This is so, so true. In boarding school, every minute of the day was scheduled except for I think four ten-minute "free times." During these free times you were supposed to get permission for all the things that needed permission (which was everything), bring your laundry up from the other side of the building, iron your clothes, iron your sports uniform, wash your underwear by hand (because it is gross to put your underwear in the laundry without prewashing??), change your sheets, etc. There was never a free time that was actually free.
By extreme amounts of slacking and totally cheating on the underwear thing, I managed to make a habit of keeping the free time before night prayers completely free. During that time I would always get overwhelmingly sad for no reason I could put my finger on. I told my spiritual director and she gave me stuff to do during that time so that I wouldn't mope.
That was when my mental health started to collapse, and I wasn't even *aware* of it because I had no time to think about it.
I feel like something further could be said about phones and the way they fill up your attention to the point that you have no time to process anything you take in or realize anything you're feeling. But that would be hypocritical because I spend way too much time on this thing.
As to how to protect yourself agains cults, here's what I did when I was Multnomah Monthly Meeting (Portland, OR) high school advisor 30+ years ago. Incidentally, I (along with most Quakers) believe that young people are autonomous beings, quite capable of make their own rational decisions without "adult" control. We're there to provide input, but they make the decisions.
So, that said, every other week we had somebody from a different faith community come in and speak of their *personal* experience of the Divine (or whatever name they might use) and then the following week we would gather and discuss what we learned.
Our first guest was an Imam from a local Mosque. Right before Christmas, we had a Pagan priest perform a Yule ritual. We had a Christian Science minister followed two weeks later by a representative of the Church of Scientology. LDS missionaries, Jehovah's Witnesses, and so on.
Perhaps the most important thing we learned from all of this is that EVERYONE has something to teach us about Spirit and about spiritual practice. We may not be able to accept very much of what they were saying, but there always seemed to be some nuggets of Truth (and sometimes a regular gold mine of Truth) included in their sharing.
I believe that this gave each of the ~16 kids an ability to be able to care for and respect others, even when they rejected their religion.
I know of multiple mainline Protestant traditions (and one deeply quirky protestant tradition) who've done interfaith exchanges as part of the Sunday School curriculums. Some experienced Jewish or Bhuddist services, or had speakers. One attended a very traditional Greek Orthodox service. I also remember some sort of interfaith choir performance.
Every group of churches/templates/mosques/etc who has done this seems to agree that's it's a fantastic experience. I suppose there's some selection bias there, because the only organizations that participate in these exchanges are the ones who value interfaith understanding. But if it seems like the kind of thing you might like, then definitely consider it.
I absolutely do value interfaith understanding and I thank you for your reply to my comment. Each of us has our own life experiences and are born with a whole plethora of innate tendencies, so the rituals that we are attracted to and the manifestations of the Divine that we embrace are truly ours. To fully develop our own spiritual life requires us to continually grow in our understanding of Spirit and that usually means learning from others who might not agree with us in everything we might currently believe.
A lot of this transfers to abusive workplaces, especially in settings like healthcare where there really are people whose welfare may depend on particular employees, a situation which substitutes for the ideological brainwashing. So you get people who believe in what they do, work way more than they can handle, lose the capacity to do anything but work, and swallow the hype so hard they say "I love my job" right up until the day they quit, often after an illness or vacation gives them some time to reflect.
My struggle with this is that there is limited space for me to truly take that time to think, because my mind is filled with so many distractions. It’s like being pulled along by currents in different directions. Taking the time for quiet does help, don’t get me wrong, but seemingly less so than for other people. It works better if I take adhd meds, or meditate consistently, or am not sleep deprived. But I feel like I give relatively vast swaths of my day to quiet time without the same level of benefit that others seem to experience. Idk if there’s any advice out there for people like me :/
I am a Person Like You and I find my ability to endure/enjoy Quiet fluctuates.
It is really hard to claw your way out of the hole when you're there. The start of last year, I decided that I needed daily Wall Time (stare at a wall for as long as I want/need). Sometime in the last 18 months, I started forgetting to do this consistently and the more I didn't do it, the more unbearable I found being alone with my thoughts was, until I was so bad at thinking that I fell behind on everything and had to take 2 weeks off work on stress leave.
Time off work let me focus on the basics (eating enough, tackling the sleep debt, personal hygiene, cleaning my living space) but it still wasn't enough to clear my head.
