1. Setting an intention
2. Shift in Attention
3. Repetition, Repitition, Repitition
4. Guidance from a Teacher

Prescription for Living Deeply

by Stacy Lawson 

"Transformation doesn't require going to the mountain top," shares Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, Ph.D., co-author of Living Deeply and researcher at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. "Something as mundane as road rage, for instance, is the seed for a moment of compassion."

Schlitz and her colleagues ((Vieten and Amorok) have spent the last 10 years investigating human consciousness and the nature of transformative experience. What is transformation? What are the common triggers? What barriers keep us from having transformative experiences more often? And how can we set the stage for these experiences as well as sustain their impact?

Their research project was inspired in part by Richard Gunther, a businessman and father, who had a significant transformative experience and wanted to understand if there were others like him. "I experienced a profound spiritual awakening...my awakening was this: we are all part of a single entity. I was part of all others and all others were part of me. I soared into this new awareness, losing all sense of myself as individual. There was no me alone, only a universal us."

Seeking to understand the mechanics of Gunther's awakening, and others like him, the team inquired into the triggers for transformation, which can be broad ranging. According to their findings, transformation can be sudden and unexpected, like the kind Gunther experienced while gazing down the dramatic Big Sur coastline on a brilliant, sunny afternoon. It can be triggered by crisis or intense suffering - a brush with death, loss of a loved one, ending of a relationship - that shatters our defenses and opens us to a new perspective. Or transformation can be gradual, taking form in our consciousness over time through the influence of certain experiences or personal practices.

The study defined consciousness transformation as "a profound shift in perspective resulting in long-lasting, life-enhancing changes in the way you experience and relate to yourself, others and the world." It is a shift in perception from the limited, individual 'I' to a consciousness that embraces the larger sense of the collective. "My 'me' becomes a 'we'," says Schlitz. "Even in our diversity we can see the whole."

Physician Rachel Naomi Remen describes witnessing this transformative shift with cancer patients: "There's a moment when the individual steps away from the former life and the former identity and is completely out of control and completely surrenders - and then is reborn with a larger, expanded identity."

So what keeps us from recognizing this expanded reality in our normal, everyday lives?

According to Schlitz, our cognitive science has a term called "inattentional blindness." It is something akin to patterned grooves in the mind that shrink our awareness to a very small percentage of what's actually going on around us. "Our culture primes us in a material, acquisitive, success-oriented worldview. When we form an opinion, it is based on our lifelong brain conditioning. As a result, our attention is focused on only a tiny fraction of the information available to us -- most of what we experience is not conscious."

Here, it seems, science and spirituality see eye-to-eye. What cognitive science recognizes as conditioned cognitive pathways, spiritual traditions have addressed as the limitation of "personal identity" or "ego" or the "false self". Both maintain that if we could see the full truth of our reality moment by moment, without censorship from our culturally and socially conditioned grooves or "blindness," we would experience a wholly new and expanded consciousness.

During their decade-long research, the Living Deeply team investigated how over 2,000 individuals (both masters and laypeople) across a broad range of spiritual traditions set about expanding the mind - how they create the conditions for transformative experience and how they've integrated their experiences in order to live more consciously.

According to Schlitz, it boils down to a few key concepts: Intention, Attention, Repetition and Guidance.

Setting an Intention: One of the primary ingredients of conscious transformation is personal choice - the desire to use the experiences of our everyday lives as opportunities for positive evolution. Clear intention is important because transformative practice isn't always a walk in the park - moments of sublime expansion may be juxtaposed with mundane moments of agitation, boredom or fear of the unknown. By setting a clear intention, while releasing the need for any particular outcome (a concept the Buddhist tradition calls "non-striving"), we can start to bring our whole self to every situation we encounter.

