In this short video, I meet with you at dawn at the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California. I'm on a weeklong prayer retreat, and in this video introduce you to a simple practice for not only awakening to the new day, but to an experience of prayer that includes all your senses, and therefore by-passes mere thoughts about God to meet with the real presence of God. I tell the story of a man who'd felt a growing distance between what he knew in his heart about God and what he was actually experiencing. This is an invitation to spiritual awakening.
An exercise for awakening to the present
So, here’s the exercise to move toward what I've written this past week: Today, and for each day of the coming week, make a little study of how frequently your mind pulls you into the past or future.
- In an average hour of your day, what percentage of the time do your thoughts dwell on things from the past or over concerns about the future?
- When you find yourself absorbed in the past or present, study how you feel. What is your stress level? Are you smiling or frowning?
- Observe your handwriting and the way you talk to others: what does your handwriting they tell you about your inner state? Your words—the inflection, speed, and type of language you choose?
Also watch for those activities, projects, or persons with whom you find yourself intensely present. How do you feel? What do you notice about the quality of your experience when you look deeply into the eyes of the person you’re with or when you are undistracted—nearly absorbed—in a project or task?
What it's like when God is more than a mere idea
What I've been saying in these recent posts is more than mere empty words, I assure you. I was once assaulted by a disease that, while the doctors told me it probably wouldn’t kill me, it made me feel like it was. A couple years later, my marriage collapsed. And a year after that, my closest friend took his life. I know what it’s like to live when life feels a lot like hell.
But I also learned in the midst of it all about the power of the present.
I learned to make friendship with each and every moment.
My body felt like it was killing me, but I was not, in each breathing moment, dead. My marriage of twenty-three years fell apart and I fell into an emotional free-fall, but I was not, in each breathing moment, falling apart. My friend’s mind broke, but my mind was not, in each breathing moment, broken.
In each moment I was alive, breathing. And so long as I stayed in the moment, life came to me and even (believe it or not) I could taste the most exquisite happiness. I learned the habit of returning to the moment every time my mind pulled me into the woulda, shoulda, coulda’s of the past, or I head-tripped through fantasies about a better future.
In the present I learned to taste God and that taste of God was nothing like what I’d known of God when God was a mere idea.
Moving beyond how trapped you feel
Worry, anxiety, and ambition robs you of the gift of what is coming to you now. Of course, it’s possible that your now is full of pain. Perhaps you have cancer. Maybe a loved one has died and you’re full of grief. You might be living with depression or someone has betrayed you or you’re losing your business. And frankly, now is not where you want to be. But the truth is, right now you are not dead, even if cancer’s trying to kill you. Right now you might be broke, but there’s still life in you. Yes, you might be telling yourself all kinds of stories about how bad things are, how things might be different “if only,” how trapped you feel. And yes, these videos seem to play in your mind unceasingly, dragging you into the past and paralyzing you as you look toward the future.
But they’re not real, not really. They may have been real, and they might become real, but they are not real right now.
Right now, the birds are singing. You’re breathing. Blood is moving through your veins. There is someone, somewhere who loves you. The sun is shining above, even if it’s raining around you. In this moment, things are not as bad as your mind tells you they are. In this moment—if you can wake up from the dream long enough—there is enough beauty to give you pleasure, to gift you with an exquisite and unexplainable happiness.
How unconscious are you?
When you decide to awaken from the dream-world in which you're living, you become aware of how unconscious you are to this present moment. Test this: ask yourself how much of the drive to work or home you actually remember; evaluate how much of this morning's meal you actually tasted. Instead, when you wake up to the present, when you're fully awake now to God, to yourself, to the world around you, there is a new quality to your experience of this present moment.
Jesus said, “Do not worry about tomorrow” (Matthew 6.34).
With these words, he liberates us from the pull of the past, the tyranny of tomorrow. He’s inviting you now to wake up from the dream and enter the splendor of the Kingdom of God which is here among us, within us (Luke 17.21); he is urging you to step into the gift of the Eternal Life now.