De Mello: Out of the Head

“The head is not a very good place for prayer. It is not a bad place for starting your prayer. But if your prayer stays there too long and doesn’t move into the heart, it will gradually dry up and prove tiresome and frustrating.” —Anthony de Mello in Sadhana: A Way to God (Liguori, 1998).

Anthony de Mello’s Sadhana: A Way to God is an amazing book—a collection of “one of a kind, practical spiritual exercises” blending Eastern and Western spiritual practice for contemplative prayer. De Mello describes contemplative prayer as communicating with God with a minimal use of words. He lists forty-seven exercises, all of which can be learned through practicing each for a week at a time.

In his first section, de Mello repeatedly teaches about how contemplative prayer comes after achieving an awareness—awareness of the body, not just the mind; and awareness of God’s presence.

The second section is about using fantasy in prayer; and the last section is on employing devotion in contemplative prayer. The awareness exercises especially help us get out of our head and into our bodies—where de Mello says we must return to our senses. He describes the head as a place to begin to pray; but becoming aware of the feelings in our whole body, paying attention to our breath, and returning to our senses is what keeps us in the present presence. It is in the present moment that God meets us—not while we are anticipating or dreading the future or resenting or gloating over the past, but in the now. Our head lives in the past or future. Our body, our heart, grounds us to the present moment.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

Johnson: Inner Works

“All forms of interaction with the unconscious that nourished our ancestors—dream, vision, ritual, religious experience—are largely lost, dismissed by the modern mind as primitive or superstitious. In our hubris, our faith in our unassailable reason, cuts ourselves off from our origins in the unconscious and from the deepest parts of ourselves.” —Robert Johnson in Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth (Harper & Row, 1989).

My spiritual director posted this quote on Facebook today. It is an affirmation for a new path that a group of us are beginning again. Our book group is rereading the revised version of Joyce Rockwood Hudson’s Natural Spirituality. We recently were in a clergy group and announced that we were studying Natural Spirituality. Two members who had recently finished seminary had no idea what we were talking about. When we mentioned dream work, they were even more in the dark, and maybe a little suspicious. Older clergy in the group had been studying dreams for some time and affirmed the value of the study.

I have been involved in dream groups on and off for more than thirty years. Dream work is one of the many ways to try to discern what God is calling us to do in our lives. My experience is that it is important to participate in a group of people studying their own and each other’s dreams. Most of us find it difficult to discern dreams by ourselves.

There are many factors to consider. Dreams tell us something we don’t already know. Parts of ourselves may block new information.

Think of our experience in other discussion groups when new ideas come up. There is invariably at least one person who flings out an automatic “no” to a new way of doing things. “That is not the way we have done it in the past.”

It always takes time for the whole group to process the information and decide to go in a new direction. Likewise, a dream group of friends looking at a dream from outside of our own ego may gently guide us in a new direction. We look for these insights into our inner life until the light bulb turns on inside and outside of us. I like Joyce Rockwood Hudson’s subtitle of her book, A Handbook for Jungian Inner Work in Spiritual Community.

Joanna joannaseibert

Early Riser

“Wisdom is radiant and unfading,

and she is easily discerned by those who love her,

and is found by those who seek her.

She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.

One who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty,

for she will be found sitting at the gate.” —Wisdom 6:12-14.

jes campbell

Many of the spiritual friends I know are indeed early risers. Early morning is their time to read or meditate or write before the business of the day begins. I used to walk around our neighborhood in the early morning before going to the hospital to work. Now I look out of a large picture window and watch and wait for the sun to come up and the cardinals and blue jays and woodpeckers to appear at my feeder.

At the beach, I like to sit outside and feel night becoming day. I like to feel the Gulf breeze and watch the water creatures gather to begin their day. This is their home. They are local. I am a visitor. The lone osprey circles high above the waves. The single blue heron swoops in and slowly struts on his stilts to be as near as possible to the early morning fishermen at the edge of the Gulf, hoping he will be given their small rejections. The pelicans fly in military formation so close to the waves that they must constantly get their feathers wet.

The early risers are like the women at the empty tomb on Easter morning. They are seeking resurrection, a new beginning—and they will find it every day as the sun majestically rises above the horizon with its color guard, especially on Sunday mornings.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com