Below is the second audio file featuring a spiritual practice from ‘Discovering the Essence.’ This comes from pages 26-28. For the first spiritual practice or for more information click here.
Each of the audio files below features a spiritual practice and a related reading from ‘Discovering the Essence.’
For free readings from ‘Discoring the Essence’ Click here.
For information on ordering the book, click here. When you do read the book, I’d love an honest Amazon review to help others determine if the book is right for them.
Summer 2021 will see our first cohort of ‘Discussing the Essence.’ If you’d like information about joining this pay-what-you-can, zoom-based exploration of deconstruction click the contact link or email otherjeffcampbell7@gmail.com. It is not necesarry to purchase or read the book to join us for this time. For more information, click ‘here.‘
There’s an excellent discussion of the spiritual power of bowing here. Two of the main take-aways from that excellent podcast are:
#1) Bowing is a supple, flexible, living reaction. This posture conveys an heir of willingness to respond to whatever comes next.
#2) There is an element of release and surrender in a bow; an heir of recognition that we stand before something that we may not fully comprehend.
As I listened to that podcast and pondered the end of 2020, it struck me as a rather timely response to this place we find ourselves in: we are saying good-bye to the strangest year in recent memory; we made it through the darkest time of the year. Residents (like myself) of the USA are in wondering if this next president will steer us away from the dangers we had been barelling toward.
The temptation can be to simply imagine a motion like bowing. The body is the doorway to so much that is good. Including it in rituals and practices is incredibly powerful. It is good to physically bow from whereever you are. It would be even better to stand solemnly and bow from a standing, respectful position.
I’ve presented a few different combinations of a bow with versions of the welcoming prayer in the space below. The first (74A) is one keyed to life changes. It might, for example, be used on New Year’s Eve. The second and third practices (74B and 74C) are practices which incorporate a bow into traditional approaches to the welcoming prayer. These are most often used to make peace with uncomfortable emotional realities.
As always, I hope you will play and explore with these practices as you construct something which will work best for you.
74A: Bowing and Welcoming the New Year (or other new transitions)
Exercise 74B: One approach to Bowing and Welcoming Emotions
The Exercise:
Exercise 74C: A Second Approach to Welcoming Emotions with a Bow
If you’d like to participate in ‘Discussing the Essence’ fill out a contact form at the top of this page or email otherjeffcampbell7@gmail.com
Fill out a contact form above, or email otherjeffcampbell7@gmail.com to recieve the link. ‘Discussing the Essence’ will meet on alternate weeks. Here is the general routine:
5-10 minute icebreaker (yes, introverts. It will be optional.)
5-10 minute reading from ‘Discovering the Essence‘
5-10 minute reflection from guests (There might be some weeks without a guest.)
15-20 minute guided spiritual practice
20-30 minute general discussion
We’ll use ‘Discovering the Essence‘ as a sort-of blue print, borrowing the topics from the chapters in order. This means that the first week will cover the introduction’s theme of ‘You will be ok’ and ‘Why Spiritual Practice?’ The next session, meeting January 28 will explore the question ‘What do I believe now?’ February 11’s topic will be ‘Who is left in my life now?’ and Feb 25 will cover the question ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ (This is an exploration of the sense of estrangement and isolation from God.)
I believe firmly that there are millions of us who might benefit from an opporutnity to process and discuss our spiritual transition. However, some might require more intensive support than this program can offer. Religious trauma is a real and often destructive force. I wish to be clear that I am a deconstructed, Christ-centered mystic with good intentions. I am not a trained therapist. While it’ll be nice to see lots of friendly faces on zoom, it’s much more important that people take care of themselves. If you would benefit from professional mental health support I strongly encourage you to seek this out.
Background: Today marks something new for the Faith-ing Project. This the first spiritual practice on the site which I am merely reposting. None of this description came from me. My hope for 2021 is that this becomes an increasingly frequent practice here. A first step for a contemplative is to take a brisk jog through the sorts of practices that are out there. But I hope that you have the oppurtunity to take a deeper dive into traditions, practices, and communities. I am beginning with this practice because I have deeply benefited from Intergral Christian Newtork‘s WeSpace Groups, Sunday Services, and free standing meditations. I think you will too.
This meditation was written by Paul Smith. You can find his excellent ‘Intergral Chistianity: The Spirit’s Call to Evolve’ on Amazon.
This practice can take from a few minutes to an hour or more. You can do one part or several, or all of it. I (Paul) often take about twenty minutes to do it all.
