I WILL NOT WHISPER - You are Love

"I want to speak to you about Love

about how you deny yourself
its slightest entry...
about how much you truly fear
Love's silent embrace.

I want to talk to you
about what you will not
allow yourself to see-
about that beauty inside
that you turn your face from.

Yes, I want to talk to you.
You who have somehow
found a way to hide
within a sliver of darkness
cast upon the pure light of Being.

I want to talk to you.
I will not whisper.

You can live in that sliver of darkness forever
and tell yourself lies.
You can blame yourself.
You can blame others.
You can blame God and beyond.
And still that Love that you are will wait
until you can tell yourself
the lie of denial no more.

And at that very moment
you will see
just how silent Love's embrace can be.
And in that silence
the truth will ring clear.
Love demands everything:
all of your illusions
excuses and fears.

I want to speak to you about Love.
I want to talk to you about
what you will not allow
yourself to be.

I want to talk to you.
I will not whisper."

~ Adyashanti
My Secret is Silence
Shared from: Adyashanti

You are made in the image of God. A co-creator of WHAT IS, you allow Divine Grace to live through you.

You are the light of the world,
You have the Mind of Christ.
Release the veils that hide your True Identity. It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are...It takes enormous humility to Love this suffering world...to love that pain inside of you.

Be Love.
Know who you are.
You are not your thoughts! You are more authentically your wounded heart, than whatever thoughts you have. Look beyond the pain and you will find the Grace.

_/\_Peggy @ ecumenicus

Say I LOVE YOU - Now!

When’s the last time you told your father you loved him (or whichever parent cant seem to express emotion to you)? Whether you’ve called him yesterday or haven’t spoken in years, take a chance and connect. While you’re at it, tell everyone who means a lot to you that you love them! The rewards will last forever, as the unexpectedly emotional participants in this video discovered. 

~Love, Social Justice, Science, Art and Music, with gratitude! _/\_

I was just thinking about this because of a class on contemplative prayer I am teaching on Wed evenings. We talked about the lower frequency of male participation in contemplative groups and the idea that cultural norms play such a huge part in keeping our fathers - men, in general - from expressing their positive emotions. We also talked about (and we are all Feeler-biased on the Myers Briggs) how we Feelers had to downplay our preference for full self expression through Feeling in the current culture, both at home and outside of the home. We talked about how our culture, even if parents are compassionate about affirming emotional expression, tends to ignore or downplay that particular aspect of personality. Maybe that’s because there is such a palpable energetic component to emotionality. That strong energy can be a threat, even below the radar of the conscious mind. And so often, we express strong negative energy more readily than strong positive energy. That does not fare well in social settings.

But somehow, it’s a stifling of both negative and positive expression. Negative gets us a strong, “No!” Positive gets us, “I’m not really comfortable with that.” Either way the message is, “Emotions are not welcome here.” So, we learn not to express them. We don’t change the fact that we have them and need to express them, we simply deny that part of our self, repressing, both negative and positive emotions. We do such a great job of this, that we don’t even know what we are feeling any longer. We lose touch with who we are as emotional beings. We fear intimacy with others. We fear the vulnerability that comes with expressing positive emotions. And sometimes, we expect one other person to be the sole source of that intimacy dynamic; a tough expectation that can lead to the disabling of the relationship. It’s a shame, really, because the world could use more love expressed. And just giving a hug or saying, “I love you,” can completely change the energetic dynamic between 2 people.

Amma, the hugging “Mother of the World,” knows the value of a hug. “My religion is Love,” she says. Gosh, that’s the message of the New Covenant too!! Yet, Amma seems to be doing a better job of loving the world than many people who would characterize themselves as Christians, New Covenant partners. What if we had a sermon every Sunday on the Great Commission to hug the person next to you or say I love you to 10 people that day?

The other thing I noticed about this video is that the people involved looked each other in the eye, with some period of silence, before they talked. This is a very intimate act. Again, when we sustain that kind of attentiveness, we become mindfully aware of the energetic nature of the other person. Our physiology responds to that, even before our intellect interprets it. “What makes you proud of me, Dad?” Wow! That is opening one’s heart to the blade! But guess what happens? Dad, who cannot seem to express himself otherwise, is challenged to bear his own heart! Sometimes, getting what you think you need means giving it out first. Sometimes saying, “I love you,” to someone allows their heart to open and their courage to swell, even if they are your parent and making their love known to you is at the top of their job description. I like to think of it as being more emotionally mature.

