In The Presence Of...

There are ways of being that opens the door to the vastness of life, and there are ways that keeps it shut.

Meditation and prayer are complementary but distinct. Meditation is the practice of sitting in presence, of being raw and intimate with your life. Prayer is the practice of sitting in the presence of, a quieting of self to make contact with something greater than itself, yet is itself. Both require slowing down and listening. Both ask for humility. Both dissolve the illusion that we are in control. Both answer different questions although they seem to circle the same mystery.

I’ve had to come to terms with how much of my life I have used "knowingness" as protection, a false sense of security in believing that if I could just know what was going to happen, or understand the mysteries of life, I would be safe. I armored myself with the illusion that I could know who I needed to be, or better said who others needed me to be. The separated and identified self clings to knowing in this way, innocently. In my experience, the more I define myself by what I know, especially when that knowing is painful or limiting, the more I confine myself to the past. The constructs we inherit, the conditioning we wear, and the stories we tell about who we are and how life is, these become the boundaries of our lives.

The humility of prayer is the small crack required where one play with the “show me” mind, the willingness to live into what we do not yet understand. It is a posture of curiosity rather than conclusion, a less guarded approach to life that allows us to be right-sized - expansive enough to glimpse our eternal and united nature, yet humble enough to remember we are dust.

In some ways, I think knowledge when used as protection is used to try to save us from humiliation. Humility and humiliation are not to be confused. Humiliation is a shrinking, a forced smallness. Humility is an accurate sizing, a willingness to let go of self-importance and merge with something beyond self. In this space, we shift from resistance to allowance, from rigidity to possibility. Martin Prechtel writes on prayer, “Real prayer is a conversation, not a demand. It is an act of feeding the unseen, of keeping the world from drying up and blowing away. The purpose of prayer is not to get what we want, but to give what is needed, to keep the holy fed, to make beauty for the ones who hold the world together.”

It is curious to me how much time we can perseverate in low self-regard, yet struggle to spend two minutes in the presence of gratitude, grace, and a love that asks nothing of us. Meditation and prayer, like two sides of a coin, both invite us to this love - one by containing the wild mind, the other by tending to the heart.

Whether or not there is an omnipresent source of guidance is not something I need to prove. Maybe there is an eternal current of unconditional love, an elegant order woven within chaos, or maybe everything dissolves into nothing. Even if I believed the answers were knowable, I no longer seek them. What matters to me now is whether I have a mind willing to be questioned, open enough to let grace have me.

*Each week, I will share either a discussion or a practice on various themes, without a set pattern. Because these teachings come from past programs, I’ve edited out participants' voices and questions, so the audio may skip or take a moment to settle. If there’s a topic or question you’re holding, let me know and I’ll see what I have. I love you, A.