After long hours in the Chapel of Grace in Altötting, I would walk back into the Bavarian sun and get gelato. Pistachio. Sometimes hazelnut. Inside, the Black Madonna sat in the dark chapel beneath centuries of candle smoke and prayer. I would kneel until my knees hurt. Sometimes tears came before I knew what I was crying about.
Then I would step outside, hear the bells, sit in the square, and eat. For much of my spiritual life, I would have known which part was sacred.
The chapel.
The prayer.
The tears.
The gelato would have been what happened afterward.
I no longer believe that.
The body that prays is the same body that eats.
That sentence has become, for me, a better definition of embodied spirituality than many more elaborate ones. Embodied spirituality is what happens when spiritual insight stops being something we visit and begins to become something we can inhabit — in the body, in relationship, in limitation, in ordinary time. The challenge is that transcendence can be real long before embodiment is.
And that creates a problem no amount of additional transcendence can necessarily solve.
The Three-Legged Stool
Years ago, I had a dream about one of my mentors, the physicist William Tiller. In the dream, he was sitting on a stool with only three legs. The fourth leg was missing.
He sat on it anyway, and I watched him begin to collapse. I brought the dream to my Jungian analyst, Nathan Schwartz-Salant. Nathan saw the image immediately as one of grounding: something important was present, something extraordinary even, and something was also missing. I never experienced the dream as a dismissal of Tiller.
Quite the opposite. He was one of the most brilliant and generous men I knew. What he opened in me mattered enormously. The dream gave me a way to love what was real in him without requiring him to be complete.
Only much later did I understand that the stool was not primarily about him.
It was about me.
It was about a pattern I would spend years repeating: developing extraordinary capacities in one direction while assuming the missing structure would somehow appear on its own.
It does not always.
A person can have mystical experiences, profound insight, unusual sensitivity, deep devotion, and genuine access to something beyond the ordinary personality — and still be underdeveloped in the capacities required to inhabit ordinary human life. The gift can be real without the missing leg being any less real.
You Cannot Leave a Place You Have Never Been
There is a developmental problem hidden inside some spiritual teachings. We are told to let go of the self. But what if a person has never developed enough selfhood to stand inside?
We are told to surrender. But what if giving way has been the price of belonging since childhood? We are told to become unattached.
But what if closeness has always been frightening enough that distance already feels safer? We are told to become selfless. But what if disappearing is something we learned long before we ever heard the word enlightenment?
The teaching may be true.
The timing may not be.
A capacity cannot be freely relinquished if it was never adequately developed. A boundary that never existed cannot be transcended. A voice that was never found cannot be surrendered.
A need that was never allowed cannot become nonattachment simply by being renamed. This is why I keep returning to a sentence that now feels almost embarrassingly obvious:
You cannot transcend what you have never fully inhabited.
Sometimes what looks like ego development is not the enemy of spiritual life. Sometimes it is the missing floor beneath it.
The Body Sends the Bill
I learned this less elegantly after an intense ceremonial retreat in Spain. I came home sick. After about ten days, I improved. For several days I thought I was returning to normal. Then my body collapsed again.
What followed had the shape of long-COVID symptoms: fatigue, fragility, a nervous system that seemed to flare and dim without warning, a body that no longer trusted exertion the way it once had. I cannot prove what caused it. Maybe I caught COVID while traveling.
Maybe the intensity of the retreat, the stress of travel, and a weakened system all contributed. Maybe several things were true at once. What I knew was simpler:
Before Spain, my body had been one thing. After Spain, it was another. Before that period, my body had often been the one room in my life that stayed lit when other rooms went dark.
I could lift. Train. Dance.
Sweat through heartbreak, confusion, grief, and fear. Movement reassured me that life was still moving. After Spain, that room became unreliable.
A stubborn pain settled into my hip. Exertion became unpredictable. The body would no longer be dominated by discipline, ambition, or spiritual certainty. Its teaching was much less glamorous:
Slow down.
Listen.
Stop pushing.
Receive.
A year later, after the end of a relationship, I returned to Sedona for a month that became another hinge point. I began to see that as long as there was another teacher to meet, another woman to read as a sign, another ceremony to enter, another country to fly toward, I did not have to stand still long enough to feel how little I trusted the ordinary life already under my feet. The search had kept me moving.
It had also kept me from arriving.
Reaching Is Not the Same as Staying
This is the distinction I wish I had understood earlier.
Reaching is not the same as staying.
Reaching says: There is something more. Further.
Higher. And I will find it. Reaching can be beautiful.
It has taken human beings into monasteries, laboratories, deserts, temples, mountains, relationships, art, science, and the far edges of consciousness. It has done that in my life too. I do not regret reaching.
But reaching does not automatically build the capacity to stay. Staying is quieter. Staying says:
I am here.
In this body.
In this relationship.
In this ordinary hour.
And I do not need this moment to become extraordinary before I can remain inside it. At Oak Creek, after my body had become less reliable, staying sometimes meant nothing more than pulling weeds for twenty minutes before my nervous system shut a gate I had not chosen. My legs would grow heavy.