Shift in Attention: Another key component of transformative experience is a fundamental shift in perspective -- from a narrow, personal focus to a larger field of meaning. We begin to see the world through an expanded lens. Personally, I remember a meditation, many years ago, in which this transformative shift occurred for me. In an instant, I realized that every breath, every action, every movement was a sacred offering to collective humanity, a prayer for the peace and happiness of the whole. Pondering my personal well-being gave way to pondering the well-being of the collective body. Through shifts like this, we naturally start to develop deeper ways of attending to the world in which we live.

Repetition, Repetition, Repetition: Whether it's pruning the roses in our garden or a more formal practice like meditation, transformative experience can be enhanced by doing our practice repeatedly with a certain discipline and order. "With repetition, we lay down neural pathways," says Schlitz. "Our brains actually change. We can continue training ourselves to be unhappy, or we can find nurturing affirming ways to shift our intention and attention, then reinforce it through repetition."

Guidance from a Teacher: Finally, a teacher can enhance our own noetic intuition and inner authority. If we wanted to become physically fit, we would hire a personal trainer to expand our skills and confidence to enact a lifelong health regime. If we wanted to become an Olympic athlete, we would insist on having a world-class coach to guide our development. So it is with spiritual or transformational teachers who understand the unique territory of unraveling the conditioned grooves of the mind. A good teacher can gently guide us to our highest potential, supporting us on the path to our own realization.

What is the outcome of all this? What are we transforming into?

"When we integrate the essence of transformation, everything becomes practice. Life is the practice," says Schlitz. "Sacred is not some abstraction. It is every moment, even the challenging moments like when we are in conflict with ourselves or someone else. Every experience becomes an opportunity for deeper awareness and compassion."

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That’s why “motivational” speakers Robbins, Ziegler.... are not motivational: they are inspirational. Motivation is directional – this but not that – inspiration is more like verbal adrenaline. It can even be used against you – more energy to do what you don’t want. Just keep working harder and you will succeed. I think I’ll position myself as a laziness coach: stop working so hard for extrinsic rewards."

It is why I'm not a fan of short talks I'm asked to give to groups...inspiring is breathing life into something or someone and it's a start...but more often than not, it's  a shot of adrenaline that comes from the outside in and it rarely generates significant change. People feel good for the day and then life hits.  (Or, if they've just learned their type, they might feel like they've been slapped lopside the head and have no idea what to do with it). 

The real work is understanding what motivates and enlivens us on a deeper level.   When we make gentle contact with the suffering we cause ourselves and others...which is usually rooted in our type's habits...the motivation to change comes from the inside out. 

I received an emailed  from someone outlining the results of a study researching why Catholics are leaving the church in droves.  

One researcher is a Jesuit and another works at a Catholic institution.  Their recommendation to the Church is:  

"(to) focus most immediately on 'a fresh explanation of the nature of the Eucharist' and 'a creative liturgical, pastoral, doctrinal and practical response' to complaints about the quality of weekend Catholic liturgies, especially about music and homilies."

A fresh explanation of Eucharist is the most immediate focus?  Or that "creative liturgical, pastoral, doctoral and practical" responses will bring people back?  

So it's liturgy and not the sexual shadow of the Church that is keeping people away?  

In 2012, women can't be ordained, celibacy is mandated from the outside, pedophilia is rampant, gay people are considered disordered (even though a healthy percentage of clergy is gay), male bishops are testifying on Capitol Hill that women should be denied birth control in their insurance coverage and sacred texts are interpreted through a solely masculine lens.  In the midst of all of this, laity are still encouraged to believe that they must surrender power to the authorities from above (all men) who know what's best for them.  

The institutional blindness even by the researchers hired within the institution is epic in its proportions and it's the elephant in the room impeding any significant organizational change.  Improving liturgy is like putting a bandaid on a hemorrhage. 

The researchers conclude with an understatement:

"the exclusion of married men and women from ordination (are) 'institutional barriers,' (and) such ordinations 'may not happen,' and many would argue that they 'should not happen, but to argue those things are 'impossible' is to deny that 'nothing is impossible with God.'

'We may be stifling the Spirit' by 'our resistance to respond' to the current priest shortage in the church’s refusal to expand its rules for who can be ordained, he said.