The lack of loving communication, the idea that one can assume they are loved because they are provided for or looked after, it just doesn’t work for a great many people. Often, they don’t even know this! They tell you very proudly about how they don’t need words or intimate actions like hugging or looking people in the eye to know they are loved. But this is how they perpetuate the relationship void and all of us live our lives with our hearts in a cage, with such hard isolation.

I will tell you, Feelers make better Thinkers (opposite judging preferences on the Myers Briggs) than Thinkers make Feelers. Why? Because we all use our Thinking awareness too much and our Feeling awareness too little. Helping us to become aware of our intuitions and emotions is the great benefit of meditation. That’s another blog, but the fundamental upshot is, give yourself some space. Heck, give the space to yourself and someone else – look them straight in the eye and say, “I love you.” You…and they will grow as a result!!

It's so worth the "risk" to give this gift of Love in the fleeting space of aliveness than to wish we'd had the courage to do so in the eternal space of what lies beyond.

I love you! Thank you for reading my words so faithfully! You are a blessing, as you are so blessed, a circle of love. Peace and joy be yours!

_/\_Peggy @ecumenicus

Oneness, Dharma and Logos and Natural Order

When in harmony with the nature of things, your own fundamental nature, you will walk freely and undisturbed.

However, when mind is in bondage, the truth is hidden, and everything is murky and unclear, and the burdensome practice of judging brings annoyance and weariness.

What benefit can be derived from attachment to distinctions and separations?

If you wish to move in the One Way do not dislike the worlds of senses and ideas.

Indeed, to embrace them fully is identical with true Enlightenment

The wise person attaches to no goals but the foolish person fetters himself or herself.

There is one Dharma*, without differentiation.

~The Dhammapada

* Dharma (Sanskrit) or Dhamma (Pali) in Buddhism is a word with a wide variety of meanings.

1. The natural order of the universe, both physical and moral.

2. The teachings of Buddha of universal law

3. Internal and external perceiving and judging (psychological processes) of the human in relationship with her reality.

Dharma is closely related to the Christian term, Logos, which means "word," "speech," "account," "to reason." The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus (525-475 BC) used Logos to mean the universal principle of order and knowledge. Both of these concepts, order and knowledge, are dependent upon a person's psychological abilities to reckon with their reality. The term, Logos, like Dharma, was used in different ways: the sophists used it to mean reasoned discourse (knowledge communicated); the Stoics used it to describe the divine animating principle of the universe.

The early Jewish philosopher, Philo (c. 20 BC – AD 50) adopted Logos in his writings and the evangelist, John speaks of Logos as word made flesh, in others words, the divine animating principle of the universe incarnated. Further, the "Word," as it is written in John's Gospel, can be traced back to the Greek term, "Logos" and Hebrew, "dabhar," or "creative expression."

One can see how these words, Dharma and Logos, are related to universal order, the order of our mind's thoughts and emotions, the way we express those thoughts and emotions in words and in action, and how our expressions of thought determine our relationship with others and the universal reality, in general. One can see how the use of these words may mean "law" at one time and "wisdom" at another, as they always contain both the physical world external to us and the psychological world, within us: thoughts, emotions, memories, all intimately connected to the body's physiological mechanisms through the autonomic nervous system.

This is what the first phrase of the quotation from the Dhammapada refers to.

"When in harmony with the nature of things, your own fundamental nature, you will walk freely and undisturbed. However, when mind is in bondage, the truth is hidden, and everything is murky and unclear, and the burdensome practice of judging brings annoyance and weariness."

The mind is in bondage when we identify strictly with our thoughts and are not aware of the influences of our memories and emotions on those thoughts. If we can watch the ways our memory and emotions influence our thoughts, we realize that not all thoughts are true. Some are defensive responses to the way the situation makes us feel. Some are judgments we conjure to justify our feelings.

Dharma is to cultivate the knowledge and practice of laws and principles that hold together the fabric of reality, natural phenomena and personality of human beings in dynamic interdependence and harmony.   ~Msr Ayyanagr

One could use the same definition for Logos, realizing that the way we use it is to call it God incarnate, Jesus the Christ, to understand our selves as Christians as "Jesus followers," in thought, word, and deed.

