Insight Trails

Practice: Tapping into the Mystical

By Jon Berry

I FELT LIKE A WATERBORNE VERSION OF THE "BEAR who goes with me” from Delmore Schwartz’s poem when I went for a swim the other night. The first five minutes of treading water with this clumsy, lumbering body seemed like an eternity.  
    But I pressed on – four strokes, breath; four strokes, breath – and eventually I began to move internally as well as through the water. I looked at my watch, and forty minutes had passed. Where had the time gone?

    That but-but-but hesitation melting into effortlessness is not new. It occurs many Sundays when I plunk down onto a bench in Quaker meeting. Skepticism – An hour? Of silence? – gives way to a deep, still stream that renews, resolves, and sends me back into the world.

    I periodically wonder if this stream courses through more of life than I recognize. Is “flow” – that pure state of focus and creativity at work, when I am lost joyfully in the task at hand – just a secular description of the mystical reverie I experience in Quaker meeting?

    Is an athlete in “the zone” – the sheer being-in-the-moment and time standing still around you – in a state akin to what the Friend a few seats over from me feels in meeting for worship?

    Would it bring down some of the walls between our workaday worlds and our spiritual lives if we recognized a kindred spirit – whatever name it goes by – at work (and play) in both places? Would we look at our colleagues differently? Make decisions differently? Look differently at all the “others” in our lives – secular vs. sacred, religion vs. "the world"?

    I have an engrained resistance to religious terms. Too often, they’re used for manipulation, position, and power. But I think that life on some level is essentially mystical. It holds mysteries that we can’t explain – from the edges of knowledge to our even being here (how did that happen). It holds the possibility of joy. Surprise. Wonder. Spaciousness. Moving outside time. Of deeper connection.

    My life works better when I recognize that this deeper flow is everywhere, and not just in “my” church, “my” meeting, “my” meditation spot. I think that’s part of the epiphany that’s beautifully described in the recent PBS documentary The Buddha (photo above). After years of torturous seeking after enlightenment, Siddhartha remembers sitting under a tree, as a child, on a beautiful day, and in that moment realizes that “the underlying fabric of this world,” with all its brokenness, “is joy.”

    That joy, to me, is not so different from the feeling that washed over me the first time I heard a Friend in Quaker meeting recite the wonderfully rhythmic prayer from early Friend Isaac Penington describing the “sweet experience” of spiritual surrender:

    “Give over thine own willing, give over thine own running, give over thine own desiring to know or be anything, and sink down to the seed which God sows in thy heart, and let that be in thee, and grow in thee, and breathe in thee, and act in thee, and thou shalt find by sweet experience that the Lord knows that and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of life, which is his portion.” - Isaac Penington (1681)

    It helps me to know that such moments of joy can break through at any time. That joy can take me by surprise – like the time a few weeks ago driving into New York City when we were directed to the onramp of the Willis Avenue Bridge by a woman traffic cop who was giving directions while dancing (yes, a dancing New York City cop).

    Or slip through my ear buds, when I listen to music both overtly spiritual – from Renaissance polyphony (like Huelgas Ensemble) to the second disc of Van Morrison’s Hymns to the Silence – to spirit-infused affirmations of life, from John Coltrane’s Ballads, to some of Duke Ellington’s solo piano pieces, to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s duets. 

    Sometimes I can help move myself into the stream. But here, too, it’s an idiosyncratic practice drawn from sources as disparate as my faith tradition to 12-step (the Serenity Prayer) to a mantra given me a few years ago by a Buddhist teacher while I was going through a hard stretch. That mantra, “Let this serve to awaken me,” now sits on the bulletin board at my job in a place where my eye easily falls while I’m starting to write.

    The point, I believe, is not how I get there, but that I get there.

 That’s I.T.

    For more on the PBS documentary The Buddha, including to view it, click here. The quotation in my essay is from Mark Epstein, one of the experts interviewed for the program.   

    For the full text of Delmore Schwartz’s poem “The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me” and its evocation of “the withness of the body,” click here.