No, Spirit cannot be stifled, but institutional barriers are hardly the only place where Spirit operates.  

Spirit is operating in this massive exodus. When people leave safety of the nest and fly away from the belief that institutional barriers only can contain Spirit, they may feel directionless and lost as if they're falling into a gap of the unknown. From a spiritual perspective, this is a damn good place as uncomfortable as it may be.

Such a free fall into the gap invites the inner dissonance which usually births some serious spiritual transformation in the deepest places inside of themselves.

There's not a lot of control and security in there; someone might even find they can be openly gay, marry their partner, upset the social order and still embody the Love of the Master...as if there ever could be an institutional barrier on that. 

The Enneagram identifies the cognitive-emotional habit of nine types. Each type as its own habitual attentional style with a core emotion that drives the pattern. Within this structure, there is a somatic response that accompanies the emotion. There are three primary afflictive emotions in Enneagram theory which are concurrent with neurobiological research: anger, fear and panic at loss of connection. (Jack Killen MD, David Daniels MD, Dan Siegel, MD). These three primary emotions correspond with the three centers of the Enneagram (Anger: Body, Fear: Head and Panic: Heart).

Recently, I received an e-mail from a woman who wanted to know if I could help her daughter. I had seen her for an Enneagram typing interview a few years back and she was a concerned mother with a daughter who’d had some challenges. Through the conversation, I recognized the mother was taking on her daughter’s problems as her own and was helping create a cycle of dependency. Mom was a 2, a type whose attention goes to other people’s needs. Each time I gently shifted the discussion to her own needs, she became visibly uncomfortable and wanted to talk again about her daughter. I suggested we work together on her own anxiety over her daughter’s challenges and that could ultimately prove to be beneficial for her daughter. I didn’t hear from her again until last week when she emailed me to see if I knew anyone who could help her daughter who was already in therapy.

Then, last week, I saw a Facebook post about the contraception issue being played out on the U.S. political stage. Someone who knew the Enneagram began to suggest the poster was angry and then began to evaluate his Enneagram style and make a rather startling array of assumptions. After he was done with that, he then typed the politician in question and told the poster that the politician must have evoked buried shadow! It felt like an assault of sorts in which someone who has access to an elegant psycho-spiritual map of integration uses it as a bludgeon to take a dissenter down. Not a good idea.

Most of us who know the Enneagram have seen this in ourselves and others and it’s not only disrespectful, but also abuses the system the same way religionists misuse sacred texts by turning it into a screen for their own projections without working the deeper, more illuminating elements which can actually engender inner shifts in consciousness.

I’m trained in the Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition which is an antidote to misuse of the Enneagram because we use it as an unparalleled tool in developing the capacity for inner witnessing as a 1st person practice and compassionate presence as a 2nd person practice. In this article, I’ll explore 1st person practice, and next week we’ll look at 2nd person practice.  To read rest of article on Integral Life, click here.

Over the past weeks, some religion in the U.S. has morphed into a desexualized political pawn in which Serious and Sober (mostly) men are disproportionately outraged over matters pertaining to a woman's body. The very tenor of the conversation sucks the very lifeblood out of the religion being represented.  

It's no surprise people are exiting the pews in droves...spiritual transformation hardly ever comes through outside-in moral prescriptions from rigid authorities who speak from ivory tower lecterns about matters in which they've minimal or no direct experience.    

The truth is, regardless of who we are, transformation is an inside-out affair.  More often it's something like this: some sort of shock inserts itself into our lives and applies the critical pressure needed which impels us to grow and thrive, shrivel up or become hardened and lifeless.  

Some experience this kind of transformation and want to impose it onto others by offering a canned version of promised salvation in the form of bound up religion. It's an inevitable stage of faith in which stasis and certitude have a place.  

Yet, evolution loves to cast doubt on our tethered convictions by pointing us to incongruities and paradox.   It was El Salvador that slapped me awake long before I had a Salvadoran grandchild and son-in-law.  It began with the blogs of my daughter whose presence in this violent country ultimately resulted in my visit and transformation by a cocktail of violence, kindness, unfathomable oppression, poverty, dirt, fortitude, NGOs, good and bad religion, music, humor, anger and love.  

I've led a rather insular life and there is nothing like a visit to El Salvador if you'd like a mirror to your blindness.  If you see the world in black and white,  El Salvador will show you paradox.  If you wave the flag in love of the U.S.  El Salvador will show you the underbelly of U.S. policy in Central America.  

If you elevate the poor and cast aspersions upon the Ones with Money, El Salvador will show you the dark side of  your idealism.  Dust to ashes.  

I've had many ask why I go there.  Others have wondered why we allow our daughter to go there...as if we could have stopped her.  We go because it's the response called for in the moment.  

But, El Salvador has changed my life. I follow a spiritual path rooted in the paradoxical teachings of Jesus and El Salvador is the teacher extraordinaire of paradox.  

I've not much interest in religion any more, nor am I one who is terribly attached to converting anyone.    I've lost interest in arguments on the divinity claims Christians make about Jesus.  I'm increasingly ambivalent  around conflicts on who is or who is not Christian or who God is as all of this misses the entire point of the path.    

For the moment we grasp at certitude, we make a pact with the devil to shut our eyes and close our hearts to aspects of Life and Love we no longer wish to see or feel.   

The Way of Love is rooted in timeless themes of betrayal, loss, redemption, passion, rejection, community, love, compassion, deaths and resurrections. Sounds lofty?  Hardly.  It's usually revealed in mundane micro-events of an ordinary day.  

But, it touches universal goodness when we discover inside ourselves a surprising capacity for kindness and generosity.

It identifies our hubris and delusions of grandeur and entitlement by humbling us into the recognition that safety, esteem and control is an illusion.  It points to our unique divinity when we swim in a delusion of our own worthlessness.

In losing my religion, I'm finding Something Else.  The odd thing is that the religion I left carries more meaning than it ever did when I was in the thick of it.  Go figure.

I remember a question one of my theology professors often asked his students who told their own stories of the paradoxical Way of Love: "But is this Christian?"  

My response? Yes. And no.  It depends on who you ask.

Yesterday, someone private messaged me after I posted a "Like" on an article about Susan B. Komen's reversal of its decision to revoke funds from Planned Parenthood. He wrote  "How do you reconcile this with your Christian faith?"  I said "I'm not going there" as my view on abortion discussions is similar to my Christian ethics professor who said, "When you choose your topic for the class presentation, you may not choose abortion.  It's too polarized an issue and we've lost any capacity to discuss it with any kind of reflection and discernment."

Yet, that's a bit disingenuous as I "went there" by Liking the article. I'd given some thought about stepping into those waters in such a public forum as Facebook.  Social media is the Wild West and you gotta know when to hold 'em.  I'd made a clear decision not to hold 'em.

But, I thought of a close friend who was a priest who told me that he was getting pressure from the archbishop for not speaking out against abortion from the altar.  He said, "I can't.  There are too many women who sit in my office and tell me their painful stories of pregnancy and abortion.  I can't rail from the altar." 

When the pressure got too great, he approached me and asked me, aged 27 at the time, to chair a "Respect Life" commission in our parish.  But he said, "I don't want it to be called, Respect Life.  I want to call it the 'L'Chaim Commission.'  L'Chaim is Hebrew for 'To Life.'  I want this to be about valuing all of Life along the continuum." 

As we talked, we envisioned something that would invite us into deeper reflection of how we, as human incarnations, value life.  How do we value our own and the lives of those we love?  How are we with the elderly, the sick, the poor and those who lie outside of the conventions of a nice suburban church?  How do we value the biodiversity of the natural world?  How do we value the complex layers of human sexuality in a Church whose sexual dysfunction is epic in its proportions?

