The Spiritual Layer: Why You Cannot Pour From an Empty Vessel

A Woman cannot generate clean, steady prana out of a depleted body. When her ferritin is on the floor, when her cortisol has gone flat, when her gut is inflamed, her energy runs thin, and everything she gives, to her family, to her work, to her practice, costs her more than it should. You cannot pour from an empty vessel, and the vessel is the body.

The vessel keeps a record of the decades. How you poured yourself out in your 20's and 30's is what you feel in your 40's and 50's, and how you refill the vessel now decides how much Aliveness you carry into 60 and beyond.

Prana is life force. Some call it the Divine, some call it God, and some have no word for it at all. You may know it best by its absence, on a day when the light goes out.

Whatever word you use, your spiritual nature is your own direct experience, and experience is embodied. Your spiritual life happens in your body, so it depends on your body.

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So: you cannot settle into anything larger while your ferritin is 17. You cannot feel Alive while your Nervous System is locked in survival.

Here is how I hold it. The body is the vessel, the host for the Spirit. A nourished, regulated, steady body is a stable vessel. When depletion, inflammation, and a Nervous System stuck in survival wear that vessel down, your practices have nothing steady to rest on. Tending the body is how we tend the Soul's home.

I also picture it as a lightbulb. Some days a depleted body can run at only 35 watts, and that is all it can spare for your energy, your mood, your relationships, and your joy. You are wired to hold 75 watts, or 100, or far more, and that brilliance needs wiring that can carry it.

Send a surge of 250 watts through a 35-watt bulb, and it blows out. So I tend the vessel first and let my voltage stabilize, and the current flows cleanly through a body that is nourished.

The Soul cannot lead in a body that is dysregulated and under-resourced. A stable body creates the conditions for a stable Nervous System, and a stable Nervous System is the doorway to the Soul.

When my own system was inflamed and depleted, I felt a density and a separateness in my body I had never known. What had been my direct experience of intimate relationship with the Divine started to feel like a memory. That was a heartbreak, and it may be the deepest ache of Midlife for many Women.

When the body is depleted, your relationship with Spirit can slowly go theoretical. You still know the teachings. You can still say the words. The felt experience, the thing that made you take up a practice in the first place, keeps getting further away.

Then the small compensations start. More time online. The glass of wine, the extra sugar, the second coffee. That is what running on empty looks like from the inside.

I watch Women take this personally, treating a physiological problem as a flaw in their spiritual life, and adding shame on top of exhaustion.

There is a phrase for the light in a person's eyes: liquid luminosity. I watched my own dim as my iron ran low, and I see it in Women every week. You can see someone's Aliveness in their eyes and the way they carry themselves.

Treading Water

I say this as someone who teaches Spiritual and Nervous System regulation practices for a living, and I include myself and my whole field in it. None of what we teach is 'wrong.' All of it helps at the level it touches. And the Physical layer is so often the one left completely unaddressed, because most of us who teach these practices were never trained to look at ferritin, thyroid, or cortisol at all.

A sound bath cannot raise your ferritin. More yin yoga will not resolve anxiety driven by low progesterone. Breathwork cannot steady blood sugar while cortisol is pouring glucose in from the inside. I cannot yoga nidra my ferritin levels up, and I cannot chant my thyroid into converting T4 into T3.

These are treading-water practices. They are beautiful, and they keep you afloat, and they cannot create lasting stability until the body itself is resourced.

For years, many of the Women in our classes were doing Nervous System practices constantly, regulating, then dysregulating, then regulating again. The practice helped in the moment, and then the baseline exhaustion came back once they got home. I was 1 of them.

When I look back at my own years of meditating in a depleted body, I can see what the practice was for me then. It was a respite, a break from an uncomfortable body, and a little bit of a bypass.

It was lovely, and I kept doing it. From the other side, the same practice is a very different experience.

When your body is resourced, something shifts that no amount of willpower can replicate. You can stop bracing. The rest you get can actually restore you, instead of only paying down a debt.

What raises the floor is ferritin, thyroid hormone, progesterone, a steadier cortisol rhythm, sleep, protein, and a gut that absorbs what you feed it. When I re-resourced my body, my Nervous System settled on its own, and my practices started giving back to me in a new way.

I have come to believe the deepest spiritual state is to be fully relaxed: alert, clear, and present, with an ease underneath it all. A relaxed system can embody the transcendent. 1 of my teachers put it something like this: Divinity itself can settle comfortably inside of you.

A body in metabolic distress cannot relax that deeply, however devoted the practice. That is physiology, and it is workable.

Sometimes, as a Woman's system finally begins to settle, the calm itself feels wrong, flat or even empty. A Nervous System that has run on high for years can mistake stimulation for Aliveness, so the first real quiet can register as deadness. That quiet is rest, and your body learns to recognize it with time.

Your surroundings matter here too. If the home you return to each day is its own source of chronic stress, regulation becomes something you need just to survive it. Lasting regulation grows when your body is resourced and your environment is safe, caring, and kind.

I love Qigong dearly, and it works alongside the body's chemistry. Once your physiology is supported, Qigong becomes 1 of the most steadying practices I know, a powerful bridge back to yourself.

