Prayer of the Heart, Step Two: "Watching"

You've spent some time now just Letting Go. Perhaps 5-10 minutes. You are still, your body relaxed, your breathing natural, not forced. The Jesus Prayer is riding on your gentle breath. In---"Jesus." Out---"Mercy." Or some other simple prayer that doesn't arouse the mind. Now move on into the second step or stage. The ancients (St. John Climacus, Maximus the Confessor, Dionysius, and others) called the first stage by various names, but they all agree that it is essentially the work of "letting go," or "purgation." The second step then is "illuminative." You simply observe or watch your inner landscape by the light of Christ.

So practice now a presence-of-mind. St. Romuald says, "Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watches for fish." Simply observe your thoughts and feelings without identifying with them. Let them pass through your mind, one by one. Your breath remains effortless. Return to the Jesus Prayer when distracted. If you become dull or bored, refocus your attention. If you become scattered, relax, let go of what pulls at you.

It's as if you've entered a movie theater. You're alone. The projectionist is playing your thoughts and feelings on the screen of your mind.

• Take a seat half way up the rows of seats.
• Sit down with your popcorn, and simply watch.
• You'll find yourself sucked into the drama on the screen and before you know it you're no longer in your seat but plastered on the screen itself trying to get into the drama.
• When you do, simply peel yourself off the screen and walk calmly back to your seat, sit down, pick up your popcorn again and watch.
• When it happens again (and it will)---when you get pulled back in, identified with your thoughts or feelings---walk back to your seat, sit, watch. Again and again without frustration or judgment.

You'll notice what's played on the screen is quite random. One moment you see something you did yesterday. At another, an image comes from childhood. Then a car door opens on the street outside, and suddenly your mind's wondering who's there; you feel excited, interested. You want to stop praying and look. This is normal. With this practice you'll realize how you've spent your whole life with very little distance between your true self and your thoughts; you've nearly always simply gone wherever they've told you to go. This exercise begins to set you free.  You realize you are not your thoughts, nor do you have to follow them slavishly.

Your goal is God. God alone. God is not your thoughts---even lovely thoughts about God.

In this exercise, you're moving past all that's not God so that you may rest in God, knowing God, touching eternity. This is what you seek.

Next post, step three---"Being".

Head Trip: How to Bring Your Thoughts Down to Earth

You can't not think. But thinking can run you ragged. In this brief video I talk a bit about the avalanche of thoughts that came at me pretty fast and furious the other day, and I invite you to practice drawing the mind down into the heart, bringing your thoughts to rest (even briefly) before Christ within you.

Such a practice moves you toward St. Paul's counsel that we are to bring every thought captive to Christ and that we learn to pray without ceasing.

Prayer of the Heart, Step One: "Letting Go"

Find a quiet place and sit down (or lie down) and spend a dozen or more minutes with God. Not the kind of prayer when you talk at God (there's place for that). But the prayer that listens deeply. Yields. Is simply present to God. Being with the Mystery. Communion. What do you do?

Begin this way . . . step one of three.

Sit (or lie) still. Alert. Become aware of your body. Find places of tension with you. (I carry my tension in my jaw and cheeks. My gut too.) Find the tension and release it gently. Let your body, settle into a natural stillness. Now let your breath fall into a natural rhythm. Don't control it. Let it comes to a natural in and out rhythm, as if you were sleeping.  Feel the life in your body.  The Orthodox Fathers searched inwardly until they could feel their heart beating. Tough. But most beginners can feel a sense of aliveness in their hands.

You seek God alone. But your body is a vessel for the Holy Spirit. The fullness of God dwells in your body, scandalous as that may be. The Incarnation teaches us to honor the body; so does Christian thought and practice. If you're going to meet God, you will meet God by becoming more aware of your body, letting your body be that vessel of encounter. If you're not in your body, you'll not meet God. You'll be everywhere else but the one place God's come to meet you.

Sit still. Sit straight. Breathe. Relax. And as you do you may begin to gently let a prayer (like the Jesus Prayer) rise and fall with your breath. In . . . "Jesus." Out . . . "Mercy." Or something similar.

Don't fret if your thoughts drag you away. They'll try. When they do, simply and undramatically return to your senses---follow your breath into your body, and corral the mind with a simple prayer.  Classically, this is the purgative or cleansing step.  With each breath, confess your tension.  Confess the difficulty you have getting still.  Confess the thoughts, ideas, images that want to lead you anywhere but here.  Confess your need for God.  Let go. Release.  Unburden.

Begin with 10 minutes and work up to 25 minutes. Once or twice a day.

Step two next post.

Prayer: Freeing your ego from mass insanity around you

When I talk about the spiritual life and your practice of prayer, I may come off as a bit hard on the ego---that precious little one within us. I suppose I do so because I find we’re so ignorant of its tyranny. We’ve all been around families whose little children are unruly, unmanageable, and frankly, rude, because they’ve not learned as you’ve said so well, to submit “to that which it understands to be for the good of the whole being.” Little children need to be loved and welcomed with space to grow, but they if they are never disciplined they become unhealthy. So too with the ego.

So, I probably exaggerate a bit much, but all with the purpose of bringing the ego back into its place—like helping a two year old know she’s loved but is not the center of the universe. Salvation is about this kind of wholeness. And people who practice interior prayer---deep inner union with Christ---will find their ego reordered and redeemed by Christ within.

They become agents of healing in a world tyrannized by the mass insanity of collective egos run amok.

The ego and the spiritual life

In recent posts I've explored the role of the ego in your spiritual life generally, and prayer particularly. Rob added an important comment/correction that I think will help you: "I wanted to say that I think the ego is getting a bit of a bad press here," he comments. "My understanding is that the ego, in its Freudian sense, is that part of us which tries to mediate the demands of the id (unbridled instinct) and the superego (constricting legalism), as well as the pressures of the real world, to attempt to attain and sustain the health of the whole being." Rob, you're exactly right in your analysis, and in your warning and plea.

The ego is not bad (I do think I’ve said this). It must not be eradicated. Rather, it’s to be healed, restored, returned to its proper function. The ego, as I understand it, is a God-given faculty within us . . . part of the image of God. But because of the Fall (whatever that is), it’s not healthy. It does not properly mediate between the Id and Superego, but too often is nearly completely identified with them.

This is central to our problem as human beings, to our spiritual practice, to the union with God that is the mystery we are all intended to experience. I think sin is to a large extent this deep and “original” (that is, at the core of our being) misidentification of ourselves with our unhealthy egos. I’ve a hunch St. Paul might identify this wounded, broken ego with the “flesh” in his writings—”flesh” that is not to be discarded or abused or despised, but healed by it’s gathering into Jesus Christ. The Incarnation informs us here too.