Category:

Wine, Roses and Mantra

11/8/2011

A woman friend opened my eyes years ago to the way we men become very invested in our props when on dates. She told me about being out with a young man who, after dropping and breaking his carefully selected bottle of wine, became more upset than she could possibly account for at the time. Why was the wine so important to him, she wondered? Only later did she realize that men set the scene for wooing and seduction through the strategic deployment of such props. Things like flowers, candles and soft music are, for most men, more like magic talismans for producing the desired result than expressions of anything like love.

I often think about this story while preparing for prayer, smiling as I dim the lights, change the shrine flowers or light a stick of incense. “I know,” I say to God, “that you are perfectly aware of my use of these props, and that you know I intend them as an offering of devotion and an aid to my own recollection, their resemblance to preparing my dorm room for a hot date notwithstanding.”

Maybe it’s my background in Protestant Christianity that makes me elevate devotion over technique the way I do. Maybe the correct pronunciation of Sanskrit mantras really is essential to their efficacy; maybe the position of the tongue in the chakra bijas really does stimulate the pineal gland, or whatever. Many people of many millennia have believed so. But to my mind, emphasizing technique in this way is the spiritual equivalent of carefully laying the scene in one’s bachelor crib. And yes, of course it absolutely is love and desire that impels us to cultivate technique–but if the love isn’t paramount, the technique is empty, however efficacious it may seem in the short run.

John Dupuche

I recently read a book about mantra meditation by John Dupuche, a Catholic priest with a doctorate in Sanskrit, who specializes in Kashmir Shaivism. I found his account of mantra highly resonant with my own:

The mantra is a word, not just a sound repeated over and over. It is not a word said to oneself, a sort of soliloquy. Nor is it just a distraction for the mind so as to let the spirit soar. The mantra is an expression. It comes from a tradition and expresses the tradition…It comes from the reciter and expresses the reciter.

The mantra is the essence of the Word that surpasses all sound…the mantra is not so much the vocable, which is uttered with the lips or mind, but an attitude, an emotion, which constitutes the essential self. By reciting the mantra the practitioner undertakes to be true to his or her self.

Thus the mantra, like all words and expressions, is a bridge between the speaker and the one addressed. The mantra is necessarily said to someone. I can become the mantra only if I say it to someone who receives the mantra, who listens and accepts the mantra.
For Dupuche, the mantra expresses the one who recites it, for the sake of the One who hears it–irrespective of linguistics and technical minutiae.

Like mantras, mudras are often thought to have empirical effects on the practitioner independent of intention. According to Kundalini Yoga theory, a mudra is:

A gesture or position, usually of the hands, that locks and guides energy flow and reflexes to the brain. By curling, crossing, stretching and touching the fingers and hands, we can talk to the body and mind as each area of the hand reflexes to a certain part of the mind or body.

While I have never seen any convincing science that supports the notion of hand reflexology, it may very well be that holding the hands in various postures objectively stimulates the nervous system. But for the time being, anyway, you can’t prove it by me.

For Buddhists, mudras have a primarily iconographic and symbolic function, similar to stereotyped hand gestures in Christian icons. Different positions of the hands have different meanings that help the viewer to “read” the image.

My own position, as usual, falls somewhere in between. For me, a mudra–like everything else in spiritual practice–is about intention. When I use a mudra while chanting or in silent meditation, I am implicitly aware of–though not explicitly thinking about–the meaning of the gesture as it relates to my intention for that period of practice. While meditating on the sahasrara, or “crown” chakra, I may use the dhyana mudra, which is associated with deep concentration and devotion; I may use the vismaya mudra, associated with clear spiritual perception, while focusing on the ajna, or “brow (“third eye”) chakra. But I do so, not because I believe that holding the hands a certain way will objectively facilitate the desired result, but as an aid to honing my intention–a mission statement for the practice, a string around my spiritual finger to remind me of what I am doing and why. A string on my finger–not a ring through God’s nose.

In spiritual practice, it seems to me, all is offering–all is devotion. We offer mantra and mudra as gifts of love, not as techniques for producing a desired result–just as a man gives a woman a ring, not to facilitate an acceptance of his offer of marriage, but as a way of declaring his own intentions and desires.

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Comparing Ourselves to Others

10/13/2011

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Everyone who’s ever been to a yoga class knows that we’re not supposed to compare ourselves to others. We also know how difficult it is not to try to match those who are stronger or more supple than we are, or to take comfort in seeing others struggle with things we find manageable. The urge to one-up others is very strong.

I’ve also heard teachers urge students not to try to “make it look like the pictures in the books,” as doing so could lead to forcing and injury.

In a physical practice like yoga asana, it’s easy to catch ourselves evaluating others, both in person and in print. In contemplation, it’s not so obvious in person; we may have a strong sense that someone else is further along the path than we are, but unless they tell us themselves about their experiences, we can only guess at how prayer is “going” for them.

In print, however, we are offered vivid accounts of the experiences of the great contemplatives of history, from Teresa of Avila to Vivekananda, and from Julian of Norwich to Ramana Maharshi. This is good insofar as it in instructive and inspirational, but I fear that reading about the great mystics can be daunting, too–especially if we have practiced for years without ever being “caught up into the third heaven”[i] or having visionary experiences.

Each person’s experience in prayer is unique, and it is useless to compare ourselves to others. The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a fourteenth-century English text on contemplative prayer, emphasized this point:

It is important to realize that in the interior life, we must never take our own experiences, or the lack of them, as the norm for everyone else. He who labors long in coming to contemplation, and then rarely enjoys the perfection of this work, may easily be deceived if he thinks, speaks or judges other people on the basis of his own experience. In the same way, he who frequently experiences the delight of contemplation–almost, it seems, whenever he likes–will be just as mistaken if he measures others by himself. Do not waste your time with these comparisons. For it may be that, in God’s wisdom, those who have, at the beginning, struggled long and hard at prayer and only tasted its fruits occasionally may, later on, experience them as often as they like, and in great abundance.[ii]

In fact, if you are experiencing emptiness in prayer, it may well be a good sign. You are, at any rate, in very good company: everyone from St. John of the Cross to Mother Theresa has gone through “dark nights of the soul.”

Screwtape, the senior demon who coaches his nephew through his first temptation assignment in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, warned his protégé about God’s motives in going into hiding:

He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs–to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish….Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best… He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

So if you feel like “nothing’s happening” in prayer, don’t despair. The signs of spiritual growth are subtle; often, other people may notice the changes in you before you do, as you gradually grow, spiritually, through practice. Or it may be that God is only withholding His hand so that you may learn to stand up on your own legs.

[i] 2 Corinthians 12:2
[ii]Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 72. Ed. William Johnston, SJ.

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Doing vs. Allowing (or, A Feather on the Breath of God)

9/29/2011

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There are some things that’s it’s almost impossible to teach by telling, or even showing, the student what to do or how to do it; the best you can do is to say how it ought to feel when done right. Singing is one: advice like “feel as though you were sipping air from a teacup” doesn’t mean anything until you’ve finally done it.

Meditation that involves an internal mantra or prayer word–like Centering Prayer, Christian Meditation, or (I suspect) Transcendental Meditation–is another. When Fr. Thomas Keating, one of the founders of the modern Centering Prayer movement, says that we should internally repeat our prayer word as gently as “laying a feather on a piece of absorbent cotton,”[i] most of us will have no idea what that means until we’ve tried it. Maybe not even then.

I find it helpful to think of myself, not as “saying” or “repeating” my prayer word, but rather as “allowing” it to say itself–as though it were something I were inviting to happen rather than “doing.” Of course, like a Buddhist monk who, instead of “ringing” the gong, “invites the gong to sound,” I’m certainly still “doing” it–but if I think of it as “allowing,” I do it differently.

When I go about my daily tasks like folding laundry or cleaning the kitchen, I often repeat the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me”) internally, which redirects my mental energy away from daydreaming, planning, or brooding and allows me to experience my experiences much more vividly. (For instance, the other day I was rinsing the soap out of the underside of a saucepan lid by swirling the water around the upturned lid. At each swirl, a little warm water would slosh out of the lid onto my hands. It felt just as though I were juggling balls of warm water. I would never have noticed that if I allowed memory and anticipation to hijack the here-and-now. A small thing, for sure–but why should all the magic be in the past or the future?)

