Readings week of August 17th.

Good day, good people,

First of all, I am ever grateful to you for joining the Daily Collective Contemplative Pauses. I find it essential to my daily rhythm to be co-creating and tuning into a palpable field of letting go with all of you. Whether you are practicing Centering Prayer or another form of quiet meditation, our shared intention to become open and available to the Divine Source supports us all.

I also wanted to invite you to participate in Working with Gurdjieff's Contemplative Exercises and Movements: A Day of Wisdom Practice, taking place next month on September 5th, both in person at Mary & Joseph Retreat Center in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA and online. We will spend the day working with two other practices that have become increasingly essential to my own rhythm of life: Gurdjieff's seated Contemplative Exercises and Sacred Movements.

You may have noticed that I have been offering more opportunities recently to work with these practices, and I thought it might be helpful to say a little more about why they matter so much to me and what I have come to understand about how they work together.

Both Centering Prayer and these other forms of contemplative practice have helped me become more attentive to what is happening within me when I am quiet and collected. And, more importantly, when I experience the pressures that are a natural part of life. These practices cultivate a greater capacity to remain present, to more frequently contain my own atmosphere when I am troubled by what is happening around me, and to stay connected to my desire to align with a Will that is greater than my habitual reactions.

This feels increasingly important to me because it is one thing to experience times of inner stillness, clarity within and coherence of thought, feeling, and sensation, as well as interconnection with all that is when I am sitting quietly. It is another thing entirely to come from that interior landscape and place of presence when my eyes are open, my body is moving, life is asking something of me, or an unexpected situation disturbs my inner equilibrium. For me, these different forms of practice provide much of the necessary training to be able to come from a place of wholeness more often.

Centering Prayer continues to engrain the gesture of handing myself over to the greater intelligence of Holy God within my very own being. It continues to teach me to entrust and open myself to this indwelling Presence, the Well of Life, and to learn to recognize and follow the impulses of this Presence rather than being governed entirely by my habitual patterns and reactions.

The seated Contemplative Exercises strengthen my ability to refine, direct, and expand my attention, becoming more sensitive to subtler dimensions of reality. Through them, the reality of God's Life everywhere is more than an intellectual idea. It is a felt sense within. The Exercises prepare me to recognize what it is like to come under a different influence, to experience different qualities, energies, or “vibrations” of Being (from my deeper Self to the particularity of each fruit of the spirit to the ternary flow of the Holy Trinity).

The Sacred Movements offer a way of putting what has been cultivated in these quiet practices—whether Centering Prayer, Contemplative Exercises, Buddhist meditation, Sufi practice, or another form of contemplative practice—into motion and relationship. They allow me to discover what happens to my presence when challenge is applied. Can I remain connected to a deeper reality while my eyes are open, my body is moving, and I am responding to what is being asked of me? Can I taste the quality of presence and action when each of my centers is engaged and working toward the same aim? Can I remain open to subtle energies while I am active? Can I allow the Movements to move me, to pray me, to become an offering for the whole?

These practices support us in becoming more fully alive, engaged, entrusting humans who can participate in offering what is needed in a given moment. This is important because the spiritual life is not a passive submission to an all-powerful God “upstairs.” We are beings with agency and choice. We have a part to play. We can cultivate the conditions that make us more receptive, more available, and more able to participate in the life of God.

If our desire is to love God and love our neighbor, we eventually discover that there is no simple set of rules that can tell us how conscious love should take form in every moment. We have to learn to listen more deeply, to receive guidance from our deeper Self within us that longs to live in alignment with the Divine Will rather than being governed entirely by our ordinary, habitual self.

And this cannot be accomplished through force, shame, or self-bullying. Giving oneself over must arise from a genuine desire. We cannot simply demand that our ordinary, narrative, habitual self become something it is not yet capable of being. Compliance and behavior management are not the same as transformation.

Transformation begins as we discover something deeper and more satisfying within ourselves. We begin to recognize that we have two natures and many selves. At first, the ordinary, narrative, habitual self with many parts or selves is usually the loudest voice. But over time, as we become acquainted with a deeper Selfhood, the voice of that deeper Self emerges and become louder. And the work is not to destroy the first. It is to learn how these natures can come into a more conscious and loving relationship.

This is what I hope we can explore together Working with Gurdjieff's Contemplative Exercises and Movements. We will work experientially with these two practices passed down by Gurdjieff—one teacher within the Christian Inner Tradition concerned with direct, personal experience and participation in the Divine, beyond simply holding beliefs or following external forms.

With gratitude for this field of practice we share,

Heather

P.S. If you would like a taste of these practices before joining us, you can scroll down and sign up for...