I then read a very bad self-help book that contained a very important insight, which is that stress is a physical state much like hunger and you need to do physical things to solve it. So for the next three weeks I tried to fit in either vigorous exercise or like, half an hour of violent outburst (punching a mattress alone in my room, etc). I also watched a lot of tearjerker type media (for me, crying is really effective for stress relief - pre breakdown I managed to fit a 2 hour cry into a flight and I remember it vividly as one of the fleeting spots of sanity in many months of being overwhelmed).
This finally cleared enough stress backlog for me to even try meditating. I read a couple of perspectives on meditation and I've been trying to practice walking meditation during my commute lately.
The last month or so is sort of reinforcing that the wellbeing pyramid, if you've ever encountered it, is true.
Tackle things in this order: base physical necessities (food, sleep, water, hygiene, environment) > stress relief (exercise, social ties, etc) > quiet (contemplation, meditation, etc)
I find it's simply too hard to have truly effective quiet without having done these things.
In more encouraging news, I find that wellbeing is often a virtuous cycle. Completing any one step (e.g feed, water, clean, tidy, sleep) normally puts you in a better space to tackle the others; successfully doing them all puts you in a better space to do the de-stress steps, doing the de-stress steps means you can do Quiet, and doing Quiet helps you process events in a way that don't create stress, or rearrange habits to stop stressful situations from happening.
But yeah, start at the bottom. Sorry, I know this is literally all wellness advice, but it's the only thing that actually consistently works.
I don't know if this will generalize to you, but if I want to get my mind to be quiet, I first need to get my mind to desire rest, rather than being bored and fighting me. Usually the solution to this is intense exercise. Even just a few minutes of sprinting really hard is good enough to make this effect kick in, though it doesn't last as long as when I exercise longer.
Also yeah, getting enough sleep makes a lot of things about life better.
I love the idea of the sit and think for an hour each week, I would probably do the same as you though and take my phone out after 10 minutes if it was just me. How does one go about finding a Quaker Meeting to join?
Please recognize that there is a vast difference between unprogrammed and programmed meetings. The former are generally Religious Society of Friends and the latter are generally Evangelical Friends Church.
"The freedom from bodily torture and unceasing labor had given my mind an increased sensibility, and imparted to it greater activity. I was not yet exactly in right relations...When entombed at Covey’s, shrouded in darkness and physical wretchedness, temporal well-being was the grand desideratum; but, temporal wants supplied, the spirit puts in its claims. Beat and cuff your slave, keep him hungry and spiritless, and he will follow the chain of his master like a dog; but feed and clothe him well, work him moderately, surround him with physical comfort, and dreams of freedom intrude. Give him a *bad* master, and he aspires to a good master; give him a good master and he wishes to become his own master. Such is human nature. You may hurl a man so low beneath the level of his kind, that he loses all just ideas of his natural position, but elevate him a little, and the clear conception of rights rises to life and power, and leads him onward
....To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate his power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery. The man who takes his earnings must be able to convince him that he has a perfect right to do so. It must not depend upon mere force: the slave must know no higher law than his master’s will. The whole relationship must not only demonstrate to his mind its necessity, but its absolute rightfulness. If there be one crevice through which a single drop can fall, it will certainly rust off the slave’s chain."
Quakers were absolutely wrong about many moral issues, though. It’s not realistic to focus merely on things they got right. Yes, abolitionism, big win, but after reading Albion’s Seed i concluded that colonial-era Quaker life sounds hellish
I do hour-long baths to achieve quiet uninterrupted thinking time with no electronics, and moving into a place with no bath kinda wrecked my life. Gotta get that thinking time *somehow*.
(CW: Christianity. I hope this comment isn't offensive or if-not-triggering-then-reminding-of-bad-things to former Christians or people abused by Christians or Christian groups.) The way that you've previously described meditating (or maybe it was whoever you linked to a little while back) reminds me of how I practice prayer [with the obvious difference that my wise and loving overlooker is (meant to be) God] and your description of Quaker Meetings reminds me of what Catholics call adoration - where we go and sit quietly in the presence of Jesus. I think these practices are serving similar purposes and are really healthy and I've loved reading about them (from you and whoever it was you recommended recently). Also I'm so glad I found your Substack - I'm always eager and excited to read whatever you write.
The way you write about the benefits of Quaker Meetings (that is, having a quiet span of time to encourage the wise, compassionate part of you to come out and think through things) reminds me very strongly of the way Sarah Constantin describes Metta meditation: https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/metta-meditation-my-way
Maybe a generalized form of this is one of those Arts that should be promoted more widely in the rat community.
