How Should I Pray

How should I pray?  Teach the art of prayer to me, that I may devote myself to you.  Should I meditate upon the wonders of your creation?  Should I give thanks for the wisdom of my elders?  Should I praise you for your many gifts to me?  Should I reflect on all the things I have done wrong?  Or should I simply wait until you speak to me?  Tell me truly: how should I pray?

I Worship You

I worship you in every religion that teaches your laws and praises your glory.  I worship you in every plant whose beauty reflects your beauty.  I worship you in every event which is caused by your goodness and kindness.  I worship you in every place where you dwell.  And I worship you in every man and woman who seeks to follow your way of righteousness.

                                                Zoroaster, 6^th c. BCE

This is what I want to happen: that our earth mother
may be clothed in ground corn four times over,
that frost flowers cover her over entirely;
that the mountain pines far away over there
may stand close to each other in the cold;
that the weight of snow crack some branches!
In order that the country may be this way
I have made by prayer sticks into something alive.

            Zuni Prayer

            When asked why people respond to him {The Dalai Lama} so warmly, he once replied, “I have no special qualities. Perhaps it is because all my life I have mediated on love and compassion with all my strength of mind.” Apparently he does that for four hours every morning, no matter what the demands of the coming day are or where he is, and again for a brief time at the end of the day. Imagine that.

            John Kabat-Zinn

            As the pace of our lives continues to be accelerated by a host of forces seemingly beyond our control, more and more of us are finding ourselves drawn to engage in meditation, in this radical act of being, this radical act of love, astonishing as that may seem given the materialistic “can do,” speed-obsessed, progresses-obsessed, celebrity-and other-people’s lives-obsessed orientation of our culture. We are moving in the direction of meditative awareness for many reasons, not the least of which may be to maintain our sanity, or recover our perspective and sense of meaning, or simply to deal with the outrageous stress and insecurity of this age. By stopping and intentionally falling awake to how things are in this moment, purposefully, without succumbing to reaction or judgment and by working wisely with such occurrences, with a healthy dose of self compassion when we do succumb, and by our willingness to take up residency for a time in the present moment in spite of all our plans and activities aimed at getting somewhere else, completing a project or pursuing desired objects or goals, we discover that such an  act is both immensely, discouragingly difficult and yet utterly simple, profound, hugely possible after all, and restorative of mind and body, soul and spirit.

            John Kabat-Zinn

Ultimately ethics and morality are not about heroes and leaders and shining examples. They are about the day-to-day and moment-to-moment ways in which we conduct our own lives, and what our basic stance is toward those tendencies in our own minds that drive us toward greed, hatred, and delusion when what we most need is to tap the deeper resources of our own hearts for kindness, generosity, compassion, and goodwill. These are not merely sentimental feelings one might feel all cozy about on Christmas Eve, but truly a way to live, a practice in its own right, and the foundation of healing, transformation, and the possibilities available to us through mediation, and through mindfulness.

            Jon Kabat-Zinn

It is now harder to pay attention to any one thing and there is more to pay attention to. We are easily diverted and more easily distracted. We are continuously bombarded with information, appeals, deadlines, communications. Things come at us fast and furious, relentlessly. And almost all of it is man-made; it has thought behind it, and more often than not, an appeal to our greed or our fears. These assaults on our nervous system continually stimulate and foster desire and agitation rather than contentedness and calmness. They foster reaction rather than communion, discord rather than accord or concord, acquisitiveness rather than feeling whole and complete as we are. And above all, if we are not careful, they rob us of time, of our moments. We are continually being squeezed or projected into the future as our present moments are assaulted and consumed in the fires of endless urgency.

            Jon Kabot-Zinn from Coming to our Senses

   Life responds to wise attention in remarkable ways, perhaps in part because of the deep plasticity of the nervous system. But wise attention requires that, when faced with great life challenges, especially those that bring with them enormous suffering and grief, we be willing, in the face of all our pain and turmoil and even feelings of despair, to do a certain kind of work on and with ourselves, a work that no one on the planet can do for us, no matter how much they would want to, no matter how much love they have for us, no matter how badly they feel for us, no matter how much they are helping us in the ways that they can help….