"If you wish to move in the One Way do not dislike the worlds of senses and ideas. (thoughts and emotions)
Indeed, to embrace them fully is identical with true Enlightenment (Christ-mind)
The wise person attaches to no goals but the foolish person fetters himself or herself.
There is one Dharma*, without differentiation."

Our psychological sensing and thinking, and our external reality are One, constantly in dynamic relationship. Know this and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

With love and a prayer for One Mind, One Heart, One humanity, One planet!
_/\_Peggy at Ecumenicus

Contemplating Art - The Beauty of Perfect Imperfection

I gazed around the quiet museum gallery feeling the intensity of ancient struggle and overcoming. Mother Mary, holding the legs of her beautiful child, Jesus, the remainder left on a beach at Normandy; Thomas Aquinas, with one eye gleaming from the bridge of the nose, the other sunken into his temple. Then there was wooden Jesus, hanging crucified huge as life, and missing the pinky fingers on his left hand. 

They all stood stoic among the other artifacts, bearing their chips and gouges as a palpable witness to life. Bearing, not only the lives whose images they bore, but the years they had lived in posterity, as the earnest work of artisan hands. The tour guide said, ”Gaze at the artwork in this room and notice what draws you, what speaks to you.” All I could see were the perfect imperfections. All I could feel was the fierce wild and loving tenderness of those relics, the lives they endured so patiently and the grace that flowed from their wounds.

All I could feel was beauty.

 

“The beauty that emerges from woundedness is a beauty infused with feeling; a beauty different from the beauty of landscape and the cold perfect form. This is a beauty that has suffered its way through the ache of desolation until the words or music emerged to equal the hunger and desperation at its heart. It must also be said that not all woundedness succeeds in finding its way through to beauty of form. Most woundedness remains hidden, lost inside forgotten silence. Indeed, in every life there is some wound that continues to weep secretly, even after years of attempted healing. Where woundedness can be refined into beauty a wonderful transfiguration takes place.” 

― John O'Donohue

This is the truth. I have no right to significant woundedness at all. My life has been privileged, successfully industrious, primarily joyful and immensely fulfilling. Sure, I've had ups and downs, in relationship and in health. I can't imagine anyone who hasn't. I lived through them and I am who I am because of them!  When you are diagnosed with cancer, for example, others who have endured that challenge encourage you with their  stories of survival; stories you never heard before your diagnosis. Survivors of cancer are numerous. Same with addiction, miscarriage, sexual abuse, betrayal, discrimination, and more. 

"Love and suffering are portals to opening the mind space and the heart space, breaking us into the breadth and depth of communion." says Fr Richard Rohr. Suffering opens the mind space and then the heart space. Indeed, when we experience wounding beyond our control we have have no choice but to find the courage it takes to live through it without controlling it! And we join the community of souls who have done likewise. We learn, through the fear that comes with wounding experiences, who we are in God (our Higher Power) and we open our minds and hearts to the reality that we constantly live in the tension of vulnerability and strength. The beauty of our humanness is our frailty and our staying power!

Alfred North Whitehead said, Beauty = intensity + harmony. The most intense times of our lives are when we are fearful or in love. An illustration of this dichotomy, John 4:18 reads, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear." When we pick up the broken pieces of our wounds and bind them back together in love, through the realization that we are stronger than than we knew, we (re)harmonize our being at a new level of awareness and empathy. We make friends with fear and transfigure it into Love. We accept our vulnerability and acknowledge our inner strength in order to  channel them into personal equanimity and social compassion. We make the "imperfection" perfect. And that is beautiful.

With the grace and peace of perfect imperfection, may you find your harmony every day, resting in WHAT IS with wisdom, balance and compassion.

_/\_Peggy @ Ecumenicus

Meditatio - Natural Healing Modality

When you bring the 4 corners of yourself together as one, you may then you can proclaim God one. Every word of your prayer should be filled with light, and when you pray, you should contain worlds. ~Baal Shem Tov

Prayer develops our psyche from active to receptive, from outward towards inward. Through silent, receptive prayer (meditation) we integrate the mind-body as we learn to yield our will and need to the sacred flow of Eternal Truth.

