Flashback by Eric Hepburn

Working on my doctoral project has invited me into some deep reflection on how I got here - in this pulpit at San Gabriel. I'll share some stories and reflections on that journey...

"We don't run to get hard. We run to get soft."

We've been working with gut, heart, and head folks for a few months now, and this morning I add another layer to the onion: each of those centers tends to come with a time orientation. Heart folks anchor in the past. Gut folks live in the present. Head folks — me included — live in the future. Every one of those is a superpower, and every superpower comes paired with its Kryptonite. Mine is that I spent thirty years waiting for the next chapter before I noticed that it never actually arrives.

Which is my problem right now, because the doctoral project I'm working on requires me to go back and walk my own spiritual journey. That's a lot of past-work for someone who doesn't come to it naturally. So I try it here, in a small way, with a modest example: blown ankles in 2008, a book called Born to Run, ten years of run-commuting to work in those funny toe shoes, and a twelve-mile training run in 2014 where a voice in my head said the line this sermon is built on. Notice that I don't say it was the moment running became a spiritual practice. It was the moment I realized it.

There's a Zen parable about a monk who needed eight more years to fix one small thing. You're worth the eight years.

I'm not asking anyone to take up running. I'm asking about transferable skills — what is it you already do that leaves you more able to show up as the person you want to be? Ritual is produced by the mindfulness you bring to a practice, not by the practice itself.

Our Great World House holds the looming election, Indigenous Peoples Day, and an update on the young man shot by ICE in North Austin. Dianne Galloway reads the Voice of Wisdom, from Eckhart Tolle. Recorded live at San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas.

Full Podcast Transcript

Eric Hepburn: Welcome to the eleventh episode of the third season of The Pulpiteer. I'm your host, Eric Hepburn, and I'm glad to have you join us for today's episode.

Today's episode is called "Flashback." In it, we'll touch on the time orientation of gut, heart, and head folks, and we'll take a stroll down memory lane, asking if there are transferable skills in our spiritual practices.

We'll begin with our Great World House segment, and then have our Voice of Wisdom, read by Dianne Galloway.

Great World House

Eric Hepburn: Now we pause to honor the Great World House of which we are a part — lifting up the needs, the hopes, and the voices beyond these doors.

Just in the last few minutes, we've been reminded that the election is looming. That's heavy on people's hearts. We talked about it last week.

Indigenous Peoples Day is right upon us, inviting us to reflect and to question. I think two really big, important questions.

How is it that we want to be with one another when that divide, that gap between us and another person, has an identity boundary in between it? Whether that's colonizer and colonized, Republican and Democrat, American and Chinese, American and Russian — whatever that identity divide is. We have to sit with the question of whether that means the people on the other side of that divide — or even the people on this side of it — deserve different treatment than one another.

And the second thing that Indigenous Peoples Day brings up for me is that we need to decide what we want our relationship with the land to be. I'm using the land as a stand-in here, not just for the earth, but for all the non-human living things. Like the divide between human identities, there's something artificially constructed about the divide between us and other natural living things. I think if we walk that path long enough, we get back to the place where we realize, as many of the Indigenous cultures of this continent did, that the land doesn't belong to us. We belong to the land.

Also on my heart: this is a time of storm. I'm assuming you can feel it out there in the ether too — that as you're waking up in the morning and going about your day, there's a lot of stuff going on, and it's swirling, and it's complex, and it can feel overwhelming sometimes. I'm not trying to pile on. But I want you to hear the thing that you're anxious about echoed in what we're talking about today.

A few weeks ago we talked about a young man who was here seeking asylum. He was shot by ICE in North Austin, whisked away, moved from detention facility to detention facility. I did some research this morning. The City of Austin and other folks have still been unable to locate him within the system, despite the fact that Austin Police Department has officially made requests to try to investigate the parts of the shooting that are in their jurisdiction.

So whichever of these things — and I'm sorry if I didn't cast a broad enough net — whatever's on your heart that I didn't talk about, maybe it's climate change, maybe it's something else. We create a space together to hold grief for one another. So we're going to have a moment of silence to honor whatever it is that's on your heart this morning, and we're going to do that together. I'm going to ring the bowl when we're done.

I'm inviting you to close your eyes.

Whatever it is that's bringing grief up for you in this moment: know that it is what-is, right now. And you having feelings about it is not a fault with you. It is you having the courage to show up to this moment and see it clearly — to not paint it over with lies or gloss, but to look at it honestly, earnestly, truly.

