Lord, Increase My Bewilderment
Like many kids growing up in chaotic homes, I developed discipline as a way to create stability for myself. Get up. Meditate. Work out. Focus.
But discipline without awareness can take you to bad places. Discipline has made me work hard for people who didn't take care of me. It has made me stay in relationships where I was the only one holding up the roof. It has made me lose sight of the bigger picture.
At some point I had to admit: I have no idea where I’m going, and discipline won't get me there. The more I see life as a problem of finding the right rules to apply, the more lost I'll be.
There’s an old Sufi prayer, quoted by Ibn ʿArabi: “Lord, increase my bewilderment.”
The Arabic word for bewilderment, ḥayra, doesn’t simply mean being lost or confused. It describes what happens when our usual ways of understanding fail us, when reality is too vast to be reduced to a straight path.
Bewilderment asks something different of us than discipline. Not to give up, but to stay in relationship with what we don’t understand. Ibn ʿArabi describes it as moving in a circle around a pole: you may not be "getting anywhere," but your relationship to the center keeps changing and deepening.
So take a second look at the places where you aren’t getting anywhere. Perhaps, like me, you’ve tried to settle down — with a stable life, a stable relationship, a stable breath — and somehow ended up more restless than ever.
But maybe restlessness isn’t a problem to solve. Maybe the point isn’t to stay still, but to move like a pilgrim around a shrine, circling what you can’t let go of: God, the love you can’t make simple, the wound you still can’t heal, the poem you’ve been trying to write for twenty years.
We don't master life. We return, again and again, to the mysteries that orient us.
Lord, increase my bewilderment.
As always, if you’d like to be held through your process, reach out and we’ll set up a free coaching call.
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