What makes this prayer exercise work is absolute gentleness in the repetition; if I’m saying the prayer to shout down my thoughts, the prayer just becomes, itself, an even more oppressive thought.

In sitting practice, I find it helpful to link the repetition of my prayer word to the breath. (In case you’re wondering, I say “Trust” on the in breath and “Love” on the out breath.) In order to keep the word from feeling like something I’m banging out on an inner anvil, I try to think of it as something carried in and out on the breath itself–almost as though it were passing over an infuser and carrying the fragrance of the word with it. I call this process “baptizing the breath.”

Suppose you worked somewhere where you had to wear an ID tag. Once the gatekeeper got to know you, you wouldn’t have to actually hold up the tag every single time you went in and out–just wearing it where it was visible would suffice. But if the gatekeeper didn’t recognize you, or there were a heightened state of security for some reason, you would show your ID again for a while.

Likewise, once you’ve established that the in breath carries the scent of your word and (if you have two words) the out breath is likewise redolent, you don’t have to “say” the word internally every time; you just let it come and go with the breath. Then, when you find you have wandered, let your breath “show its ID” again for a few cycles until you’re back in the moment.

It’s almost as though the word has to die “to the flesh”–to go from being something solid to being incorporeal, something that can float on a breath–in order to do its work in us. Jesus said that if He did not “go away” to the Father, He could not send the Spirit to His disciples. (John 16:6) Perhaps, like Jesus, if the “bodily” prayer word does not die and ascend, it cannot participate in the Spirit–the word for which, in both Greek and Hebrew, is “breath.”

[i] Keating, Thomas, O.C.S.O.: Open Mind, Open Heart

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A Gate That Opens Both Ways: Mantra and Mindfulness

9/21/2011

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Patanjali

Yogash chitta vritti nirodhah. –Patanjali, Yoga Sutra 1.1.

Life rarely presents us with laboratory conditions for meditation. Unless we want to spend a lot of our practice time gritting our teeth and willing distractions away, we need to adapt to circumstances. Which is not my strong suit.

I have always been drawn to dhyana meditation, or “one-pointed concentration.” Sri Ramakrishna, the 19th century Bengali saint, likened the mind in dhyana to a continuous stream of oil being poured from one vessel to another. The field of awareness is narrowed to one object–whether the breath, a mantra, or “the lotus feet of the Lord”–and all else is excluded from it as the meditator “gathers the scattered energies of the mind into one place.”[i]

This way of meditating has always appealed to me more than mindfulness meditation, in which the meditator observes whatever comes up, internally or externally, remaining open to what the moment brings. I don’t like remaining open.

Jodie Foster once said that she didn’t like live theater because the audience can look wherever they want; as a filmmaker, Foster prefers to control the view. I, likewise, prefer, when possible, to choose the object of my awareness in meditation.

Plymouth Weekly Meeting

But sometimes–or often, depending on one’s circumstances–that just isn’t possible. For instance, my children attend a Friends (Quaker) school, and most Thursday mornings I accompany my older daughter to Meeting for Worship in the austerely beautiful 18th century meeting house. In traditional Quaker worship, anyone may speak if they feel moved to do so, but the speech proceeds out of, and falls back into, silence; often, the entire period goes by in silence.

But “silence” is relative. When you’ve got a big room full of kids ranging from kindergarten to sixth grade, fidgeting on the creaky benches, coming in late on the creaky floorboards, asking to go to the bathroom or for someone to pass them the tissues–even if they aren’t speaking aloud, it would be a stretch to call it “silence.”

So I used to struggle valiantly to exclude all the hubbub from my awareness and practice Centering Prayer–a Christian form that resembles both mantra japa and vipassana in that a single word or short phrase (the “prayer word”) is repeated internally, often synchronized with the breath, as a way of keeping the mind from wandering. But the effect, under those conditions, was more like covering my ears and shouting, “La, la, la, I’m not listening!” The prayer word, rather than keeping me from being hijacked by my thoughts, became a thought itself–something to think rather than being available to the moment.

