Peace with Process

I once lived in an ashram where hours of time would be put into very detailed and laborious tasks, such as filing tens of thousands of letters, painting a meditation hall or peeling hundreds of pounds of apples. At some point well towards the end of an exhaustive assignment, the teacher would come by and notice a very small but essential mistake that the success of the entire project was contingent upon. And so we had to start over from the very beginning. It was excruciating. Although the running joke was that the SYDA acronym for the retreat center actually stood for, So You Do it Again, few were actually laughing when we had to backtrack and restart the task at hand, albeit with a greater understanding of the importance of thorough forethought, and the challenging spiritual task of making peace with the process at hand.

Have you ever been moving along swiftly and steadily towards a specific goal, where everything is going according to plan, and then --boom -- you get a phone call or receive some bad news and you feel like it's all gone to pot, and it's hopeless? Maybe you are finally recovering from debt, and an unexpected expense pops up. Or things are just taking way longer than expected to come to fruition, as in my recent struggle to get this newsletter into your e-box. In addition, I never dreamed it would take so long to find an affordable and suitable house, a process I have been involved in for more than a year. Several times I thought I came close, but haven't made it to "closing." A dear friend recently drew a parallel between the home-buying process and the struggle and length of time it takes for someone to actually feel "at home" in their own lives, in their own skin. Hmmm.

How do you recover from the inevitable setbacks life throws your way? Well, you can (and should) complain, grieve and talk about it in therapy if you are in that process, or meditate, or if it works for you, do some "get back on the horse" type affirmations. But despite popular tools for navigating life, sometimes resiliency -- that feeling of bouncing back into the game -- can be hard to access. Especially in the face of feelings of despair, or the sense that some dream is forever lost and/or you are no longer on your path. It not only takes patience to achieve your goals, it takes patience to make peace with the process of achieving them.

It seems to be especially hard for us Americans to understand that life is always a process. The notion that one day you are going to finish growing and be complete --beyond all this annoying life stuff-- is terribly persistent despite the many personal examples each of us has that it is not so. How to make peace with process? Here are some actions and thought paradigms that might help you stay connected to and at peace with your process of evolution no matter what's happening in your world. And while you use them, remember that even understanding or making use of these tools is in itself is a PROCESS.

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