...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.

In 2002, a series of incidents and private e-mails from an alarmed parish staff led to my serving as a whistleblower when the pastor of the community where I'd been a member for 30 years embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars.  As in many of these cases, the extent of his transgressions was never made public for a number of reasons.  That's someone else's story to tell. 

Yet, I did learn what happens when you bring forth an uncomfortable truth about a well liked leader:  

Letters to the editor.  (Who IS this woman?  I have know Fr. ________for years and he is a good, caring man).  

Phone calls from the press who have little concern for a traumatized parish. (Why won't you agree to on-camera?  Don't you care about the truth?)  

People on the sidelines who want to make you Joan of Arc.  (You go, Leslie.  Bring down the corruption of the Catholic Church).  People from other religions believing Catholicism is the problem and all I need do is try out their church and their god.  

People who go out of their way to avoid you in the grocery store and at Mass.  (I hate going to church, my daughter would say.  I feel like everyone is looking at us).  

People who call out of the blue to see how you are doing and do you need some advice on how to deal with the press and who try to see the complexity of the unfolding story without splitting the players into caricatures of good and evil.

Church leaders protecting their own. (You are on an extraordinarily unchristian crusade, wrote a Jesuit I'd deeply respected in a scathing e-mail).  It hardly felt like a crusade. I felt like my insides were being ripped out and I left the parish broken, disillusioned and in a spiritual dark night.

Thanks to spiritual direction, therapy, supportive people and work I love, I found my way through one of the most painful times of my life.  The Penn State story brings it back.  The truth is, I understand the desire to stay silent and hope it goes away.  The cost is enormous for telling the truth.   Families are hurt.  Friendships are torn apart.  Children and grownups are disillusioned and innocence is lost.  The accused fall ill under the stress at best and at worst, focus the attention on themselves as victims.  

My son gets angry with me when I question whether I did the right thing.  As a Penn State grad, he sees "a campus full of people that are deluded" and that devotion to the sport trumped child rape.  As a former Catholic, he believes religion can do the same thing.   

Groupmind is powerful and will blind decent people when devotion, faith, loyalty and sense of sacrifice to something higher than themselves feels threatened.  One need look no further than the Penn State riots to see what happens when a beloved icon turns out to be a fallible god.  I facilitate groups and have heard from more people than I care to count who are the collateral damage of this groupmind.  Sexual abuse and rape is rampant in families, churches, spiritual communities, the military and in sports and it continues because of the conspiracy of silence and allegiance to the institution and its icons.   It boggles my mind.

I can't seem to shake the images of the 10 year old, the young coach and the senior coach.  I wonder if Sandusky was a survivor of abuse himself because if we know nothing else, we know that perpetrators were often young victims.  Other images and stories I've been told flash through my mind and I consider the long, painful road of trauma, healing (maybe), forgiveness and redemption.  

I consider my experience and know it is comparably mild.  I do know that anyone who has ever had to decide whether to speak out or stay silent when faced with abuse or injustice has had a face-to-face encounter with the darker impulses of their own humanity.   Looking inside they may ferret out a desire for self-preservation, group acceptance, hidden agendas, loyalty to flawed gods and religions, comfort and material security.   When combined with groupmind the ability to rationalize heightens. 

The hopeful part of myself wonders if more of us will take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves how love of the team, the religion, the spouse, the guru or the country compromise our ability to do the right thing. Self-deception is dicey stuff.  No one's exempt.

Last Thursday, I slid into the back of a church with about 20 other people. I belong to no parish, but occasionally stop in for these tiny morning Masses in the university chapel far from my neighborhood. During the petitions, a thirtysomething man prayed for healing and forgiveness for everyone involved at Penn State. His sincerity moved me.  My self-imposed exile from organized religion has me missing the company of some really decent people.

Yet, I know my place is outside of these walls where I can see with more clarity.  These days, I'm not much into pledging allegiance to any group or guru for it muddles my mind and I've a hard time finding my way to the truth.