When I finally grew tired of doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result, I decided the time had come to give mindfulness a try. Jon Kabat-Zinn describes mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.” In theory, that sounds like it should include concentrative dhyana meditation–one does, after all, pay attention to the object one is contemplating–but in practice people generally make a distinction between focusing the mind on an object and observing the mind itself, or the experiences of the moment.

Yoga Sutra 1.1

I have written before about how internally repeating the Prayer of the Heart, or “Jesus Prayer,” while doing everyday chores quiets my mind and makes my experience of what I’m doing more vivid and immediate. As I become more available to the moment, my awareness–both of myself, and of the ever-present Spirit–becomes sharper. What I am doing, then, is using a prayer word, not in a concentrative way, but as a tool for mindfulness. The prayer is a gate that allows my experience in while excluding my otherwise incessant mind-chatter.

So a prayer word or mantra can, it seems, function both as a tool for dhyana, helping maintain the attention on the chosen object while excluding outside experiences, and a tool for mindfulness, helping us attend to our experiences while suppressing the inner monologue. It is a gate that opens both ways. Which is where the above-referenced two-thousand-year-old Sanskrit scripture comes in. Here it is again:

Yogash chitta vritti nirodhah.

As is often the case with ancient texts, there are divergent opinions about the precise meaning of this sentence. One of the more widespread translations is:

Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. In other words, when the mind is as unruffled as a pouring stream of oil, entirely concentrated upon one object without distraction, that is yoga.

But there are other translations; for example:

Yoga is the mastery of the activities of the mind-field. That is, when distractions occur, and we acknowledge and accept them without judgment or commentary, that is yoga.

So which is the better translation? Is it about quieting the mind, or about making it do what we want? Is yoga both dhyana and mindfulness?

I’m prepared to say that it is. One of the differences between scripture and “content,” it seems to me, is that while the latter may mean one thing or less, scripture can almost always mean one thing or more. For instance, consider Jesus’ words about the Kingdom of God:

ουδε ερουσιν ιδου ωδε η ιδου εκει ιδου γαρ η βασιλεια του θεου εντος υμων εστιν. (Luke 17:21)

You won’t be able to say of the Kingdom, “Here it is,” or “There it is”–all the many translations agree on that much. But about the next part, translators are about evenly divided. Did Jesus say,

…for the Kingdom of God is within you,

or,

…for the Kingdom of God is among you?

The controversy hinges on the meaning of the word endos, which in many contexts means “within.” (Eg., “endoscopy” = “looking within.”) But the word can also mean “among,” or “in the midst of.”

While scholars cite linguistic evidence and/or theological arguments–none of which are, in my opinion, either conclusive or interesting–in support of their favored interpretations, the meaning seems perfectly clear if we view the text in the light of experience rather than doctrine. If we invite God to reign in our hearts, then the Kingdom is within us. And if we are as connected to each other as the branches of a single vine (Jn. 15:5), and if we are to care for each other as for Christ Himself (Mt. 25:31-46), and if Jesus is present whenever two or more are gathered together in His name (Mt. 18:20), then the Kingdom is manifestly among us as well. Anyone who has ever felt the movement of the Spirit in his or her own soul as well as among the gathered community knows this to be true. It means both.

So when a scripture seems to have two equally defensible meanings, we can assume that both are valid. In interpreting Yoga Sutra 1.1, if circumstances dictate that I must meditate in different ways at different times–if I see myself as both a yogi, struggling to achieve liberation through spiritual practice, and a bhakti, dependent on divine grace and longing for true devotion–and if experience tells me that the same meditative tool can be used in ways that point to both translations–why argue any further about meaning? Why posit a dilemma where none exists?

One final thought: purist practitioners of mindfulness meditation may object to the use of a mantra or prayer word. And from a purist standpoint, they may have a point. But being as much a bhakti as a yogi–a devotee as well as a practitioner–I need to bring a note of devotion with me into my meditation. Pure mindfulness, for me, is too lacking in content; I need to smuggle in a little devotional meaning, even if only in the background. Which is why I continue to use a prayer word in both dhyana and mindfulness practice: for me, it works both ways.

i. Swami Tyagananda, Boston Vedanta Center

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"Give Me That–Pray This!"