The Soul Questions

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There is a Buddhist teaching I love about how rare this life is. In the Chiggala Sutta, the Buddha describes a blind sea turtle that rises from the depths of the ocean once every 100 years, and a yoke with a single hole drifting somewhere on its surface. Buddhist teachers use the image to show how rare and precious a human life is, and I picture that yoke as a golden ring.

You can know intellectually that your life is that golden ring and still be unable to feel it in your body. In my experience, that gap between knowing and feeling is very often physiological, and very often addressable. For 7 years I practiced while my body was quietly depleted, and the distance between what I knew spiritually and what I could sustain day to day was enormous.

There is a kind of anxiety that comes from this layer, and it is often overlooked. It arises when the deepest questions of your life get no room:

• For what purpose do I exist?
• Where do I feel my Aliveness? Where does my enthusiasm rise on its own?
• Is what I am putting my attention on what matters most to my heart?
• What am I, beyond my body and my roles?
• What in me is permanent and unchanging, in a world where everything else is always changing?

These questions are part of being human. We are wired for wonder about meaning and purpose. When they are pushed aside for years, they create what I call an inner tension, a tightness, a prickliness, a sense that something is unresolved.

Our culture gives us very little space to wonder. We are busy, productive, and managing everyone's schedule, so we distract ourselves, numb, or stay too busy to sit with the big questions. The inner tension stays.

Purpose also has a measurable effect on the body. In research from Rush University, older adults with a strong sense of purpose in life held on to their thinking better, even when their brains showed Alzheimer's changes similar to those of people with less purpose.

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I think of life as 3 arcade tokens, 75 cents, or 75 years. By Midlife, you have spent 2 of them. I want to spend my last token fully, feeling the rapture of being Alive and being useful in the world, from a body that is resourced enough to sustain it.

My father, at the very end of his life, said it more simply than I ever could: love your people, love your life.

Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi gave this season a name I love. In From Age-ing to Sage-ing (1995), written with Ronald S. Miller, he describes spiritual eldering: taking deliberate time to look over the whole landscape of your life, harvest what it has taught you, make peace with your mortality, and pass the harvest on.

1 of his tools is an ethical will, a letter or recording of your values and the lessons of your life, written first for yourself and then, if you choose, for the people you love. Nobody else can harvest your life for you, and Midlife gives you the vantage point to begin.

Enjoy, and Be Useful

I teach a practice I call the keys for conscious and inspired living, and 1 of my favorites is this: enjoy, and be useful.

Enjoyment is how you meet the moment. It is different from gratification, comfort, or distraction. You can wash a sink full of dishes in enjoyment, and you can sit on a beach without it.

The thing that most reliably pulls us out of enjoyment is complaint. You cannot complain and feel grateful at the same time. Try it this week, and notice what happens when you pause at the complaint and invite gratefulness back in.

Being useful is the other hand, the listening-first usefulness from the Relational layer. Enjoyment softens the heart, and usefulness directs that energy outward.

There is a quiet pain many of us carry: the gap between how we show up in our lives and who we know ourselves to be at our best, patient, compassionate, clear. When that gap is wide, it hurts. So much of that gap is energy leaking, and plugging the leaks is how it begins to close.

Practices for the Spiritual Layer

• Touch stillness every day. 5 minutes with nothing to do. A chair by a window. The pause after an exhale.
• Go outside and pay attention. A walk with no podcast. For me, nature is 1 of the most direct doorways there is. Byron Katie teaches a silent version she calls the Morning Walk: look at what you see as if it had no name yet, then give each thing a simple first name, sky, tree, shoe, Woman. When your mind adds a story, such as 'what a beautiful tree,' notice it, and come back to the single word.
• Start the day with wisdom. My first practice each morning is reading something from 1 of my teachers. Choose a book, a poem, or a prayer that nourishes the deepest part of you, rather than stimulating your mind.
• Great Energy Qigong. Optional, and highly recommended. It is the practice that lets many Women feel their life force move again, once the body underneath it is being resourced.
• Effortless Meditation. Showing up is the whole practice. There is nothing to get right.
• Sit with 1 Soul question a day. In my private Facebook group, the Women's Midlife Health Community, I post a daily reflection question for exactly this. You can also write 1 of the questions above at the top of a journal page and let it work on you for a week.
• Keep your Energy Integrity questions. Where did I touch stillness today? Beauty? Reverence? How did I express gratefulness? Did I remember what really matters to my heart?
• Write the key on your wrist. When I am practicing a key like enjoy and be useful, I write it on my wrist or make it my phone's wallpaper, so I see it all day.
• Come to Sacred Sunday. Our free monthly gathering is 1 hour of practice together, and a place to be with others who care about the same questions.

The Rapture of Being Alive

In The Power of Myth (1988), Joseph Campbell said that what we are seeking is less a meaning for life than an experience of being Alive, so that we actually feel the rapture of being Alive. I hold that as a guiding light.

That rapture becomes available to a body that has been tended, regulated, and finally believed. A Nervous System stuck in survival has little room for it.

Awe is 1 of its most ordinary doorways. Not long ago I pulled up a chair in my own kitchen and spent at least 15 minutes watching a small spider carry a ladybug up its web to its snack spot. I was completely full of awe, and I told Christopher all about it, more than once.

Awe also shows up in the body. In research at UC Berkeley, people who felt awe more often had lower levels of IL-6, a marker of inflammation, than people who felt it less.

Tending the body is part of your spiritual life.