When I asked my seven year old son what makes a good friend he said, “calmness”. One of the greatest surprises that came from meditation was a personal sense of greater openness and less reactivity in daily interactions with others. Before beginning regular meditation, I felt great stress interacting with family, friends and co-workers. The stress came from always trying to impose my will on the moment, my need to control. This put a lot of pressure on relationships and created a distance between me and others. I was certain about what everybody else needed to do, even down to when they should wash their hands. When my son would tell me what he did at school that day, rather than honoring his presence and following the story as he told it, most of my attention would be devoted to strategizing on how to get him to do what I thought he needed to be more successful. I experienced stress, for myself and others, by taking everything too seriously and wanting to control outcomes as much as possible.
Meditation over time helped me to not take things so seriously to not be so controlling. Even the more challenging unavoidable conflict problem solving with a challenging co-worker became smoother and more productive. This does not mean that I have become overly nice. I am more willing to have difficult discussions around a conflict. At work for example, I am more honest with myself and with others to address and solve problems with mutual respect.
The Spiritual Side of Meditation
Before I learned meditation I thought I was satisfied: I had a great circle of family and friends and a successful career. But, I noticed that my day to day interactions with others seemed repetitive and mechanical. I was set on automatic pilot, preoccupied with a tomorrow that would never come and while the present was passing by: parents were growing older and children were growing up.
Since beginning to meditate eight years ago, “my” understanding deepened from two kinds of learning: intellectual learning and experiential learning. Intellectually, I learned as much as I could about how different spiritual traditions framed meditation as a spiritual practice. Through this I found that each tradition was a path that is designed to remove that which causes us to feel separate and isolated from the divine.
But all of this learning was only as useful as it could be connected to the experiential learning. For me the spiritual practice is where the real transformation happened. As I began using the prayer of the Lamb, I found it to be especially helpful for being open and present in each moment of relationship. In the Prayer of the Lamb I was able to let go of the burden of an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. I did not even have to believe any doctrine to engage the practice but somehow, someway I discovered through the experience of the practice a process of spiritual healing through Jesus.
I am very grateful to the Rev. Beverly Hosea for articulating the Gospel of Jesus that presents the Christian path in a way that is about discovering the spiritual process we are brought into for discovering our being in union with God. In Buddhism for example, it is the dissolution of attachments that blind us from knowing our true nature. In Christianity I find it to be the dissolution of a self-obsessed world view which distorts one’s understanding of being in union with God. By practicing the Prayer of the Lamb I am also developing a relationship with a Jesus as I discover creation happening as God’s continuing expression, a whole new world view.
Pieter
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