It is sometimes painful to see the world as it is. To notice the gap between what-is and what we wish were, what we wish would be. Rumi says that gap is the heartbrokenness that we carry. And it's also where the light comes in.

Voice of Wisdom

Dianne Galloway: After the words are spoken, we will breathe together in silence until the ringing of the bowl calls us onward, into the space where the Word unfolds among us.

We welcome this Voice of Wisdom, carried through Eckhart Tolle.

Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?

Unfolding in Word: Flashback

Eric Hepburn: Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now. After all, here you are. And if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?

Like all really good quotes, this one's taken out of context. All quotes had an originating context. But I think what Eckhart Tolle is pointing at is that often our preoccupation with the past does stop us from showing up in the present — here, or here, or here.

Superpower and Kryptonite

We've been talking over the last few months about gut, heart, and head folks, and using that as a lens for looking at things. I'm going to use that as an entrée this morning, and introduce another layer of the heart-head-gut onion.

Heart folks tend to be past-focused. People who are naturally heart people tend to anchor their identity, their way of being in the world, on memories and recalling and storytelling about what happened.

Gut folks, as you might imagine, being action- and intuition-oriented, tend to be strongly in the present moment.

And head folks — me included — our struggle is that we tend to live in the future.

Now, we've talked before about how all of these proclivities have potentially healthy and potentially unhealthy manifestations. I like to think about it like a Superman thing: your superpower is also your Kryptonite. They come in pairs. There's no superpower that doesn't have a Kryptonite.

So if you are a heart person whose proclivity is to live in the past, the Kryptonite is that sometimes you live in the past to the exclusion of being able to plan for the future or show up in the present. You are obsessed with the past.

I'll give you an example. My grandfather, in the later years of his life, between retirement and the full onset of dementia — there was a three-year period where you could not show up to a conversation with him that was about any decade that had happened in the last three. Every conversation, he wanted to talk about something that had happened when he was in his twenties or thirties or forties. That's what he wanted to talk about. And for him, there was nothing interesting happening now. Unfortunately for me and for my grandfather, this is not one of the healthy examples. This is what happens when the proclivity to live in the past goes off the rails in a bad way.

The superpower part of it is that heart folks are really great at watching the unfolding of their own and other people's lives, because of the attention they pay to what has gone before.

Unhealthy gut folks tend to be so present that there's an absence of reflection and planning. It's all intuition, all gotta-go-go-go all the time. That's the negative version. The positive version is that they're already where all the rest of us need to end up. They don't have to move as far to stay present, and they have some capacity to both learn from the past and project into the future, because they already live there. That's their superpower — that the rest of us have to figure out how to live in the present and not let our superpower become our Kryptonite. Gut people have to learn to open up to caring about what came before and what's going to come after. They have to expand that present moment a little bit.

And head folks like me tend to live in the future. I'll give you unhealthy examples from my own life.

When I was in junior high and high school, I was already in college. I didn't want to be present in navigating emotional baloney with my family. My after-school job was just a means to an end so I could have a car. High school was just another hurdle I had to get over so I could get on to stuff that mattered. Ring any bells for anybody?

But I lived in the future. I was doing some planning — oh, I have to clear this hurdle by this much so that I can get to the future I had envisioned for myself. And it took another thirty years before I figured out that it was real unsatisfying living in the future, because it never gets here. It never shows up. Then I was in college and I couldn't wait to get married and have a job. And then I was married and had a job and couldn't wait. If you're always looking forward to the next chapter, it never comes. You never get to be in it in a way that brings you joy and fulfillment and resonance.

A lot of past-work

So here's my challenge. I'm a head person, but in order to do this doctoral project that I'm working on, I have to go back and spend a lot of time in the past, figuring out: what has been my spiritual journey through my life up to this point? What are the milestones and the markers? What did I learn from those things, and how do I turn the idiosyncratic, weird stuff that happened to me into something that could feed other people?

Because you're not me. Some spiritual practices that worked for me will work for 22 percent of the people in this room, and other ones might work for 76 percent, but nothing I have done on my spiritual path has a glowing hundred-percent marker next to it, meaning it will work for everyone. That's just not how we are. We're different enough and similar enough that we get the beauty of being able to share things with one another, but no guarantee that everything works for everybody.

As a matter of fact, the evidence says the contrary. The evidence says we have a diversity of intellectual, emotional, somatic, and spiritual practices because we have a diversity of human beings who have been through diverse life experiences, and they're in diverse places on their own journey.

So I'm trying to distill what I've been through and ask: what are the distillable lessons that might come out of some of this stuff that might help you on your journey — knowing that you is big, and broad, and there's a whole bunch of different ones of you. And not only that, but you're at different places on the timeline of your life, on the timeline of your spiritual journey, on all of it. Some of you have had vastly, dramatically different experiences than one another.