   But in the end, what else is there to do?  It is your very life that hangs in the balance, and for that reason alone, the work is profoundly satisfying in addition to being so challenging. We discover that it is indeed intrinsically fulfilling to be fully present, to attend non-reactively, non-judgmentally, even when, especially, what we might be attending to is fear, or loneliness, confusion, and the psychic pain that accompanies such mind states. We discover that such mind states and body states are indeed workable, and that means, ultimately, profoundly healing.

To commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of modern times.  –Thomas Merton

            Saying “yes” to more things than we can actually manage to be present for with integrity and ease of being is in effect saying “no” to all those things and people and places we have already said “yes” to.

            Why is that?  Precisely because if we are overwhelmed, it is likely that we will be so agitated, so distraught, so self-preoccupied, that we won’t be able to meet anybody or any situation from ease and the fullness of our own being, and that includes, most importantly, even an authentic meeting of ourselves and those we most care about.  Perhaps we would do well to examine the impulses that drive us into such unfortunate circumstances.

            Jon Kabat-Zinn

            The more things go “our way” for awhile, the more we can believe that that is the way it is supposed to be.  And when things don’t go “our way,” which sooner or later they will not, we can get angry, disappointed, depressed, devastated, forgetting that it was never “supposed to be” any one way at all.  How our lives unfold is virtually never exactly the way we think they will, or plan for them to, or desire that they do.  It is never entirely under our control.  Yet we persist in thinking that things should be a certain way, that I should not have to suffer this indignity, or that loss, or should be treated this way and certainly not that way; and that the world should be a certain way, that wars shouldn’t happen, or earthquakes.  And the more powerful we are in terms of our status in an organization or within society, or even within the society of our own head, the more susceptible we become to intimations of our own infallibility, to an arrogance that forgets that all things change in ways that are uncertain, that nothing is fixed for long, and that we are all subject to the law of impermanence.  Such a simple, elegant realization.  It could readily, if kept in mind, counterbalance our natural tendencies toward arrogance and self-importance, and help us to learn how to live more in line with the dharma, the tao, with the lawfulness of all things, especially in the face of hardships, of dukkha, or anguish, if only we would take it to heart.

            Jon Kabat-Zinn in “Coming to our Senses”

The aim is also to remind us that there is nothing passive about awareness.  Our state of mind and everything that flows from it affect the world.  When our doing comes out of being, out of awareness, it is likely to be a wiser, freer, more creative and caring doing, a doing that can promote greater wisdom and compassion and healing in the world.  The intentional engagement in mindfulness within various strata of society, and within the body politic, even in the tiniest ways, has the potential, because we are all cells of the body of the world, to lead to a true flowering, a veritable renaissance of human creativity and potential, an expression of our profound health as a species, and as a world.

            Jon Kabat-Zinn in “Coming to our Senses”

A thoughtful piece for consideration in Lent

            We are wont to vilify particularly egregious emergences of ignorance as evil.  This allows us to assert categorically our own identification with goodness in contradistinction.  It is a gross and ultimately unhelpful gloss, even if there are elements of truth in it.  Both views, of others as evil and of ourselves as good, may be better characterized as ignorant.  For both ignore the fundamental disease, the one that manifests in human beings when we fall prey to unawareness of the preciousness of life, and wantonly or witlessly harm others in seeking pleasure and power for ourselves.  In the Book of Psalms, evil is often referred to as “wickedness” but perhaps a better rendering would be “heedlessness,” an inattention to the full spectrum of the inner and outer landscape of our experience.  This inattention allows us to artificially separate self from other, the “I” from the “Thou,” to de-sacralize the world and thus make it predicated on division, on artificial separation and boundaries.  We forget or never recognize a deeper underlying unity that allows for greater possibility, for the emergence of new degrees of freedom and greater latitude in our maneuverability and conduct, both in our interior lives and within the vast diversity which is the world.