Cultivating Contentment

The still heart that refuses nothing.
— Jane Hirshfield, "Lake and Maple"

"The Rule of Benedict counsels contentment, which essentially means being fully satisfied with whatever is being presented to us in a given moment. It is the satisfaction of desire. Being content often means shifting what it is we desire so that we can grow more satisfied with what we already have. Benedict wanted us to remember that every gift and grace we have comes from God, and to marvel that there is something rather than nothing. We won't grow spiritually if we are always striving after something bigger and better, for maturity comes from cultivating a sense of contentment with the lives we already have.

"I learned a great deal about contentment from my yoga practice. In Sanskrit the word for contentment is santosha, which asks us to accept the current state as it truly is, and work with the resources we have available to us rather than forcing or pushing to achieve the goals of our egos. Contentment calls for a release of our resistance to what life brings us. It can be a very subtle opening. I had practiced an openhearted welcome to my own difficult feelings and experiences for years before I realized my still-hidden desire to have this act of welcome move me past my difficulties to a sense of joy, or to something other than what I was feeling. It was really the line above from Jane Hirshfield's poem that broke it open for me in a deeper way. The still heart, which is what we are trying to cultivate through contemplation, refuses nothing.

"Contentment doesn't mean we are always happy about life events or deny the reality of pain. We cultivate contentment by cultivating the inner witness who is able to respond to life from a place of calmness, peace, and tranquility. It means we honor that what is given to us in any moment is enough. So it is the 'still heart' — the heart of equanimity — that can welcome everything in. Instead of always living with a sense of dissatisfaction about our lives, or anticipation over what comes next, we live in the knowledge that this moment contains everything we need to be at peace, to experience freedom, to develop compassion for ourselves and others, to find God. Benedict's rule counsels contentment with what we have, a sense that what is, is 'enough.' We don't need anything more and so we are content. When we experience contentment we have softened our bodies, minds, and hearts so that we are able to release the unconscious resistances we hold to our own experience.

"We can connect this movement to the practice of simplicity and asceticism. Monasticism has always been connected to living simply, but this does not imply bitterness or resentment in the face of scarcity. Instead, the call is to celebrate the sufficiency of what one already has. Contentment is closely connected to the practice of gratitude, of recognizing that having anything is gift. A deep and profound joy is rooted in being content, satisfied with this moment offered to me.

"We slow ourselves down as we enter our practice of lectio divina and each movement invites us to dive more deeply into the heart of spaciousness. As we transition into the fourth movement we may already be in a place of profound stillness, and yet in, contemplatio we become even more present and offer ourselves over to its beauty. As we develop our ability to move into the silence of the heart we grow in our capacity to live from this calm center. We are able, more and more, to welcome in all aspects of our experience, even — or especially — in the midst of life's messiness, challenge, and unknowing. We can, as Jane Hirshfield writes in her poem, 'refuse nothing.' Refusing nothing means making room for the equal measures of sorrow and ecstasy that shower us daily.

"The moments when we want to refuse our experience, when we want reality to be other than it is, can be extremely subtle. We may not realize that our gnawing dissatisfaction, or inner resistance, is an act of refusal. Contemplative practice allows us to hear the call to rest into the truth of what is and respond in our daily lives out of our prayer experience. By breathing deeply, we can allow the energy of what we are resisting to have a place in our hearts, and somehow we are able to bear it."