At the risk of sounding simplistic, I've found love works better than most anything else for although it hurts like hell, it holds a space for screw ups, accountability, responsibility, idiocy, selfishness, abuse, suffering, betrayal, forgiveness and redemption.  

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?

When my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer 5 1/2 years ago, my initial response was the requisite, "Why her?" She'd experienced a number of life challenges and I felt as if she’d had her fill.

Yet, that was then and this is now. 

Janice took an unconventional approach to cancer by treating it not as an enemy with which to do battle but as a rather unwanted companion who had shown up to offer her insights into her feelings, her body and her relationships. 

She reflected on thought patterns that had created undue stress and began to change the way she saw the world and let go of her propensity to worry about things beyond her control. 

She chose not to reduce her interaction with the health care system to oncologists, surgeons and cell destroying meds. Nor, was she going to rely exclusively on conventional medicine to heal as she intuitively knew that she was far more familiar with her body than an oncologist whose attention focused exclusively on her cancer. 

Instead, she chose to view her body as a living organism which wanted to cooperate with her healing. She participated in an acupuncture study at Tri-Health Integrative. She received therapeutic Healing Touch the morning of each chemo treatment. Bethesda generously allowed Ceece, her Healing Touch practitioner to do a treatment pre-op and post-op. Ceece created a loving , healing environment for all of us in the waiting room as she is aware of the impact a family’s stress can have on the patient. As she worked with me, I could feel a spaciousness inside of me that facilitated a deeper level of acceptance.

Yet, it did not stop there. Recognizing the power of the mind to facilitate healing, Janice listened to guided imagery CDs which have been proven to alleviate stress and promote positive surgical outcome; her surgeon noticed that bleeding was remarkably minimal. Janice also used a set of CDs designed to invite the power of the mind to assist her in navigating the debilitating effects of aggressive chemotherapy. Her oncologist remarked upon Janice’s surprisingly minimal side effects.   (She told him her approach once her treatment was complete; she didn't want to risk his skepticism clouding her commitment to the path she'd chosen).

She also chose to examine relationships which served her healing and those that would create stress. (This sometimes included me as she told me I loved her so much that she could feel my fear). She set clear boundaries on relationships as she reflected on her energy capacity for different encounters. She used her cancer to consider which relationships were life giving and life draining and she made necessary changes.

While she has no desire to repeat this cancer journey, she recognizes this uninvited guest became a companion that engendered a profound personal and spiritual transformation for which she is abundantly grateful. She has, in her characteristically unobtrusive fashion, offered these insights to other women experiencing cancer.

Today, we walked our 5K with my daughter and her hub, my niece, my brother-in-law and of course, withAlejandro, my grandson who thinks his Tia Janice is the next best thing to Pepperidge Farm goldfish.   

I just had a conversation with my friend who was raised in a secular Jewish household by liberal parents.  She studied for years with a spiritual guru and is one of my more interesting friends. She's the one of the most honest, reflective people I know and she has no interest in impressing anyone except maybe her boss.  

I first met her in an Integral Theory program at JFK University and frankly was intimidated by her intellect and her low tolerance for anything I might call inauthentic drivel which I engage in occasionally.   We've become friends who talk regularly about Integral, our families and our lives. She encouraged me to pursue my idea of an online sangha (community) for people interested in post-traditional Christianity.  

The other day, she sent me an e-mail in which she wrote: 

one of these days i want to talk to you about the idea of someone sacrificing for your spiritual advancement.  the whole christ died for your sins thing is completely weird to me. 

It never made much sense to me either. So I explained to my friend that this misinterpretation is rooted in sketchy theology.   The Greek word being translated as "salvation" is what scholar Lynn Bauman might call "restoration to fullness of being."  It isn't about anyone dying FOR anyone in the typically sacrificial sense.  

Rather, it is about entering into deep communion…loving so deeply, so fully that this love unites the I and the Thou.   I'm not talking about sentimental, gushy love.  I'm talking about a fierce love which stands solid and steady in a state of open surrender to what IS in the midst of some of the biggest curve balls life throws you.  (The Buddha's insight helps here.  Life is suffering.)

I also explained that there are other texts beyond the four familiar gospels which help flesh out the Jesus path.  This is helpful as the four gospels in the canon have been interpreted in some pretty frightening, misogynistic ways.  

These other texts include the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Gospel of Philip. They predate the canonical gospels and Jesus has a distinctly Buddhist feel in these texts.   For instance:

If you bring forth what is within you, what you will bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.    (Nothing like the shock of recognizing our hidden selves).  

These other texts also place Mary Magdalene in the front of the room…as the one apostle who fully understood Jesus' radical message of love.  

So I said this to my friend: "It's as if the path of Christ consciousness hasn't been fully realized or understood by mainstream Christianity.  It's a case of mistaken identity.  And I see many people embarrassed and ashamed to be Christian these days and I understand that as well.  But, there is a wealth of inner, contemplative wisdom in these texts.  There is a well worn path of love.  

She said "You wouldn't know it by what you see out there."  

That's because they don't get attention.  Loud people do.  And, while I'm not a traditional Christian, I do find many traditional Christians leading a life of love.  They're in hospices and homeless shelters feeding dying people.  There are also countless Christians, traditional and post traditional, practicing contemplation born in the wisdom path of conscious love in which the divine is not out there in an elusive far away place called heaven.  Rather, it is in the stillness of our hearts for we are participating with a divine force of love some call God.    

Renowned scholar, Huston Smith, distills Christianity to this:

We're in good hands, and in gratitude for that fact it would be well if we bore one another's burdens.

She found this helpful.  She said it makes more sense than using religion as what she calls a "political bludgeon." She found Christianity frightening as a kid growing up.  No big surprise from a woman from a Jewish household.  

We also talked about the "spiritual but not religious" postmodern tendency to meld all religions into one ignoring the distinct contributions of the world religions which is useful in moving past "my way is the only way" mindset of traditional religion, but it often tends to distill wisdom to pablum.  

So, we might ask, why start over? Why throw the baby out with the bathwater?  Why not integrate ancient practices with modern and postmodern insights?   Traditionalists have much to offer in a world in which Girls Gone Wild is often seen a distorted pinnacle of sexual freedom.  

She wants to tape a conversation in which she asks me some of the more difficult questions.   I'm open.  While I've no interest in Christian apologetics,  I do have an interest in contributing an alternative perspective that often gets lost amidst the clamor.  

It isn't until I enter the silence that I fully realize the extroverted life I have chosen for myself.  

Dave and I spent today driving through mountains, eating lunch in Aspen (where my friend asked me to buy her an expensive, useless gift) and closing out the day St. Benedict's Monastery in Snowmass for the first time.  When a monastery is within 100 miles, I'm a moth to flame as if I've found my people.   No greeters at the door telling me to have a nice day.  No signs pointing us anywhere except away from the cloistered silence of the monastic monks.  No shops with kitschy mugs and politically correct bumper stickers.  No explanation of anything except the intimations of Nature who has a language of her own.

I walk into the bookstore and icons of the Christ line the walls and my favorite authors' books are set out on tables.  Merton. Bourgeault. Wilber.  Zuercher.  Ilia Delio. Chodron.  Aurobindo.  Enneagram weaves with Integral weaves with Buddhism weaves with contemplative Christianity.   I am away from the religion and politics that dilutes wisdom to a shadow of itself and feel no need to explain the path I've chosen.

I walk outside and Dave sits on a bench under the aspens.  As I sit behind him, I know that some day soon I'll come back.  Maybe not to Snowmass, but to a longer period of silence in the natural world that waits for me.

“There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.” Thomas Jefferson

One of my Facebook friends posted this today and it got a boatload of "Likes" which is no surprise considering the alarming traction a faction of fundamentalist Christianity has gained in the highest echelons of the Republican party with viable, mainstream candidates dancing around science as if it were the enemy and a liberal conspiracy.  

To complicate matters, the silence of rational conservatives is deafening which is why a Tweet like Jon Huntsman's goes viral.  It's not because he said anything particularly revolutionary; it's that he said anything about science at all which is increasingly outside the mainstream of the Republican party. Furthermore, many contemporary conservative analysts have developed a disturbing penchant for reducing homosexuals, immigrants and the poor to bizarre caricatures which play on virtually every fear that has shown up in uncertain times throughout history.  

So, we're left with is distortions, assumptions and reductionism and what Andrew Sullivan calls, "Christianism," which is not a religion, but a political ideology. 

Yet, to take a quote like Jefferson's and post it on Facebook without any context is its own sort of reduction as Jefferson was earnest in his desire to tease through the distortions and obfuscations of the Gospel writers in order to get to the authentic sayings of Jesus.   (In the interest of full disclosure, I'm teaching an online class called "Coming Home, A New Way of Being Christian," a course which has been informed by the Beatitudes, philosopher Ken Wilber, the Jesus Seminar, Stages of Faith,  evolutionary science and contemplative Christian teachers like Cynthia Bourgeault.  So, I do have a bias here although it's rooted more in a resolve to clarify distortions than any desire to convert).  

Jefferson was pointing to the obvious: religion (and in this case, Christianity) produces no small bevy of "fools and hypocrites" capable of using the sacred texts to project their psychological shadow onto the chosen "out" groups and promote a political agenda focused on some sort of power dominance rooted in the One True Way.     

Yet, my Facebook friend may know not know about the letter Jefferson wrote to John Adams about the teachings of Jesus.  He wrote: 

"The whole history of these books (the Gospels) is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text…that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine." 

But he also wrote:

In the New Testament, there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and other parts are of the fabric of inferior minds." 

He called himself a Christian of sorts (with  caveats).  His words:

To the corruptions of Christianity, I am opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself, I am in Christian in the only sense in which he wanted anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing every human excellence and believing his never claimed another." 

Jefferson's use of the term, "tricks" points to the same discoveries made by the Jesus Seminar: the texts have been altered, deleted, distorted.  Many texts like the Gospel of Thomas and Gospel of Mary Magdalene were hidden and they speak of a very different, rather Buddhist sounding Jesus.  You have to do some sleuth work and spiritual practice to tease out the inner meanings of the essential teachings of Jesus.

With that said, the point is this: when you fight reductionism with more reductionism you still end up with distortions and risk falling into some other expression of Jefferson's "foolishness and hypocrisy." 

There are countless Christians out there of every stripe.  Some of them are scientific, non-theistic rationalists (you'll find them mostly in Unitarian churches), some are social justice evangelicals (found in places like Sojourners and The Simple Way movement), some are postmodern Oneness folks who see the Christ or Spirit in all religions (found often in Unity churches).

Some are living the Beatitudes in forgotten developing countries serving the poor, healing the sick, building wells and gardens (described often in Nick Kristof's columns), some are contemplatives in and outside of monasteries and some are psycho-spiritual Jungians (found in the writings of my deceased friend, Fr. Lou).  

They are Greek, Russian and Syrian Orthodox and they are Chinese people at all stages of faith holding secret prayer meetings in communist China.

Some are integralists who are a sort of an evolutionary amalgamation of the above who see Christianity as an ancient tradition rooted in the spiritual practices of Jesus.  This includes meditation, contemplation, self-reflection, conscious work and creation of post-traditional community which focuses on service to others  and to the earth itself.  

It is rooted in remembering that the love for which we long is already present in the innermost Sabbath of our hearts and not far away in some distant heaven waiting for our death.  

Like many Christian expressions, it births a humility in the limits, the possibilities and the responsibilities of our incarnation.  It lives side by side (and in my case, in the same home) with atheists, yogis, Muslims, Buddhists, Democrats, Republicans, agnostics, gay people and immigrants.  It lives itself into answers which become questions again because that's the nature of incarnation and the nature of a living energy we call the cosmic Christ.  Many in this movement don't go to traditional church and have redefined what church is to them.

But, please let's not reduce all Christians to the political Christianism of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry  for this is it's own kind of foolishness.  Nor reduce it to a Catholic structure which refuses to evolve past patriarchal notions of women, sex and power.

Many non-Christians have a boatload of shadow work to do when it comes to their own individual and collective Christian wounds.   (Shadow work, for those unfamiliar with the term, is rooted in the psychological notion of projection in which you see in others what you've denied in yourself).  

So, here's the challenge:  Ask yourself or someone you know the question asked by the Master himself: Who do YOU say that I am?  Pay attention to whether the answer opens their hearts to themselves and others.  Pay attention to the vast array of answers and to the lived lives born out of those answers.  An antidote to untested assumptions is simple curiosity about the life of another.

Hold the paradox and the complexity of perspectives you'd never considered. There's a value in being discriminating and careful when drawing conclusions.  This is what grown ups do.  And right now, the world desperately needs grown ups.

I'm one of those people who has occasionally admired people who get in their cars, brave all sorts of weather and stand on street corners for something they believe in.  I beep at them as I pass them in my car and I wave out the window if I support them.  

Yet, the closest I ever came to participation was standing on the corner of Montgomery and Cooper Rd. with my second grader and her friends in support of a local school levy.  I'm somewhat embarrassed about this because I believe in many things.  

But, I rationalized that I give my time in other ways and that you can't stand on a street corner in support of every cause.  You must pick and choose; there is only so much time in one day.  I do other things. I don't have the protest temperament.

Yet, there was something else: I mostly missed the 60s as I was still jumping rope and swinging on swings during the height of the protests and my mother told me "those people on the streets are dirty and long haired and disrespectful."  I believed her.  

There was something inside of me that equated protest with nastiness, bombastic self-righteousness and demonization of certain groups which include some people I care about.  

A transplanted New Englander, I've lived in the Midwest since the 70s and I've grown terminally polite.  I've been seeing the dark side of radicalism across the political spectrum and don't want to find myself guilty by association with perspectives which add fuel to a fire raging out of control.  

Yet, a sort of domino effect of events have happened which had me slapping a sticker on my shirt and standing today in front of the courthouse steps.  Two stand out.  

My daughter, her husband and their son have just come here from El Salvador and my grandson's legacy is one in which thousands of people were massacred because people like me were silent or mostly ignorant about what was happening to poor people in developing countries. 

Then, I happened upon an article written by Paul Knitter, one of my theology professors.  He wrote of The Appalling Silence of Good People:

 Protest cannot be motivated by hatred.  It must always prefer non-violence.

(Yet), Buddhists don’t rule out indignation or anger. They just don’t want anger to lead to hatred and to hate-inspired action.

But anger and indignation play a very important role in the response to injustice.  They should not be short-circuited by a too quick, and perhaps too facile, call for compassion.

The same day I read the article, I got an e-mail inviting me to attend a prayer vigil for a group of people I love. They run an inn for women trying to get back on their feet as they go through tough times.  Oh, and they also have a successful program for women moving through prostitution and addiction.  I love these women too. Their stories of abuse often leave me slack jawed and I've been part of a team which does facilitation training for the peer facilitators. 

A local corporation, Western Southern, is suing the inn and the city of Cincinnati because they want the area re-zoned and they want the property on which the 100+ year old Inn sits.  They say the area has changed and they say it is not an area meant for facilities like the Anna Louise Inn.   I was taken aback by the hubris.  

So, I went today and it was pretty awesome.  My grandson, Alejandro, joined us.  It was a beautiful, cool morning, I saw lots of friends, the prayers and speeches were thoughtful and reflective, music was played, some people sang and Alejandro ate goldfish.   

Each side argued their case before the judge who said he'd decide next week.  

I'm realizing this afternoon that I'd fallen into one of those dichotomies that says people and events are "either this or that."   Yet, activism has its own spectrum which includes people experiencing indignation and channeling their anger with some level of dignity and care.  

I'm sorry it took me 52 years to find that out.