8/24/2011

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Many years ago, while performing at a Renaissance Faire, I was living in a room over a bar, across the hall from the guitarist I was working with. I smoked a pipe at the time, and my friend, finding my tobacco-of-choice obnoxious, had dubbed it “Old Mustard-Mouth.” One evening he burst into my room, snatched up my tobacco, and threw down a pouch of Captain Black. “Give me that,” he said; “Smoke this!”

God did a similar thing the other day as I prayed the Anglican Rosary.

First, a little background on this devotion. Unlike the more familiar Catholic rosaries, the Anglican Rosary does not include a fixed set of prayers to be prayed on the various beads; instead, the person praying chooses the prayers: an introductory prayer on the Cross, a dedicatory prayer on the Invitatory bead, another prayer on the four large Cruciform beads, and yet another on the sets of seven smaller beads (or “Weeks”.) While some prayers are widespread–the “Our Father” on the Cruciform beads, the “Jesus Prayer” (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me) on the Weeks, and a Doxology on the Invitatory, there are a very great many different configurations of prayers in use. (Click the diagram on the right learn more.)

Recently I was praying the A.R. in my usual fashion–a fairly typical Christ centric one with the Anima Christi (“Soul of Christ”) on the Cruciform beads and the Jesus Prayer on the weeks. I had done it that way twice, when suddenly a whole new set of prayers came into my mind almost fully formed, as though it had been given to me.

Now, I am not a person given to visions and promptings, being more attuned to finding God in the ordinary than in the extraordinary. But this came to me so clearly and unsought that it reminded me of nothing so much as “the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.” (Rev. 21:2) Which doesn’t happen every day.

The most salient thing about the new set of prayers is that they are all extracts from the Psalms. As such they are, while of course still biblical, not specifically Christian. This new way of praying the Anglican Rosary doesn’t reference or address Jesus at all. Which surprised me, because I had regarded this particular devotion as my seriously Jesus-oriented practice. While I am multi-spiritual[i]–comfortable with the practices and frames of reference of more than one faith tradition[ii]–I try to avoid syncretism, or mixing of practices from divergent religions. Hence, while I may chant a Sanskrit mantra in the morning and pray the Compline service from the Book of Common Prayer in the evening, I don’t combine the two.[iii] And the Anglican Rosary was supposed to be “Jesus time.”

The Christ-free prayers that came into my head bothered me a little, because I often chafe under the pressure I feel to throw Jesus under the bus in the yoga-and-meditation world. When a yoga studio or Unitarian church transparently tells me my music is “not where their people are” (despite my assurances that we needn’t perform the two or three chants addressed to Jesus at any particular event) I remind myself that people have many more or less valid reasons for balking at anything that smells of church, but it’s hard. What are you doing to me, Lord? I asked.

While I love my family dearly, I always say “yes” when my wife offers to take the children somewhere for the weekend and give me a little time to myself. Maybe that’s what God is doing: sending Jesus and me on separate vacations for a while. Perhaps that is how God plans to open me up still further to the wisdom and insights of other traditions–the better to understand my own, of which my view is necessarily limited. “We shall not cease from exploration,” wrote T.S. Eliot, “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Over and over again I have found his words to be true–and if God wants me to pray the Anglican Rosary with Jesus way off in the background for a while, maybe it’s just one more journey of exploration to undertake.
_______________________________

[i] See Paul, Russill, Jesus in the Lotus

[ii] One hears people say, in denigration of using more than one spiritual practice, that you cannot strike water by digging multiple holes, but by digging one hole faithfully. I used to worry about that, until a friend pointed out that a multi-spiritual approach could just as easily be thought of as digging one hole using multiple tools.

[iii] My interfaith kirtan chants being a notable exception.

(Here, for those who are interested, is the version of the Anglican Rosary I am currently using.)

Cross: Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen. (This prayer, the Collect for Purity with which the Eucharist opens, is how I begin all my rosary devotions, and it remained unchanged.)