F. Scott Peck said, “everyone has a spiritual life, whether they acknowledge it or not.”[1] And spirituality, or essential being, takes the entire self into account. Spirituality is the eros, the relational energy that enlivens us, holds us together and integrates our thoughts and emotions with our actions on all levels of being and doing.[2] While spirituality often evokes religious ideology, psychologists tend to view spirituality as a “universal human phenomenon, largely independent of concrete confessions or religious organizations or movements.”[3]

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”[4]  These supposed words of Jesus from the Gospel of Thomas imply the necessity of giving attention to the inner self, both its essential loving nature and its [naïve] errancy. In fact, this statement reflects the same idea of death or destruction as a result of failing metanoia as indicated by Paul, Origen and Philo, mentioned above.* Spiritual wholeness or healing is the balance of Mind:Body:Spirit. And because the body is an expression of the Mind and Spirit, physical healing can also be augmented through spiritual well-being. We are healed and whole when the energies of our thinking and our behavior are tempered, guided, and integrated by a Spirit of love. The fully integrated human being (using both factual and intuitive/emotional memory) and doing (applying that “wisdom” in purpose) is a person reconciled through the Spirit.

In the 6^th century BCE, the Buddha taught meditation as part of the Eight-fold Path of spirituality, a mechanism by which suffering could be overcome and the practitioner could become aware or enlightened.[5]  Saul was also relieved of the emotional suffering that motivated him to slay Christians, and it was simply by realizing the love of Christ and his participation in that relationship.  There are two things that cause us to suffer: one is not knowing who we are (Olendzki 2005) and the other is the tension of what is and how it should be (Siegel 2007).[6]^,[7]  We can resolve both these stressors through contemplative mind, a perspective which is cultivated through prayer practice or mediation. This is not a new concept; in fact it actually predates the Buddha. Meditation or contemplative prayer has been the foundation of religious (including Christian) spirituality for hundreds of years. But, at least since the Age of Enlightenment (17^th century), it has been buried under our Western cultural bias towards rationalism.

The Hindu Vedas, the oldest sacred texts in existence (1500-1000 BCE), the Buddhist and Taoist texts (500-400 BCE) speak of meditation as a practice to cultivate mental balance, enlightened consciousness, encourage wisdom, calmness and inner peace. In the Eastern traditions, meditation was referred to as a “salvation path,” leading to serenity, insight, and wisdom.[8]^,[9] The Tibetan word for meditation is “gom,” meaning familiarity or habitual.[10] In Alexandria, Philo (20 BCE – 40 CE), the Jewish philosopher, is credited as the first to notate a contemplative prayer path leading to Godliness in the Western traditions.[11]

To pray, or meditate in Hebrew was called hāgâ, meaning to sigh or murmur, and also, to meditate.[12] The Greek translation of hāgâ was melete, which became the Latin, meditatio.[13] The use of the term meditatio as part of a formal, stepwise process of meditation goes back to the 12th-century Carthusian monk, Guigo II.[14] The Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 4^th century practiced contemplative prayer, wishing to remove the onus of vice (ego) such that the true nature of self (Godliness) was revealed through continued experiences of God in silence and self reflection. John Climacus (7^th c) (Ladder of Perfection) in the Eastern church and John Cassian (435) (Conferences) in the Western church wrote of the desert dwellers as deeply in love with God and fiercely committed to humility.[15] Cassian’s writings were incorporated into the Rule of St Benedict, the founding precepts of Western Monasticism, and further developed by an unknown writer in the 14^th century in the classic, Cloud of Unknowing. A contemporary Christian contemplative practice that grew out of the “Cloud” is centering prayer, revived as such in the 1960s by Benedictines, Thomas Keating and Basil Pennington. Simultaneously, British Benedictine, John Main was originating what would become the World Community for Christian Meditation. Christian contemplative practices are numerous and varied, active and passive to suit many personalities and spiritual types.

