Brian McLaren describes how contemplative practices allow us to “mind our mind,” making space for thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations without getting caught up in them.
When you learn to mind your mind, you begin by allowing your thoughts and feelings to shout or cry, to throw a tantrum and have a meltdown. It’s fruitless and ultimately quite harmful to perpetually beat down those feelings. So for some period of time, you let your inner committees express their distress and negotiate, firing up the subway for a frantic rush hour.
And then, at some point, you have to get off the train and exit the subway station and find a quiet place. Perhaps you’ll meet with a circle of trust, processing with some friends what you’re struggling with. Perhaps you’ll find some solitude to practice private contemplation.
One of the most time-tested approaches to private contemplation could be called the focus/release method…. I might focus on a single, simple word. I might focus on a phrase or mantra…. Sometimes, when simple breath, heartbeat, words or phrases aren’t working, I might listen to music, dance, cook, or simply walk mindfully and focus on what I see around me…. I may go running, practice yoga, or play a game, so I have to shift my focus from inner turmoil to physical endurance and prowess.
McLaren names the freedom and creativity that arises from contemplative practice:
Contemplation liberates me from being a perpetual prisoner of my trains of thoughts and feelings; it helps me realize that I am not my thoughts and feelings. It helps me see that these inner reactions and negotiations happen to me and within me without my consent, like digestion, like sleep, like fatigue or laughter.
In the stillness, new insights, comfort, and ways of being often arise. If stepping off the train is letting go, and if dwelling in the stillness is letting be, receiving these gifts is letting come. When these new gifts come, I experience a kind of liberation, a setting free. All of my best creative work seems to flow from this deep place of restful, receptive awareness beneath my mental subway system….
What we experience in the letting-come phase some people describe as intuition. Many would call it the gentle voice of God speaking within them. Seasoned contemplatives like Thomas Merton describe letting go, letting be, letting come, and setting free as discovering the true self. Others call it becoming the best self. I tend to think of it as becoming the integrated, unitive, or connected self….
This connected self seeks to bring together smaller competing parts into larger harmonious wholes. It seeks to integrate the known and the unknown. It wants to help the parts of [me] to live intentionally in relation to each other and to the reality outside of me. It seeks harmony and interdependence among parts, not domination, manipulation, exclusion, and oppression. It holds the both/and of part and whole.
Reference:
Brian D. McLaren, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2024), 45–46, 47.
Image credit and inspiration: Nsey Benajah, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. A gentle openness, relaxed and present, welcomes each moment as it is; neither clinging to feeling nor fleeing from it—simply accepting and allowing it to flow through.
Story from Our Community:
My contemplative practice centers around what I call “The Still.” This practice is based on Brother Lawrence’s guidance to “live constantly in the experience of that sacred presence, the ground of all being.” Yesterday, when I was in emotional pain, I practiced getting still within myself, and I felt a physical gentleness drawing over me from the head down, like a soft, warm, comforting cloak. To me, this feeling is universal love—that from which the cosmos is made. My prayer for each of you reading this is that you become aware that sacred presence is already here with all of us!
—Philippa R.