Invitatory:            Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Give me the joy of your saving help again and sustain me with your bountiful Spirit. (Psalm 51: 10-12)

Cruciform beads:            O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a barren and dry land where there is no water. (Psalm 63:1)

Weeks:       For God alone my soul in silence waits. (Psalm 62:1)

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Intention is Everything (or, The Economy of Passion)

8/14/2011

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As with all the ways of practicing God's presence, it is our authentic desire and willingness that counts, not the specific experience or lack of experience. –Gerald May

I love novenas–those nine-day Catholic cycles of prayer with a particular intention. I used to explain to Protestant friends that a novena is like a public radio pledge drive of prayer: of course, your local station would love for you to contribute at any time, but every so often they set aside several days to pester you about it. A novena is a dedicated time of prayerful pestering.

During a period when I had a lot of discerning to do, I used to use novenas frequently. It got to the point where I would sometimes receive an answer to my prayer almost immediately after I had formed the intention of praying a novena–even before I had actually prayed it.

I have come to believe that intention is everything in spiritual practice. It trumps technique, and it is more central, more vital than any altered states of mind we may experience. It is more key to spiritual advancement than any specific exercise or sacrament, and it is more powerfully influential in prayer than what we say or how we say it. And I will go so far as to say that the primary purpose of spiritual practice is to sharpen and focus our intention.

Now, I’m not advocating some kind of The Secret-esque “law of attraction” that will “manifest” what we want in the world if we manage our thoughts and feelings properly. But I am suggesting that if we sharpen our intention, two things will follow:

Our moment-to-moment choices, both conscious and unconscious, will be more in line with our deepest desires. We will be less likely to “trade in what we want most for what we want now,” as a colleague puts it, if we have, through practice, kept our true intentions within our awareness. As Gerald May put it, “All our choices reflect an economy of passion: how we decide to invest ourselves in what we care about. Large and small, we make thousands of such choices every day.”
God will honor our desires more abundantly as they become more focused. “Delight in the Lord,” says the Psalmist, “and he will give you your heart’s desire.” (Ps. 37:4) I used to think this was a kind of Catch-22, like Henry Ford’s promise that you could have your Model T in any color you wanted as long as it was black. But I have come to realize that our true “heart’s desire” is, in fact, the Lord–everything else is something we have been duped into believing we desire. The more focused our intentions, the less divided our loyalties between God and what the Bible calls “the World,” and the Upanishads call maya. “Come near to God,” says the Letter of James, “and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.” (Ja. 4:8) Or as Jesus Himself put it, “No one can serve two masters.” (Mt. 6:24)

Ganesha

After a long period of uncertainty about what I was being to called to do in the world, circumstances began to align themselves in a way that made my path clearer than it has ever been. Now, you would think that this would be cause for rejoicing and plunging in with both feet, but life can put us into a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, in which we cling to our captivity out of fear of the very freedom we crave. Knowing exactly what I needed to be doing, I found myself doing everything but, balking at change and caught in the grip of acedia.

Fearful that my chance would pass me by, I began a nightly practice of chanting Om gam Ganapataye namaha–a mantra addressed to Ganesha–with the intention that the Lord of Success and Remover of Obstacles would clear my path of obstructions. (I will write more soon about how this Christian relates to the Hindu pantheon.) Almost immediately, I began to feel my stuck-ness loosening up, and found that I could move down the path before me with increasing ease.

Finding that my rate of recovery was slackening, I approached one of my parish priests for laying-on-of-hands and healing prayer. The result was dramatic; the combination of her intercession and my own practice set up a kind of virtuous (as opposed to “vicious”) cycle of grace and intention, each fueling the other and taking me to a greater state of emotional and spiritual health than I had enjoyed for a long time. I practiced with intention, and God answered with grace that, in turn, encouraged my intention–an "upward spiral," if you will.

The Baal Shem Tov

In Martin Buber’s Legends of the Baal Shem, God commands the Master to do spiritual battle with a false messiah. Warning him that his foe was too powerful for him to defeat alone, God charged the Baal Shem to seek the help of a tzadik, or holy man, to whom he would direct him. Traveling through a field, the Baal Shem saw a shepherd incessantly leaping back and forth over a ditch. “For you, Lord,” the shepherd cried, “and to please you! If you had sheep, I would guard them all day without pay; show me what I can do for you!” This, God told the Master, is the holy man you seek.

