Religion can open a door to Spiritual Meditation

Once your nervous system has accustomed itself to the meditative experience, you will find that sitting for a few minutes, just sitting, allowing the mind to settle into the here and now, to be aware of what is–allows that adjustment of the nervous system to transpire. It feels like a deep alignment, your energy field harmonizes and adjusts, and begins to integrate into itself whatever is jarring and disruptive from your life. Just sitting, doing nothing, allows this to happen. You feel better: adjusted, aligned, and just better.

Spiritual meditation, as I have come to understand it, has another dimension to it. To come into contact with this dimension, religion is helpful. Religion imparts a sense of meaning or purpose to your life; it gives you a sense that you have something to do, for society, in service, in love and light, for others, and for God. It imparts a sense of place, your small place in a larger scheme of things. It imparts a way to understand your little self as part of a larger self, to have respect for yourself, and to be authentically humble. 

My two teachers, Joe and Appa, allowed me to feel this difference in their presence. Joe would begin the RoseWay meditation with an invocation, and then asking us to say, “In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit… and your name.” So we added our own name at the end. In the name of me. In the name of my true self and my incarnation as part of God’s Light and Plan. This set the tone for the higher meditation: but only because we had grown up in this religious thematic, and it encompassed an entire set of metaphors, symbols, and understandings that we were taught–if we were lucky–as children in an embodied way.

So it can be a start to a deeper meditation and offer a spiritual connection in a way that “just sitting” rarely does.

Perhaps more on this in later posts.