    For more on Van Morrison’s Hymns to the Silence, which confounded the mainstream rock press (like his other albums on spiritual seeking), but inspired a devoted following among fans like me, click here. Click the album title for more on the other music, Piano Reflections (Duke Ellington), John Coltrane's Ballads,  Utopia Triumphans (Huelgas Ensemble), Ella & Louis, Ella & Louis Again.

    You can find bios and writings of Isaac Penington on the Web, but I think a better starting point for him and other Quaker writers is an anthology like The Quaker Reader.

Thich Nhat Hanh on the Hudson Line

By Jon Berry
I recently began meditating on the commuter train into work. It wasn’t a practice I sought out. But my work situation changed and I'm working in the city again. Rather than give up starting the day with 15 minutes of silence, I decided to see if meditation is transferrable. It is.

While my preferred meditation spots are still my screen porch – where, this time of year, I can look out onto tulips, daffodils, and forsythia, and hear the whistle of birds – or a worn, wooden bench in my Quaker meeting, the “Hudson Line meditation center” carries its own, idiosyncratic benefits.

Putting down the newspaper, tuning out the Blackberry, and turning within, in the midst of a crowded train of rustling newspapers, tap-tapping keyboards, and muffled conversation, has given me a glimpse into things that are obvious to an outsider, but are easy to lose sight of when you do them every day. That I’m in motion. That I’m with other people. That, when I stop my busy-ness, I can see and hear more, and feel grounded -- even when going 60 m.p.h.

I’ve also found anew how porous the boundary is between the spiritual – that great force that breathes life into us – and the rest of life.  In the meanderings of the mind that often accompany the first phase of meditation, my mind wandered one recent morning to an upcoming business trip to California. I thought about what I planned to say in the presentations I’d be giving…then about what was most important to say…then about the issues my clients are facing…then about the human consequences of their companies' success or failure.

This led to thoughts about the people I’d be seeing…how a colleague with small children was doing, and a colleague who grew up in China under Communism and was now here and working for my company…about what a strange and wonderful world we’re living in today. I thought about whether I’d be able to visit a friend whose son has been struggling. I remembered I’d be flying over Indiana, and thought about whether my 82-year-old Dad would be out on his 50-year-old tractor on his centuries-old farm – and I smiled. Then I came back to breath, as always, after my thoughts have carried me momentarily away, and recentered into my meditation.

This idea that the spiritual is always hiding in the non-spiritual parts of our lives is what Thich Nhat Hanh is getting at in the idea that “a dandelion keeps our smile.” The most mundane parts of life, he says, can bring us into “profound communion with life.” Hanh, whom I've been reading on the ride in, writes about waiting in the airport and washing the dishes, but it could as easily be the commuter train or a staff meeting.

To Hanh, spiritual practice begins with breathing and smiling. Like the little revelations that come when we focus consciously on what we’re doing, it’s a deceptively simple idea. We all breathe. We all value moments of joy. This may seem like Buddhism Lite – something Hanh gets occasionally dismissed as. But in context of the practice of engagement in the world that the Vietnamese monk advocates – the “inter-being” that led him and other monks out of their temples during the Vietnam War to attend to the victims of bombings and strive for peace – it is the most serious of spiritual work. I love this quote from his book Peace Is Every Step:

“Our smile affirms our awareness and determination to live in peace and joy. The source of a true smile is an awakened mind.”

I love the words he chooses – “determination” is such a fierce word; the linking of smiles with “an awakened mind,” the decision to live in peace and joy.

If we don’t cultivate a practice of being conscious of our presence in life, the fact of life is like the wonders of the Hudson River that fly by while our noses are buried in the newspaper – there, but not there.

***

“Real strength is not in power, money or weapons but in deep, inner peace.” -- Thich Nhat Hanh

To learn more about Peace Is Every Step, or to buy a copy, please click on this link:

http://www.amazon.com/Peace-Every-Step-Mindfulness-Everyday/dp/0553351397/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208692878&sr=8-1

For more on Thich Nhat Hanh:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thich_Nhat_Hanh

http://www.plumvillage.org/

Practice: Cultivating Silence

By Jon Berry
WHEN I WAS A YOUNG, ASPIRING NEWSPAPER REPORTER, a gruff, old journalist taught me something I never forgot. It wasn’t about writing a lede, developing sources, or other tools of the trade. It was the importance of cultivating silence.