Inner well-being as critical for physiological health is very old wisdom and the Mind: Body balance is infused into many ancient terms which apply to both outer and inner realities, as we’ve already discussed. Another example is shalom, meaning “peace” is from the Hebrew, “shalam,” to be “complete” or “whole.” Shalom, spiritually interpreted, is the integrated state of a person in a right relationship with God, with others, and within self. Shalom is reconciled being healed and at peace within and without.[16] Over the past 40-50 years, secular meditation has been widely employed in clinical psychology practice and has shown benefits for autistic and attention deficit disorder in children. In the last ten years much has been learned about the neurophysiology of the brain during and after meditation, due in large part to medical professionals who are also Buddhist meditation practitioners. The wellness benefits of meditation practice are well established.[17]^, [18]

Peggy Beatty, Promoting Reconciliation Through Contemplative Christian Prayer Formation (excerpt)

Peace of reconciling oneness to all of you! Peggy @ Ecumenicus

* (From a previous section) The more challenging life becomes, the greater emotional stability required. Not by denial or distraction, which is often the way we cope, but by what is referred to in the Bible as “healing.” Indeed, this “suffering” we do is profoundly implied in the paschal mystery, wherein the suffering of Jesus the Christ results in “healing” for the world. When faith heals us, it is through our renewed realization that suffering can be overcome by love. We, in a very deep intuitive, not intellectual, way undergo what the Greeks called, metanoia, metá, meaning "beyond" or "after" and noeō,” meaning "perception" or "understanding" or "mind". Metanoia is a change of perception that allows us to overcome any and all psychological obstacles to our essence in love, which is our Imago Dei. Metanoia is related to gnosis or wisdom, which is inner knowing, intuition, insight. A Hellenistic understanding was the “Spirit of God in the mind of humanity.”[1]  Strong’s concordance defines metanoia as repentance, a change of mind, a change in the inner man.[2] Philo, Origen and Paul make use of metanoia to refer to the response to death that occurs as a result of the life of misguided passions.[3] In this case, death does not mean end of life, but the psychospiritual “deaths” which are concept and behavioral barriers to realizing ourselves as true loving self, the Imago Dei. This is psychospiritual “death” that wanes as metanoia allows wisdom to rise. All behavior is reflective of a psychological state of mind. Suffering or woundedness arises as both external circumstance and internal response, not necessarily in that order.

---

[1] Holmes, 18.

[2] Strong’s Concordance Online @ (http://biblehub.com/greek/3341.htm, Accessed April 20, 2014.

[3] John T. Conroy, Jr., “The Wages of Sin is Death” the Death of the Soul in Greek, Second Temple Jewish and Early Christian Authors., PhD diss., Notre Dame University, April 2008.

---

[1] Corinne Ware, Discover your Spiritual Type. (Alban Institute Publications, Inc., 1995), 10.

[2] Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing, the Search for a Christian Spirituality (New York, NY: Doubledday/Random House, 1999), 22.

[3] Pavel Rican and Pavlina Janosova, “Spiriutality as a Basic Aspect of Personality: A Cross-Cultural Verification of Peidmont’s Model,” The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 20;2010:2-13.

[4] (Meyer, M. The Nag Hamadi Scriptures: Revised and Updated Translation of Sacred Gnostic Texts(New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2007), 148.

[5] Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta: Setting the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion, translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, 1993, Online @  http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn56/sn56.011.than.html, (Accessed April 17, 2014).

[6] Olendzki A. “The Roots of Mindfulness.” In Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, ed. K. G. Germer, R. D. Seigel, and P.R. Fulton (New York: Guilford, 2005), 241-261.

[7] Siegel, DJ. The Mindful Brain (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2007).

[8]Heinrich Dumoulin, James W. Heisig, Paul F. Knitter, Zen Buddhism : a History: India and China (Bloomington, IN : World Wisdom 2005), 15.

[9] Bhikkhu Bodhi, In the Buddha's Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon (Teachings of the Buddha) (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications 2005), 267-70.

[10]Rudy Harderwijk, A View on Buddhism, What is Meditation, Online @ http://viewonbuddhism.org/meditation_theory.html, Accessed April 20, 2014.

[11] Holmes, 17.

[12] Terje Stordalen, "Ancient Hebrew Meditative Recitation", in Halvor Eifring (ed.), Meditation in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Cultural Histories, (London, 2013), 17-31.

[13] Lawrence S. Cunningham, and Keith J. Egan. Christian Spirituality: Themes From the Tradition (New York : Paulist Press, 1996), 88.    

[14] Ibid., 38.

[15] Carmody, Denise Lardner and John Tully. Mysticism Holiness East and West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 198.