So I'm going to try to do that today in a small way, with a modest example.

Born to Run

In 2008, I had been playing co-ed city league soccer every Saturday morning for about five years. I quit playing soccer when I was in elementary school, rediscovered it when I was about thirty, got back into it, and I just loved it. I loved going to play every Saturday. It was exercise and it was fun.

I did that for about five years, and then I blew out both my ankles, one after the other, pretty badly. The first one, I was out about seven months. Then it got better, and then I went out again and blew the other one, and then I couldn't run again for thirteen months.

But I wasn't ready to give up. So I went to the doctor and I said, can we fix this? Are there exercises? He said: there's no exercises. You've yanked the rubber band. There are some surgeries we could try, but if you wanted to do both ankles at once to get back to playing sooner, you're looking at four to six months in a wheelchair, followed by a full year of physical therapy.

Yeah. I guess I don't want to play that bad. So I didn't get the surgery done.

This was all happening around the time my son Simon was born. And while I was on paternity leave, I found a book called Born to Run. Anybody read that book? A few people.

So I became one of those weird people. More than a decade ago now — ten to twenty years ago — there were a bunch of people running around in these little weird toe shoes, probably making many of you viscerally uncomfortable for reasons you couldn't quite explain. I was one of those people wearing the little weird toe shoes. I cannot tell you — I got accosted by people wearing flip-flops who were freaked out and disgusted about the way I was displaying or not displaying my toes. And I'm like, dude, you're wearing sandals. I can literally see your toenails. It's a foot glove. What? Anyway, people's negative emotional reaction to those shoes was inexplicable and hilarious.

So the inspiration that this book provided for me — as I was returning to work off paternity leave, I started run-commuting to work. Now, that's not possible for everybody, that's a whole other thing. I was very fortunate. I lived about two miles from my office. I lived in Central Austin and I was working at the University of Texas.

So I bought a decent backpack. I had my little funny shoes on, and I would run to and from work every day. I'd go sit in my office and check email while I stopped sweating. Then I'd take the dress-up clothes out of my backpack and put on my work outfit and have a day. And then I'd change back into my running clothes and run home. I did that regularly for ten years.

During that time, my son Simon started kindergarten at the UT Lab School. So I'd put him on his little bike and I would run next to him, and we'd commute and drop him off at the lab school for kindergarten. And then he went to Lee Elementary, which is in between our house and the university, so when he was in first grade we'd do the same thing. I'd put him on his bicycle and we'd run to school in the morning, and I'd drop him off and then go on to the office.

We don't run to get hard

About five years into that running practice, I was training for my first marathon — the 2014 San Antonio Rock 'n' Roll Marathon. I was out on a twelve-mile training run on the Town Lake Trail, and it was starting to get hard.

I looked down at my legs and I noticed how much stronger and harder they were than they had been before I started running to work every day. And I felt the grimace on my own face starting to harden as the run was becoming harder. And that feeling — I wish I was doing something else. You're familiar with that feeling.

And I looked up and I saw all these faces running toward me on the trail, and they had that same grimace on their face. I wish I was doing something else.

And I laughed out loud. And I had this moment of spiritual insight, and a voice spoke in my mind and said: We don't run to get hard. We run to get soft.

We don't run to get hard. We run to get soft.

And my grimace turned into a smirk, and the rest of the run flew by.

In my running practice since then, whenever things get tough and my mind starts to complain, it makes me smile and laugh. I was even laughing and smiling when I had to walk the twenty-first mile of the marathon later that year. It was the laughter of the big-bellied Buddha that reminds us not to take anything too seriously.

And it's like a magic switch. They've even done neuropsych research on this — that if you find yourself in a moment, you can smile with your face and it will brighten your actual biochemistry. You'll notice it brightens your mood too. It's fascinating, right? That we've actually validated that it's not a placebo. Your biochemistry changes when you decide to smile, even if you don't mean it at first. And then you live into meaning it. It validates this fake-it-till-you-make-it idea in some interesting ways. It doesn't mean fake, fake, fake, disingenuous. It means that if you're willing to take a risk, sometimes you can turn the tide. You can turn the tide from I wish I was doing something else to I am blessed to be doing this.

Now, it's clear to me in hindsight that this moment on the trail was the moment when I realized that running was a spiritual practice for me. Notice I didn't say it was the moment it became a spiritual practice. I said it was the moment I realized it. It was the moment when I recognized it.

