Cultivating a Spiritual Practice

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“As vast is the infinite world beyond is the world within the lotus of the heart.” -The Chandogya Upanishad

 

A spiritual practice is a powerful tool for the integration of nonviolence on a daily basis. Spiritual here does not mean ‘religious’ or ‘dogmatic’; it means rather an ‘inner awareness’ or an integrated perspective on life. One becomes aware that just as there is an outer world with physical laws, there is, inside of ourselves a world with another set of laws. For example, no one will disagree if we appeal to the law of gravity and say that if you drop a vase from the top of a building, it will break. A similar awareness of a law of our inner life tells us that if we cause harm to someone else, we harm ourselves in the process. But it is not all negative, either. When we do good to another person, or when we cultivate the strength of our will-power to overcome a negative habit, such as resentment or greed, we benefit at a deep level in all of our relationships.

At Metta, our working definition of nonviolence draws from this integration with the inner life of people: nonviolence is the energy released in a successful struggle with a negative drive. In other words, when everything inside of me is telling me to act out hatred toward a person who insults me, and when I overcome that negative conditioning and transform it into something positive and constructive, I am engaging the power of nonviolence. This does not, and cannot, happen without daily practice of training the mind in meditation or a similar discipline. We might add to that training the commitment to learn everything we can about nonviolence, and if we dare, begin replacing our dependency on the commercial mass media with its ongoing message that we are not capable of self-discipline. We have to work at it every day. When we train our minds to respond nonviolently in what seem to be small matters, we are preparing ourselves for nonviolence on a much larger scale– modeling how to resist nonviolently and to cooperate selflessly as a movement.

 

See also:

Person Power

The Story of Belonging

How to Meditate

Or off-site:

The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation