(The 5-second start-anywhere prayer.)
WARNING: It will take a slow to average reader about six minutes to read this little essay. This is five minutes and fifty-seconds longer than it takes to engage the five second prayer (mental health exercise) which it introduces and recommends. Just saying . . .
Our Abbot at Heart Mountain Monastery (who originally suggested the organizing of the New Buddhist Methodist Church) recently suggested that the world-wide near shut-down due to the virus is simply nature’s way, life’s way, of encouraging all of us to “slow down, you move too fast,” as Simon and Garfunkel once put it. The shut down has given all of us an excuse to just chill. Relax. Take a breather.
Easier said than done, this, as we’ve all recently experienced. To those of us who were previously constantly on the move, it’s been even more challenging. Our very identities were wrapped around “going places,” moving on up. To slow down, not go anywhere, for our own and the planet’s good, was a completely new responsibility, obligation.
A number of years ago I was asked to come out of retirement and, for a month or so, “fill in” at my old job as a stop smoking coach for our local Health District. I was honored to be asked, and happy to oblige.
Previously, when I worked with smokers helping them to outgrow the habit, (“just chill, relax, take a breather”) we would generally work together for at least six weeks (this is, after all, a life-long habit many of them carried) and sometimes we would work together for six month or longer. (See my book, How to Stop Smoking in 15 Easy Years.)
But when I was just “filling in” for those few short weeks, I realized I would most often have the opportunity to talk with the smoker just one time. I had to condense everything I had learned in a lifetime of study (I myself had smoked regularly for several decades)— I had to condense all that I had learned about the habit, and how to drop it, into a single, one hour or less session. Thus, I came up with what later became known as the “Five Second Start Anywhere Prayer.”
Spoiler alert: Since it was a government program, I didn’t call it a prayer. I called it a technique. But my understanding is anytime you decide to take a second to love, you are praying. But we’ll get to that.
At the time, I called it the “Zoom-Love Technique.” I also admitted to my clients up front, “ I know, I know: it sounds corny. But hear me out.”
It’s a five step process, which I have found to be not only quite useful in stopping smoking, but also quite useful here in the time of virus, to shake off the heavy burden that seems to have invaded the atmosphere. Five steps, to wit:
- Stop. Just stop. Even for just one second. (If you can stop longer, that’s great. But one second works.) Stop moving, stop thinking, stop feeling, stop worrying, stop complaining, stop plotting and planning, about the virus and everything else. Even stop breathing, just for one second. Just stop, just for a second. Internally if not externally. (Bob Newhart had a classic segment on his show when he played a psychiatrist, where he told his clients, simply “Stop it!”
- Relax. Just relax, just for a a second. We can stop, but then notice we are still quite uptight, quite wound up, tense, even irritable, about the virus, politics, everything else. So for just a second (one lousy second) for no reason at all, just relax. Relax physically—let your shoulders drop, your facial muscles relax, your arms and legs relax, let your tummy relax. Just for a second. You can do this if you have already, just for a second, stopped worrying and fantasizing about what could/might happen with the virus. Just stop such musing. And then relax. (It’s just for one second, for pity’s sake.) Take care of yourself. Give yourself some breathing room. Relaxing is good for the immune system.
- Just Love. Yes, yes, it’s corny. But for just a second, just love. Love where you are, love what you’re doing, love who you’re with, love what’s behind and what’s ahead. Love being locked down, just for a second.
And if it’s too much to ask you to love the deep mystery of the virus itself, then love the “one world family” that is meeting this virus together. Love the totally new world it has brought us into. The craziness, the newness we are now living. Just for a second, just love it.
Impossible, you say?
Okay, let’s say the worst happens: you die. What do you want your last act, your last mood, your last intention on earth to be?
Yes, of course: love. Even a little bit—a second of love. You love the sandwich you had for lunch. You love the people you are locked down with. You love the grocery store clerks, the truck drivers who brought in all this stuff. You love the budding spring that is flowering regardless of the fear that is about in the land.
Love, as mentioned earlier, is prayer. One second of love—a second of prayer—is better than no love, no prayer at all, here in the time of virus.
When working with smokers, teaching this exercise, I would take out my little kitchen time and say, “Okay, for just one minute, let’s just love. Whatever thoughts rise up—thoughts such as, this guy’s an idiot—just love those thoughts. Love all your thoughts for just one minute, no matter what they happen to be. And then love whatever images, feelings, sensations, sounds, urges (I need to pee) rise up. For just one minute, just love, okay?”
I never had a single client who refused to “love, for just one minute.” Even tough truck drivers and motorcycle mamas.
But rather than a full minute, the suggestion here is to love for just one second (five second or ten seconds or a full minute, if you can. But just one second works.) Love whatever is arising in your awareness in the moment. Just love it, as best you can. A little, teeny-tiny awkward bit of love is better than no love at all. (“…if you have the faith [the love] the size of grain of a mustard seed, you can move mountains!”)
- Zoom Out. We humans have the amazing capacity to focus on the minutia in one moment (maybe on the tiny mustard seed) and in the next moment zoom out, recognize—imagine—we are looking down from the space station, or standing back from the solar system, or watching the galaxy.
Researchers have documented the healing effects of moving from a narrow focus to a wide focus perspective. The most obvious example of “zooming out” is when we watch a football game on television and the announcer says, “let’s take a look from the blimp.” And suddenly we are given the view of the football field from a thousand feet in the air.
What would the view of of our current situation look like if we were viewing it from the blimp, or from the space station? From Mars? Neptune? Pluto? Zoom out: see our sun from the far end of a gigantic galaxy.
Such a view gives you breathing room, yes?
When I say “zoom out,” I mean out, out, out! Leave your body, leave the solar system, get way, way out there, just for a second.
When people actually do this (rather than just read about it) –when they use their imagination to view their circumstances from way, way way out, the spontaneous response is most often to take a deep, deep breath. Without even thinking about it. This is a wise counter to the “constricted breath” of the virus, yes?
- Carry on. Just do what you were doing. Go back to your daily routine. (For what it’s worth, these five steps—to a degree—are what smokers do when they stop for a smoke: stop, relax a bit, love the circumstance, zoom out from their project for a brief while, and then carry on. See my book, The Smoker’s Prayer.)
In a nutshell, the 5-step, start anywhere prayer:
- Stop
- Relax
- Just Love
- Zoom out
- Carry on.
After personally using, playing with this prayer/exercise for a number of months after first introducing it to my stop-=smoking clients, I realized I didn’t need to be so literal, or linear. I could start, on occasion, with the zoom out, which allowed me to love reality more easily, which allowed me to relax and stop the foolish worrying I had been indulging.
Or, I could start with “Just love,” which helped me to relax. Or I could start with relaxing, which helped me to love and zoom out and stop my foolish complaining. That’s why I now call it the start-anywhere prayer.
With one exception: it doesn’t work if you start with “carrying on.” That’s what we are already doing, it’s what we do all the time—“carry on.” The point of the prayer—the point of spiritual, life-enhancing practices—is to interrupt, if just for five seconds, the daily “carrying on” of our suffering routines. (If we are already deeply happy and at peace and totally loving, we don’t need any “exercises” to help us remember, to help us get back to it.)
So you can start anywhere with any of the first four “one second” practices: 1. Stop, 2, Relax; 3. Just love; 4. Zoom out. You don’t have to remember “carry on,” because you’ll do that anyway.
Lots of other prayers and “mental health,” spiritual health technique have come to the surface, or are coming to the surface here in this never-before experienced time of the virus. But for me, knowing it only takes five second, the Start Anywhere Prayer, or technique, has proven quite practical, uplifting.
And, for a short cut, if you don’t remember all five steps (Stop, Relax, Just Love, Zoom Out, Carry on) that’s also okay. You only need to remember one step: Just love.
That start anywhere prayer helps us do just that.
Stay safe, stay light, friends. Keep the faith.