Set your intention to open to the four goals of Whole-Body Mystical Awakening:
(1) expanded heart consciousness,
(2) mystical oneness,
(3) the spiritual beings present with you,
(4) windows of spiritual knowing.
1. Start with your Heart.
Move your awareness from your head to your heart. This is not being aware of your heart but being aware from your heart. To help, you can tap on your head, then tap on down your temple, jaw, neck, and chest. Continue tapping on your chest until you sense you have moved to your heart space. You can also place your hands on your heart which can increase the energy there. Your heart space includes your chest, back, arms, and hands. You may also think of someone you love to help activate the love flowing from your heart.
Deep in your heart center is an inexhaustible flow of love which is always there, ready to radiate outward. You may feel warmth flowing from your heart and bliss flooding your being.
2. Treat your Feet
Move your attention to your feet, making sure your feet are planted firmly on the floor. You may want to stamp your feet or wiggle your toes to help your consciousness move there. Think of roots growing from your feet deep into the earth, anchoring you in your body and your body to the earth, even the whole material cosmos itself. Draw up energy from this grounding and centering that comes these spiritual roots which connect you with the transcendent oneness of all divine material reality.
3. Chummy with your Tummy.
Draw that grounding energy on up to your gut, your spiritual womb. Residing here is our intuitive self, with the ability to understand or know something without conscious reasoning.
This is the home of your core self, your divine identity, which is accessed not by conceptualizing or thinking, but by intuition and sensation. Rest in your spiritual womb by simply being. Be aware of anything that emerges from this area of deep spiritual knowing.
Jesus said from here flows living water or the awakened consciousness of our divine identity (John 7:37-38). The gut deepens into transcendence as we experience not only our own divine identity, but that this identity is the one divine identity of all.
4. Spread to your Head.
On the way up to your head, pause in your heart space to soak in your heart’s radiating love. Then move up into your head space. You may notice your mind is unusually calm as your carrying the grounding energy of your feet and womb and the radiant love of your heart with you into you head space. Rest in the cleared stillness there are long as you wish. If you wish, you can move up out of your head space, spreading into the vast, spaciousness there. This is the transcendence of pure consciousness that is the mystical realm of the infinite divine.
5. Impart your Heart
Move back down into your heart space, this time becoming aware of the spiritual presences that are with you. This can be the motherly-fatherly presence of God, the Living Jesus, and other spiritual companions such as Mary or other saintly presences who are there to comfort, encourage, and strengthen you. Let them hold you and touch your heart. You can sense their presence, converse with them, and receive from them.
Then let your heart flow out to others that come to your mind, sending the energy field of love out to them as healing, light, and blessing. Finally, let your heart expand to transcendent awareness as it enlarges and moves to hold all sentient beings in its blissful, loving embrace
6. Devotion in Motion
Finish with devotion in motion by reaching down to your feet with both hands and feel the energy move up through your body like a flowing geyser until your hands are raised high in the air. You are a geyser of love and healing shooting up through and from you. It flows out to the world and universe becoming a part of the Kosmic groove you and others are cutting in fabric of the cosmos, co-creating with God new pathways to the continuing evolution of creation.
The deep feelings of the HEART are retrieved through our awareness moving into the heart center with the chest, arms, and hands in contact with one another.
Our body energy field is accessed with our awareness sinking down to our legs and FEET, grounding and drawing energy up from the earth.
Our intuition and core identity are accessed with our awareness resting in our gut and contact with our hands on our lower abdomen or SPIRITUAL WOMB.
The impressions, images, and words that come to the MIND are accessed through contact with the head and forehead.
These physical areas are entryways into the depths of being present and their associated ways of spiritual knowing.
Background: Today’s practice is a visualization which builds on some on oneness practices. For examples of more oneness practices, click here and here.
It will be helpful, before practicing to bring to have choosen a small group of people whom you feel very safe and comfortable around.
The Practice:
Discovering the Essence: How to Build a Spiritual Practice is coming in November. Click the link for a free preview and more information.
Background: Today’s practice is deeply inspired by Resmaa Menakem’s ‘My Grandmother’s Hands.‘ I am including it here because this important book is something that everyone should be reading right now. It is explores questions of race, white supremacy, and trauma by exploring where these things live in our bodies. It is not easy work for an old white guy like me; but it is important work. Contemplatives and those who love spiritual practice might find this approach to be a powerful one. Each chapter features practices like this one.
