Week 6: Spiritual Practice – Cultivating Inner Strength

Spiritual practice helps us to cultivate inner strength. I believe that to be the case more and more as I am exploring the spiritual practice of Passage Meditation and the other practices that go along with it. I find that I am cultivating strength, stability, patience, compassion, perspective, all these good kinds of things, as I set about the work of slowing down the thought process in my own mind and filling it with good stuff.

I was raised as a Catholic Christian, so I am very comfortable using the Prayer of Saint Francis right now. In fact, I love that prayer and Francis of Assisi, too. I’ve been using it for a while, though, and I am thinking of trying another passage starting next week. I’ve only just started getting into the daily practice of meditation. It has taken me some time to get in the routine of waking up at 415, having a coffee, sitting back down for a half hour, and then biking to work for 5:30. But God knows I need to, because when I get to work (I work in a kitchen), it’s like I am having to practice nonviolence with my co-workers the whole day! Even if I’m starting to rush, just reminding myself that I did my meditation helps me to slow down a bit. I am more attentive, I am slowing down, and I make fewer mistakes because my work is thorough. And when I do make mistakes (this is the best thing I’ve noticed yet about my practice), they do not get the better of me like they used to.

Meditation is helping me to draw from that source of active love (nonviolence) inside of me, because as my mind becomes steadier, the negative current running through my mind loses some of its strength. I’ve noticed that as this happens, I am starting to identify less and less with the negative, violent side of myself. My problem at the outset was thinking about mistakes I have made in the recent past while I was meditating. It’s like they would just barge in and not leave. Some days the conflict happening in my mind between who I used to be and who I am aspiring to be proved too difficult, and I just had to go do something else instead of meditating. We talk a lot about forgiving others when we talk about nonviolence, but less about forgiving ourselves for things we have done to others. This has turned out to be a real challenge for me personally, one I was not anticipating.

Meditation is helping me slow way down, though, and so I can look calmly, and compassionately, into my own mind and find where those negative, destructive, feelings are buried, and slowly uproot them. It’s like with plants. If there are weeds right around your plants, you have to slowly work them from the ground lest you disturb the soil and plants around them. In meditation, I am carefully, slowly uprooting things  I don’t want there, in such a way that I don’t disturb the things I am trying to actually cultivate!

I can see how we are all able to do both wonderful things and awful things depending on where our mind is at. This awareness is helping me to be a lot more compassionate and forgiving towards others and myself. It’s actually a totally liberating feeling, being able to recognize our essential goodness, and not have to use my energy staying angry and frustrated at others (and myself) who are maybe saying or doing things that are not so good. As I have worked on my own mind, though, it has made me less impulsive so that I am not condoning the bad stuff like I used to with either a laugh, another unkind word, or a thoughtless action. I might even be able to think of a creative reply or action, now, because I’m learning to stay calm, and not be intimidated or afraid. I’m harnessing that positive energy in meditation, and using it whenever I need to. Saint Bernadette said she wanted to be not a channel, but more precisely a reservoir of God’s grace. That’s the best I’ve heard it put.

But this is only happening with practice, and regular practice! I emphasize that because the more I meditate on who I want to become, what I want others to be,  and what I want the world to look like, the clearer it is (here is the wisdom of nonviolence) that I am actually meditating on who I am, who we are, and what this whole world really is.

I have to tend to my mind like I would a plant. It will get unruly, maybe even sick, if I don’t take good care of it. I need to pay attention to my mind, feeding it the right things, not poisoning it with other things, pruning things as needed, weeding here and there. Meditation is the tool I’m using to take care of my mind. I hope it will help me to flourish as I am learning about nonviolence 🙂

Brendan

As physical training is important to violence, spiritual practice seems to be just as important to nonviolence. Nonviolence revolves on spiritual principles and as a result if we were to better our spiritual understanding and application of those principles it seems that would help us greatly in nonviolence. Just looking at the successful practitioners of nonviolence throughout history their immense spiritual understanding and capability can be seen. If we want to successfully practice nonviolence then working to imitate them in this respect, even if it will pale to their level of achievement, seems like it would be important work.

