Episode 14 - Meditation

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hey guys welcome to another episode of the liturgist podcast this one's kind of off the cuff um i'm in la um so for once i'm not live via satellite into a literature's podcast episode and we decided to do an episode on meditation because it's something we care a lot about it's a practice that has certainly been transformational in my life and it's something i've noticed that a lot of christians have an anxiety or an insecurity about there's a lot of fascination but also what's good what's bad what's dangerous is the devil going to come into my brain all these sorts of things um so we just decided let's do the science art and faith of meditation because it's something we both have done a lot in our lives and so you know when we think about this the first thing i want to say is doing an episode on meditation is like doing an episode on art or music it's an incredibly broad umbrella so don't expect to walk away with a comprehensive understanding of all types of meditation our goal here is to get you familiar with the topic maybe help you start some googling and walk away with a few things you can do yourself to get into a sort of practice me practicing meditation is something kind of new i've kind of grown up in church my whole life and started not experiencing god in the way that i used to at church it's it's really just been a way that i can i can connect to god and currently it's one of the few ways that i've been able to experience god and kind of recalibrate and reset myself and just kind of feel that that presence that i've always been pursuing

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so mike when was uh your first kind of because you were you were raised in a similar environment to me i think where i was raised to think of meditation as dangerous and as far as as when you say people that meditate even though it's through the psalms and through you find it all through the bible um and we would say i know pastors would tell me in my environment um yes but that meditation is you know you you're just thinking about the bible you can't clear your mind like these easterners because and these california people because uh you'll make room for satan you know you'll you'll you'll leave room for the devil and so yeah for me for years meditation was this kind of off-limits it was almost like a ouija board or something oh my gosh man i always forget all the ropes i used to be afraid of yeah i was at a party once with a ouija board and i refused to use it because i told my friends who didn't go to church that they were inviting demonic forces into this party that's a great way to convince people your faith is worthwhile by the way let's tell them a child's toy is incredibly dangerous like i wish i was making this up same thing i was convinced meditation was just a wonderful way to have demons come into your life you know like really and i remember in middle school i started reading the bible myself like not in in sunday school or whatever but just like grabbing my bible off the shelf open it up and read i remember getting really excited because there were sexy parts and that was a that was the song even before that just like all it you know onan like whoa spilling seed into the ground rock on let's go ot uh but then i i ran across an even dirtier word and that was meditation i was like whoa whoa and i had it um at that point had the exposure to people saying well that was a different kind of meditation i just had this sort of like gear grinding for a minute of whoa this is in the bible so i always steered really clear of meditation and it which was tough because i had a friend who lived up the street from me and his mom was like a new age spiritualist who led meditation classes and so like i've never told him this to this day i'd be at his house and i would take a moment to like sneak away and pray over the house oh yeah to try to like get rid of the demons oh yeah i get some oil going yeah i'm serious like this is there's no oh man well about some people have been taught as we were taught it's like that's what the you know that's what the satan worshipers do right right so i stayed away from it until i uh lost god now i know if you're listening in your anti-meditation i just gave you a slam dunk case to avoid meditation i'm aware of the irony of that statement but i gotta i gotta tell it like it happened uh on my way out of theism uh when i i knew for certain that jesus christ was a mythical figure i said well maybe god is just some other god so i started to explore different forms of god i read the quran and that that was i thought that was a step even further uh and so then i studied uh hinduism and tried to do some of their meditative practices some of their mantra based meditations that didn't really work for me and so then i tried buddhist meditation and zinn found that remarkably helpful in dealing with the depression and anxiety and isolation that goes on with pretending to be a christian and not being one at all so for a little bit i think i thought i was a buddhist which is what every trendy western pseudo-intellectual does at least once in life and then i sort of decided well no the more i read secularist writings the more i read skeptics even buddhism seemed like a bag of spaghetti so then i just discovered mindfulness meditation which is a secularized form of zen meditation born in the american west in the 60s and 70s and uh that became sort of the substitute for prayer in my life because you know you don't really pray if you don't believe in god but i found god again or maybe even