The Sunday Church Syndrome

Many years ago, when I was in my 20s, I visited a small island in the south of Thailand near Koh Lanta.

It was your archetypically chill place.

Soft sand.

Blue seas.

Chilled beaches.

No one who stayed there had anything pressing to do.

No one had mobile phones or access to the internet.

So we simply talked, read, ate, strolled along the seashore, and dipped in the admittedly shallow waters.

We had no responsibilities, no stress, and no obligations.

So for everyone there, it was a holiday of the purest kind, of the likes we rarely experience these days.

What's more, it was a special place.

A place of power.

A place so brimming with energy that you felt it enveloping and permeating your being throughout the entire day.

So it wasn't only when I meditated in the mornings that I felt a huge flow of energy throughout my body. It was all day.

I could eat. I could read. I could sleep, and nothing there seemed to disturb this energy.

As a result, it was the first time in my life when I could go day after day feeling like I was in a pure meditative state.

Sure, I had thoughts. It wasn't as if my mind was fully silent, but the chi flowing through my body never left me, and there wasn't a moment when I felt disconnected from a deeper part of my being.

The experience was profound, and it taught me many things.

On a basic level, it taught me that your environment matters.

This isn't something we should get paranoid about. We never want to feel that unless we're in certain environments, we're doomed to bad energy and misery. But even so, it's useful to know that certain environments are more conducive to high-energy states than others.

It also taught me that often, our problems come more from what we're doing than what we're not doing.

So the important thing isn't necessarily that we do hours of formal meditation practice each day, or read spiritual literature, or do noble deeds, or whatnot.

Rather, the key is often simply not to do things that disconnect us from our inner peace, our inner being.

In other words, if we didn't do all those things that ruined our inner balance or energetic state, we'd naturally be in a state of flow.

But in practice, we get caught up in the stresses of life. We fill our heads with all sorts of rubbish. We get dragged into negative emotional states, and before you know it, our natural state of calm and energy has been buried.

Imagine it like a pond. If we don't do anything, the water in the pond is still and calm, but if we toss a rock into it, it will create ripples. If we keep tossing rocks in, the ripples will grow more and more. And that's what most of us do in our lives.

We have our work rocks.We have our relationship rocks.

We have our responsibility rocks.

In short, we can have hundreds and hundreds of little rocks we keep tossing in time and time again, and we never give our inner pond time to settle, time to calm.

Sometimes, it's also simply biological. For instance, I personally find that my energy flows better if I eat vegetarian foods.

Your body might be different. For you, it might be other foods. It might be alcohol. It might be sleep or a lack of it. Whatever the case, there'll be things you are doing that are inhibiting your chi flow, things that are impeding a natural meditative state.

Sadly, the moment I left the island, the regular world returned, and it became a lot harder to stay connected to energy and the essential part of me.

It wasn't impossible, just harder, and I had to consistently remind myself to stay present and feel the energy within me, and at times, I simply disconnected.

Yet despite things being more challenging away from my island retreat, my little successes at staying in a meditative flow as I went about my regular day encouraged me – so much so that I headed off to a monastery in Northern Thailand where I hoped to deepen my meditation practice.

I signed up for a 26-day retreat, and it was a hardcore kind of place.

We got up at 4.

We didn't eat after midday.

We meditated for between 12 and 22 hours a day.

We slept on a wooden plank.

And yet, for all the austerity, we also absorbed the serenity of the location, which made it easier to meditate and stay in a meditative flow throughout the entire day.

We spent almost all our time in silence, but on one occasion, excited by my progress, I foolishly got into a debate with a fellow meditator about meditating 24/7. You would have thought he'd be receptive to the idea, but he simply shook his head scornfully.

Meditate while going for a run? You're kidding me.

Meditate while talking? What a joke.

Yep, despite the energy that thrummed through the monastery air, for him, meditation could never be anything but sitting on a mat, closing your eyes, and doing your best to stay present.

It was one of those frustrating kinds of conversations I used to insist on having in my youth, one that an older version of me would simply avoid.

But his refusal to entertain the idea of a more freestyle version of meditation frustrated me because I was, at least in part, speaking from experience, not theory. But nothing I said was going to change his mind, so even the young me eventually let the matter drop.

But I didn't let go of my quest. I dreamed of taking meditation and meditation energy deeper and deeper into my day, and as novel as the idea might have seemed to me at the time, in truth, it wasn’t actually so radical.

It's simply what the monks mean when they talk about taking ‘Zen out into the field’.

It's the idea of being present no matter what you're doing.

And I suspect it's what spiritual practitioners mean when they talk about being filled by Spirit.

