Reflections on a three year journey and one that continues. 

Our circle dedicated to the practice of presence started in the fall of 2011. For several years we focused on meditation and how to settle into an sense of the embodied now. We kept coming back to our arms and legs, fingers and toes. We explored how the superego, or the inner critic, attacks us, judges us and insists that we cannot and should not expand beyond the confines of our contracted familiar ego self. We faced the need to dismiss and reject this shaming, debilitating voice. We are not children in need of continual scolding and punishment. We are beings of presence capable and desiring to grow and expand into the spaciousness and love.

Many people have come over these years,  and some have stayed. There is a sense of presence as we take our seats together. The sincerity, openness, trust and depth has slowly grown over the seasons of our work together. We hold the fullness, confusion, despair in the lightness  of our collective presence. And through this grace these moods shift and the presence clarifies and deepens. 

As the facilitator and co host with Joe I have learned to trust this movement of moods. I seem to have less need to know where this is going, or try to make it all alright and more trust in the generosity and intelligence of the field of  presence we cultivate together week after week.  I am learning, along with you, to be an open vulnerable instrument, so that presence can teach me. So I can see my own  shadows, my fixed ideas and my own superego. I am humbled by what is emerging. It is mysterious. It reveals itself slowly with little nudges,  in moments of inspiration and in warm hearted generosity. 

As we ended our time together for the summer I have been looking back. Where have we come from and what is pulling me and maybe you forward?

We have spent the last year reclaiming sacred words. Words that are so overused, or so debased by secular or fundamentalist certainty, that some of us almost gag when we hear them. Or we simply walk away. And why not? Our instinctive recoil points to the savagery, misogyny and persecution  of religious practice over the centuries. But are we loosing something precious?

So let me take a big view. We live in what is being called the post modern world which in this is a world deeply suspicious of authority, tradition, hierarchy. We embrace relationship, the personal narrative, freedom, individuality and creativity. 

So  it is not surprising that our circle of pilgrims is called to a contemporary, even interfaith  spiritual understanding. We meet in a circle, we share together in a circle, we listen to all the voices, not just mine or Joe's. We use psychological understanding help us navigate through the lens of ego to living presence. And yet both Joe and I have felt a powerful pull to reclaim the sacred and ancientness  of the Word of Wisdom. Why this mix? 

You may be familiar with the writings of the philosopher Ken Wilber. His significant contribution is that consciousness and in turn culture evolves. What is striking is that this evolution mirrors our own evolution from childhood to adulthood. I won't go into great detail but simply say that we live in times of a great evolutionary pressure. These times are being called the Second Axial Age. Our post modern relational view is a reaction to the modern, rational scientific paradigm that began in the West during the Enlightenment. Each new level of consciousness reacts to the previous level by rejecting it as naive, dangerous, simplistic, and not inclusive enough. 

These paradigm shifts are always times of turmoil and even bloodshed as the new challenges the status quo. During the first Axial Age, the monotheistic religions, the mythic level, rejected the pagan view as superstitious and heretical. And now the post modern view rejects the hyper rationality of the enlightenment, and the authoritarian hierarchy of the mythic feudal religion--now called fundamentalism-- of the Middle Ages. And so it goes. Well not quite. What is emerging now  as we are increasingly immersed  in the   global village is  what Wilber calls the Integral view. This  view does not  simply reject the preceding evolutionary stage. The Integral perspective recognizes that there is precious wisdom in all the previous stages of evolution of consciousness and culture. The integral view attempts to recover what is precious from the past and bring the treasures  forward into the present.

Without realizing it this  is how our circle seems to be evolving. We are peeling away the misunderstandings, limitations and ignorance of earlier wisdom streams without throwing out the mystical essence of the Word. Can we reclaim words like God, the Father, worship, sin, prayer and through our contemplation in presence feel the living presence. Do they come alive, take us deeper. Do they align us with the countless humans who have prayed these words for generations before us? Do they take us across theological divides, wars even, to the deepest core of love?

I hope some of you feel this. I have discovered-thanks to the internet- that many other small circles like ours are undertaking similar journeys.  I sense we are tapping into an awakening. It is happening in small circles on the edges of, or outside, religious institutions. This is the way of the post modern ethos! Even though it seems that our numbers dwindle at times, we are part of something larger. This is the mystery of collective prayer and practice. What a blessing to be part of this unfolding. And it can’t happen alone.