[16] C.W. Ellison and J. Smith, “Toward an Integrative Measure of Health and Well-Being,” Journal of Psychology and Theology Vol 19, Spring 1991:35-48.

[17] Brandon L.Whittington and Steven J. Scher, “Prayer and Subjective Well-Being: An Examination of Six Different Types of Prayer,” The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 20,2010;59-68.

[18] P. Gregg Blanton, The Other Mindful Practice: Centering Prayer & Psycholtherapy, Pastoral Psychol 60, 2011:133-147.

Clinging to Concepts and Resurrection: Jesus and Mary Magdala in the Garden

When Jesus appears to Mary Magdala in the garden he asks her not to touch him -

I never suspected
Resurrection
to be so painful...
to leave me weeping
With joy
to have met you, alive and smiling, outside an empty tomb
With regret
not because I've lost you
but because I've lost you in how I had you --
in understandable, touchable, kissable, clingable
flesh
not as fully Lord, but as graspably human.

I want to cling, despite your protest
cling to your body
cling to your, and my, clingable humanity
cling to what we had, our past.
But I know that...if I cling
you cannot ascend and

I will be left clinging to your former self
...unable to receive your present spirit.

Fr Ronald Rolheiser, Mary Magdala's Easter Prayer in Forgotten Among the Lillies, p176.
Art: St John's Bible

One of the most significant revelations in my journey was the definitive change from flesh human having a spiritual experience to spiritual human having an enfleshed experience...I really already knew this from science classes - that matter is really tiny "particles" (not really particles, but we have created a particulate model) of energy, and mostly space between said "particles." My amazing optic brain mechanisms create a vision of solid form where there is, on a different level of observation, jiggling dancing energy.

Perhaps the other significant factor that I became aware of was that thoughts have power....and they can limit my understanding, create delusion and keep me from loving peace. Like words, thoughts reduce anything that exists before the thought. This is why the Israelites would not say the name of Yahweh. In fact Yahweh and Allah are both descriptions of breath moving through the lips, not definitive names for Ultimate Reality.

When my father died, I was forced to change my relationship with him from one in matter to one in spirit. I need him to be here, so I am willing to change the way I understand my reality so that he is as close as ever. Through meditation, I have cultivated a very peaceful and real spiritual reality, which gives me increasingly profound reverence for all of life. Oh, its continuing work! I live in the tension between what can be and what is - possibility(spiritual) and concept (matter or thought). I am most certainly not the only one! My peace in this place of unseen reality is reflected to me in scripture, where Jesus and Paul constantly attempt to change people's perspective to emphasize the spirit. Metanoia - think again....

Just as the Buddhists, Hindus and ancient philosophers espouse, it is our attachment to material reality, conceptual reality, a reality based on form as the predominant nature of everything, that causes us to suffer and to remain unenlightened. And if we are a Pastor and we are teaching a solely material reality, then we, like Mary Magdala cries in this beautiful poem, are keeping each other from ascending and we are keeping our selves in darkness. Or put another way, our attachments to what we think is true can keep us from gaining a more expansive perspective of truth. One point of truth can be bisected by an infinite number of lines; lines being perspectives.

Religion, from re-ligare, means to bind back, which is to say, return to your spiritual Oneness in the Divine essence. You are made in the image of God, sacred, priestly, holy. ALL religious texts and practices are designed to draw you away from matter and its hold on you and give you an experience of Spirit. Matter is context. Matter is where spirit finds purpose or action. Matter causes struggle and forces us to rise above it! When the Spirit is changed, when it is given priority, then purpose flows from Oneness and benevolence, rather than defensiveness. That's called transformation or in the case of Paul, conversion. Metanoia - think again. When we "have the Mind of Christ" we are awake, enlightened, can see truth from many perspectives (called nondual perspective), and we can hold the tension of living as spiritual beings enfleshed, we can temper and be mindful of the power of our thoughts and words.

To live in the Spirit. This is what it means to be resurrected. This is what it means to be enlightened or awake. This is what it means to be a follower of Jesus the Christ.

Easter blessings! Be still. And know that I AM.

