One should not give up, neglect, or forget for a moment his inner life, but he must learn to work in it, with it, and out of it so that the unity of his soul may break out in all his activities —Meister Eckhart

I held Milo against my body as I felt the waves of trembling rolling through his furry body. In the five years we have shared together, I had never felt him shake with this much intensity and helplessness. Outside, the July 4th fireworks were splitting the night sky, crackling with no cadence, startling even me with every eruption. Holding him, it occurred to me that he’s never once seen the explosions or even where they come from. He has no framework for what was happening to him except that his nervous system was responding to the imagination that the ground may be turning against him.

As I tried to hold him steady, I knew this fear. This same one! It is mine!

The loud sounds that haunted him became, in me, the possibility of displacement from a life I have gotten familiar with. A future that was floating somewhere. An unseen catastrophe that my mind had rehersed so vividly that my body answered it as if it were already happening. My own body shivering exactly as Milo’s shivered. Oh, how little fear depends on reality yet flourishing in suggestion, feeding on distance and no evidence beyond the stories that the body believes to be true. My body, it clenches and tightens and braces against a world that exists only in my own imagination.

My gosh! Who would tell this body? Who would heal the disease of my mind? How can I help myself?

You see, we could all lay back in our spiritual stupor, and like Jacob watch the ladder set itself up between heaven and earth, the angels moving easily up and down its rungs, the whole host visible …if you just tilt your head right. We could all enjoy what it is like to feel transcendent— the clouds arranging themselves into readable jolly shapes. Every philosophical position, every sermon about grace hitting the right spots, sounding right and balanced, every recognition of one’s self as the Divine sitting comfortably on the carriage of the mind. But let the world shake! Let turmoil and turbulence come knocking and that ladder into heaven disappears. The angels you saw dancing and floating around like bubbles from a bubble maker are no longer visible from the vantage point. All the techniques, prayers, mantras, pranayamas that worked a moment ago, scatter like something you’re now trying to remember from a dream. The cruelest realization then becomes this: the peace one once knew was only visible in fair weather.

Maybe this is the work after all. Maybe one of the deepest signs of spiritual maturity isn’t that we stop trembling. Maybe it’s that we become the kind of people who know how to sit with our fears and so learn to sit beside someone else while they are trembling. Maybe maturity is not reaching a spiritual altitude from which storms no longer exist. Thank goodness! Perhaps the work is seeing what fear is truly made of. Oh it’s easy for me to see that every fear begins with a story of separation. It says to me:

* I believe myself to create and direct my life

* I believe myself to be separate from all of life

* I believe the stories of the mind. I dance to the symphony of thoughts without questioning their ultimate existence

* The “I” that I think I am feels real.

The body hears the story and does what bodies have done for millions of years. It prepares for exile.

So this is what I’m left with, sitting on the floor with a dog who has finally stopped shaking. For him the danger is passed when all the bangers have stopped. Oh, I envy the simplicity of that. For us, the echoes linger. I keep replaying the echoes of chaos that have never happened to me. I keep inhabiting a future that just never comes. I keep exiling myself from a home I have never left. My gosh! Oh, what if Jacob only woke up to what had always been true: “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.” Nothing in his surroundings had changed. Only his seeing shifted.

My job was never to talk the body into stillness. It was to stay in all this freaking messiness, arms open(if i can open it), breath doing what breaths do, until the mind collapses into what is already true— it’s that everything is already as it is. Simple. Maybe just then the body will remember what was already true long long before all of the noise started.

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