In 2011 I stumbled into a meditation class at an Episcopalian Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas in which Eastern and Christian meditation were equally emphasized.  The class was exploring a book by Richard Rohr, “The Naked Now,” a Franciscan priest in Albuquerque, New Mexico who was the founder and director of The Center For Action and Contemplation.  It was this class and luminaries such as Rohr, Thich Nat Hanh, Thomas Merton, et al who brought to my consciousness the relentless “spin” of my religious mind/heart.

That class taught me there was no “right” way to meditate.  I learned that meditation was about reining in the incessant chattering of the “monkey mind” and that any daunting of that relentless mantra of the egoic mind was the goal.  The basic instruction was, “When you find your mind, wandering away, merely bring it back to a mantra, a ‘sacred word,’ or even one’s breath.  The goal was merely “reining in” that mind, not doing anything “perfectly.”  One thing I quickly realized was just how much my spiritual life was about “getting it right,” aka “perfectly.”  I gradually became aware of the relentless unconscious mantra, an internal dialogue which had haunted my life, “Do it perfectly.” This venture into the discipline of meditation brought to my consciousness the tyranny of self-talk which was a piped-in “muzak” drone designed merely to fill the otherwise pregnant void of my life.

This experience was the advent of “the light of day” to my life, inviting me to “listen” better to what I was hearing “out there” but also to the incessant grind of unexamined internal dialogue.  “Ears to hear that were ‘hearing not’” were beginning to hear for the first time; eyes that had never seen before were beginning to see for the first time.  One could even say I was being “born again” in a very real sense though without the hysteria of the “born again” culture.  I want to share here a relevant observation from a noted teacher of meditation, Laurence Freeman, who is the founder of the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM):

To see reality as it is, or at least to free oneself progressively of its
filters, is a major act of faith. It expresses the trusting face of faith
because our attachment to the beliefs and rituals of our tradition can
become a false and falsifying security. And so, many deeply religious
people feel an aversion or antipathy to meditation because it seems to
(and indeed does) undermine the secure boundaries that protect our world
view and our sense of being superiorly different from others.

A way of faith, however, is not a dogged adherence to one point of view
and to the belief systems and ritual traditions that express it. That
would make it just ideology or sectarianism, not faith. Faith is a
transformational journey that demands that we move in, through and beyond
our frameworks of belief and external observances—not betraying or
rejecting them but not being entrapped by their forms of expression
either. St Paul spoke of the way of salvation as beginning and ending in
faith. Faith is thus an open-endedness, from the very beginning of the
human journey. There is, of course, value in a framework, a system and
tradition. [But] if we are stably centered in these, the process of change
unfolds and our perspective of truth is continuously enlarged.

NOTE:  Laurence Freeman, WCCM, and meditation culture are a gift to me as a result of blogging.  Freeman and many others I would never had heard of without having cyber “met” a woman from Toowoomba, Australia.  Thank you, Anne-Marie.