My hip would tighten. My mind would fog. I would sit down in the dirt with a half-pulled weed still in my hand.
Poppy would come over and stand beside me.
Nothing opened.
No revelation arrived.
No ceremony began.
The weed remained half pulled.
For a mind trained by decades of seeking, this can feel like failure.
Nothing is happening.
But something is happening.
A person is learning that a moment does not have to become more in order to be inhabited. That is a different capacity from transcendence. And for some of us, it is the missing leg.
Why the Missing Leg Can Stay Invisible
The difficulty is that spiritual gifts often work. Mystical openings can be genuine. A teacher can be brilliant.
A practice can transform consciousness. A ceremony can reveal something real. A person can become wiser, kinder, more perceptive, more spacious.
And still something remains untouched. This is what makes uneven development so difficult to recognize.
Transcendence does not announce what it hasn't touched. It only shows you what it has.
The missing leg often becomes visible later.
In the body.
In relationships.
In burnout.
In loneliness.
In succession.
In the inability to remain ordinary after years of needing intensity. In the way a person responds when someone they love says no. In the way they receive criticism.
In whether they can stay present when nothing is opening. Reaching looks like effort. It produces visible accomplishments.
Staying can look like nothing at all.
No breakthrough.
No initiation.
No next level.
Just a body, a room, another person, and the discipline of remaining there. That is one reason a missing leg can go unnoticed for years. The capacities we celebrate are often the easiest ones to see.
Inhabiting Yourself Is Not Narcissism
There is an obvious objection to all of this. Doesn't focusing on the body, one's needs, personal history, boundaries, emotions, and psychological development simply turn spirituality into self-absorption? It can.
Psychology can become its own religion. A person can become endlessly fascinated with wounds. Every disappointment can be interpreted through childhood.
Every difficult demand can become a boundary violation. Every relationship can become an excavation. That is not what I mean by inhabiting yourself.
To inhabit yourself is not to worship the personality. It is to become present enough inside it that you are no longer unconsciously governed by what you refuse to occupy. It means inhabiting your yes enough that your no becomes trustworthy.
Inhabiting anger enough that it does not have to leak sideways. Inhabiting need enough that you do not have to call avoidance nonattachment. Inhabiting agency enough that surrender is not collapse.
Inhabiting grief enough that it does not have to become a spiritual lesson before it is allowed to hurt. The aim is not a larger ego. It is a more available human being.
Relationship Reveals What Transcendence Missed
Illness was not the only place I encountered the missing leg. Relationship has been just as ruthless. It is relatively easy to feel spiritually mature when no one is disappointing you.
Solitude can be sacred. Meditation can reveal something profound. Retreat can strip away noise.
But another human being can activate rooms in the psyche that years of private practice never enter. Can I stay when I am misunderstood? Can I set a boundary without turning the other person into an enemy?
Can I receive criticism without retreating into certainty? Can I let another person's experience of me exist even when it does not match my own? Can I remain inside my body when love is not going the way I hoped?
Can I disappoint someone and remain kind? Can I need another person without turning them into salvation? These are not lesser spiritual questions.
They are where spiritual insight becomes accountable to life. Some of my most beautiful spiritual ideas failed precisely here.
Not because they were false.
Because relationship exposed parts of me the ideas had not reached. A spirituality that works only when nobody touches your wounds is not yet fully embodied.
What Inhabiting Actually Asks
Inhabiting is not a technique.
It is closer to capacity.
The capacity to remain present inside a life that does not need to become extraordinary in order to be bearable.
That capacity is built slowly.
Without much applause.
It looks like staying in a conversation several minutes past the point where escape would be easier. Feeling an emotion in the chest without immediately explaining it. Letting the body ache without fighting it into submission or turning it into a message from the universe.
Being bored on Tuesday afternoon without manufacturing a new quest. Pulling weeds until the body says enough.
Then stopping.
Eating when hungry.
Sleeping when tired.
Apologizing when wrong.
Saying no when no is true.
Letting love be human enough to disappoint you. Letting spiritual experience remain sacred without forcing it to solve everything. This is what spiritual integration actually asks of a person: not to diminish what was revealed, but to build the capacity to live it.
None of this means abandoning transcendence. The stool does not need to be thrown away because one leg is missing. The missing leg needs to be built.
The Question Worth Asking
For many years, my question was: How far can I reach? I suspect people drawn to spiritual life are often already very good at reaching.
The more useful question for me now is:
Can I stay?
Can I remain inside my ordinary life long enough to know it from within? Can I live in a body without treating it as transportation for consciousness? Can I remain in relationship without converting every difficulty into either fate or failure?
Can I let an ordinary day remain ordinary? Can I stand on the ground I keep trying to transcend? You can reach something real and still be sitting on three legs when you arrive.
That does not make the height false. It means the ground still needs attention. This is what I understand now when I think of embodied spirituality.
Not less spirit.
More incarnation.
Not refusing the chapel.
Walking out of it into the square.
The bells still ringing.
The tears still drying.
Pistachio melting in the sun.
The body that prays is the same body that eats.
And both have to be inhabited.
Because the height was never in question.
The ground always was.