this body

Meditation

2011-08-23T13:45:00.000+01:00

right and left
front and back
centre and circumference
crown to pelvic floor to toe
this body
breathing
i am alive
i have arrived
there is nowhere else

Walking the Office

2011-04-21T11:36:00.002+01:00

I have taken to reading the Daily Office outdoors in the early morning and evening, walking the side-streets around where I live.

In the unlikely case that you should be interested, I use a version of the Office called Celebrating Daily Prayer compiled by David Stancliffe, until recently Bishop of Salisbury: "a pocket version of Common Worship: Daily Prayer ... that draws together the pioneering work of Celebrating Common Prayer and the Church's mature experience of what helps people to pray with the Church." What I like about it is that it is in one, handy-sized, hardback book, complete with psalms and readings, which includes variations for the liturgical year. It can be done in 5 minutes if I am in a real rush, or 20 minutes at a slower, more reflective pace.

I wonder what people make of me, or whether they even notice this unwashed and unshaven man reading a book under his breath as he ambles up and down the short streets and little circus of upmarket Stockwell in the early morning light.

In any case, there I am, walking slowly, muttering the Offices to myself, every now and then stopping to think and let something sink in or look around me. It is engaging. All of my senses are stimulated, this body is on the move, and yet there is a quiet simplicity about it. Where I live is unusually beautiful at the moment: Spring is a happening surprise; the sun shines; the leaves and the blossom are out; there are the perfumes of the flowers and the particular smells of the early morning and evening; the birds sing; and there is the air, the sky and the clouds. Nature is the great explicator of God.

What this body does when I pray is so important. I love to be still: to sit in silence and solitude, to relax, to feel into this body, to feel this body in God, to trust this body to God. There is something quite different about walking and praying aloud (albeit sotto voce). It opens me up to the world in a different way. It makes me stop and look and ponder. There are moments when I realise that I am joining in with the prayer of and with and for the world.

Feeling into this body

2010-10-22T16:20:00.000+01:00

There is a skill that is common to several spiritual practices: Buddhist mindfulness meditation, Focusing, the Application of the Senses from the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius, the contemplative approach of the Cloud of Unknowing and the Practice of the Presence of God. I call this 'feeling into this body'. I think it confers several benefits:

a stronger and more concrete sense of self, 'who I am';
the sense 'that I am' as the Cloud says;
a sense of safety in stressful or frightening situations;
a sense of having a home and being at home in oneself;
a felt sense of the presence of God;
an ability to stay with and hold difficult feelings in this body.

I have come to think of it as a crucial life skill. If this body can tell us everything we need to know, then feeling into this body is an essential prerequisite to hearing and receive this teaching.

My way to start is to feel down into my body, into my thorax and especially into my heart, and to see what comes. I see that I have written 'my' body, whereas I mean to say 'this' body. There is no body that is 'mine'; there is only me - 'this' body. And the important point about this is that I am, in the end, not observing this body, not attending to it or caring for it: in the end I am this body and in feeling into this body I am being myself: I am. Now, I can connect with what is most true and most important about me.

One thing that I notice in feeling down into the thorax, especially the heart, is that here there is no judgement or condemnation. I live most of the time in my head. By this I do not mean that I am thinking: thinking is great. What I mean is the defensive head who is scanning the territory for danger and making sure I am safe. This, too, should be fine. I need to be kept safe especially when, for example, I am cycling on London road. The problem is my head's definition of safe. It is trying to make sure that I do not put myself in a position where I might be criticised or ridiculed or otherwise abandoned. It is trying to make sure that I do everything properly, without making mistakes, or faux pas, or being childish. Anything spontaneous, or sexual, or playful, or creative, or (indeed) honest to who I most truly am is, at the very least, censored before it emerges into the daylight. At worst is squashed when the censor gets his prurient little hands on it.

When I sink down into this body, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I allow myself to be aware from my heart or belly, when I am this body, something different happens. I can attend to a different source of information about the world; and I can attend to the world, and myself as part of the world, from this place. I can see more clearly how things are. Then my head can bring a more helpful criticism to my attention. For example, I am writing. I am letting (or at least trying to let) my heart write, but my head is making sure that I am spelling things correctly, watching the keys I am hitting, and generally keeping me on track of the task in hand, the practical details of writing at a computer and obeying the rules of spelling and grammar. The problem is when it gets in the way and wants to judge the quality of my writing. This is not its job.

Quality is allied to the experience of 'consolation': feeling alive, moved by beauty or suffering, connected, loving, trusting, at home in myself. These are the marks of goodness, of quality, of honesty.

So what is going on in my torso and heart today? I am really enjoying this writing. I love the sense that if I sit here and attend to my heart that something will come and that I feel at home in myself. I am being myself and I am writing, creating. I also sense that what I have written here is, in some sense, 'true'.

I find myself thinking, "Perhaps I could add it to this blog?" I suddenly feel a start of anxiety. It is putting myself 'out there' that is scary. Then I expose myself to judgement and ridicule. And the feeling of anxiety is in the same place as my heart so it starts to block the flow of thoughtful creativity and honesty. If I thought someone was going to see this I would start censoring big time.

The art is to write as though no one was looking. This is how the body, heart and the guts write. Inside, on a good day, I feel-think I have something to say. Or rather, there are things that I want to say and I have no idea whether anyone wants to hear them, but if I attend to my innards these things want to be said. And then, just maybe, the job is all but done.

On being loved and desired

2010-06-12T12:31:00.034+01:00

I have been rereading The Shape of Living by David F Ford. I am trying to put into practice something he says.

