Spirituality & Practice

"Hair is powerful to the Algonquin," according to Evan T. Pritchard who has written extensively about the traditions of these Native American people. "It collects the vibrations of the energies around you and is important to purify carefully. Hair also holds the smell of the smoke a long time. This is part of why native people don't cut their hair."

In the sacred dances of Sufi dervishes in Kurdistan, worshippers enter into a trance state tossing their long hair back and forth over their heads. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen master, challenges us to see the hairs on our heads as "ambassadors of truth"; he counsels us to observe them well to discover the messages each hair is sending us.

Throughout human history . . .

I remember with pleasure striding down the street as a young man filled with energy and nothing on my mind except reaching the place I was going to with speed and graceful movement. In New York City, I could zigzag across intersections and avoid traffic lights for ten blocks or more. Certainly I never considered the stress I was putting on my ankles by constantly moving so fast and so heedlessly down the streets.

Then one day my stride was broken as my right ankle twisted and I tumbled to the pavement in pain and disbelief. I took a cab home and immediately applied cold ice packs to my swollen ankle. Wayne Winnick, a chiropractor and sports doctor, told me that ankles are the most commonly injured body part – some eight million people sprain an ankle each year. Many will go on to injure the same ankle in the future, as it becomes weak from the injury.

In order to avoid this fate . . .

I loved to sing as a young boy and at age 12 was already a member of the senior choir at our Lutheran church in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. All of the religions of the world bless song as a marvelous gift of God. Dina Soresi Winter has poetically written:

"It is important that we sing. . . . Singing frees the soul, makes it flexible, and helps it soar and expand. Singing lets the sun in – gives warmth to our lives and wings to our spirit. Those who sing know this."

The throat serves as the passageway between the heart and the head. When fear, anxiety, or negativity affect this body part, the energy flow between the head and the heart is blocked. The spiritual act of singing unclogs the throat and allows free passage of the emotions. We've learned this from traditional Chinese medicine.

Many years ago I was told . . .

Many early cultures viewed the ears as the seat of wisdom but I prefer to follow W. H. Mathieu and regard my ears as an altar. Through these remarkable organs with the three tiniest bones in the body, I take in the sacred in the world around me. I rejoice in the sounds of bells, trains in the distance, bird song, Beethoven's symphonies, a cat's meow, and the whispered affirmations of love. Hearing is the first sense to appear and the last sense to go when we are dying.

Each day, sounds roll in like waves vying for our attention, and we can pick and choose what to ignore or what to embrace. As a boy I loved that moment in a movie when the hero put his ear to the ground to hear what was approaching from a distance. As a young man, I thrilled to the loud noises in sports stadiums, concert halls, and theatres. One could hear the rumble and tumble of emotions sweeping through these places of high energy and unfolding excitement.

But the older I get . . .

The comedian Jimmy Durante had a large nose and used to make jokes about it. "Da nose knows," he said and I believed it. We ramble through the world smelling things and being attracted or repelled by them. When I was a teenager, I worked in a fast food restaurant where I was exposed to many foul odors; three of the worst were rotten eggs, and fish and chicken that had gone bad.

I have never had a very acute sense of smell, certainly not compared to my wife's or mother's. Scientists researching this area have discovered that women have a keener olfactory sense than men do. But women can't hold a candle to dogs whose sense of smell is extraordinary. Naturalist Diane Ackerman has written that whereas a human being has 5 million olfactory cells, a sheepdog has 220 million. As a result, they can smell 44 times better than we can.

We are able to discern . . .

My skin is quite an astonishing organ performing a wide variety of services for me. Among them are serving as a selectively permeable sheaf for the body, protecting me from certain attacks, regulating my body temperature, relaying my sensory experiences including touch, and serving as a doorman letting in some things and keeping others out.

According to the social scientist Ashley Montague, the skin provides millions of cells of different kinds, some 350 different varieties per square centimeter, 2 to 5 million sweat glands, and about 2 million pores. My skin and I could never under any circumstances be called "slackers." We're both busy, busy, busy.

Although there is very little poetry about the skin . . .

When I was a teenager I remember being told by my parents and other adults to stand up straight. But my shoulders were already rounded and my chest caved in as if I were hiding.

Jonathan Fields, a yoga teacher, has called the way in which thoughts and feelings get locked into the body "holding our issues in our tissues."
A very clever turn of phrase. It got me thinking about the past.

In my youth I was very thin. The neighbors used to worry about my well-being when I sat in the backyard sun-bathing. Instead of shoulder muscles to show off like other adolescents in my class, my gift to the world was a predominant rib cage. No wonder I was always chosen last in supervised sports competitions. After so many rejections, my shoulders were permanently tucked in for fear of another attack.

Despite the weakness and lack of balance . . .

You can tell quite a bit about a person's life and personality by looking at their hands. I have often thought but never said aloud that my hands are one of my best features. When we were living in New York City for only a few months, a friend of mine from a publicity agency asked me if I would be willing to be featured in an advertising campaign for The New York Times. I said yes since I was an avid reader of the newspaper. Everything went smoothly as they photographed me in various poses. But the one I liked most was of my hands, resting and totally at peace.

I grew up as a boy in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and liked to play baseball with improvised bats. One day I picked up a piece of wood with a nail on it and swung at the ball sending a nail through my middle finger. A friend of the family drove me to the hospital with the board sticking out the window. The scar remains as a sign of my bad habit of rushing through things without paying attention.

There are other signs of my life . . .

"Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake," Wallace Stevens once said. I'd make that a "walk around the city." I love to walk and have made it a daily part of my spiritual practice. Mary Ann and I don't own a car, and we live in New York City where you don't need one. I can walk almost every place I need to go.

When I am moving down the street, I say my mantra and my mind is cleared for the sensory delight of the city and its abundant stimulation in sights, sounds, and smells. Walking for me is a devotional path that leads through body to Spirit. Of course it is much more as well.

Most physicians recommend . . .

"There are so many things that can provide us with peace. Next time you take a shower or a bath, I suggest you hold your big toes in mindfulness. We pay attention to everything except our toes. When we hold our toes in mindfulness and smile at them, we will find that our bodies have been very kind to us. We know that any cell in our toes can turn cancerous, but our toes have been behaving very well, avoiding that kind of problem. Yet, we have not been nice to them at all. These kinds of practices can bring us happiness."
– Thich Nhat Hanh in For the Love of God edited by Benjamin Shield and Richard Carlson

I must confess that I have not been very kind to or appreciative of my feet. . . .