After a brief hiatus to chart a course, I’m continuing my COVID supplement to The Book of Waking Up. If you’d like to support this project, signup for my Substack. Special thanks today to Susanjen who signed up as a yearly $65 subscriber!

11. Staying Sober Through Personal Practices

If you’re looking for some spiritually actualized guru who takes every moment, thought, and opportunity captive, turn away. My naked hypocrisy might be waiving in the wind.

In the waning hours of last week, I sensed the slow spread of familiar feelings. The first was an electric pulse, a jittery buzz somewhere just under the skin. It pushed and pushed and pushed from my trunk to my fingertips, toe tips, the crown of my head. So, I laced up my shoes, jogged a mile to burn off some of that anxiety. When I was finished I sat on our front-porch pew (doesn’t everyone have one of those?) and listened to the birds, the neighbor dogs, the yard-squirrel searching for nuts in the leaves.

Electricity spent, a Novocaine fog set in. This is the truest way I know to say it. And as the careless cardinal flittered from one branch to the next, I felt the numb truth filling every cell. I had fallen out of my waking practices.

As I write in The Book of Waking Up, there are certain collective practices, ways of staying connected and attached to the Divine Love as a community of people. In seasons of pain, panic, or chaos, we join the Waking Community, the people who hold each other in the Divine Love of God. We sing the Waking Song, that collective chorus that encourages one another to stay awake and sober. We participate in the Waking Meal, the Eucharist (communion, the Lord’s supper, whatever), the bread and wine that is our participation in the Divine Love. But here’s the pandemic rub: In this day of social distancing, corporate waking is a digital illusion.

(Opinion: Can Zoom carry the weight of corporate waking? No, I suspect.)

On the porch pew, I considered my personal waking practices. This new season might call for a deepening of those practices, I thought. After all, times of heightened panic call for heightened awareness, mindfulness, and connection to Divine Love. This is the only way to stay sober, to keep our affections ordered, particularly in a pandemic.

Life Examined:

In this new pandemic, have you pushed into your own Waking Practices, into meditation, prayer, and devotional reading? Or, are you carried by the chaos of the news cycle?
Carve out 15 minutes today to engage in some personal Waking Practices that connect you with the Divine Love. Do it at a time where you can create a consistent daily rhythm of the practice.

To be continued…

Join me tomorrow (and for the foreseeable future) as I continue my Pandemic Supplement to The Book of Waking Up. And if you haven’t grabbed a copy of The Book of Waking Up: Experiencing the Divine Love that Reorders a Life, grab a copy. And yes, Amazon has slowed down book shipments, so considering purchasing it from Bookish, Fort Smith or grabbing a digital copy for Kindle or Nook.