Prayer and Mediation

I have always had a deep sense of exploration and wonder. I have always felt that there is something greater than me. In the past, I called that something God. God was the Catholic God, the God of the Trinity. God was equal parts loving and fearful. God was infallible and infinite. He was the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega. In order to go to heaven, you needed to accept Jesus into your heart and confess your sins.

As I grew up, the nature of God changed. I began to question the essence and nature of God. It seemed to me that the Catholic God was confusing and contradictory. I wondered how God could tell his followers to love and be compassionate of all and also condemn nonbelievers to hell and eternal suffering.

This confusion made me feel lost. I wanted to know who and what to believe in. Catholicism gave me guideposts in my faith. I knew I was holy because I went to church on Sunday, I prayed before I ate, I read the Bible, I tithed, I taught Sunday school. If I didn’t believe in the Catholic God, what were my actions but hollow? Who was I but a shell?

So I searched. I searched in the Tarot, in science, in Nietzsche, in myself, in leaders I admired, in friends, in nature, in the spaces and places between things. I tried to find the spirituality and faith I once had.

I found many things – beauty, love, respect, humility, vastness, absence, presence, joy, explanations – but I did not find my spirituality. What I once had was eluding me. It was if with every corner I turned my spirit turned the one right ahead of me. I kept getting glimpses of it and yet I never saw it. I was chasing my shadow.

I had to change course. Instead of searching for something outside of myself, something greater than me, I needed to find me. I needed to go deeper inside and see what made, and makes, me tick – how I move about in this world.

I remember my fourth grade teacher Mrs. Bishop. She was an amazing woman with a great sense of wonder. One spring day she told our class about astronomy, but in order to fully grasp it it needed to be dark outside. She told us to meet her in the schoolyard at 8pm that night.

I showed up eager to learn. Mrs. Bishop brought telescopes and a night sky map. It was my first memory of seeing the stars through a telescope, and somehow they didn’t seem so far away. I learned how to find Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper, and the Seven Sisters. Mrs. Bishop made astronomy seem so simple. In order to understand it, you simply needed to pause, observe, and reflect.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized the depth of Mrs. Bishop’s teachings. She wasn’t really teaching about astronomy. Astronomy was just a tool she used to teach us how to learn, explore, and deepen understanding. If we could pause, observe, and reflect on something as vast as the heavens, as space, then we should be able to do it with anything.

My good friend Margaret recently asked me to attend prayer/mediation workshops at her church. Margaret has always welcomed me into her faith. She is a model of letting her spirit speak through her actions. She is a mentor of mine for spiritual growth.

Over the last seven years, Margaret has invited me to various church functions and services, and I have politely turned down most of them. This time, however, something resonated within me. Partly, it was because I wanted/want to walk more intentionally in this world and this opportunity seemed like an excellent way to increase my intentionality. Partly, it was because I was/am no longer angry at the church (Catholic or otherwise). Partly, it was because my fondness for Margaret has grown tremendously and this seemed an excellent way to connect with her on a deeper level. All of these reasons converged and I committed to attending the workshops.

Previously, I would have attended the workshops in search of something outside of myself. This time, I attended the workshops with the focus solely on me – understanding what role prayer and mediation played in my life, in my journey towards leadership. I found myself pausing, observing, and reflecting. I took the lessons I learned – that prayer and meditation are simply a method to focus quietly on intention – and applied it to me. And I found a glimmer of myself. My shadow paused momentarily before running around the next corner.

The prayer/meditation workshops lasted only four sessions, so I needed to find something else that would enable me to pause, observe, and reflect. Another mentor of mine, Kica, co-teaches mediation classes for the San Francisco Buddhist Center. Coincidentally, their next six-week Introduction to Meditation class started the Tuesday after my last prayer/meditation workshop. I signed up.

I had my first class last Tuesday. I went with no expectations. I had written my first blog entry the same day, so I was really focused on nothingness. And nothingness is what happened. There is no way to describe the realization of being outside of your self by going deeply inside of your self through concentrating only on breathing. It is like realizing that the shadow I thought to be my spirit is really just my shadow and that my shadow is really who I am – space with little form that eludes everything and everyone and disappears in great light and great darkness.

My spiritual journey is my path towards leadership. Prayer and mediation are vehicles/tools I draw upon to pause, observe, and reflect. They help me step into nothingness.