Image from Greenbelt

There are two great simple truths about Christian desiring. The first is that God desires us.

This is perhaps the hardest truth of any to grasp. Do we wake up every morning amazed that we are loved by God, aware that this is the ultimate in delight, dignity and self-worth? Do we allow our day to be shaped by God's desire to relate to us? Are we ready to be stretched in our hearts, minds, imaginations, actions and sufferings in order to do justice to this glorious God? Do we habitually see ourselves, other people and creation in the light of God's desire for us all to flourish? Do we simply long to enjoy God?

We are never in a position to have an overview of what is happening in the dramas or grace in our lives or the lives of others, but our main calling is clear: to let ourselves be desired and loved. pp.28 - 30

My take on it is that all authentic spirituality starts with God's love and desire for us.* Several things happen when I sit in this awareness that I am loved and desired by God. I can stop worrying about needing to make an impression or competing to be seen. This body relaxes and I start to feel the whole of this body. My back opens up, my chest and shoulders relax. I begin to enter this body. And then I can imagine and feel the small being that I am in the vastness of existence, an existence in which I am and always will be totally immersed, and by which I am surrounded and pervaded and thoroughly soaked.

* If you don't like the word ‘God’ then substitute your own favourite word or image: mine would be to say that I am a loved child of the Universe. I know that people will argue that God is beyond the Universe, that He created it, and this I take as true; to my mind the Universe is so unimaginably large and other that, to all intents and purposes, it is a good enough approximation for everyday use.

A Fall of Snow

2008-12-03T17:00:00.017Z

I go to a patient in a side room. This elderly lady about whom I know nothing is dying and, as it turns out, has less that 24 hours left to live. She is unconscious, lying on her side, one eye and her mouth slightly open, breathing softly, unresponsive to my voice or gentle touch. One of the amazing privileges of the hospital chaplain is being able stand and stare. I am, perhaps, a kind of voyeur, but a voyeur who sees me, one day, on the bed, dying. She is another I. Today I am fortunate to be able to gaze and gaze. I see this body that is simply worn out. I stand by her bed and as I look I feel a peace settle over me after this morning’s rush. I am not a very loving or compassionate person, but in this moment I feel overwhelmed by tenderness for this scrap of life unable, to my senses, to respond to God in any way, at least consciously. Who knows what goes on in the dying? I ‘see’ God still loving her, still giving her grace, which seems to me now like a persistent, heavy snowfall softly, silently falling on her, grace piling upon grace. Whatever her goodness or lack of goodness, despite her seeming inability to respond to God or bring her consciousness to bear on this reality, despite everything that we usually think of as necessary for a person to be in connection with God, at this moment, I ‘see’ that God’s giving and desire to give to her is not – will never be – checked.

God cannot help it. Irrespective of our ability or wish to respond, the torrent of love and grace that flows from God continues unabated. We indigents can never step outside God’s desire for us and this gratuitous, intemperate outpouring. I can feel it now, on the surface of this body, this skin, the snow falling and falling on me, on all of us. This dying woman was my teacher and I can feel these lessons still.

God’s love and grace is not dependent upon anything I do. It is not earned by achievements, by duty or by goodness. This is completely different from how things usually work. We are exhorted to study hard, pass exams, work hard and then we will get the rewards of money, security, happiness and being well thought of. We are expected to go to church, to study the scriptures, to spend time in prayer and then we will grow close to God and become holy. With God, all these efforts are unimportant; they are important for us, perhaps, but they are not how things work with God. There is nothing we can do to improve our standing with God.

The very places where we expect God to be absent are where God is most present. In the irresponsible near-death coma, in the self-forgetting of dementia, in the places that terrify us the most because we seem to be least like the selves we have come to know over a lifetime, there God is comatose, demented.

It seems to me that our job, and the work of prayer, is simply to put ourselves in the way of – to crack ourselves open to – being drenched by that love and grace. There is nothing more important in life than this.

Relaxation exercises

2008-07-21T13:03:00.005+01:00

I am used to exercises to relax and prepare to pray that focus on and relax parts of this body in turn until the whole body is relaxed. Some start at the top of the head and work down to the feet; some the other way round. For my money, the best end up in the belly.

I think these exercises are not primarily about relaxation. I think they about awareness, about noticing the whole of who I am, about allowing the whole of me to be present, and about the integration of all of who I am. They are prayer too, and praise of, God whose creature I am.

Identity

2008-07-04T20:45:00.001+01:00

An assertion: my identity — my sense of self, of me — is rooted in the sensations of this body. If these sensations change, e.g. during serious illness, or as the result of an accident (as happened to me when I was knocked off my bike and broke my arm), then my sense of who I am changes too. There are times when we say, "I don't feel myself, today."

Movements

2008-07-03T21:29:00.014+01:00

There are two movements:

outwards to the world — opening the pores of this body to sounds, sensations, the other, the Other — moving to an opening in and to love;
inwards to this body and attending to this body's voice, in tenderness and interest.
"Breathing in I go back to the island within myself." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

Both are about being present in the present. Both tend towards love and compassion.

(See this blog post and this research paper on Open Monitoring and Focussed Attention.)

Levels of Body Prayer

2008-06-27T20:55:00.005+01:00

Relaxation
Awareness of the breath
Awareness of physical sensations
Attend to the ‘stories’ this body has to tell, it's messages; learn to be at home
Let this body tell you who you are
Let this body be ((in) God)

One never moves on from earlier stages, but one moves deeper into them as each new stage is given.

What I learnt today

2008-06-27T20:03:00.004+01:00

This body can be still even as the mind chatters away.

Let this body do the praying.