Body work in prayer

In my last but one blog I promised to say something about the importance of the body in contemplative prayer.

My daily practice owes much to three sources:
1. Cynthia Bourgeault has given me ‘Centering Prayer', a way of meditating taught by Fr. Thomas Keating, which recommends a prayer word as a symbol of one’s intention to be available to the eternal presence deep within. From her I have learnt the way of ‘kenosis’ (a New Testament Greek word for self emptying) so beautifully expressed in Paul’s great hymn in his letter to the Philippians:

Though his state was that of God,
yet he did not claim equality with God
something he should cling to.
Rather he emptied himself,
and assuming the state of a slave,
he was born in human likeness.
He, being known as one of us,
Humbled himself obedient unto death,
Even death on a cross.

2. Jon Kabat-Zinn who developed a sequence of simple yoga postures and the art of ‘body scanning’ to help people attending his clinic for those with chronic pain. From him I have learnt the importance of the body both as the inescapable reality of our human life (including its spiritual aspect) and as indispensible aid to meditation.
3. Donna Malcomson, a teacher of therapeutic yoga at Morley College in south London who has helped me to see the importance of moments and movements of transition; for example between one posture and the next and between the period of formal practice and one’s everyday life. She helped me to experience each body movement in minute detail and thus to stay with it rather than start anticipating the next posture.

Stress!!

Today’s Times, Weekend section, proclaims that in “Anxious Britain” 70% of us are stressed, 55% have been depressed, 20% have had therapy and 31 million antidepressant drugs are dispensed every year. Inevitably these days, meditation is one of the recommended strategies for dealing with this onslaught. Earlier this week I read somewhere of the ‘commodification’ of meditation and it is apparent that self help gurus can make a handsome living, especially in the USA.

So, from the religious viewpoint, what are we to make of the current popularity of meditative techniques? Surely, we must welcome anything which might help people to develop a new way of being-in-the-world? They certainly don’t find much help in contemporary Christianity; perhaps the churches are rediscovering too late and too slowly, their ancient tradition of meditation and contemplative prayer.

There are pitfalls (for everone including religious people) when one uses meditation merely as a ‘technique’ to cope with stress or to enhance one’s life prospects. Jesus warned of these dangers when he is reported to have said,

“Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father.”

It’s not that Christians should be tempted to claim exclusive rights to meditation. We should welcome any signs that people are discovering what it might mean to be truly present in the world from the depths of their being. But as Jesus also said.

”Beware of false prophets .... you will know them by their fruits.”

So is there an added ingredient to Christian meditation? Well, compared with self help meditation there might be. It is already present in the Buddhist mindfulness approach since Buddhism regards the self as an illusion anyway. For Jesus the self was something to be 'denied' and the modern recovery of the Christian contemplative tradtition comes close to Buddhism in asserting that the self to which we are so attached is a 'paste up' job which is also pretty illusory. Illusory it may be but the ego - my picture of myself - will defend the illusion even if it is pasted up out of a random selection of memories, attitudes and roles which we play. Maybe most of our stress comes from our dogged attempts to preserve the ego we have so painstakingly constructed since childhood. As someone has said, 'Our anxiety comes mainly from our search for tranquility'.

The Christian added ingredient is 'kenosis' - the New Testament Greek for self-emptying - letting go of any idea we have about who we are until we find the truth deep within us. With no ego to defend stress is taken care of.

John Main

"The important aim in Christian meditation is to allow God's mysterious and silent presence within us to become more and more not only a reality but the reality which gives meaning, shape and purpose to everything we do, everything we are." John Main.

Last night at St. Johns, Waterloo Lent course on contemplative prayer we heard the story of two monks walking along a riverside. The younger one keeps asking the other questions about the nature of the river: how long is it? how much water flows past every hour? what kind of wildlife does it support? how wide is it when it reaches the sea? Finally in exasperation the older monk pushes his companion into the water, waits a few minutes, then hauls him out and says, "Well now you know what the river is like!" Liz Watson, our storyteller, had come to push us into the river but first she gave us some guidelines on how to survive in the water; guidelines worked out by John Main whose life of contemplative prayer has given rise to a stream of meditation known as The World Community For Christian Meditation. As with Jill Benet last week, the guidelines are simple (though subtly different from Jill's):

Sit still and upright with eyes lightly closed, relaxed but alert. Silently begin to say a single word (a prayer word or mantra). The word 'Maranatha' is recommnded, recited as four syllables of equal length. Listen to it as you say it, gently and continuously. Try not to think or imagine anything, spiritual or otherwise. If thoughts and images come these are distractions during the time of meditation, so keep returning to simply saying the word. Meditate each morning and evening for between twenty and thirty minutes.

