Rejecting or Embracing the Sacred in Meditation

A version of this post appears on my blog for PsychCentral, "Getting Older with Bipolar."

I spent the weekend at my parents’ house in the mountains, very quiet, and found the entire secularization of sacred traditions troubling.  I thought about the way I’ve been teaching meditation.

I recently taught a class in creative contemplation that was based on Lectio Divina, or divine reading.  It is a practice undertaken by contemplative Christians and monks in which one completely surrenders to the voice of God as inspired by a line of scripture.  

I have no real allegiance to Christianity, other than my upbringing, and I presented the practice as a completely secular way to meditate.  Many modern meditative and contemplative forms are presented this way.
  

Centuries old sacred traditions are stripped of theology and much of their underlying philosophy as a means of adapting each to a stressful, material world.  Sort of like insisting that prayer without an object or spirit to pray to will bring about a miracle.  The act, not the deity or ideas, holds the influence. 

Faith in God fascinates me, even as I have little of my own.  On the few occasions I have felt moved to prayer I have rejected the impulse as one born of weakness or unreason.  But I have studied Benedictine and Zen traditions very carefully in the development of my meditation practice and as a foundation for teaching methods inspired by these traditions.  I’m not alone.  

At a teacher training with Jon Kabat Zinn, the founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction,  he insisted on a full understanding of the dharmic principles that underlie mindfulness as a prerequisite to teaching MBSR in secular settings.  Then he spent a couple of hours on Buddhist principles. But that was it.

Many teachers learn this stuff and then stash it away as irrelevant or incendiary to their students’ searching.  Many don’t learn it at all.  Yet I believe that every person who sits for a moment in silence is searching for something.  

Should we who call ourselves teachers reveal only the practical methods and deny the spiritual and the ethical?  

Yoga today is often taught as a form of stretching, without its philosophical underpinnings.  A step toward good health for the mind and body while ignoring the soul.  Meditation is now making the leap into the same territory.

A conversation a few years ago with a man named Scott who runs a UPS store opened up for me how vacuous this approach can be.  He was printing flyers for a class of mine and revealed himself as a student of Zen.  He spoke of life, work, and relationships as inseparable from one’s practice.  He embodied the ideal that it is not the time one spends on the cushion that makes a life, it is the living that makes the life.  

When life is fully infused with the dharma, or the rule,  or whatever underlying philosophy one’s method of practice comes from, formal practice becomes aligned with one’s very existence.  The caution I heard was that formal practice without the infusion of some ethical construct is fraudulent.

This really screwed me up.  I stopped practicing for a bit and reconsidered my relationship with mindfulness and meditation.  Had thousands of hours on the cushion been an escape?  Had contemplation without catechism fostered an inwardly motivated perspective that resulted in self-absorption?  Had I been searching for answers that already were presented a couple thousand years ago, or was I rejecting uncomfortable questions about my relationship with others and the ideas I maintained were truths?  I felt like a fraud.

Then, finally, I truly began to notice.  I raised my gaze from the floor in front of me and saw truths I had been missing.  I re-read the ancient texts that inspired my practice in the first place.  I learned.  My relationship with my wife improved.  I took more joy in my daughter.  I became more serious at work and cared a lot more about others.  

I found something.  Something that carries a sense of the sacred, even if I refused to acknowledge it as such.  Mindfulness is based on ideas with ethics.  I’ve known that intellectually for over a decade.  Now I live it, most of the time.  The sacred is slippery.  It’s elusive and hard to hold on to.  But once experienced, it does change you.

I started to practice formally again.  It doesn’t really feel different, except that it feels more like part of my day than a pause in my day.  Perhaps, finally, I am always practicing.

I hope I can hold on to this sense of openness to experience and ideas.  I’d gotten old and dodgy.  I’d completely rejected any notion of the sacred.  I thought I knew too much.  Now I’m noticing that I know just enough to be inspired to continue to practice and learn, and to expand the reach of my practice beyond the expedient and the material.  Sacred space is available still.