more accurately god found me and i began to come back to christianity kind of begrudging stepping grudging step but i was afraid to leave behind this very powerful thing that was meditation i learned a couple things one prayer is a type of meditation it's not like there's prayer and there's meditation there are different things no prayer is a particular type of cataphatic meditation that's all it is let's explain cataphatic for those who haven't listened to some of our our meditations on our liturgies between uh cataphatic and apophatic so apathic um is any meditation that is without word or image the goal in apathetic meditation is pretty much the elimination of thought the elimination of self uh which is let's be honest pretty difficult but ketiphatic meditation is with word and with images so something like a transcendental meditation would be apathetic even though you're making a sound and something like um the ignatian spiritual exercises as you can hear on our recent release o light uh would be ketiphatic and something like centering prayer would kind of split the difference and so when you're talking about prayer we're just talking to god that's a cataphatic process you're using language to approach and understand the divine but it's still meditation so meditation is just this big umbrella term for a huge variety of practices that encompass things that have you work on focus and attention and intention focus attention and intention are sort of the things in common to all the different forms of meditation what i learned coming back to faith was that there was a broad rich tradition of christian meditation there were the ignatian spiritual exercises uh which i'm a huge fan of they're very accessible and very powerful ways of exploring scripture and exploring christianity uh they're centering prayer and there is also really classical eastern meditation in the first centuries of the church and the desert fathers and this was all new to me because i grew up not only being a protestant but being a conservative evangelical where there's this tremendous distance from all those movements that come from catholicism and and older branches of christianity and so it was a real surprise to me to understand that there were people who were both deeply into meditation and completely committed to following after jesus in their life and that was a big like moment for me because it meant i didn't have to abandon my meditative practice in order to be a christian so maybe before we get into the faith of it why do you think so many people through pretty much every religion and even non-religious people what is it do why is it lasted for millennia you know um what does it do in the human brain meditation is bar none one of the most beneficial things you can do for your brain uh in the brain research i've read and i've read a lot three activities come up over and over as having remarkable benefits for the brain one is reading two is physical exercise three meditation it's on that tier in terms of being good for your brain so let's say you don't know where to start well do you pray well let's say you take 15 minutes a day and talk to god six days a week several things are going to happen one your anterior cingulate cortex that's the part of your brain responsible for compassion and empathy it it sits on the threshold between your limbic system your your sort of rodent brain and your neocortex the most human part of your brain is going to over time and as quick as just a few weeks get thicker and healthier it's going to help you respond to situations with greater compassion and empathy any stimulus another part of your brain is going to so benefit from this activity and that is your prefrontal cortex that's the part in the front of your brain behind your forehead where focus and agency and concentration come from so doing something as simple as just praying in a way you understand right now is going to improve your mental health it's also going to help lower your blood pressure it's going to help reduce stress and it's even been shown to be therapeutic for people with dementia or alzheimer's this is a dramatic much more powerful than placebo process now when you expand your practice to maybe a little more challenging form of meditations and strengthen or lengthen your practice to 30 minutes a day six times a week now you kind of supercharge the neurological effects you begin to see measurable effects on depression on overall mood as you meditate 30 minutes a day six times a week it's actually going to become more difficult for your brain to get angry come on this is amazing stuff and it's completely non-controversial science there's very few things that you can talk to in brain science and get everyone to agree on and meditation is you can talk to richard rohr or richard dawkins and they're both going to give you a thumbs up on meditation that's a that's a pretty broad consensus now of course different types of meditation affect the brain differently this is a question i get a lot when i talk about meditation um you know are all forms of meditation the same uh do buddhists get those benefits do atheists get those benefits a lot of people would love me to say that only when you talk to jesus your brain gets better but that's not true at all buddhists show remarkable and similar neurological benefits from prayer meditation as do jews as do hindus as do atheists who meditate via mindfulness or um you know traditional zen but there are some distinct areas first of all when buddhists meditate you see a similar activation of the anterior cingulate cortex and the prefrontal cortex you see a similar