Multitasking to Enlightenment (or, Avoiding the Spiritual Mommy Track)

I have been reading alot about women’s brains lately, mostly in Dr. Mona Lisa Schulz’s The New Feminine Brain (http://www.drmonalisa.com/) and Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain (http://www.louannbrizendine.com/.) Both of these books have received their fair share of criticism, but they are fascinating looks at women’s hormones at different stages of life, and how this impacts brain function. One sub-topic of each is how women’s brains are hardwired for multi-tasking. I won’t bore you with all the scientific details, but basically we tend to have more connections between our right and left brain hemispheres than men, and therefore we tend to juggle more mental ‘threads’ at any one time. This especially kicks into gear once we have kids, after we recover from an initial phase of ‘momnesia’ during the baby phase (if you think you’ve lost all your brain cells since having kids, check out this article for more info on why http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-03-03-momnesia_N.htm.)

In short, nature conspires to make sure we can handle watching our rugrats while simultaneously checking our email, making a grocery list, and calling back the pediatrician. This is not news to most of us, but it’s nice to have some scientific validation.

So, what does all this have to do with spirituality? Well, that is what I have been pondering. Before having kids, my spiritual path revolved around meditation and retreats – the longer the better, in terms of profound experiences. But as with most activities, since having kids, efficiency is paramount! So I have had to really own the premise that spiritual insight and experience is not about time, it’s about moments - powerful moments. Studying the lives of famous mystics (a somewhat nerdy hobby of mine, I admit), I have been struck by how many revelatory, life-changing mystic experiences occur in mere moments. For example, medieval Christian mystic Margery Kempe (mother of 14 children!) recovered from a severe, protracted case of post-partum depression after one, brief mystic vision. The Zen Abbess Mugai Nyobai’s moment of enlightenment occurred when the bottom of a bucket of water she was carrying suddenly fell out. The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Sukasiddha is said to have achieved enlightenment after her very first spiritual teaching.

So, how does this apply to real life? I think the first step is in not allowing a busy life to become an excuse. I, for one, do not want to ‘mommy track’ my spirituality. That is to say, I don’t want to just accept that deeper experiences or insights are not possible for the next 18-20 years. At the same time, I can’t spend the time I used to cultivating spiritual growth. So, I think the trick is to find a way to keep the spiritual ‘thread’ within my mind open all the time, even when I am busy working, watching the kids, or folding laundy (or all three at once.) I’ve discovered this is an active process of juggling within my awareness – an active process of asking myself, ‘what is really true in this moment’, continuously throughout my day. It is a kind of mindfulness, but beyond simply watching my thoughts or emotions. It is almost like a part of my awareness is in a continual state of meditation, and I simply bring it to the forefront every so often.

This kind if juggling is really what multitasking is, according to brain studies. We don’t actually hold multiple thoughts in our awareness simultaneously, we juggle multiple threads in and out of the forefront.  And most women are better at keeping the ‘dormant’ threads alive, and at jumping back into a dormant thread after a break. So the key is, keep that spiritual thread alive somewhere in your awareness all the time, and don’t give yourself any excuses by falling into the habit of thinking you really need to meditate (or pray, or retreat, or whatever) to have a deep and powerful revelation.