This is so, so true. In boarding school, every minute of the day was scheduled except for I think four ten-minute "free times." During these free times you were supposed to get permission for all the things that needed permission (which was everything), bring your laundry up from the other side of the building, iron your clothes, iron your sports uniform, wash your underwear by hand (because it is gross to put your underwear in the laundry without prewashing??), change your sheets, etc. There was never a free time that was actually free.
By extreme amounts of slacking and totally cheating on the underwear thing, I managed to make a habit of keeping the free time before night prayers completely free. During that time I would always get overwhelmingly sad for no reason I could put my finger on. I told my spiritual director and she gave me stuff to do during that time so that I wouldn't mope.
That was when my mental health started to collapse, and I wasn't even *aware* of it because I had no time to think about it.
I feel like something further could be said about phones and the way they fill up your attention to the point that you have no time to process anything you take in or realize anything you're feeling. But that would be hypocritical because I spend way too much time on this thing.
As a Quaker geek, I thank you for sharing this.
As to how to protect yourself agains cults, here's what I did when I was Multnomah Monthly Meeting (Portland, OR) high school advisor 30+ years ago. Incidentally, I (along with most Quakers) believe that young people are autonomous beings, quite capable of make their own rational decisions without "adult" control. We're there to provide input, but they make the decisions.
So, that said, every other week we had somebody from a different faith community come in and speak of their *personal* experience of the Divine (or whatever name they might use) and then the following week we would gather and discuss what we learned.
Our first guest was an Imam from a local Mosque. Right before Christmas, we had a Pagan priest perform a Yule ritual. We had a Christian Science minister followed two weeks later by a representative of the Church of Scientology. LDS missionaries, Jehovah's Witnesses, and so on.
Perhaps the most important thing we learned from all of this is that EVERYONE has something to teach us about Spirit and about spiritual practice. We may not be able to accept very much of what they were saying, but there always seemed to be some nuggets of Truth (and sometimes a regular gold mine of Truth) included in their sharing.
I believe that this gave each of the ~16 kids an ability to be able to care for and respect others, even when they rejected their religion.
I know of multiple mainline Protestant traditions (and one deeply quirky protestant tradition) who've done interfaith exchanges as part of the Sunday School curriculums. Some experienced Jewish or Bhuddist services, or had speakers. One attended a very traditional Greek Orthodox service. I also remember some sort of interfaith choir performance.
Every group of churches/templates/mosques/etc who has done this seems to agree that's it's a fantastic experience. I suppose there's some selection bias there, because the only organizations that participate in these exchanges are the ones who value interfaith understanding. But if it seems like the kind of thing you might like, then definitely consider it.
I absolutely do value interfaith understanding and I thank you for your reply to my comment. Each of us has our own life experiences and are born with a whole plethora of innate tendencies, so the rituals that we are attracted to and the manifestations of the Divine that we embrace are truly ours. To fully develop our own spiritual life requires us to continually grow in our understanding of Spirit and that usually means learning from others who might not agree with us in everything we might currently believe.
A lot of this transfers to abusive workplaces, especially in settings like healthcare where there really are people whose welfare may depend on particular employees, a situation which substitutes for the ideological brainwashing. So you get people who believe in what they do, work way more than they can handle, lose the capacity to do anything but work, and swallow the hype so hard they say "I love my job" right up until the day they quit, often after an illness or vacation gives them some time to reflect.
My struggle with this is that there is limited space for me to truly take that time to think, because my mind is filled with so many distractions. It’s like being pulled along by currents in different directions. Taking the time for quiet does help, don’t get me wrong, but seemingly less so than for other people. It works better if I take adhd meds, or meditate consistently, or am not sleep deprived. But I feel like I give relatively vast swaths of my day to quiet time without the same level of benefit that others seem to experience. Idk if there’s any advice out there for people like me :/
I am a Person Like You and I find my ability to endure/enjoy Quiet fluctuates.
It is really hard to claw your way out of the hole when you're there. The start of last year, I decided that I needed daily Wall Time (stare at a wall for as long as I want/need). Sometime in the last 18 months, I started forgetting to do this consistently and the more I didn't do it, the more unbearable I found being alone with my thoughts was, until I was so bad at thinking that I fell behind on everything and had to take 2 weeks off work on stress leave.
Time off work let me focus on the basics (eating enough, tackling the sleep debt, personal hygiene, cleaning my living space) but it still wasn't enough to clear my head.
I then read a very bad self-help book that contained a very important insight, which is that stress is a physical state much like hunger and you need to do physical things to solve it. So for the next three weeks I tried to fit in either vigorous exercise or like, half an hour of violent outburst (punching a mattress alone in my room, etc). I also watched a lot of tearjerker type media (for me, crying is really effective for stress relief - pre breakdown I managed to fit a 2 hour cry into a flight and I remember it vividly as one of the fleeting spots of sanity in many months of being overwhelmed).
