In his book Just This, Father Richard Rohr considers how contemplative prayer allows us to release our thoughts, finding deeper wisdom and guidance:
Contemplation is a panoramic, receptive awareness whereby we take in all that a situation, moment, or person offers without judging, eliminating, or labeling anything. It is pure and positive gazing that abandons all negative pushback so we can begin to recognize inherent dignity. It takes much practice and a lot of unlearning of habitual responses.
We have to work at contemplation and develop practices whereby we recognize our compulsive and repetitive patterns. In doing so, we allow ourselves to be freed from the need to “take control of the situation”—as if we ever really could anyway!
It seems we are addicted to our need to make distinctions and judgments, which we mistake for intelligent thinking. Most of us think we are our thinking, yet almost all thinking is compulsive, repetitive, and habitual. We are forever writing our inner commentaries on everything, commentaries that always reach the same practiced conclusions. That is why all forms of meditation and contemplation teach a way of quieting this compulsively driven and unconsciously programmed mind.
The desert fathers and mothers wisely called this process “the shedding of thoughts.” We don’t fight, repress, deny, identify with, or even judge them; we merely shed them. We are so much more than our thoughts about things, and we will feel this more as an unlearning than a learning of any new content. [1]
When we meditate consistently, a sense of our autonomy and private self-importance—what we think of as our “self”—falls away, little by little, as unnecessary, unimportant, and even unhelpful in many cases. The imperial “I,” the self that we likely experience as our only self, reveals itself as largely a creation of our mind.
Through regular practice of contemplation, we become less and less interested in protecting this self-created, relative identity. We don’t have to attack it; it calmly falls away of its own accord, and we experience a kind of natural humility.
If our prayer goes deep, “invading” our unconscious, as it were, our whole view of the world will change from fear to connection. We won’t live inside our fragile and encapsulated self anymore, nor will we feel any need to protect it. In meditation, we move from ego consciousness to soul awareness, from being fear-driven to being love-drawn. That’s it in a few words!
Of course, we only have the courage to do this if Someone Else is holding us, taking away our fear, doing the knowing, and satisfying our desire for a Great Lover. If we can allow that Someone Else to lead us in this dance, we will live with new vitality, a natural gracefulness, and inside of a Flow that we did not create. It is the life of the Trinity, spinning through us. [2]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Just This (CAC Publishing, 2017), 60–61.
[2] Rohr, Just This, 66–67.
Image Credit and inspiration: Patrick Hendry, untitled (detail), 2015, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. A person stands in a contemplative “just this” moment with the night sky.
Story from Our Community:
A morning writing practice gets me centered each day. Over the past few years, three Haiku stanzas surface from the Silence most mornings. This was given today:
breathing noticing / opening now to presence / I find it all here
patiently waiting / I hear welcome we missed you / we breathe together
grounded and rooting / in darkness reaching for light / practicing just this.
—Bob D.