This conversation along with his guidance has informed my view on abortion because I saw Fr. Lou embody the core teaching of the Master: "And the greatest of these is Love."  Love trumps everything.  

When possible, he would not allow himself to be used as a political pawn in a very polarized issue as he knew there were countless factors which weigh into this issue.  Every statistic has a refuting statistic and then you suddenly find yourself in frustrating discussion of point/counterpoint and Love is lost.

All I could think when I read of Komen's initial withdrawal of funds, is "Farewell to another safety net for the underinsured."  So, as I read of the Komen decision yesterday, I was pleased.  I'm at a medical convention this week and they'd just shown the movie "Sicko" to a group of physicians and while I'm no fan of Michael Moore's inflammatory films, I was depressed by the state of health care in the U.S. for the uninsured.  I also started to think about my sister who's been through breast cancer once and wondered if she'd lose health insurance if any work status changed.

There's an unstated implication in these polarized times that if you walk a Christian path, you must be pro-life  (I am pro-life in its endless expressions across the life continuum) and not pro-choice (I am pro-choice).  How can I call myself both?  It’s black and white, isn’t it?  No, it’s not.  Love is never black and white because it includes all things.  Love doesn’t make distinctions.  People do.  

Love is not bound by chronos time with it’s ever evolving notions of sex, power and gender.  It does not identify with political parties and religion as litmus tests. 

Still, in time bound reality we have to make practical decisions about how we  vote and where we stand.  We have to hold the paradoxical tensions of the evolving insights and evidence in science, economics, human behavior, gender, culture, sexuality, birth, death, psychology, spirituality and religion. 

Because we’re swimming in our own subjective realities and our own lived experience, there will be times when we will fall on opposite sides of a given issue.   We may even consciously insert an opposing perspective in order to expand a view in some way or even allow ourselves to change our view.

Yet, Love is the third, reconciling force between opposing forces and perspectives.  You can feel its Presence.  It is timeless and it changes any given conversation by slowing us down.   Love invites deeper discernment and reflective listening in which we hear beyond inflammatory words.  

I’m temperamentally disposed to speed, quickness and passionate debate so quite frankly, this shit is hard.  But, it’s the contemplative path of the Master.

I love this sacred story in light of the Law of Three, which is a way I make life decisions for it holds the shifting forces: When someone tried to trap Jesus between opposites by asking whether religious law should be enforced by stoning a woman for adultery, he paused, crouched down and drew in the sand.  He inserted the crucial, contemplative pause. 

He then invited people into their own hearts and discernment and said, “He who has no sin, cast the first stone.”  They became silent.  They paused.  Then, they dropped their righteousness, dropped their indignation and dropped their stones.    

Part of the Christian path is to work towards creating the kin-dom of God in the here and the now on this material, time-bound plane.   Only Love can hold the tension of the opposites which arise in a chronos time world.  Yet, Love forever births new ways of seeing because we pause long enough to deeply see the Other.   

For anyone claiming to follow the path of the Master, this is the one non-negotiable for it's ever so clear: The greatest of these is Love.

...and why is it so helpful in calming yourself?  Typically, when we hear we need to "get into our bodies," we think our way to the body...we think about our legs, our hands our heartbeat. This happens frequently when someone is new to the practice. It takes much gentle prompting to get a client to feel the sensations of a certain body part. 

The bodymind is a term that is showing up more frequently to point to the reality that mind and body cannot be split AND that the body IS its own intelligence with endless information and insight.

This is why I often begin a guided meditation with "body scans" in which we fine tune attention to subtle sensations in the body. Typically, this drops a client more deeply inside of themselves and shifts attention from the hamster wheel of thoughts to the felt sense of the body. People find it really helpful when they are beginning to learn meditation and/or contemplative prayer.  

