that you would be to others. Which isn't as simple as it sounds. It's the work of a life time. Your business.

 

Photo: by dearest friend, Aile Shebar