    Whenever he hit a wall in a story or in life, the journalist went off to a corner of his house where he wouldn’t be disturbed, lit a candle, and spent a half-hour in complete quiet. He always came back, he said, with a new perspective.

    A business executive once expressed the same idea in a different way to a friend of mine. “Everyone,” he said, “needs some ceiling time.” He meant that everyone, even busy executives, needs time to meditate. His own daily meditation was to gaze up at the ceiling – the one space in his office that didn’t carry a reminder of work.

    Silence can be uncomfortable. We’ve all had the experience of being asked to observe a moment of silence in a ballgame, dinner, or meeting, when the leader leaps onto the next sentence before the word “silence” has barely been said. We live in a culture of taking action. Slowing down is disruptive. It’s disturbing.

    And it leads to good things. I see it in the people I’ve interviewed so far for Insight Trails. They practice it in different ways – walks in the woods, meditation, prayer, quieting down in religious or spiritual setting. But all have silence as part of their life.

   I experience the power of cultivating silence in the spiritual communities that I’m part of. In the Quaker meeting I go to on Sunday mornings, the hour of silence yields insights, connections, and a sense of calm unlike anything in my day-to-day life.

   I’ve opened meetings in non-spiritual settings – including workplaces – with a brief silence. Sometimes it’s a minute. Mostly it’s just one or two full, deep breaths. I don’t identify the request as spiritual as such – saying instead something like, “first, let’s take a deep breath and think about what we want from this meeting…” This moment of reflection can do wonders for focusing the group’s attention.

    Early Quakers identified the experience of discomfort that we have in silence as the first step in spiritual awakening. They believed that we all have within us an “Inward Light” that impels us toward truth, including uncomfortable truths. The experience brings us fresh points of view and deeper perspectives – in Friends’ terms, closer to God. Within it is the potential to transform, refresh, and heal.

    How does one begin? Recent readings have deepened my appreciation of the process of Quaker silence. Taking these books and pamphlets together, certain themes come through:

    Center Down. This old Quaker term literally means what it says. Quaker worship begins with turning inward, to our center, and focusing down, to get out of our heads. The goal, says J. Brant Bill in Holy Silence, a good, book-length primer on Quaker worship, is to “create a space for God to work within us.” It’s not easy. Cares of the week bubble up. Sounds crowd in – someone coughing, cars going by, children whispering. Some Friends respond by returning to centering down. Others turn the disruptions into prayer – reminders to pray for people’s health, safe travels, and children – “pray the distractions directly into the prayer,” as Douglas Steere puts it in his pamphlet Friends and Worship.

    Deeper Silence. At a certain point, the busyness gives way to a deeper quiet. Bill puts it nicely. Having “cast off from the shore” and made our way “around the edge of the spiritual sea,” we are drawn to “launch out to the depths,” to a place that is “deeper spiritually” and “higher emotionally” than “any place we normally live.” The busyness of the first phase of centering drifts away. It’s as if we’ve stepped outside time.

    Opening up. In this deeper silence, things happen. Life opens up. The controls that we clamp onto day-to-day life – that often keep us from experiencing life – fade away. Some people experience a welling up of gratitude that isn’t accessible to them in everyday experience, from the divine mystery of life to simple beauties around them – birds at the birdfeeder, children on the playground, bicyclists going by.

 Answers. Early Quakers found another, important thing occurred in this deeper state: Answers came to them. Many times they were elusive – an image, a feeling, or a snippet of a phrase. But they resonated as true.

    Rex Ambler, who recreated the process of early Friends’ worship experience in his brief book Light to Live by, writes about the words “be real” coming “out of the blue” to him while meditating on a troubled relationship. He “understood immediately,” he writes, that he had “been acting a part” in his life, with the result that he didn’t know himself or how to be in a relationship. It would take courage and acceptance, but – if he could be true to himself – he had a way through his problem.