... a free offering to get a taste of the Contemplative Exercises explored in Cynthia Bourgeault's book Mystical Courage

... Deepening in the Movements: A Three-Week Wisdom Practice Series

...Working with Gurdjieff's Contemplative Exercises and Movements 

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Readings from last week's Daily Contemplative Pauses

*All previous readings & reflections can be found here*

Monday, August 17th

Reading: “Our great daystar floods the earth with fire in this season of summer. The heart of the sun prays at 40 million degrees; grant me a heart of such fierce fire as I now begin this new day in an act of devotion and adora-tion. Wrap me in the silence of your Spirit and lead me into quiet prayer.

”Like comets, various thoughts and concerns of my life have circled in my silent prayer. I consecrate these concerns which have been present without my permission in this time..."

— Edward Hayes, Prayers for a Planetary Pilgrim

Chant: If you will, if you will, if you will, if you will, you can become all flame, become all flame, become all flame. You can become all flame: become all flame

— Darlene Franz

Tuesday, August 18th

Reading: “If it's not about achieving tranquility, peace, altered states, single pointed focus, what is this practice anyway? Well, more and more now, as I introduce the prayer, I say, it's essentially a gesture. The heart of this prayer is not about anything. except applied, immersion, in a simple letting go. Okay? It really is to work in meditative form, practicing inwardly, and in our being, in the, what you might call our subtle nervous system, imprinting this gesture of letting go.” — Cynthia Bourgeault

Chant: I surrender — Heather Ruce

Wednesday, August 19th

Reading: “The heart really is [the imaginal realm’s] native ground. And when all the intellectual abstractions have been stripped away, and it is allowed to speak in its own native tongue, what it speaks of with surprising simplicity and directness, is beauty, hope, and a mysteriously deeper order of coherence and aliveness flowing through this earthly terrain connecting it to the infinite wellsprings of cosmic creativity in abundance. Instead of the isolation and anomie so often conveyed in our postmodern cosmological roadmaps (where we are simply an insignificant planet in an insignificant galaxy in a random “big bang” among a ceaseless cacophony of big bangs), it speaks of the preciousness of our human particularity and the exigency of our human contribution (tiny though it may be) to that vast, dynamic web of cosmic interbeing, which can be seen, in toto, as the heart of God. It calls us to a renewed sense of dignity, accountability, belongingness, cosmic intimacy, and love.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, Eye of the Heart, p. 13-14

Chant: Be right here, in the Heart of God  — Henry Schoenfield

Thursday, August 20th

Reading: “For now it's important to keep reminding ourselves that from a metaphysical perspective, this realm has less to do with physical location than with density. In fact, virtually all spiritual teachers in all traditions have insisted that the “higher” ( i.e., less dense) realms are not somewhere else but within—already coiled inside us as subtler and yet more intensely alive bandwidths of experience and perception. The reason we do not typically notice them is that the laws governing any realm are generally too coarse to allow the penetration of those finer vibrations emanating from the next realm “up” into its normal sphere of operations. As St. Paul reminds us, we do indeed “see through a glass darkly.””

— Cynthia Bourgeault, Eye of the Heart, p. 15

Chant: Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, deep within and all around  — Henry Schoenfield

Friday, August 21st with LeMel

Reading: Though one may be overpowered,

two can defend themselves.

A cord of three strands is not quickly broken. — Ecclesiastes 4:12

Here is a community defined

And by this definition, so is God

Nothing is meant to be alone

Cain, upon hearing he was to wander alone, cried out

God took pity and he was allowed a city

So, too, we are meant to be together

So, gathered here together

Let our intent be pure

For when two or three are gathered

One can most certainly sense the Divine

Let us do so with heart and compassion

For what we create is strong indeed

May we, with our bonds

Become a strong rope

That holds and sustains

So that a web of strength

Carries us through 

These winds of change

Amen. — LeMel Firestone-Palerm

Chant:

O Sacred Three

Encircle me

— LeMel Firestone-Palerm (reading and chant recording)

Saturday, August 22nd

Four Gestures

Chant: Just be here, let go be here, keep within, within your heart, just be here, let go be here, keep within, within God’s heart  — Heather Ruce

Sunday, August 23rd

Reading: “In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what God is. He may or may not mercifully realize that, after all, this is a great gain, because "God is not a what," not a "thing." That is precisely one of the essential characteristics of contemplative experience. It sees that there is no "what" that can be called God. There is "no such thing" as God because God is neither a "what" nor a "thing" but a pure

"Who."* [God] is the "Thou" before whom our inmost “I” springs into awareness. [God] is the I Am before whom with our own most personal and inalienable voice we echo “I am.””

— Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p.13

Chant: I am, I am

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