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.
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.
Here's a helpful talk that urges us to consider ways we can learn to engage technology responsibly. Just because cell phones and the internet makes just about anything available to us at any time doesn't mean we're obligated to stay wired 24 hours a day. But many of us do, as some of these humorous (and alarming) examples make clear.
If we're unconscious and out of control (or being controlled because we're unconscious), we never fully present where we are. This is partial definition of insanity.
In his blog about this video talk and its relation to the teaching of Jon Kabat-Zinn, Trent Gilliss comments:
"Kabat-Zinn describes a person viewing a sunset. Instead of simply taking it in, he says, we either are thinking about how we might write about it (or perhaps tweet or blog it), or, that certain somebody standing next to you actually has to gab away and tell you how gorgeous it is — which completely removes you from the moment of recognition and contemplation. In other words, we have this compulsion to do something with the moment in order to make it meaningful. We are not being mindful."
Prayer is life. But we''ll never meet up with God if we're not really living it.
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.
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.