I will have truly made progress on the day when all my spiritual practice is done in the same spirit of pure, Godly intention.

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Pratyahara and Praying Without Ceasing

8/6/2011

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There is a yoga discipline called pratyahara, which means “control of the senses” or "withdrawal of the mind from sense objects." During practice, the mind is supposed to be so focused that no distractions are able to enter our awareness. And that withdrawal is a good thing—I want to experience my experiences fully. But I like to think of pratyahara more broadly than that. When I am on a hike or picnic or retreat, for instance, I don’t want radio, television, recorded music or the internet intruding; I want to withdraw my senses from the overstimulating media that usually occupy them, so that my mind may be more available to the subtler experiences around me.

But even then, my “monkey mind,” as the Buddhists call it, continues to interpose itself between my awareness and the world. Everything I see and hear reminds me of something I need to do, someone who is trying my patience, another time and place in which I saw or heard something similar, something I know, or wish I knew, about the thing seen or heard. Nothing just is what it is on its own terms—everything becomes an object of my judgment and analysis, a springboard for my daydreams.

So I find it useful to regularly withdraw my attention, not from external stimuli, but from my internal commentary on them, which allows things to be more what they are. Be a stranger—be “not from around here,” the better to experience things as for the first time. It helps if the field of stimuli is relatively narrow—any activity I do more or less mechanically can clear a space for contemplative practice—and on a good day, when I am mowing the lawn or cleaning up the kitchen or folding laundry, I will remember to take advantage of the opportunity. Here’s what I do:

I begin by becoming aware of my breathing, which “takes attention away from thinking.”[i] The moment I begin this is one of the most satisfying moments of the day; there is a sense of release and restfulness, but not a somnolent restfulness—rather, a heightened awareness charged with energy even as it calms me, that gives me a pale glimpse of what it means to be “he who in the midst of the greatest silence and solitude finds the intensest activity, and in the midst of the intensest activity, the silence and solitude of the desert.”[ii]

"Pratyahara"

I then begin to pray the so-called Jesus Prayer:  Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.  This prayer, adapted from the words of the blind man who called out to Jesus from the roadside, has been used in contemplative practice since the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and is still widely practiced in the Eastern churches. It is prayed over and over, like a mantra.

(A word of explanation: the Greek word eleos, which is translated “mercy,” actually has a broader meaning than we ordinarily ascribe to it, including not only forgiveness but healing. The word has the same root as elia, meaning “olive,” because prayer for healing was—as it often still is—accompanied by anointing with [olive] oil. The point being that a repeated prayer for mercy is not necessarily the grimly penitential exercise it might sound like.)

Now here’s the counter-intuitive part: you’d think that repeating something over and over in your head would just add to the chaos, but in fact it does just the opposite. When the monkey mind is occupied with the mantra, I am actually freed from the distraction of memory, anticipation, plans, regrets, fantasies and all the other busywork that occupies me most of the time. So I am able to see, hear, feel everything much more vividly, without a layer of commentary between my deeper self and my experience. What a potato feels like as I rub the dirt off its surface under the tap, how the ocean sounds on the far side of a stand of trees through which the wind is blowing, the licorice smell of a pile of pulled weeds—everything is novel and intensified, unfiltered by commentary and classification. Experience bypasses the monkey mind and registers more directly.

The Indian sage Patanjali wrote, “The Seer is intelligence only, and though pure, sees through the coloring of the intellect.”[iii] When the intellect is otherwise occupied, the view is less colored. The monkey mind leaves you alone.

"Pray without ceasing." –1 Thessalonians 5:17

This entry was originally part of a larger post at Little Teaboys Everywhere.

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Wine, Roses and Mantra

Comparing Ourselves to Others

Doing vs. Allowing (or, A Feather on the Breath of God)

A Gate That Opens Both Ways: Mantra and Mindfulness

"Give Me That–Pray This!"

Intention is Everything (or, The Economy of Passion)

Pratyahara and Praying Without Ceasing

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