A few nights ago, I woke up at 4AM and found it hard to fall back asleep. But rather than fret, or get on the phone and doom scroll, I kept myself company; I was a companion to myself. I breathed. I listened to myself in the quiet. I heard my own thoughts and musings. I became acquainted with what was preoccupying me. Then, I breathed some more. It was lovely.
In the harried beat of our hectic lives, we do precious little self-accompanying. Dashing as we do, from one frenzied activity to another, maximizing personal efficiency, we no longer make time to hear ourselves. As if our busyness were not enough, we are also challenged by our tech. Do I have 20 minutes to do dishes? Well, why not listen to the latest drop of my favorite podcast? Ditto for when I head out for my walk. Even transition times are filled with what our devices have on ready offer. As a result, being a good companion to oneself falls by the wayside.
This kind of self-presence is not the same as meditation. In fact, I have been told by a Zen master friend that lack of time in self-accompaniment can interrupt meditation. The stillness of meditation creates an open space in which unheeded thoughts come flooding in. But that is not the time. While there are forms of insight meditation where attention to one’s own thoughts is welcomed, such attention is for the sake of critical self-scrutiny; the goal is to track our attachments back to their roots and to set ourselves free.
Self-accompaniment is a different task, though no less spiritual. It is the work of befriending and self-cherishing. It is the work of listening to oneself as one might to a friend. When you disconnect from the frenzy, who is the self that shows up? A Christian might regard such presence to oneself as fulfilling Jesus’s commandment to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If you do not love yourself, if you are barely acquainted with yourself, then how you can you possibly love your neighbor as you love yourself? A friend and former student, who is also a Buddhist, Eric, spoke of this omission as “leaving ourselves out of the circle of care.” Self-compassion is central to Buddhist practice. You are no less worthy of compassion than the rest of the human community. So, why the self-neglect?
Well, the reasons are rather too clear. We live in a capitalist hustle culture. We are urged to maximize our brand value, cultivate a side-gig, keep working because we have to, especially when in many a North American city, Victoria included, the cost of rent alone can chew up half your salary. Under such conditions, it requires an immense countercultural effort to unplug—including literally unplugging from your devices—to cultivate the silence in which one’s ownmost voice can be heard.
Unsurprisingly, after some time of such self-accompaniment, I fell back asleep and woke with a kind of peaceful ease. Although soon I was back into my customary immersion in daily tasks, the silence of nighttime listening seemed to carryover and infuse the rest of my day. This act of hospitality for myself put me on more even keel and so also rendered me more patient and attentive to others.
I suspect that it is high time to name and embrace the work of listening to oneself in this way as a “spirituality of self-accompaniment.” It does not replace meditation or prayer, but it is nonetheless a sacred labor of graciously giving to yourself the attentive care that is very much your due.
John J. Thatamanil is Professor of Theology and World Religions at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. He is also a Priest and Diocesan Theologian of the Diocese of Islands & Inlets (Anglican Diocese of British Columbia). He is, most recently, the author of Circling the Elephant: A Comparative Theology of Religious Diversity. He splits his time between living with his wife and son here in Victoria and living with his daughter in Manhattan. His research centers on how Christians can learn from the practices and insights of other religious traditions.
You can read more articles on our interfaith blog, Spiritually Speaking, at https://www.timescolonist.com/blogs/spiritually-speaking
* This article was published in the print edition of the Times Colonist on Saturday, October 28th 2023
