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Meditation and Prayer:
Do you have a meditation practice?
William Bloom and the Spiritual Companions Trust have very recently published Meditation Masterclass which can be downloaded (for a small fee).
‘How to Meditate’, in Momma Zen by Karen Maezen Miller is recommended – it shares a practice of the simplest kind: breathing in and out to the count of ten, repeated. The work of The Lorians brings many rich resources for finding our way into an inner life that is congruently framed in terms that resonate now.
The vast subject of Meditation and Prayer also opens the door to the subject of Forgiveness. A few treasured prayers below bring some of these concepts into view, including Binnie A Dansby’s work with Forgiveness as a living practice, and arising from A Course in Miracles. This work has been and is of huge influence, and brings together the spiritual and the biographical in ways that make it clear that they are inseparable. A Course in Miracles focuses profoundly on the process of forgiveness as a metaphysical inquiry into the mind.
Binnie Dansby on The Process of Forgiveness:
You are invited to do your own research, and to write your own prayers. Let get as real as we can with each other about where you / we really are with your/ our inner practices.
It’s time to deepen, together. For most of us that means it’s time to start.
Again, and again. And again.
When the heart is hard there is no love
in the house no sap to bend the tree
no song to greet the rising sun
no dance, not free.
like a shrivelled hardened nut
it hides within its shell
it knows no overflow,
it feels like hell.
But life in all its compassion knows
it will have to fashion mighty blows
to crack, to shatter open,
to bring into the light this heart.
In these awakening moments
rivers of tears are cried
and hours of pain felt,
very delicate moments
regaining a vulnerable state.
A softened heart bathed in tears
knows the enfoldments of the love of All love
and no longer needs to hide
pp61 Silently Within, Modern Sufi Poetry
Deborah O’Brien Bell