The monk with sweaty palms

Eckhart Tolle tells a Buddhist parable that I share a lot when I'm doing pastoral work with people.

We talked last week, when we were talking about arrows and targets, about the slow feedback loop that life sometimes is, and how frustrating that can be — about how we want feedback that's more clear and faster. We want to GSD. That means get stuff done. It doesn't really mean that; there's a different S word. We want to get stuff done. And the culture we live in reinforces this idea that we ought to be being productive all the time, and it makes us impatient.

So I'll share this story with you. It's called "The Monk with Sweaty Palms."

A monk was supposed to officiate at the wedding of a great lord. On the day of the wedding, he's standing out in front of the temple with his disciples behind him, waiting for the lord to arrive. And he notices — he just notices — that his palms are sweating.

Well, he's got work to do. He's got a job. So he takes a deep, centering breath and awaits the arrival of the lords. They come. He does the ceremony. They leave.

Afterwards, he calls his disciples into the hall and gives them the bad news. I'm not ready to be your master. I still have not learned to see through the veil of human ranking and to treat all people the same.

So he left them. Left his disciples, left the temple, went to become the student of another master. He returned to his disciples eight years later, enlightened.

Here's what I love about that story. One little thing. He had one little thing left that he needed to work on. Eight years. Eight years just to fix that last little thing, that last little hang-up he was carrying.

Do you usually have that kind of patience with yourself on this journey? Are you willing to give yourself eight years to fix that one little thing?

I know I say this to you a lot. I'm going to say it again, and I'm going to keep saying it: you're worth the eight years. It's not too long.

Those of you who've been around the block a few times know how fast eight years can fly by. This feels like not that long ago to me — but I've got a seventeen-year-old back there who would fit in my arms when this happened. I've got a picture of me holding him in one arm like this. Now he could probably do that to me, but definitely not the reverse.

This spiritual unfolding work that we do isn't instant gratification. Don't be dissuaded by the long timelines. The work is still worth doing. And I don't care where you're at in your life course. Even if you don't think you've got eight years left, don't let that stop you from starting. Don't let that stop you from starting the thing that's showing up in your life, asking for your love and attention. It matters. It all matters.

Two miles home

Poor Simon's going to feel picked on this morning.

Shortly after the marathon — I think the next year, if my reconstruction of timelines is accurate — he was in first grade at Lee Elementary, and there was an incident at school, and I had to go pick him up. My wife was out of town at a conference. So I was at work, and I had to run home two miles, get the car, and go get him.

When the school called, I reacted in that immediate moment the way that my parents would have. I was filled with anger and frustration and judgment.

But by the time I ran home, I realized: I don't have to parent that way. I don't want to parent that way.

And I was so glad I didn't have my car with me. If I'd had my car, I would have gotten to school before I had time to develop some distance between those reactions I'd been trained in and the more spacious awareness that allows you to ask how you want to show up in your life.

So I showed up to my son's school, and I didn't shame him, and I didn't judge him, and I wasn't angry or frustrated. I got to do what I wanted to do as a parent, which is ask: what does he need in this moment? What does he need in this moment, so that this moment is not one of those moments he has to have therapy to heal later? What does he deserve, in terms of the presence of a loving adult in this challenging moment, that lets this issue, this thing that happened at school, not turn into anything bigger than it is — not be amplified or exacerbated or turned into some cause for future shame or guilt or self-recrimination or self-judgment? What does he need so that this can just be one of those things that happened?

It's powerful to show up for each other like that. When our own insecurities and fears and anxieties are not the triggers driving our responses.

I did show up for him well that day. But it took many more years for it to become anything like a habit. I don't want to give you the false impression that after that day I showed up for him as my best self a hundred percent of the time. That certainly did not happen. It took many more years and many more methods of finding the spaciousness and recognizing the triggers that made me react and get anxious or scared.

I wish the onion only had one layer. You peel it off and we're all done. I'm pretty sure we'd all be enlightened. Even people in politics would already be enlightened if it was that easy.

But because of that episode, I realized that the running was also a way of getting ready for the challenges of my workday every morning — a way of becoming a calm, centered presence, so that when stuff happened at work that was challenging, I had the resources to deal. And it was a way of leaving work at work for me. It was a way of running and being ready to really be home with my family, fully present, when I got home from my run.

Transferable skills

Now, I preached a sermon on this at First UU Church in 2010, sixteen years ago. And a whole bunch of people came up to me after church: but I don't like running.

Cool. I don't need you to run.