As Liz said, it is for each of us to discover what method of meditation best suits our temperament. The important thing is to find one and stay with it; to jump in to the river and find out what it is like.
Afterwards one member of the group reported that she found it quite possible to 'multitask' mentally while saying the prayer word. She could happily think about things which are labelled 'distractions' while saying the prayer word. Result - no experience of real silence. Perhaps this is not so unusual and it may be why some folk find that combining meditation with yoga is helpful (actually, yoga is meditation). We are creatures of the earth and spirituality is never an escape from that fundamental fact. Remaining anchored in the body is often a help with 'distractions'. I'll return to this in a later blog. I will also pick up another member's concern that maybe she is trying too hard.
Meanwhile, by request here is the prayer I use to end each session of our course:

O thou eternal Wisdom
whom we partly know and partly do not know,
in whom we live and move and have our being,
our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.
Grant that we may be still and know the truth of eternal presence,
and in that stillness and that presence may know the love and peace
which pass all understanding.

Centering Prayer

Last week we were thrown in at the deep end of silence without any instructions on how to swim. This week at the St. John's Waterloo Lent course Jill Benet of Contemplative Outreach came to teach us how to swim in our silent depths using the Centering Prayer approach developed by Fr. Thomas Keating. You can see a video of him describing the approach on Youtube.

Jill reminded us that contemplative prayer was quite common in the first 1000 years of Christian history. Then, somehow, in the middle ages it came to be seen as the preserve of highly specialised people - monks! Not nuns, in spite of the fact that there were some remarkable women in England and Germany for whom this would have been a perfectly natural way of praying if the men had not said females weren't up to it. Fortunately they got on with it anyway and even managed to write about it which is why we know about them now.

Jill gave us a set of guidelines for Centering Prayer:

1. Choose a sacred word as the symbol of your intention to consent to God's presence and action within.
2. Sitting comfortably with eyes closed,settle briefly and silently introduce the sacred word.
3. Whenever you become aware you are engaged with thoughts return ever so gently to the sacred word.
4. At the end of the prayer period remain in silence with eyes closed for a few minutes.

The sacred word can be any short word (or maybe two)not necessarily religious. "I do," as the answer to "who wants to be a millionaire?" is totally different from the answer to "do you take this man/woman to be your wife/husband?" It's the context and the use of the word that makes it sacred.

Jill's handout gave us four "Rs" about 'thoughts' when engaged in Centering Prayer:

Resist no thought
Retain no thought
React emotionally to no thought
Return ever so gently to the sacred word

The purpose of Centering Prayer (and indeed of all meditation/contemplative prayer) is not having no thoughts but having detachment from them. "The only distraction or failure is if you get up and walk out or deliberately entertain thoughts."

So now there are 20 of us who don't need to become monks or nuns. We can carry our cloister around with us, rather like a snail who takes home with it - except that our 'home' is deep within.

Will the real Jesus please stand up.

'Will the real Jesus please stand up' is the title of the first session of a Lent course on contemplative prayer that I am running for St.John's Waterloo


The course is a 'journey home' - to a place that is familiar and safe -

“We remember wholeness so readily because we don’t have far to look for it. It is always within us, usually as a vague feeling or memory left over from when we were children. But it is a deeply familiar memory, one you recognize immediately as soon as you feel it again, like coming home after being away a long time. When you are immersed in doing without being centred, it feels like being away from home. And when you reconnect with being, even for a few moments, you know it immediately. You feel like you are at home no matter where you are and what problems you face.” (Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living, page 95.)

Or as St. Augustine said, "You have made us and our hearts are restless 'till they find their rest in you."

