Inner  Frontier
Fourth Way Spiritual Practice

 

Inner Work


For the week of October 13, 2008

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Non-Panic

The current global meltdown in the credit markets offers an example of how certain overarching stories in the news grip our inner world, riveting our attention and raising our fear and anxiety. Other recent American examples include 9/11/2001 and the run-up to the current Iraq war. The fear and anxiety with which we individually and collectively meet such situations usually exacerbate them. And while we certainly need to make judgments about the future and act accordingly, we also need to look after our inner state in the present.

For many of us who aspire to a spiritual inner life, episodic, situational anxiety drains our energies and distracts us from our work of presence. When the society around us loses itself in the burning issue of the time, can we maintain an inner equanimity while doing what we need to do externally? The answer depends on the cumulative effect of our spiritual practice. By working inwardly, with energies, presence, meditation, and prayer, we gradually change our frame of reference, widening our perspective to include both the outer, material world as well as our inner world. That inner work becomes for us an anchor in the seas of turbulent times.

By staying calm, even when actively responding to the times, we not only help ourselves personally, but we also weaken the societal forces of panic and hysteria. Rather than abdicate our decisions to a destructive pattern emerging in the society around us, we keep to our personal responsibility for our acts, our personal compass of conscience. We remain the agent who lives our life and we opt out of toxic though urgently persuasive societal patterns like those that have led to the atrocities of ethnic cleansing or the impoverishment of widespread economic depression.

So we come back to sensing our body, to the practice of presence, to meditation and prayer, to attending to the promptings of conscience, to keeping up the momentum of our inner work and establishing ourselves in peace. We let any impulses of anxiety and fear remind us to reconnect with our spiritual practice. In financial crises we invest in our spiritual present and future, an investment that will always pay dividends. We do not turn away from the difficulties, but we do face them in full presence, with the whole of our being, and we act – or not – from there.

For this week, let the gyrations of the market and the voices of doom remind you to reengage with your body, your breath, your presence.


     

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