Try this:

Drop your eyes.  Bring your attention to your left hand.  Feel the coolness of the air on the skin of your hands.  Now, notice any sensation you didn't notice a moment ago when  your eyes were open.....Imagine you are sending  your breath to your hands.  Do this for a few breaths...breathing in....breathing out....now, fine tune your awareness and notice any sensations in the palm of your hand...if you notice nothing, no big deal.  Just pay attention to the sense of "nothing." Place your attention on that space of nothing.  Do the same with each of the fingers on  your left hand, noticing sensations you didn't notice a moment ago.  Breathe into the sensations.  After a few minutes, place your attention on your right hand.  Can you feel a difference between the right and the left hand? Sometimes, simple awareness illuminates subtle sensations in the body.

Let me know how it goes.

I've created meditation downloads for each of the types on the Enneagram as each type tends to have certain patterns of holding the breath and holding the body.   You can find them here or on iTunes.  Just put "Leslie Hershberger" in the Search

Rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you, and be kind to those who remain behind, and be sure and calm before them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with Your confidence or joy, which they could not understand.

Seek yourself some sort of simple and loyal community with them, which need not necessarily change as you yourself become different and again different; love in them life in an unfamiliar form and be considerate of aging people, who fear that being-alone in which you trust. 

Avoid contributing material to the drama that is always stretched taut between parents and children; it uses up much of the children's energy and consumes the love of their elders, which is effective and warming even if it does not comprehend.

Ask no advice from them and count upon no understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance and trust that in this love there is a strength and a blessing, out beyond which you do not have to step in order to go very far!.....But Your solitude will be a hold and home for you even amid very unfamiliar conditions and from there you will find all your ways...

Rainer Marie Rilke

We've a need to blame and a desire for revenge when we're hurt.   I see this in myself and I see how easily I repeat family patterns which cause me to try to get from others what they are incapable of giving me due to their emotional imprinting.  Childhood lasts a lifetime.  

We've needy little selves who create drama whenever someone mirrors some past memory that we never quite got around to integrating.  I've a rather predictable story and I'm usually cast in the starring role of Martyr.  

I'm finally finding my way to peace and it's through the simple (albeit occasionally annoying) act of not judging the damn thing.  Loving the Martyr, forgiving the Martyr, not trying to change, fix, advise, save or understand the Martyr.  Love. When I do it, I feel a pop inside of me.

But then I run into a glitch.  It's you.  You hurt me.  You let me down. You were arrogant and righteous. You didn't cop to your part in this drama which in my Martyr playbook looks something like a lack of support.

So, I try something I learned when I used to say my prayers at night.  I can't seem to get there on my own.   I ask for help in forgiving you and forgiving myself.   And, wonder of wonders, it works.  I'm humbled.  It cuts through my righteousness, my arrogance and my need for you 'fess up. In his book, The Presence Process, Michael Brown writes that

"Prayer is a tool for neutralizing arrogance and gaining an awareness of peace....forgiveness can't be forced nor accomplished mechanically because it's 'the right thing to do.' So, this is why we humbly get down on our knees and ask whatever we understand our source to be an assist in this matter...by asking for assistance in this matter, we dismantle the fortress of arrogance and neutralize the venom of anger."

By god, he's right.

When Pema Chodron was Deirdre Blomfield-Brown she said, "There is nothing wrong with negativity."  Poet David Whyte writes, "Deirdre saw her depression as a thing in itself, like a mountain or a cloud, with its own life, its own necessities, and therefore worthy of respect, more like a doorway than an obstacle.  It was a path to follow, not an error she made that she should eliminate."  

As one who reads Pema often and as one who habitually embarks on a "flight to the light," I've learned there is no shame in darkness.  It's in darkness where we feel safe to explore the parts of ourselves we may hide in the glare of the light of day.  Maybe, it's why I like when the days grow shorter and the sun rests lower in the sky.   There's more time for darkness, reflection and tears. I'm often struck at how quickly people apologize for crying and see their sadness and darkness as a beast to be tamed. 

Why fake some happy version of yourself or why wrap yourself in cynicism in order to shield yourself from arrows if your heart is breaking and life is kicking you hard? What good does this do in the world?