Home has two doors: one, our physical body (the temple of the Spirit) and two, the present moment (the 'narrow gate')

We looked at the announcement of Jesus's message at the beginning of Mark's Gospel: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the Gospel." The good news Jesus was announcing is that the contemplative life is for everyone: the Kingdom is now and it is within and it is about 'repentance' - but how wrong can you be about repentance!

We entered another brief period of silence after which I asked people to look again at the verse but this time to focus on the negative spaces, within and between the letters. This I suggested is repentance; it's a change of focus, of one's field of view, and way of looking at things. A mind shift has taken place which is what Jesus wanted his hearers to understand.

In feedback on this one person who is a graphic designer talked about using gobbledogook when designing a layout so that the designer's brain doesn't focus on the sense of the words but on the pattern of the layout. "The devil is in the detail" she said, and we had great fun with that; the 'devil' undoubtedly confuses the big picture with details! The trick in the contemplative life is not to lose sight of the big picture. Especially don't let the details of my life, who I think I am, blind me to the truth about me which is that I am rooted and grounded in love - and so is everyone else no matter what the external details of their life and behaviour may be.

But when we enter the silence of contemplation what about distractions? Are they the same as 'temptations'? We thought they were. Distractions are always temptations to leave the present moment and the object of meditation is to let the past go (leave the dead to bury their dead) and not anticipate the future (take no thought for tomorrow). It's not that the mind can ever be free of distracting thoughts. The big question is what you do with them. Confession, I suggest, is the basic stance of prayer, i.e. acceptance of whatever is going on in us without judging it as 'good' or 'bad'. Nothing can be effectively dealt with until it is fully acknowledged. Two of the most important words Jesus said were, 'judge not'.

Next week Jill Benet of Contemplative Outreach will be leading us into the art of Centering Prayer.

The uncomfortable gap.

Back in the 1960s someone published a series of amusing sayings on postcards called ‘Potshots’. One read, ‘If things don’t improve soon I shall have to ask you to stop helping me.’ It occurs to me that the media are trying to help by giving us an unrelenting diet of bad news. They are saying, “This is not how things should be and if we keep on reminding you how bad they are someone, somewhere will do something to make them better.”
The fact is that lots of people, including politicians, are doing things to try and make life better but generally speaking they don’t get reported by news media. Or if they are reported it’s usually because someone thinks that it’s not enough or that the wrong tactics are being used. In some respects, of course, for many millions of people, life does get better. Even in my lifetime it has got infinitely better for me and for many people like me. But there’s always a gap between the way things are and the way we would like them to be.

We are dominated by the ‘doing mind’, left hemispherical thinking. Therefore we rarely begin by accepting what is the case about our present situation (either internal or external). We perpetually begin with the famous response, ‘If I were you I wouldn’t start from here.’ The gap between here where we are and there where we want to be is intolerable. We assume that rational thought will get us there and fast. But sometimes it’s a question of ‘don’t just do something, stand there!’ In fact it’s nearly always the right way to start tackling a problem. And it’s certainly the right way to start if the problem cannot be solved immediately or by me personally. The rush to judgement, condemnation, recrimination has become a pandemic more serious than swine flu. A little more stillness, being instead of doing, acceptance of what is now the case, of where we are, of where I am in this present moment would produce dramatic results for all the suffering about which we are constantly reminded.

Mindfulness

I'm re-reading “The Mindful Way Through Depression” by Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal and Jon Kabat-Zinn. I come across the following succinct and exact definition of ‘mindfulness’, “Mindfulness is the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally to things as they are.” Every element of that definition is essential. As the authors point out, mindfulness involves, necessarily, intention (I am reminded of Martin Buber’s dictum, “Will and grace are two sides of the same coin.”); it focuses on the present moment; and it, again necessarily, requires a non-judgemental attitude. It's a pity about the book's title because it is a wonderful resource for anyone, depressed or not, who wants to know how to live 'wisely, agreeably and well'. (I can't remember the origin of that quote)

In a nice piece of synchronicity, Yvonne tells me later of a quote from Saul Bellows’s The Rain King: “The forgiveness of sins is perpetual and righteousness is not required.” One might begin such a wonderful sentence with, “Confession is essential ....” One would then have a more ‘spiritual’ approach to mindfulness in which becoming aware of ‘things-as-they-are’ is ‘confession’; and ‘righteousness is not required’ is the non-judgemental bit.