    This notion of letting in answers separates the Quakers from other kinds of meditation that emphasize continual letting go. The concept has been integrated into therapeutic practice. “Focusing,” a six-step technique developed by Eugene Gendlin, a psychologist who attended Quaker meetings as a child, is premised on the idea that truth resides in each of us (as opposed to an external authority); that this truth can be experienced; and that it often lies deeper than words or other symbolic expressions. Our inner truths often have corollaries in our bodies – “felt senses” in the chest, gut, or elsewhere. Focusing doesn’t solve the problem. But, in the words of one writer, it can lead to “the beginnings of clarity about changes I need to make in my life.”

    These moments of clarity can also be accompanied by physical effects – sighs, tears, deep feelings of relief. I’ve seen all of these, as well, in Friends’ Meetings for Worship.

 Transformation. Cultivating a practice of sailing into the deep waters of silence, and listening to the deeper truths available there, can be risky business. Early Friends describe being “ripped apart” by the experience. But they also found that opening themselves up in silence changed them in powerful ways. Exposing the old, uncomfortable truths, says Ambler, can lead to “the birth of a new, truer self.” 

    This transformation can spur further changes. It sends us back into the world with a new energy. It’s the underlying idea, I believe, in the often-quoted line from William Penn (founder of Pennsylvania) that “true goodliness does not turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavors to mend it.” It keeps us focused on the big picture and big questions, forcing us, as Bill says, to ask “what does God want?” rather than “our usual ‘what do I want?’” It helps us be with others; a deep, shared silence can be more helpful than any words to a friend in need of comfort. It gives us “strength and power to allay all storms and tempests,” in the words of George Fox, the early leader of Quakerism. Done communally, as in Friends Meetings, it can harmonize us with those around us and open us to wisdom that others possess. Fox counseled his followers to always “carry around some quiet inside thee.”

    Early Friends considered silence to be a direct path to God, the Christ Within. This was a radical idea in its time. Giving up dependence on doctrines, rituals, preachers, and the other accoutrements of the church, and turning inward to find the Eternal, put the Quakers at odds with the establishment.

    Silence remains a radical idea today. In our culture of Blackberries, cell phones, the Internet, high-definition televisions, and continual bombardment of advertising, cultivating silence – as opposed to consuming products – is a radical idea. But it can connect us to – and keep us on – the path we’re supposed to be on.

That’s I.T.
 
J. Brent Bill’s book Holy Silence is a fine introduction to Quaker practice, with guidelines for starting an individual practice or going to a Quaker meeting. For more information, visit Brent’s website:
http://www.brentbill.com/
To purchase a copy of Holy Silence, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1557254206/qid=1113445622/sr=8-6/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i6_xgl14/103-6882526-5818259?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 

Rex Ambler’s great little book Light to Live by chronicles Ambler’s study of early Friends’ approach and step-by-step distillation of it for individual and group meditations.  To purchase a copy, click here:
http://www.quakerbooks.org/search

To read Douglas Steere’s Friends and Worship, a classic introduction to Quaker meeting, please click on this link:
http://www.fgcquaker.org/library/welcome/fa-worship.html

 Nancy Saunders’ article “Focusing on the Light: A Modest Proposal,” is a good introduction to Eugene Gendlin’s technique of Focusing and its links to Quakerism: http://www.focusing.org/focusing_on_the_light.html

For more information on Focusing, click on this link:
http://www.focusing.org/

The website Quakerfinder can help you find a Friends meeting near you:
http://www.quakerfinder.org/

Friends Journal is an excellent resource for learning more about contemporary Quakerism (full disclosure: I serve on the board of this publication, in addition to being a big fan of it.):
http://www.friendsjournal.org/

The image of the Quaker meetinghouse is of Live Oaks Meeting in Houston, Tx. The meeting room features a "skyspace" ceiling window that opens to the sky. For more, see:  http://www.friendshouston.org/