t the Zen monastery, we made a distinction between “bringing spiritual practice into our lives” versus “bringing our lives into spiritual practice.”

You see, if I am using spiritual practice (mindfulness, meditation, chanting, visualizations, breathing techniques, etc.) to better my life, subtly I’m saying that I must improve myself. I need to get something for myself that I’m somehow lacking. It’s like the ego is proclaiming, “What’s in this for ME?”

In our modern day world, we can be incredibly results driven. So it’s easy to see why we would approach even spiritual practices in this manner. I mean, why do something if we don’t get the good stuff from it? Where’s the R.O.I.? Right?

However, in my experience, there’s a different attitude of mind we can take. We can bring our lives INTO spiritual practice.

For me, this approach represents humility, surrender, and trust. It’s like I’m saying, “Life, you know best. I don’t have any control over this transformation business. I am going to get out of the way so you can live through me perfectly.” In this way, my most significant contribution to Life is to show up fully, do my work, and leave the results to the Universe.

Take, for example, the humble caterpillar. It doesn’t go out someday and say, “I’m going to make this transformation business happen for me by becoming a better being. I’m going to become a butterfly. Gosh, darn it!” On the contrary, that caterpillar has Life on its side to deal with the HOW of transformation. The only thing that caterpillar needs to do is keep showing up and keep doing what it does to facilitate the process. For the caterpillar, the transformation is INEVITABLE because of its single-minded focus and its practice.

Today, look to see how you can be like that caterpillar. Surrender to your practice. Bring your life INTO your spiritual practice.

And allow Life to surprise you.