A few weeks ago, I was at the Garrison Institute for the Awakened Heart Project and Institute for Jewish Spirituality Jewish Mindfulness Teacher Training Program’s first retreat. After a week of teachings, practice, and silence, we were going to have a “talking breakfast.” We were told that another group was beginning a conference at the retreat center, not a meditation retreat, and we would all be in the dining hall together. It made sense that we would break our silence beforehand and not require the other group to have a silent breakfast.

I should tell you that during this retreat, one of the themes that kept popping up for me was integration. And, more specifically, how am I integrating all aspects of my life. Now, through Joshua Venture Group, I will be supported in directing the JMC, but I also will continue to work part-part-time as an urban planner. This career juxtaposition was on my mind, because I love my urban planning job, I want to finish my projects, and leading the JMC (and being supported financially to do so) is a total dream come true. How to do both and not burn out?

Back to breakfast. We all entered the dining hall. The other group was already there, talking, loudly. After a silent retreat, I always have a little bit of a hard time adjusting to not being in silence. My energy level spikes, and I feel kind of shaky. It’s a hard transition. Anyways, that happens. I take a few seconds to just notice it, and then a friend starts talking to me. I notice over his shoulder someone from the other group, sitting, eating breakfast. I recognize this person. I try not to ignore my friend, but I quickly realize that sitting before me is one of my urban planning heroes. I quoted him extensively in my Masters Thesis, cited his work constantly, and loved his recent book. Van Jones. Totally out of context. He was at the Garrison Institute for a conference on the “Green Economy.”

I looked back at my friend, and told him the situation. “Go talk to him!” And so I did. I walked over, interrupted his oatmeal, and said “Hi. You’re Van Jones!” He looked up and nodded. Said hello, politely, cautiously. “I’m Alison. I’m actually here for the meditation retreat, but I’m also an urban planner.” Now he smiled, got up, shook my hand. “I wanted to come over and say hello, because I’ve been so inspired by your work. Thank you.” He hugged me, we talked, and he said “Thank you. Thank you for going on meditation retreats. Thank you for taking care of your spiritual self so that you can do good work in the world.”

This seems to be the lesson I come back to over and over again. To me, it doesn’t matter if you’re a “good” meditator, or spiritual practitioner. Your practice on the cushion is going well- awesome, but that’s not that exciting to me. What interests me is how we take our practice into the world. How do you treat other people- strangers and loved ones and not-so-loved ones? How are we working to help others? Integrating our practices and our lives can be difficult, but when strange coincidences that open your heart and blow your mind start happening, I like thinking that means I’m going in the right direction. After talking with Van Jones, I floated back to my table and smiled over my oatmeal.

What does it mean to love or find love as part of your spiritual path? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, mostly about my extreme aversion to approaching love in any sort of rational way. What makes sense to me is that if you live your life in a contemplative way, if you have a spiritual practice, your faith and trust in yourself and your world expands and includes love. I was thinking the other day about how I feel some sort of new freedom to be honest with myself and others, to not be so hung up on how I’m received, and to trust that everything will work out- that it is working out perfectly, and I don’t need to worry so much. Or, at all. That feeling was all about my career, money, etc, and decidedly not about finding someone to partner with, but now I’m seeing it in this place, too.

I’m finding that when you truly sit with yourself and you train yourself to love (let’s call it metta or g’milut chasidim or just plain love), self-love happens and it’s sort of hard to contain, to keep all to yourself. This process of really opening your heart, being receptive to and generous with love, is a leap of faith. Feeling like God (however you want to define or not define the concept) has your back, that it’s all going to be okay- that makes sense to me. Applying logic to love makes me short-circuit, and it’s just not the kind of life I want to live. Honestly, I know I’m treading some sort of hippie line here. And part of me can’t even believe I’m writing (or feeling this), but I think it’s true.

Meditation seems like good training wheels for unconditionally loving. To love someone means to see, respect and accept all of them fully, their faults and their amazingness, their potential and their past, and most importantly their present reality- and to love all of it. A meditation practice teaches you to do this with yourself- what a great experiment! Here you have this subject that you can observe from the inside-out, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Learning to be gentle with yourself, to hear all of the negativity and judgments and hatred that we all have somewhere inside and to softly move it forward, past fear and into understanding, this is the great human experience.

It’s been an important part of my meditation practice- to deeply listen to myself, to feel compassion, and to believe that I am capable and have the capacity to grow and learn and change. Because of that, I also believe that others are capable of the same thing. And, here’s where faith comes crashing in- cultivating an open heart is difficult, I feel vulnerable, I feel sort of forced to be brave, but on the other side of that, I also feel less afraid of all of those maybe ridiculous worst-case scenarios that pop up in single-life (“I’ll never find anyone,” “I might be alone forever,” etc). I don’t want to minimize these fears. They’re real, but they don’t have to move in and set up shop. Just like in meditation, it’s possible to have these fears but not attach to them, to let them come up and let them fall away. I’m learning to have faith that love sort of works like my breath, and I’m working on noticing those subtle moments when an inhale becomes an exhale and paying attention to the way it feels when my breath leaves my body completely and then comes back without me running after it.

Last winter, after learning and meditating on the concept of g’milut hasadim (acts of loving kindness), and reading a lot of old rebbe stories where God or an angel is always dressed as a beggar, I decided to make giving tzedakah (charity) to people who ask part of my practice. It’s difficult and challenging every day, because I always made a point of not giving money, but giving food or donating to charity to make panhandling less attractive (and lucrative) and because who knows where the money’s going.

But when I decided to make this a practice, those reasons didn’t really matter anymore. I thought, who cares where the money’s going, that’s not really what this is about- this is about an exchange of coins, yes, but also eye contact, physical contact, humanity in some way. I can hear dissenters saying this is totally selfish, that this isn’t true tzedekah, and really, whatever. Yeah, I am getting something out of it, and that’s okay, maybe it’s more than okay, maybe it’s good.

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