The simple act of waiting has proven to be one of the most difficult spiritual practices for me thus far in recovery. I have learned through some painful lessons, however, that it is also one of the most important. I know better now, but I still often find myself latching onto someone, some thing, or some dream, and running toward it full steam without consulting my higher power. Before getting sober, I found myself shocked and devastated-time after time- to find that another dream had died, another material possession had failed to bring happiness, or another relationship had crumbled. In my recovery, I’m still sometimes discouraged when my selfishly motivated actions and ideas don’t go according to plan…but I’m never surprised. My higher power knows the path I am meant to walk, and she will continue to pull me from my narrow-minded route in her own time and in her own way. Sometimes the pull is painful, but it is never in vain.
Waiting, for me, is not about stagnancy or complacency. Waiting is about patiently living my values to the best of my ability while I keep my heart open to the spiritual guidance I trust will come. Waiting is about accepting that my timeline and the timeline of the universe don’t always coincide. Waiting is about believing that my higher power knows more about what I need than I do, and that if I just remain in the moment, doing the best I know how, she will speak to me. And when she does, I will listen.
The following is an excerpt from Marya Hornbacher’s most recently published book: Waiting: A Non-Believer’s Higher Power. In it, she discusses her own spirituality in the absence of belief of a higher power outside herself. Whether we believe in a higher power or not, I think there is a beautiful message to take from the text about the simple and vital spiritual practice of waiting patiently in the moment. Please enjoy, and check out Marya’s other work, too:
“The spirit, it seems to me, grows noisy and goes silent by turns over the course of one’s life. There are ways in which we silence it. Many of us have silenced it through addiction, but there are other ways, and many of us have used those as well. And there are ways in which we can draw the spirit out, listen for it with all the strength we’ve got.”
“But listening for spirit is something of a complicated process when we do not believe in a God, or do not feel a connection to what may be called a Higher Power. Many of us have been trained to think of “spirituality” as the sole provenance of religion; and if we have come to feel that the religious are not the only ones with access to a spiritual life, we may still be casting about for what, precisely, a spiritual life would be without a God, a religion, or a solid set of spiritual beliefs.”
“Throughout this book, I use the words spirit and spiritual often, and that may seem strange when I state my own lack of belief in a Higher Power or God. And some days it seems strange to me as well, that I am so certain of an ineffable force within me and within all of us when I doubt the presence of a metaphysical power without. But really, it isn’t contradictory. I am not speaking of metaphysics. I am speaking of the thing in ourselves that stirs.”
“The origin of the word spirit is Greek. It means “breath.” That which stirs within, slows or quickens, goes deep or dies out. When I speak of spirit, I am not speaking of something related to or given by a force outside ourselves. I am speaking of the force that is ourselves. The experience of living in this world, bound by a body, space, and time, woven into the fabric of human history, human connection, and human life. This is the force that feels and thinks and gives us consciousness at all; it is our awareness of presence in the world. It is the deepest, most elemental, most integral part of who we are; it is who we are.”
“So when I speak of spirit, I’m speaking of something that frustratingly defies articulation, because we have few words for spiritual beyond those that refer back to a God. But not believing in a God is not opposed to a belief in an aspect of the self that can be called spiritual. The latter is experienced, and defined, very personally, and is different for each individual.”
“I am not speaking of some universal or transcendent “Spirit” that exists outside of us; I am speaking of the human spirit that exists in each of us. I’m speaking of something that is urgently important in ourselves, the very thing that’s sent us searching, the thing that feels the longing, the thing that comes knocking on the door of our emotionally and intellectually closed lives and asks to be let in.”
“When we let it in, and only when we do, we begin to be integrated people. We begin to find integrity in who we are. We are not just a body, not just a mind, not just a mass of emotions, not just people dragging around the dusty bag of our pasts. We have depth and wholeness, not shattered bits of self that never seem to hold together properly. And we begin to walk a spiritual path.”
“This path is not toward a known entity of any kind. Rather, it is the path that leads through. And there are many points along the way where we stop, or we fumble, or we get tangled up or turned around.”
‘And those are the places where we wait. We’re not waiting for the voice of God, or for the lightning-bolt spiritual experience. We’re not waiting to be saved or carried. We’re waiting for our own inner voice – for lack of a better word, I’m going to keep calling it spirit – to tell us where to go next.’
‘It will.’
Excerpted from Waiting: A Non-Believer’s Higher Power by Marya Hornbacher
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