Meditation techniques for the busy or impatient

Meditation is not limited to a particular religious tradition.  Across the world, people have practiced meditation for millennia, finding the practice not only a source of strength and inspiration for their spiritual growth, but a benefit to the whole of their life. Here's a helpful link to some meditation techniques for you if you practice meditation, or would like to, but find yourself distracted, busy, or impatient:

Meditation techniques for the busy or impatient

Whatever your religious orientation, these suggestions can help you develop a richer spiritual life and provide you with broader health benefits.

You may find yourself wary of techniques that don't overtly speak your religious language.  Let's say you're a Christian.  Then, consider the meditation techniques as the frame around the priceless painting that God is to you.  Remember, the Trinity is the focus of your attention; the meditation techniques are simply the frame leading to contemplation of the divine.  That the frame might highlight a Buddhist's or Muslim's or Native American's priceless painting doesn't mean you can't also use the frame.

The technique is just a frame.  It's to focus your worship not hold it.  And the sooner the frame's forgotten the sooner you'll be lost in wonder, joy, and love.

Signs of Awakening

There are signs of awakening all around us.  And there are people who are daring to give voice to that awakening; they’re trying to find words to put with their experience.  Sarah’s one who’s reaching for words—and she, like so many others, is helping us to imagine the future by doing the hard work of bringing to the light of day what the Holy Spirit is speaking in her during these twilight hours before the Dawn breaks upon us.

“There’s a longing that’s stirring within me—a longing for holiness.  You’re right about the Wal-Mart style of Christianity, and it’s created an experience of deep sadness in me, a disappointment at the overall cheapness of it.

“I long for something of value, something of real goodness that cannot be quantified or made systematic. My longings are hard to explain; it’s more of an I-know-it-when-I-see-it kind of thing, and I know it when I see it because it’s real.  I’ve also experienced the kind of conversations within church communities that sound like they’re on the right track, but they’re not.  People ask each other: ‘what does it look like to be real?  How do we create something authentic?’”

Sarah rightly knows there’s an intrinsic link between holiness and realness.  And she knows there’s something false lurking nearby when realness is used for some other purpose.  The moment real can’t stand on its own as a good thing in its own right, is the moment you’ve come face to face with phoniness all dressed up and looking pretty.

If you’re weary and wary of the charade, chances it’s not cynicism that’s at work in you.  You’re part of a larger awakening.  But it could turn to cynicism if you don’t link up with others who’ve glimpsed the first rays of Christ’s coming dawn.

In my experience they're often nearer than you think.  But knowing each other requires guts; we’ve got to try to give voice to what we’re longing for, and risk speaking it to others.

How to greet the day

The words you mutter to yourself matter, especially upon waking. After staggering in and out of the bathroom, you may have one word on your mind—coffee.  If not coffee, then you’ve got a shower on your mind, or letting the dog out, finding the newspaper or getting yourself out the door and off to the gym.  As your brain gets your body moving, it begins to churn with the obligations of the day, tugging you out of this moment, lurching you anxiously down the road, or fretting over something that happened yesterday that you’ve got to live with today.  These thoughts are nearly automatic. The ego, your internal self-manager, is already doing its job in the way it’s done it since you were little.

In some sense, from the moment you awaken (and also in your dreams), you’ve been praying without ceasing—not to God, but to the roles and responsibility, fears and ambitions that drive you.  The din of this unceasing, interior muttering, the pressure of all that’s coming at you, distracts you from the stunning wonder of the dawn, the light that’s coming to you as a new day begins, and the God who’s running toward you now, even before you’re ready for God’s embrace.

But the unconscious muttering of your mind hides all this, just as morning fog or city smog hides the dancing sun.  Your muttering matters.  So, take charge of those first few words.  You can’t shut out completely the words that tumble through your brain, but you can, over time, swap them out for other, better words.

Try these instead—

Look!  My Beloved comes, leaping on the mountains, bounding over the hills.  My Beloved comes and says to me, “Come away, my love, come away. Let me see your face; let me hear your voice.  For your face is lovely and your voice is sweet.” from Song of Solomon 2.8-14

Each day, look to the sun (or wherever it’s supposed to be if you can't see it for one reason or another), and utter these words with a lusty, throaty and audible voice.  They’re better than a double shot of Espresso.

And you’ll gain eyes to see God coming toward you even if you’re stuck in gridlock during your morning commute.

The door is too easily ignored

After a brief pause to address a few reader comments, this post follows up on God meets us in the most surprising places: Those monks and mystics worth their salt in any age also faced the daily, ordinary life of cleaning bathrooms, preparing food, working in the field, facing people they’d rather not face, and falling asleep in prayer.  I’ve often wished we had more from them about living alert to God in the midst of it all.  But I’ve come to appreciate their reserve.

“If you’re going to watch me,” they seem to say, “then watch me at prayer.  Follow me in prayer and you’ll have light to guide you in your daily life.  Your path will be made known to you.  But you must not hurry.”

Start then wherever you are.  Wake up to this moment, this place.  Beware of the impulse to find a teacher, a guru, a conference, or some sacred place that will launch you into the ecstasy you seek.  If you don’t find it here, where you are, you’ll likely not find it at all.  Follow those impulses and you’ll spend your life always looking elsewhere when the door you’re looking for is as obvious as the nose on your face . . . and just as easily ignored.

The early desert fathers and mothers cherished a little saying that kept them centered in the only place God comes to meet us.  Here.  Now.

“An elder said: If you see a young monk by his own will climbing up into heaven, take him by the foot and throw him to the ground, because what he is doing is not good for him.” (Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert, 96)

If you’re going to be found by God, you’ll be found on the particular ground where you spend your time each day.

God meets us in the most surprising places

Much of the spiritual writing we’ve inherited comes from monks and mystics.  Their vision for the spiritual life may inspire you, but it can also leave you with the nagging impression that you’ll probably never find your way into enough open, quiet space to let God find you. You have a hard enough time finding yourself in the midst of the busy, demanding, active life that is yours.  You’re lucky if you can squeeze out a handful of minutes each day to return to the center through prayer and meditation.  Because you cannot withdraw and live a life of prayer, much monastic teaching and most mystic intimacy with God seems beyond your reach, written for someone who doesn’t share your kind of life.

None of those who write anything worthwhile about the spiritual life intend this.  They know that the most humbling and ordinary tasks of daily life matter.  They do not intend to leave any of us with the impression that the real spiritual life is lived in some airy-fairy place of bliss.  No, God meets us in the most surprising of places . . . where we live and work and play each day.

In Jesus, God came among us bodily.  God made matter holy.  God blessed and celebrated ordinary life.  God hidden, incognito, tucked away in the most surprising of places.  God growing in the womb of a teenager.  God born in a peasant’s stable.  God crying, nursing, needing someone to change his shorts.

Those who were looking elsewhere for God’s grand entrance missed God’s humble coming.