suppression of the limbic system specifically the amygdala but you see an activation in the visual cortex in a buddhist whereas when you ask like a westerner to meditate a nun a monk someone like that you see an activation in the left temporal lobe huh that's kind of weird what's the difference well when buddhists meditate they tend to visualize things and that shows up by getting this activity on the back of the skull where the visual cortex is we westerners do everything with language so the left temporal lobe is where language lives and so that lights up in meditation now one thing that's interesting in the research i've seen some people masters of prayer have a feeling that they transcend the space they're in and goes somewhere else as they pray they do when you look at people who continue this 30 minute a day six day a week practice over months and over years when they pray there's a particular suppression of activity in the parietal lobe the parietal lobe is part of your neocortex up on the top of the brain and that part of the brain is responsible for your sense of physical space and proximity and so when these these buddhist monks these catholic monks these nuns would pray their parelobe would go dark neurologically they left the space that they were in and that was unique to religious meditation secularists who were meditating albeit in much smaller sample sizes so this is something we need to do more research on did not have the same effect and i know in my own prayer practice and my own meditative practice because i've done it so much if someone asked me to pray for them and i bow my head and i close my eyes in five to ten seconds i forget completely the space i'm in and when i open my eyes again it's always very disorienting to be back here and now i understand that's because my parietal lobe like has to reboot and come back online here's another thing that's interesting tanya lerman did an experiment where she asked people to pray and different types of prayer even people who didn't believe in god at all and when she asked people to pray consistently over a six week period almost all of them including people who didn't believe in god at all reported feeling closer to god at the end of the process and so what we see here is for all the sort of taboo maybe in parts of the church about meditation science indicates that this is a slam dunk form of spirituality in terms of actually feeling closer to god so if you've ever felt like god is distant if you ever feel like god isn't listening believe it or not one of the most powerful things you can do to have a real and immediate sense of god's presence is to pray every day i guess my sunday school teacher was right some of my best work comes whenever like i just got finished meditating it helps me refocus my attention on things that matter rather than like stuff that's really stressful it also helps me like feel closer and more connected to god it helps me feel more creative and i found that it's a really helpful way to like connect to god without having to really worry about words and i just feel more myself when i do it i first started trying this and i you know when we were i was pastoring we had started this church called bloom in denver and we were doing this series on what can we learn about jesus from and fill in the blank and we we put in all sorts of different sorts of people and one of the uh one of the blanks was from buddhists which we learned about jesus from buddhists and uh and that got me on this kind of reading and studying meditation and stuff and surprisingly found all these christian you know mystics and christian uh especially yeah catholics and orthodox people that that meditation is a huge part of their spirituality and seeing how historic it has been to christianity and like how did this get lost in protestantism it's so strange so we we started kind of trying to to do it but i even as a person that i wouldn't have at that point said yeah i'm afraid that if i do this demons are going to slip into my brain it still felt like i'm toying with something that felt dangerous i was afraid to kind of really engage in it for for a minute you know i'd kind of keep my mind halfway out of it or something you know like keep saying god like is this okay am i um but i think if you imagine if you're there christian if if this is where you're at you're a little timid a little fearful just be honest with god about that come into it like if you're going there into this space to pray to engage with god to as a form of worship as a form of um opening yourself to god why do you think that god would like just let you be and just give you a bunch of demons instead of himself in that moment you know like trust him a little bit and just open yourself to to that light i think that was a step that i had to finally make and just i'm just gonna i'm opening myself to you god nothing else no no i think as christians we ought to it there is a history of it it's within orthodox christianity and there's this rich uh rich history of it and theological um foundations of it and and if you're really freaked out about it read more about it but i think the best thing is trust yourself trust god and do it and try it and see what happens and when i first started trying it um i started with a lot of centering prayer kind of stuff and i think that was our first meditation that we did as a liturgist as well was centering prayer check that out if you haven't heard it and try it you know you you can get into this place where you calm your body and you focus on your breath and on or on a phrase or on something and you just kind of meditate on the