This Path Under My Feet

The Life Already Here

For most of my life, I have carried some version of the belief that spiritual growth means getting onto the right path.

I do not think I would have said it that plainly. I would have used better language. More luminous language. I would have talked about awakening, healing, remembering, becoming whole, returning to the sovereign self. But underneath all of that was often a hidden assumption that somewhere along the way I had gotten separated from the life I was meant to live.

I could look back at my life almost like a map of turns. Seeing certain choices as moving me closer to my path and others seeming to take me farther away. Perceiving a relationship as a detour. An ending as a correction. A career as belonging to the false self. A longing belonging to the true one.

It is a seductive way to understand a life, especially for those of us devoted to inner work. It gives the soul a heroic storyline. It gives suffering a kind of architecture. It allows us to imagine that if we can just find the true path, at last we will become who we were meant to be.

The trouble is that this way of seeing carries an old wound inside it. The wound is the belief that the life we are actually living cannot be trusted as sacred ground. That our humanity is too messy. That our bodies are too needy. That our attachments are too ordinary. That our choices, unless they can be arranged into a beautiful enough myth, may have taken us away from what is holy.

So much religion and spirituality begins with this suggestion. We are broken. Fallen. Sinful. Fractured. Too human, too embodied, too wounded, too attached to the world. The path becomes improvement, purification, correction, transcendence.

Rise above the body.

Rise above the world.

Rise above the self that made such a mess of things.

There is truth in some of this. Some roads do need to be left. Some identities do need to be shed. Some relationships, systems, addictions, and inherited roles do not need to be made holy. They need to be exited.

But there is also a subtle violence in any spirituality that distrusts the life we are actually living. That is suspicious of the body. That makes a judgment about the ordinary. That holds the belief that our humanity is the problem our soul must overcome.

A truer spiritual path, I believe, is uncovering what has been hidden. Hidden by culture, survival, grief, obedience, inheritance, and all the ways I learned to belong by leaving myself behind. This changes the path from manufacturing a better self into remembering what has been covered, bringing back what has been exiled, and letting the unlived life begin to breathe through the life already here.

This spiritual path does not conclude in arrival and achievement. I do not get to declare myself finished and decorate my cage.

The path I want to walk more authentically now is one that keeps me moving and evolving, because my soul only trusts a path in motion. But the motion of my soul is now toward inhabiting the life I already have, and living it more deeply. This is the part that feels both simple and almost impossible. Because if I am honest, my instinct is often to turn every inner soul-stirring into a new outer form. This is part of my gift. I can see patterns. I can feel when a form has gone dead. I can listen for what wants to come through and begin building a vessel for it before it has fully made itself known.

But gifts have shadows. Mine certainly does. The shadow is that sometimes it is easier to imagine the next form than to inhabit the current one. Easier to build a new doorway than to walk through the one already open. Easier to turn the ache into a teaching than to let it change the way I make breakfast, answer an email, stand in my own kitchen, look at my own calendar, live inside my own body.

I live in Madison. I am divorced. I live alone. I have two adult sons. I curate a yoga community. I am getting older. I am staying sober. These are not dots on a moral map of right turns and wrong turns. They are not proof that I have gotten my life right or wrong. They are the clay of the life I am actually living.

And my soul does not need better clay before it can begin. It wants breath.

This home. This body. This work. This age. This season. This ordinary day. This dog at my feet. This grandson who will never be this age again. These are the living, breathing forms of my life.

They are the path waiting to be animated under my own feet.