What To Do When Your Practice Gives You A Shove!

The invitation can upend your life in ways you never expected—and create great joy.

How will you respond?

- John Backman

I’d come to this gala year after year: the annual awards dinner for local professional marketers like me. Same good friends and colleagues. Same banquet hall. Same stale jokes and cheese cubes and speeches and choice of prime rib or chicken.

This time, I had no idea why I was there.

I’d just returned from three days at a local monastery, and the visit had given my whole normal life a giant shove. It left me sitting in that banquet hall and thinking: Why do we do this, any of it—the schmoozing and “networking” and grasping for more business? How have I ever justified selling things to people? Why do we give out awards, anyway? Who ever thought this was important?

In the 10+ years since, the shove toward a different life has changed me. My thriving full-time business is no longer thriving or full-time. Instead I work part-time to pay the bills and spend half of each day writing articles like this. I’ve felt drawn into much more solitude, as much as a married person can have. I’ve written a book and become a spiritual director. None of this has generated commercial success.

At the same time, my joy level has soared. So has the sense that what I’m doing means something.

We don’t usually think of spiritual practices as having this sort of effect. We adopt them for what they give to us. So we meditate to reduce stress, practice mindfulness for clarity, pray for inner peace. Of course these benefits often come.

But there’s something else here too. Most spiritual practices connect us with something or someone much, much larger than ourselves. You might call it God, or the Divine, or Buddha-nature, or the Universe, depending on who you are. Let’s call it the Larger for now. The punchline is this: In our spiritual practices, we open our hearts wide to this Larger, and the Larger opens its heart to us.

And if we let it, it changes us.