Currently my spiritual practice revolves primarily around a couple of practices. Probably the main one is my study of the nonviolent martial art Aikido. Aikido is a Japanese martial art and can be translated as the “Way of Harmony through Energy” or even the “Way of Harmony through Love”. In the practice we train on getting attacked in many different ways, with empty hand techniques or with weapons. The goal is to counter the attack in a way in which not only ourselves but also any attacker is also not hurt as well. It is a physical and mental training of the principles of nonviolence. Some of the understanding is that every action we do has an effect. If someone would attack us and we were to physically hurt a person what would the results be? That particular attack may be stopped but the negative feelings they had for us would increase. In addition, if animosity remained it would just encourage the attacker to learn more skills of violence to win any next contest. As a result, just like anything based on violence in order to stop any more violent attack in the future I would have to become more violent myself. This would not only increase the violence in the world but also leave one in a state of moral slavery. My goodness would then depend on the actions of my opponent, if they became more violent than so would I. As a result my level of morality or goodness would be dependent on factors outside of myself. I think this is a microcosm for society as a whole. In Aikido however, if we are able to accept a violent attack and respond with kindness by neutralizing the attack and intentionally and purposefully not hurting an attacker than it does the opposite. It takes the opponent’s mind and teaches a lesson. It sets an example of returning compassion for aggression, which can transform both the attacker and the Aikido practitioner as well. I find the continuing practice of training to not harm someone even if they were just an instant ago attempting to inflict harm while controlling the situation is a good training ground for practicing non-violence. This constant training and practice I feel has applications in everyday life and the consistent physical and mental training involved makes it a good and transformative practice for working on non-violent principles.

A second practice I have been working on is the program by Eknath Easwaran, which I think has been expanded a little by Professor Nagler. I have been working on passage meditation for the last couple of years on and off and have got more serious in the last year of so. I have still have a lot to learn but I have been consistent about meditating everyday in the morning and have been trying to incorporate the other elements in, with varying success. There is a workshop for passage meditation in my area in September so I am hoping to attend if possible and gain a little more exposure and perhaps get some guidance in some of the areas I have questions on or am struggling with.

While talking about spiritual practice, I was at a museum one day and they had us reenact a lunch counter scene from the civil rights movement. They had some of us in the audience either play the demonstrators at the counter or their harassers.  I was one of the harassers in this demonstration. We basically crowded around the people at the lunch counter and tried make them feel really uncomfortable to give them a feel of what it was like to be in that position. It had an effect on me and I also think it had an effect on the people who were playing the demonstrators at the lunch counter.  From my readings, it seems that those who participated in the civil rights movement went through similar training to get them ready for when the real thing happened. I believe such training is extremely helpful. It has led me to wonder if this type of training is not something that could be implemented at some religious services. Often religious services preach and ask people to live certain moral standards however may not put them in the best position to do so since they just hear about it and do not get a chance to train and practice it in a controlled environment. As a result, I wonder if adding a training component at some services where people can actually practice in a training environment putting those principles to practical use could possibly be of some help.

I have been practicing Passage Meditation and Eknath Easwaran’s 8 point program for 20 years. It’s been hard work and often feels like I’m getting nowhere at all, but if I look back over that time, I am literally a completely different person now. I think that my marriage, career, efforts as a father and relationships would all have suffered hugely if I had not had my practice. I think that spiritual practice has to be the basis of nonviolence work because it gives us inner resources of strength, endurance, self control and above all hope, that we will need to motivate ourselves and others in the efforts ahead.

I think that even if you use a different form of meditation, then please consider the other 7 disciplines that Easwaran expounds. They can be practiced independently and have all changed the way I view myself and others. I think that the mantram will be particularly helpful in stressful situations when others challenge our nonviolence, possibly violently. Gandhi called the mantram his staff of life and I think he probably used it all the time.

I think that the power of committing to daily practice is that even when my meditation feels dry and unhelpful or just full of sleep or worry, I just do it anyway because the habit is now so strong. And that in itself is a source of self respect and strength.

I also think that spiritual practice is a wonderful antidote to the fear of ageing and death. How can we fear being old or redundant to society, if we are all on this wonderful inner adventure that is always ongoing as long as we are alive. Even prison would give us an opportunity for more meditation!

Love Paul

I grew up in the Lutheran church and spent a few years as a member of a Methodist congregation, but as I got older I found that there were too many things about organized religion that did not sit right with me and I left.  I studied religion in depth in college and I have spent my adult life exploring a number of different spiritual traditions including yoga, earth-based spirituality, shamanism, unitarian universalism, and Christian mysticism in a search for the right fit for me.

This question is interesting for me, because I think that my search for a spiritual “home” was driven by a recognition, that I had not articulated, that I needed something to support my activism.  I was noticing that there was a widening chasm between the person I wanted to be in general, and the parent I wanted to be in particular, and the person who was showing up in the world every day.  I knew I needed to develop a skill set that would allow me to be more patient and compassionate, and that in order to do so I would have to bypass the mind and find what lies beneath.

About a year ago, I started a regular Zen practice and I think I have finally found my spiritual home.  I like that it gives me a framework within which to look at myself and the world around me and to examine my judgements and reactions to things.  I have found that it has helped me to develop many of the skills and qualities I’ve been committed to on an intellectually but have failed to really embody.  And in the fall, I will begin my formal study of the Precepts, or the ethics taught by the Zen tradition, and I am very much looking forward to examining the connection between my spiritual practice and the way it is manifested in my life!

Kelly  🙂