This finally cleared enough stress backlog for me to even try meditating. I read a couple of perspectives on meditation and I've been trying to practice walking meditation during my commute lately.
The last month or so is sort of reinforcing that the wellbeing pyramid, if you've ever encountered it, is true.
Tackle things in this order: base physical necessities (food, sleep, water, hygiene, environment) > stress relief (exercise, social ties, etc) > quiet (contemplation, meditation, etc)
I find it's simply too hard to have truly effective quiet without having done these things.
In more encouraging news, I find that wellbeing is often a virtuous cycle. Completing any one step (e.g feed, water, clean, tidy, sleep) normally puts you in a better space to tackle the others; successfully doing them all puts you in a better space to do the de-stress steps, doing the de-stress steps means you can do Quiet, and doing Quiet helps you process events in a way that don't create stress, or rearrange habits to stop stressful situations from happening.
But yeah, start at the bottom. Sorry, I know this is literally all wellness advice, but it's the only thing that actually consistently works.
I don't know if this will generalize to you, but if I want to get my mind to be quiet, I first need to get my mind to desire rest, rather than being bored and fighting me. Usually the solution to this is intense exercise. Even just a few minutes of sprinting really hard is good enough to make this effect kick in, though it doesn't last as long as when I exercise longer.
Also yeah, getting enough sleep makes a lot of things about life better.
I love the idea of the sit and think for an hour each week, I would probably do the same as you though and take my phone out after 10 minutes if it was just me. How does one go about finding a Quaker Meeting to join?
Here's a link to Friends General Conference Find A Meeting: https://www.fgcquaker.org/find-a-meeting/
Please recognize that there is a vast difference between unprogrammed and programmed meetings. The former are generally Religious Society of Friends and the latter are generally Evangelical Friends Church.
"The freedom from bodily torture and unceasing labor had given my mind an increased sensibility, and imparted to it greater activity. I was not yet exactly in right relations...When entombed at Covey’s, shrouded in darkness and physical wretchedness, temporal well-being was the grand desideratum; but, temporal wants supplied, the spirit puts in its claims. Beat and cuff your slave, keep him hungry and spiritless, and he will follow the chain of his master like a dog; but feed and clothe him well, work him moderately, surround him with physical comfort, and dreams of freedom intrude. Give him a *bad* master, and he aspires to a good master; give him a good master and he wishes to become his own master. Such is human nature. You may hurl a man so low beneath the level of his kind, that he loses all just ideas of his natural position, but elevate him a little, and the clear conception of rights rises to life and power, and leads him onward
....To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate his power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery. The man who takes his earnings must be able to convince him that he has a perfect right to do so. It must not depend upon mere force: the slave must know no higher law than his master’s will. The whole relationship must not only demonstrate to his mind its necessity, but its absolute rightfulness. If there be one crevice through which a single drop can fall, it will certainly rust off the slave’s chain."
- Frederick Douglass
Quakers were absolutely wrong about many moral issues, though. It’s not realistic to focus merely on things they got right. Yes, abolitionism, big win, but after reading Albion’s Seed i concluded that colonial-era Quaker life sounds hellish
I'm so curious what led you to become Quaker, Ozy!
Regarding Cal Newport's secret Quaker theology, his grandfather was actually a famous Baptist theologian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal_Newport#cite_note-4
I do hour-long baths to achieve quiet uninterrupted thinking time with no electronics, and moving into a place with no bath kinda wrecked my life. Gotta get that thinking time *somehow*.
(CW: Christianity. I hope this comment isn't offensive or if-not-triggering-then-reminding-of-bad-things to former Christians or people abused by Christians or Christian groups.) The way that you've previously described meditating (or maybe it was whoever you linked to a little while back) reminds me of how I practice prayer [with the obvious difference that my wise and loving overlooker is (meant to be) God] and your description of Quaker Meetings reminds me of what Catholics call adoration - where we go and sit quietly in the presence of Jesus. I think these practices are serving similar purposes and are really healthy and I've loved reading about them (from you and whoever it was you recommended recently). Also I'm so glad I found your Substack - I'm always eager and excited to read whatever you write.
The way you write about the benefits of Quaker Meetings (that is, having a quiet span of time to encourage the wise, compassionate part of you to come out and think through things) reminds me very strongly of the way Sarah Constantin describes Metta meditation: https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/metta-meditation-my-way
Maybe a generalized form of this is one of those Arts that should be promoted more widely in the rat community.