The invitation is this. I'm telling you a story of something I found that worked for me, and I'm trying to tell you some things about how it worked for me, and how I noticed that it worked for me. That might be what we call in the business transferable skills.

We've heard this phrase before. If you were running accounting books in a for-profit business, you might not have all the skills you need to do it for a nonprofit — but there's a big 85 percent Venn diagram overlap. There's 15 percent new stuff you've got to learn, but some of the basic stuff, like double-entry bookkeeping, you already have a handle on. Transferable skills move from one role to another.

And in this case, what we care about is that there might be some transferable skills that work from one spiritual seeker to another.

What is it that you do in your life that creates space — and then you notice, oh, I get to make a different choice, one that's more aligned with who I want to be and with my values, after the practice than I would have before the practice?

That's an important marker. It's a litmus test. It starts to tell you whether the thing you're spending time doing is grounding and centering you or not.

Does it change the way you want to show up? Does it change your capacity to show up? Do you have moments of insight that bring moments of healing to yourself during or after the practice? Do you make time for practice at all?

Ritual is produced by the mindset you bring

What might some of those practices be?

It's a fascinating and weird time to be alive in spiritual and religious movements. I can tell you that there's a blog post somewhere identifying something that you do every day as a spiritual practice. The weirdest thing you can think of that you do every day — someone has written a blog post about how they use that thing as a spiritual practice.

When I first ran across this phenomenon a few years ago, I was a little skeptical. I was a little like: okay. Yeah, but I'm having a hard time imagining that putting your hand inside the bag and picking up your dog's warm poop from the grass on your morning dog walk is a moment of deepening for you. I'm having a hard time imagining that. Some folks write about the process of making and drinking their morning coffee. I was a little incredulous about that.

But I'm less incredulous now. Because what I know now that I didn't know fifteen years ago is that ritual is produced by the mindfulness and the mindset that you bring to a practice.

Ritual is produced by the mindfulness and the mindset that you bring to a practice.

Now, I have not chosen to make washing dishes a spiritual practice for me, but I recognize that I could try it out. If I wanted to try washing the dishes in the evening as a spiritual practice, it wouldn't be so much about the dishes. It would be about me saying: I'm going to carve this time out in my life as sacred time. I'm going to take my AirPods out and stop listening to my music or my podcast. I'm going to show up to the sink —

You're laughing.

I'm going to show up to the sink, and I'm going to take three deep breaths, or some other real basic practice that I use to ground and center myself. And I'm going to give loving attention to the dishes. Maybe I think of the way in which cleaning these dishes and preparing them is a way that I provide sustenance to my family, whom I both deeply love and am deeply intimate with. That this small thing is an act of care. And that the food prepared on plates washed with love is going to taste just a little bit better than food prepared on plates washed with resentment.

Do you see the nuance I'm pointing at here? It's why I'm no longer skeptical.

If you have found something that works as a spiritual practice in your life, deepen it. Ask yourself how to deepen it.

Hard lumps

Anytime we show up truly present in our lives, we are making the better world that we're always yammering on about, dreaming about.

We think we have to fight other people who are not doing it in order to make it happen. That is a distraction. Most of the time. I'm not saying there aren't moments when that's the right call. I'm saying that it is also a distraction from the work of creating the better world you want to live in, right here in your own life. Because it is contagious. The better world is contagious.

I saw how many of you took a deep breath after I took a deep breath. That stuff is contagious, in a good way.

Now — superpower, Kryptonite — anxiety is also contagious. If I stood up here feeling anxious, you would get in your car after service and wonder, why do I feel more anxious now than when I arrived? Even if I was masking and hiding it the whole time I was up here and didn't mention it once. If that's honestly how I was feeling, you would leave here feeling that way, because you gave me your attention during this time.

Those triggers, those things within us — they're like little metastases. And what do we know, ladies, from our breast self-exam process, and gentlemen, from our testicular self-exam process? Metastases show up as hard lumps in the body.

Spiritual practices help us notice the hard lumps in our souls.

Because we don't do spiritual practices to get hard. We do spiritual practices to get soft.

Amen.

Eric Hepburn: Until next time. Thank you for joining us on The Pulpiteer.

If you enjoyed the podcast, you can help others find it by liking and subscribing. If you'd like to support the podcast directly, you can make a donation at sangabrieluu.org/give.

The Pulpiteer podcast is a production of the San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Georgetown, Texas. The podcast is hosted by Spotify, and theme music is by John Faber. Our live recording tech crew is Frank Sanders, Keith Hutchinson, Lance McCollum, and Matt Tardy. The podcast is produced and performed by Eric Hepburn.

See you next time.