I’ve known for a long time that I need to return to a committed meditation practice. I am more aware of my anguish and yet somehow more peaceful when meditation is part of my life. So, who is educating me and moving me right now to launch this endeavor again? Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault, an Episcopal priest, contemplative, and teacher of Centering Prayer in the tradition of Catholic priest Thomas Keating. She believes that Jesus was the first Western teacher of non-dual consciousness, and his name for it was the Kingdom of Heaven.

Fr. Richard Rohr teaches the concept of non-dualism as one of expanding consciousness, of moving beyond what we would refer to as intellectual thinking or simply incorporating the rational mind to examine the world according to your personal condition (environment, place of birth, life experiences, etc). In other words, it’s a capacity for looking sideways, not in the traditional logical ways we’ve been taught, but in an integrative way that is rooted in present experience and the body and is connected to the deeper Ground of Being.

The thing that is inspiring is the idea that this movement toward non-dual consciousness and action through Centering Prayer, or meditation, actually transforms the structures of the brain and rewires the brain-heart connection.

And how is this non-dualistic mind developed? In an interview with Terry Patten, Bourgeault says, “What you are actually doing is…suspending the subject-object configuration of your attention….Anything that you put your attention on is a thought, and the thought is the thing that you have to let go of. So, this gives people who are really working in dualistic language and categories a hard time…: ‘You mean I have to let go of God?’ And the answer is ‘Yes.’ ‘You mean I have to let go of my bliss?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You mean I have to let go of my state of nirvana?’ ‘Yes.’ But this repeated practice of withdrawing attention from that subject-object configuration and learning to hold it in a state of pure awareness in which there is only being, not ‘I’ and the pole of my attention. That really is a non-dual state.”

A state of pure awareness without the trickeries and obsessions of my mind: anxieties crowding, self-centered worries, fantasies, and the endlessly creative machine. Now this is something that would benefit myself and others! I have moments, but to be able to cultivate non-dualism is exciting.

For a nice beginning primer (there are many on the Web), you can hear an all-day retreat with Cynthia called The Ways of the Heart:
Intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbYRp46rUn8
Video 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdvHK-gyKiw&feature=relmfu
Video 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9Axy11pe5Y&feature=relmfu
Video 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnUDSEZJu8c

Join me!