It's also what I believe to be one of the most important practices we can do these days.

For how often have you resented needing to earn a living or needing to immerse yourself in worldly activities?

How often have you dreamt of what I call the ‘mountaintop cabin’? That place where you can simply focus on your spiritual practice, meditate, do yoga and the like, and not get distracted from your inner work by the stresses of life, by material concerns and obligations.

Sadly, when you think about it, the majority of spiritual practitioners end up living some sort of version of ‘church on Sundays’ and spiritual amnesia for much of the rest of the week.

For an hour on Sundays, or maybe for an hour each day on the meditation mat, they are truly present. They are in the flow. They are connected to Spirit. But then they leave the church, they throw themselves back into everyday life, they go to work, go shopping, play cards with their mates, and they disconnect entirely from the inner space they experience during their ‘spiritual practice’.

As a result, much of their day feels soulless and disconnected, and in time, they resent that.

Typically, they curse their job, their family chores, their obligations, even if, ultimately, the issue isn't these things, but rather that they become a different person when they are doing them.

And much of the time, the issue is simply that they don't even try to stay connected when going about their regular life.

They've given up.

They've bought into the philosophy of sacrifice.

The philosophy that says they must sacrifice most of their waking hours to earn the time and space to enjoy a few golden hours.

They're working for the weekend, working for holidays, working for a moment that certainly doesn't have anything to do with their work or worldly responsibilities!

And there was a period of my life when I was exactly the same.

Yes, I never got myself a regular 9–5 job, but even so, I can’t say I attempted to suck the marrow out of my regular working moments. Rather, I simply tried to make them as short as possible so I could get back to my meditation and spiritual practice.

And because I live frugally, because I was young with no family responsibilities, I could indeed spend large parts of my life meditating. But that didn't heal the fundamental divide in my life. On the one side, there was my spiritual practice; on the other, everything else.

From a practical perspective, I ended up partially overcoming this issue by merging my spiritual practice with my work – something I've done for the last 18+ years.

And I'm not going to lie, that makes for a more enjoyable and comfortable life. But if that's all I ever did, it wouldn’t fix the fundamental issue of me living two distinct kinds of life, of me dividing my life up into times when I actively seek to stay connected, and times when I surrender and sacrifice the present moment for future moments of stability, balance, and harmony.

That's why ultimately, the key for me has been to strive to make my practice continuous.

That doesn't mean my practice is always continuous. It simply means that I strive to make it continuous.

And if I get sucked into the busyness of my everyday life, or if I lose the flow in my connection to energy and the spirit, all I need to do is refocus and realign.

It's like when you meditate: you're sitting there, present, feeling the energy, and then whoosh – you get lost in daydreams and only re-emerge back in the present moment a few moments or minutes later.

But when this happens, you don't beat yourself up. You simply focus again and do your best to stay present. Then, sooner or later, you'll get dragged back into your thoughts, dragged away from the present moment. But that's what your practice is. It's learning to refocus every time your mind wanders, every time you get sucked out of the present moment.

And that's what I recommend you do throughout the day. Do your best to stay connected to the energy, to the presence of your meditation, no matter what you're doing. And when you lose that connection, that presence? No matter. Simply refocus, realign, and try again.

If you do that, bit by bit, you start to erase the division between spiritual and non-spiritual times. The division between times that are meaningful to you and times that you've sacrificed to the future.

Ultimately, when you get better at holding your space, you’ll find that you can even get paid to meditate while at work!

And when that happens, you'll stop resenting your worldly responsibilities, for they will no longer take you away from your essence, from the being you wish to be. Rather, they will simply give you another avenue to express this being.

So if you're feeling a large divide in your life between spiritual time and non-spiritual time, consider working to erase that division.

Every moment offers the same possibility to connect to a deeper part of your being.

Some moments might be more challenging than others, for sure. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't at least attempt to stay connected.

And one day, if we manage to stay connected in these challenging environments, then we will have reached a far deeper level of practice.

We will be playing the spiritual game at a higher level.

Anyone can meditate well in a monastery. But can we do the same amid the hurly-burly of everyday life?

It mightn't be easy, but for me, it's a challenge worth pursuing.

(Article by Jeremy O'Carroll)

P.S. Over the last 30 years of meditating, I've developed practical systems for helping people to stay connected to meditation energy no matter what they're doing.

These are techniques I practise daily, and for about 15 years, I've taught them to my students. So if you’d like to check out what I’m teaching, visit my Mastering Your Mind meditation course homepage to learn more.

Few things can change the quality of your life more than learning to stay connected as you go about your day.

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