Holistic Spirituality

The Resources

As I’ve reflected on the themes in this stream, there seem to be three main areas that it aims to bring into focus:

• A celebration of embodied aspects of life and faith
• An opening or deepening of perceiving and becoming more aware of Presence
• A cultivation of gratitude for ordinary gifts of life and relationship

We began with embodiment, which is a good antidote to all the mental activity which is normally associated with faith as a belief system and an applied interpretive approach to scripture. When we can accept and embrace the goodness of creation and of our embodiment in its imperfection and as a work in progress, then our lived experience becomes the most obvious and natural way to encounter God and express our trust, love, joy, fears, anger, grief and longing.

Cynthia Bourgeault, author and teacher and living mystic, was interviewed on the ‘Opening Minds, Opening Hearts’ podcast late last year and she identified embodiment as the big issue for centering prayer in the next generation. She points out that contemplative prayer was never meant to be a separate path, a stand alone kind of practice or spirituality, but rather it was an aspect of of the Way of Jesus which had been part of the monastic life and had fallen off the radar.

The Benedictine monks who reconstructed this practice of silent contemplative prayer also had solid embodied practices of physical work in service to the community and chanting the psalms.

These embodied aspects of prayer serve to ground the practice and integrate the deep emotions that arise in encounter with Presence.

Cynthia says, ‘it allows emotion, which is personal and possessive, to move into feeling, which is universal and non-possessive’.

Does that resonate for you? Does it make any sense? Honestly, I’m not sure I know what she means here, but I’d like to understand….see if I’m making any sense of it….

As we develop our capacity to be open and aware of our full reality, which is the ability to ‘be with’ whatever is happening on the outside and the inside with compassion and curiosity, we’ll be able to be more aware of the unsurfaced emotional content of our interior world. Centering prayer practice offers a taste of Oneness with Christ, as it is a practice of joining in the Divine action of self-emptying love, generously letting go, sincerely letting go. A letting go that offers a direct route to open hearted, open minded awareness. And in all that letting go, we also open a space for that which is in need of deep healing – emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. The personal presence becomes part of the universal Presence – or perhaps rejoins? The personal wounding is tenderly held and felt in the great web of belonging and Oneness instead of being trapped in the story of me, alone? It’s a way of both relocating the sense of ownership of pain and of remembering that all pain is shared pain.

The incarnational stream, the heaven-in-ordinary spirituality, is a holistic spirituality. It’s recognising that ‘the body is an expressive instrument of our full reality’ (more Cynthia), and our full reality is emotional, mental, physical, spiritual, relational.

Pause for reflection

What is helping you to cultivate opening or deepening your awareness of Presence? How are you practicing being present to your full and whole reality, and maybe which parts are receiving less of your attention?

The practices

A Field of Awareness Exercise

This is a practice you can try anywhere, but not while driving or operating machinery. Set a timer for ten minutes, and then pick something to focus your eyes on. Look intently at that one thing and study it with as much of your attention as you can. Then, without moving your eyes, start to widen your field of awareness. Without shifting your focus, what else can you see….stay with this for as long as you can, and then start to tune in to your other senses. What sounds can you hear? What aromas can you smell? What about the temperature of the air on your skin, the feel of your clothes, the touch of the ground, your seat, and the taste inside your mouth?

When the timer goes off, sit for a moment with all that fullness before you move on to whatever comes next.

An Other Awareness Exercise

Attention is generative – it creates, brings aspects of things and others into being. The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you bring to the world. Your gaze, when you greet another person derives from a conception of who or what that person is. Often we let our gaze be less than attentive. We look with a superficial quality of attention at another person and see only superficially who and what that person is. Thomas Merton famously describes an experience of a shift in his gaze from superficial to deep, intense and infused with a quality of light and of Oneness-in-Being (communion). This is a long quote, but stay with me here…(plus, we have to be tolerant of his exclusive gender language – he really didn’t get it).

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . . .

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.”

Conjectures of a guilty bystander

This way of seeing was a gift, and temporary, but we can also practice bringing this quality of attention to our seeing and our speaking. How about you try it with a friend or partner – someone you know well, feel warm towards and see often. Can you lift the quality of your attention to them? What do you notice?

Or, how about you try it with someone who you find challenging or difficult to get along with. Can you lower your defenses and see beyond the prejudice of past interactions to shift the quality of your attention? What happens when you try?

What Colour is Presence?

Take some coloured pencils or markers and some paper. Draw lines to diivide the paper into six squares and in each square write down an area of your life – work, hobby, home, friends, family, Spirit/church/whatever fits for you.

In each square write the names of people you interact with or who are significant for that area. Then, without analysis or over thinking it, choose colours and draw something that reflects the quality of your attention for each of the people in each of the squares. When you have done that, pause and check that what you have chosen and what you have drawn feels resonant with your experience….notice if you have reservations or are aware of judgements as you do this and make note of these. Then, again without analysis and trusting your instincts, choose colours and draw something that reflect the quality of each of those people’s attention for you. Pause again and check that you are happy with that as a good representation of the feel of the relationship, again, notice any reservations, dis-ease or judgements.

Then ask yourself:

• Where’s my attention most focussed and what is the quality of that attention? Who am I giving a deeply loving gaze? Who returns that gaze? Do I want to change anything?
• What are my reservations and judgements telling me? Where have they come from? What effect are they having on me and the other? Do I want to change anything?

Talk to God about what you have drawn and what you notice, asking for whatever you need to make whatever changes seem good to you at this time.