To be honest, I am a little hesitant about sharing this practice here. I think that this practice could have lots of positives not related to exploring racial trauma and white body supremacy. And this is my concern: I would not want to co-opt and distract from this important work. I am also aware and sensetive to the issues around white people stealing the work of black people without approprite credit and attibution. The best I know how to do in this regard it to state again, emphatically, that regardless of your background or history Resmaa Menakem’s excellent ‘My Grandmother’s Hands’ should be on your reading list.
The Practice
Background- this practice could be connected with a wide array of inspirations.
This practice is ideally done as a contemplative walk. A good contemplative walk carries a tension within it. Of course safety is ultimately important. Therefore, diverting some attention to an awareness of how to get home and ensuring that we don’t walk into an unsafe situation are very important. Walking into an unsafe situation might be failing to look both ways before we cross a street. It also might be making sure we don’t wander into neighborhood that is unsafe for us.
However, being too planful takes some of the power out of a contemplative practice. I believe in something larger than us that will guide our steps when we are willing to cede control of our destination. Even if I am wrong on that, it is clear that being too strategic and logical ends up giving over a certain measure of headspace over to the logical, planning side of our brain. As a result, we end up not being as fully contemplative as we might have hoped for.
If a walk does not make sense for you right now, much of this practice can be applied to a more sedentary approach. A practitioner might find value in applying this practice to a place they think they know very well. It can be surprising the things we discover when we look at familiar surroundings with fresh eyes. Alternatively, Finding a seat with unfamiliar surroundings can also bring new discoveries.
Before beginning the practice description, I would like to own and name the reality that this practice can feel a bit silly. The internal monologue would look rather amusing if viewed out of context. I believe that a little silliness if quite a powerful thing. Most of us (including me) are entirely too grim and somber about our spiritual practice.
The Practice
1. Begin a walk with a cultivated sense of purposelessness.
2. Identify something in your field of vision. Greet and name it. (e.g. ‘hello tree with yellow leaves on the north side.’ or ‘Hi, fire hydrant with a rusty chain.’) work at noticing and naming in a way that identifies the uniqueness of this one particular thing you are seeing.
3. Note, name, and greet the next thing in your field of vision as you continue your walk. The goal is to produce a nearly nonstop litany of the things you encounter. If someone were to hear your thoughts, it might almost sound like a guided tour of the walk.
4. As you continue the walk, see if you can apply it to sounds or smells.
5. You can similarly greet feelings, thoughts and memories as they come up for you.
Background for 69A: Box breathing is a mindfullness practice. It begins by identifying 4 points: the inhale, the pause after the inhale, the exhale, and the pause after the exhale. Practioners are invited to imagine a box and circle their attention around each side with each of the four parts of the breath.
Mindfulness offers up many tools. I find these tools very useful in enhancing my experiences of other types of spiritual practice. One of the most basic principles of mindfulness is to anchor ourselves in this present moment with the information the 5 senses provide. One of the challenges with this sensory data is to receive it in a manner which is as concept-free as possible.
Thus, in mindfulness, it is good start to notice the feeling of the breeze on my hand. It is better to disengage my knowledge that it is a breeze and to simply tune in to the feeling on my hand. It is even better than that to release my concept knowledge that I have a hand: the goal is to simply experience that sensation as something that is occuring.
It is powerful to attend to the breath for as long as we are able. Perhaps that is just for a part of the inhale. Perhaps we are able to stay fully in our breath for all 4 “sides” of the “box.”
Two versions of this practice are presented here. It is worth being reflective on how the two different prescriptions for breath-lengths leave you feeling.
Practice 69A
Background to 69B
It might be helpful to recall the shape of a trapezoid from your last geometry class. 
For this practice, it’s helpful to envision a box of the shape shown above. We could imagine that this box had legs of 3 feet. We could imagine the smaller, upper base was 4 feet, and we could imagine that the lower, longer base was 5 feet.
Practice 69B:
Background: This spiritual practice will introduce a few different approaches to staying present. The overaching idea with mindfulness is to meditate by locating ourself in the present. One of the way that this is done is through recognizing when we are having having intrusive thoughts or sensations by simply and gently witnessing these: watching them come and go. I find this powerful because identifying their coming and leaving is a way to remind myself that I am not the same as these thoughts, and as I do this I am shown that this is what the mind does– it thinks and feels things.
A second major feature of this practice is to locate the self with the physical sensations we are noticing now. Most often these are the sensations of breath.
There are some related spiritual practices listed at this website. I am sharing this practice to introduce a handful of new possibilities. A few different possibilities are featured in each of the practices below. I suggest trying each of them and then picking and choosing your favorite aspects of each of the practices below.
Practice 68A
Practice 68B
Practice 68C
Practice 68D
The Faith-ing Project 