Learning To Be Fully Present

Leaving the Land of the Numb

Guest Writer: Don Follis

I grew up in Northwestern Kansas--the land of numb--where everyone was fine: families, teachers, pastors, dogs, and cats. Everyone! Before my Grandmother Follis's funeral, my dad stood in the church foyer, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. He was attired in his signature outfit--tweed jacket, white shirt, and Levi jeans--both heavily starched--and handmade alligator-skin boots he had fitted in Dallas. He was a man's man.

Walking up to him, I put my arm around him and said, "Dad, how are you feeling?"

"Just fine, son. How are you?"  I smiled and said, "I'm just fine, Dad." You can be sad when your mother dies. You can be relieved if she suffered, but you can't be fine. "Fine," my wife says to me, "is a grade of sandpaper." Like my dad, I have mostly been "Just Fine." But I realized that Jesus isn't only the meek and mild figure so often presented in paintings and liked by everyone.

Being liked was not Jesus' highest value. Like a golden retriever, I always want everyone to be my friend. Not Jesus. And there's the rub. I can't have it both ways--helping others the way I want to while expecting to be liked by everyone. My wife reminds me: "If being liked is your highest value, especially when you have a chance to speak truth to power, you have the wrong value."

Every day, I try to be fully present, allowing myself to feel whatever painful and positive emotions come my way. Some days, I laugh; some days, I cry. It is the only way to live. Jesus is a hero to me because he was fully present emotionally. Not once was he ever "Just fine."

Learning to be fully present has been a long journey. I tell my story of learning to connect my emotional and spiritual lives in a new memoir, Leaving The Land of Numb, available on Amazon.

Don Follis

Joanna  https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Moving from the Head to the Heart

 De Mello: Out of the Head    

“The head is not the best place for prayer. It is not a bad place to start 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, Christian Exercises in Eastern Form, 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 minimal words. He lists forty-seven exercises, all of which can be learned by practicing each one weekly.

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

The second section explores the use of our imagination in prayer, such as keeping an imaginary scrapbook of times we were loved and felt God’s presence.

 The last section describes devotional prayers, such as the Jesus Prayer.

The awareness exercises help us get out of our heads 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 entire body, paying attention to our breath, and returning to our senses keeps us in the present moment.

It is in the present moment that God meets us—not where we anticipate or dread the future, or resent or take pride over the past, but in the now. Our head lives in the past or the future. Our body, our heart, grounds us to the present moment.

Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Painting as a Spiritual Practice: Learning About Shadows

  Painting as a Spiritual Practice: Learning Abour Shadows

Guest Writer: Ken Fellows

 A Graceful Penumbra

     Someone painting a house … not usually a subject to capture in watercolor. Walking past this scene in Stonington, Maine, I was attracted by the painter on his ladder … riveted less by the man than by his graceful, dramatic shadow. How remarkable that an ordinary human, doing such everyday work, could cast a near balletic penumbra. On reflection, this seemed a dramatic physical representation of the concept, existing in both spiritual and psychological literature, that human personalities have both a consciousness and a latent shadow side.

     Painting in watercolors for many years now and incorporating shadows in my work has always been intentional and personally rewarding. Shadows create and denote light in a picture. Without them, there is only color to build interest in the subject or scene. Shadows in paintings can be any color. Art classes often teach that they should be the complementary color of the object they cover …. that is the 'painterly' way. Most people think of shadows as black or gray, but in fact,

scientists say they are variations of blue. Whatever hue an artist chooses, shadows have highly variable shapes and sizes, edges both faint and sharp, and a random distribution in any scene that attracts and intensifies interest.

       Painting shadows in watercolor can be somewhat of a high-wire act. Because watercolor is a light-to-dark, transparent medium, the lightest colors must be painted first. Unlike oils, if a color is painted that's too dark, it can't be rectified by covering it with a lighter color. As a result, the shadows in a watercolor painting are usually the last step … to be laid down over the lighter colors in a scene. A lot can go wrong: shadow washes too dark, misplaced, or unrealistic ….and the painting is ruined and can't be corrected.

     In my pre-teens, long ago and way before TV, I listened daily to radio dramas.

One of my favorites was THE SHADOW …, a mystery program always begun with a

deep, ominous voice asking: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!" Since those days, I've always found shadiness intriguing. Later in life, my profession as a radiologist may also have influenced my perspective. A former medical colleague at an art showing remarked, "Well, I see you're still dealing in shadows."

     For some, shadows exist as a dark side of human personalities. The psychologist Carl Jung has written that "everyone carries a shadow," and "the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is."

The spiritual teacher, Patricia Adams Farmer, supports the concept of the need to attend to one's shadow side with "compassionate self-awareness." She further

advises: "Our shadow side is part of our humanity, albeit the more primitive, unpleasant, and difficult side. With courage, we can look deeply into the dark

side of our being –not to judge and condemn –but to understand, to suffer with, and to love back into the wide, rich tapestry of our being."

     My favorite painting teacher, Dewitt Hardy, taught that artists "are in the business of making miracles." For me, my watercolor efforts have no chance for such an aspiration without effective shadows.

Ken Fellows

Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/