_/\_Peggy @ ECUMENICUS

Artwork: St John's Bible

No Pain, No Gain

The Spirit is the Great Integrator of the Mind-Body. And spiritual energy is the aspect of "self" we pay the least attention to. We educate the intellect, we exercise the body....but the mind and body continue to work together without our real awareness (a Spiritual awareness; a non-biased energetic awareness), often in ways quite traumatic to our balanced being - panic attacks, anger issues, overactive empathy, addictions of all kinds, emotional outbursts - while the mind is able to observe these run-away body responses, these physiological and psychological "habits," it often finds itself at their mercy. The body reacts and the mind justifies it.

Meditation is a practice that turns the attention toward quieter, more subtle levels of mind. Meditation, or spending time in silent prayer, is the pump-iron method for the Spirit. Practicing quiet time allows the mind time to integrate its "better judgment" or "no judgment" circuits with emotional centers in a way that subdues their reactivity. The scientific explanation for this is that meditation encourages the development of our prefrontal cortex, the evolutionarily newest area of the brain, and the region responsible for reasoning and executive functioning. The prefrontal cortex has authority over the evolutionarily older limbic (emotional) centers and can temper their reactivity into controlled response...or no response.

The benefits of meditation, or sitting in silence (no thinking), have been understood for thousands of years. But we now have objective evidence through scientific inquiry that this practice has profound effects on the autonomic nervous system (the fright/flight mechanisms that influence heart rate, blood pressure and a host of other physiological reactions associated with our basic need for survival, triggered in times of fear anger, embarrassment - these can be viewed as misdirected Spiritual energy or a lack of Spiritual integration of the mind-body.

You can talk about this in the language of Christianity. Our being in Christ-minded spirituality means to be aware/enlightened/integrated in mind-body so as to be a "logos" or ordering principle in life. Logos or "word" even implies that we "communicate" in an orderly, self-aware way; the way of Jesus.  The title, Christ is derived from the Greek term Khristós meaning "the anointed one." The symbolism of anointing in this sense is recognition of something spiritual, sacred and Godly. Khristós is also related to Keres, associated with anointing to purify or heal the body or rid the self of negative influence. Thus, as is the case in Paul’s writings, anointing can be understood as a state of mind (and body) in which both negative influences are dispelled and a greater state of sacred Godliness is assumed; or in the context of "re-ligare" or reconnecting (religion) to the Divine nature, to perceive with an illuminated or enlightened awareness.

You can talk about mind-body integration, enlightenment and self-awareness in other religious contexts and world philosophies. Human spirituality is fundamentally the same, regardless of how we contextualize it. Certainly, eastern religions have discussed this same human condition for thousands of years. Now we have science, and at the least, psychology, to describe the way we humans maintain a balanced mind-body relationship. In fact, psychology practices have been prescribing meditation as a means of treatment for "disorders" like those mentioned above for going on 50 years now.

But the real focus of this blog is on a step in the spiritual journey that is one we don't much like. It is called different names by different authorities, and it is the step in which our greatest spiritual growth can take place.  It is a time, intrinsic to change, that we will meet again and again during life, a time when things are no longer the way they were. It is threshold....and it signals either arrest or transcendence. These times of chaos cannot be avoided. As much as we try to avoid them, we often just don't see them coming. This step in the spiritual journey, or threshold time, is called samsara or wandering, wilderness or desert, depression (some forms), dark night of the soul, the wall, the shadow, suffering, midlife crisis, and more. 

Once again, it is that time when things are not the way they were -- and very likely we'd say, things are no longer as they "should be." 

The Buddhists say we suffer because our mind argues with what is. Many people who are not practicing awareness and spiritual growth intentionally will hit these bumps and not really understand what whats going on. They will look only at the outer circumstances and react to them. But no matter what the circumstances, the deepest and most essential (spirit means essence, btw) challenge for a person traversing these times is to keep the mind-body coherent and that is a spiritual job.

Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron, in her book, When Things Fall Apart, says this: "Sticking with uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic – this is the spiritual path. Getting the knack of catching ourselves, gently and compassionately catching ourselves, is the path of the warrior.

For practitioners or spiritual warriors - people who have a certain hunger to know what is true – feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back."

The spiritual path is a path of truth, even if it hurts. It is a path of intention toward integration of the mind-body, such that one can respond to life changes and know the self as a vessel of generative relationship, loving presence within and without. Love your wounds, love the thresholds, for they teach you to be a compassionate force in the world.

Namaste, _/\_Peggy @ ECUMENICUS

Art: Jennifer Broussard