Your Life is your Practice

“Your life is your practice.” Maezumi Roshi said many marvelous and inscrutable things, but that is the one I remember most vividly. Like nearly everything I heard him say, I thought it meant something else. Something deep and beyond mere mortal comprehension. It does. But it also means just what it says.

Your life is your practice. Your spiritual practice does not occur someplace other than in your life right now, and your life is nowhere other than where you are. You are looking for answers, insight, and wisdom that you already possess. Live the life in front of you, be the life you are, and see what you find out for yourself. Easier said than done, I realize today, more than ten years after hearing those words for the first time. Understanding it or not, I did get on with life, laughter, love, work, matrimony, and the precipitous path of early motherhood. At this point, grasping for familiar ground, the words echoed back: Your life is your practice.

Oh, you mean this life? This tripping up, breaking down, crying-out-loud life? This I’m-no-good-as-a-mother life? I turned the power of silent observation on the chaos within. All of that grumbling about Other Mothers was what Zen calls “putting a head on your head,” conjuring up comparisons, judgments, ruminations, and criticisms and, in the process, producing interminable suffering in my own mind. I was doing what we all do but precisely what I had been taught not to do. The events I describe in this book kept waking me up and making it clear. One head will do.

Motherhood is a spiritual practice. It is a crash course in wisdom. It is your spiritual legacy lying in wait for the taking. How else do you suppose mothers always end up knowing best? You do not have to mount a formal spiritual quest to uncover spiritual truths. I have, and it helps me. But you might not. As a mother, you have many priorities. Those priorities are nothing but your practice. If you allow it, being a mother is one of the most amazing, miraculous, mysterious, dignifying, and illuminating things you will ever do…

One day, I plopped momentarily on the floor to play dolls with my four-year-old daughter. Then she said something. She said something innocent, startling, and wise, and I ran off to my computer to record it. She followed behind, disappointed, and I told her I had to write down what she had just said. “Is that book about me?” she puzzled. “Well, sort of,” I waffled, to console her. “It’s not a book about motherhood!” she exclaimed, flush with the sudden thrill of discovery. “It’s a book about childhood!”

She had beaten me, again, to the full understanding of Master Dogen’s words about the oneness of mother and child, the understanding that upends the delusion of being separate and adversarial, the understanding that unlocks all the answers. The life of a mother is the life of a child: you are two blossoms on a single branch. It’s only my egocentric point of view that is limited—the view that I am over here, and she is over there driving me crazy. To be a fuller, a more compassionate and even-minded mother, live as though there were no gap and become the child. Yeah, right. I promise you: there will be times when you see through the fog of your fears and fatigue and know exactly what I mean.

Your life as a mother will reveal self-evident insights. It will show you more clearly who you are and what life really is. It will prove how capable and creative you are, how boundless and free. You are just not likely to believe it right away. You will suspect that there’s something you’re not getting, something you’re missing. You’ll think you’re not clever, good, or natural. This book aims to save you some of the savagery of your own self-criticism. It offers a tiny bit of help and a handful of advice, but mostly it gives a close and constant source of solidarity.

Stuck in stroller traffic, I came to suspect that we were all Other Mothers, or rather, that there was no other kind. A lifetime supply of insufficiency arrives with the stretch marks. Moments of self-assurance in motherhood do occur—joyful, satisfying, and complete—but they are just moments. In between are long, lonely spells when you feel lost and clueless. Ahead is another blind curve leading you somewhere you’ve never been. Yes, this crying-out-loud life is your crooked path, whose bumps and bends cannot be negotiated through mere reasoning. Time and again you’ll be stripped of your preconceptions, judgments, ideas, theories, and opinions of motherhood and left to go straight on through the inexplicable experience itself. These gulfs of incomprehension bring the opportunity for spiritual growth and self-acceptance. It is an unexpected gift and not always recognized. That you recognize your gift is my aspiration with these recollections. These words thus flow from my heart to yours, from one other mother to one other mother or mother-to-be. I know. I understand. Me too.

‘Even poor or suffering people raise their children with deep love. Their hearts cannot be understood by others. This can be known only when you become a father or a mother. They do not care whether they themselves are poor or rich; their only concern is that their children will grow up. They pay no attention to whether they themselves are cold or hot, but cover their children to protect them from the cold or shield them from the hot sun. This is extreme kindness. Only those who have aroused this mind can know it, and only those who practice this mind can understand it.’ —Dogen Zenji, “Instruction for the Tenzo”

It strikes me as best to begin with love. The word will never again mean so much. Of course you love your spouse. You love your parents and brothers and sisters. You love your friends. You love your home and perhaps your hometown. You love your dog. You may love your work. You might attest to loving your alma mater, mashed potatoes, or reading on a rainy day. But this is love. The feeling you have for your child is so indescribably deep and consuming that it must qualify as one of the few transcendent experiences in your plain old ordinary life. It arrives spontaneously as though part of afterbirth. It is miraculous and supreme and irrevocable. It makes all things possible.

There is a certain attitude, perhaps unavoidable, that most of us seem to adopt as we grow up. It is a kind of self-satisfied conclusion that our parents didn’t love us. Oh, they might have loved us, but they didn’t love us enough. They didn’t love us the right way. They didn’t love us just so. Have your own child and you will penetrate into the utter absurdity of that idea. You will love your child as your parents loved you and their parents loved them. With a love that is humbling and uncontrived, immense and indestructible. Parents err, of course, and badly. They can be ignorant, foolish, mean, and far worse, in ways that you can come to forgive in them and try to prevent in yourself. But this wholesale shortage of parental love at the crux of everyone’s story must be the product of shabby and self-serving recollections. Now that you are a mother, set that story aside, forgetting everything you thought you knew about love…”

~ Karen Maezen Miller, Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood