Your Heart Was Made For This: Parenting As A Spiritual Journey
Oren Jay Sofer on contemplative practice, activism, and parenting
Hello friends.
My husband and I caught a bad cold/flu this week. We had to cancel some fun plans with friends, I had to beg off a pair of talks I was supposed to give, and we took turns limping through the parenting and household duties, because as you know, if you have kids you never really get a sick day. I remember the first time that sunk in—I had a newborn, I was feverish, exhausted, sweaty and snotty, and yet I still had to keep nursing and holding that baby!
The ways your heart is invited to stretch when you have a child is a major theme of Oren Jay Sofer’s new book. I was so pleased when our mutual friend Jay Michaelson introduced us. Sofer’s a meditation and nonviolent communication teacher who’s written what reads almost like a manual for cultivating the qualities we need to be socially and politically engaged humans and present parents in a changing world. In other words, all the things The Golden Hour is about.
Here’s the lightly edited version of our conversation. Typos thanks to Nyquil.
What inspired you to write this book?
It was 2 things. One was the crazy year we had in 2020—the pandemic, George Floyd, the wildfires. And as a meditation teacher, wanting to provide people with a little bit more of a skill set than just ‘sit quietly and pay attention to your breath.’ And wanting to grapple with the question of, how does contemplative practice relate to all the challenges we're facing? And can it be a concrete resource: for people working for social change?
The other inspiration for the book was becoming a parent. We have a 13 month old.
Mazel tov. So, asking for parents, of the qualities you name in the book, what comes into your own journey as a parent most often in this first year? Knowing that it changes over time.
Patience is one of the primary ones, you know.
Oh yes.
I come up against my edges constantly, and as a meditation teacher with 25 years of experience in the bank, it's really humbling, which I love.
It’s a great reframe for parents, to realize that this is an opportunity for growth, not just a place where we are judged and often feel like failures.
For sure. Another one is mindfulness. Particularly at this age, where from what I observe and understand from the research, every interaction and experience is a learning experience for them. They are observing and absorbing everything, you know. So when my wife and I are fighting, how am I holding and expressing that anger when he's in the room? It takes a lot of presence to be aware of what's happening.
And even before that, in the decision to to have a child, I think courage is just a huge factor, and I know it took a heck of a lot of courage for me to say yes. You know, my wife and I have been together for 10 years and weren't planning on having kids. So it was a shift for me. And just opening to the intensity of the feelings, which I know you've written about. And the vulnerability.
To love is to risk losing.
That’s beautiful.
Here are two more qualities that that come to mind. One is devotion, and I love talking about devotion, because we live in a time where G-d is dead and the sacred is been subsumed by the marketplace and science. So people don't talk about or think about the sacred, and yet I think that devotion is one of our core needs as human beings.
And to me devotion is not necessarily about something spiritual or religious. It's about the quality of love and attention that we bring to what we're doing, right? So, changing a diaper with devotion, washing the dishes with devotion, rocking him to sleep with devotion, so that sense of giving wholeheartedly to something larger than ourselves, is a huge, both resource, and also, like a medicine of fulfillment.
You know, it’s so stressful to try to be working and being engaged with our world and raising a child, there's so many things going on all the time that I feel like it's essential that we nourish ourselves when and how we can.
Yes. For sure.
Devotion is one way of doing that, and the other is joy. And you know little beings are just like joy machines, but I think we have to be available to receive the nourishment of joy. We can blow past it when we're in a rush, we can overlook it. And so, being able to slow down enough. truly join a child in their joy in their wonder. and let it, you know, let it move me. And it reaffirms for me that we come into this world with so much goodness, and that we have to be taught to hate.
In my last book I wrote about care and I referenced what Martin Luther King Jr., in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, called the “network of mutuality” that connects all human beings. And I talked about, can you meditate on who changed your diapers? You probably don't know everyone who did it, and you can't pay them back, and some of them are probably gone. But they definitely loved you, all of them in their own way.
Yeah, I mean, you know, both my wife and I talk regularly about how we just didn't get it until we had a kid. It’s staggering the amount of energy it takes to keep a human being alive.
And also, I’m his primary caregiver. Like after we're done I'm going to rush to the playground and hand off with the nanny and be with him til 6 when my wife gets home. And it’s been such an education in the unbelievable amount of labor, literally and figuratively, that women have performed for tens of thousands of years. So you know, for anyone interested in equity and social transformation, looking at parenting through a lens of oppression and patriarchy is a real sobering education.
So speaking of connecting your day-to-day reality with equity and social transformation, one of my themes in this newsletter, and which is also very present in your book, is how we balance the need for engaging with the problems in the world and working on our own inner stuff—alongside everything else that we have to do, of course.
Yeah, I think it's a false dichotomy. We don't have to choose between self-care, wellness, spirituality, and social change, although it's often presented that way. Ideally the two are integrated and support each other. So our service, our social change work, offers this vehicle to express our love and our care for the world, to engage in structural problems at a structural level. And then the contemplative tools do a few things. One, they equip us with the resources so that we don't burn out. But equally importantly, I think they provide a way for us to align means with end, which is really the vision of principled nonviolence. So it's a way of uncovering and transforming internalized oppression and unconscious bias. It's a way of living into the kinds of relationships, livelihood and worldview that we're struggling as a species to create.
Wow. Okay. I love that. And can you speak concretely to what that looks like in your life?
So, I see my work as a meditation teacher and a communication trainer as a form of social change work —that I'm giving people the tools to transform their hearts and minds. To wake up. To be more empowered, engaged, and effective.
I see parenting as a form of social change work, and am thrilled to be on that journey and learning about it as I go. You know, raising little humans that actually have the skills to make peace.
And then I'm part of an experimental social change network called the Fierce Vulnerability Network that works at the intersection of direct action and climate justice and racial justice.
We do training together and also plug into different direct actions, and they're kind of experimenting with, what does it mean to rethink direct action from a place of inhabiting vulnerability and trying to awaken people to their humanity rather than the antagonistic protest. The mentality of ‘shut things down.’ How do we open things up?