love of god or or whatever the specific meditation you're doing but there are so many different sorts of practices that you can kind of stay in that same vein and where you're just there and opening yourself and i i feel bad right now i'm in a really bad rut of not doing it as i was telling mike on the way over here i'm like man i i've been like guilty about it because i know that it's good i feel when i'm doing it that it's good for me and i know that it's uh the whole thing about increasing empathy and stuff that's amazing who doesn't who doesn't want that it's amazing but i get busy i could sit here and do nothing meditating or i could do the work that i have at my desk to do quick and maybe i'll do meditation later and that's what happens all the time and then it just gets pushed off but i encourage you and i encourage myself as a result of this episode do it i because i when i was doing it really faithfully and i've gone through periods where i've done it really faithfully i think that that lost time gets made up in productivity i come clearer to the task when i come to the task i'm more focused i'm i'm ready i'm emotionally ready i'm spiritually ready uh i think it's something like exercise or reading or it's like yeah it feels like another chore another thing to add on to your calendar onto your schedule for the day but it makes you as a person a fuller person ready to engage that day and you get more done anyway so listen to this michael gunger and uh take note it's like flossing it you know what i mean like there's no downside to flossing it doesn't take that long like it not only gives you healthy teeth it's been linked to reduce risk for heart attack and stroke that's crazy and everybody's got a full thing of floss in the medicine cabinet and twice a year they go oh yeah i'm gonna change my life and they floss and i think a lot especially our audience i know you guys are sort of meditation friendly and i just from the tweets i saw just as we got ready to record a lot of you are like yeah i really want to do this keep forgetting so um a couple of things on that note okay nobody says they have 30 minutes i strongly believe everybody has 30 minutes because we approach our lives chaotically even the most disciplined of us but forget that try 15. i don't have 15 minutes try five yeah give yourself five minutes of centering prayer because some of the forms of meditation anyway take a lot of practice to get good at like if you just jump in and try to do singing prayer for 30 minutes the first time you're going to go crazy or fall asleep we should do some shorter meditations and what do you think i want to do a like like this for options like a p90x of meditation yeah like that starts out at the beginner level and ramps yeah yeah that would be real i think a lot of people would benefit from that because you know another thing i saw coming through twitter what are some great meditation resources for guided meditations the liturgists you know like there's some mindfulness stuff that's great but it's not christian at all there's a lot of christian stuff that's written and you should explore for yourself and that's another thing i want to say like our sort of approach with what we do on the liturgist releases it is kind of a meditation for dummies because a really good meditation you wouldn't necessarily be listening to something like that but what what i've done and based on the research i've read i'm trying to help you quiet the calm of your brain and start a practice so if having michael do some great sound design and me talking a little bit can help you maintain that state longer i think that's worthwhile compared to giving up in frustration but like when i meditate when i meditate it's just me in silence and so you know if if you can only get five minutes and get five minutes but what we're doing here is we're learning to quiet the cacophony of our inner monologue i mean your thoughts are always happening they're ping-ponging from all directions you have worries you have anxieties you have stress you have bills to pay this afternoon the trash to take out your boss is yelling at you you're already late and meditation helps you cut through all that stuff and be present and when you're present you get more done not less our brains aren't natural multitaskers and so for me meditation has been incredibly transformative not only to helping me do more work but also to do quality work because when i sit down to write i just write when i you know sit down to be with my children i'm just with my children most of the time the smartphone really is is a qualm that's another thing that meditation can help you learn to do is utilize that beautiful do not disturb function on your distraction device but centering prayers are great a great form of meditation to start with that is just straight down the middle of christian practice the epiphanic stuff is a little harder the the really easy stuff now and and i say easy because once you learn to do it it's easy the problem is there's no good guided sources but the ignatian spiritual exercises that's a full curriculum that's designed to be done in a retreat format you can either do it like really intense like go to one of these retreats and just burn through it or it can be done over a multi-week period more realistically and in the nation exercises all you're doing is richly and vividly imagining scenes from scripture that's the process so if you listen to olight we do one with with the christmas story right we help you kind of travel with mary and joseph and and imagine what that was like very vividly you encounter the baby jesus and the ignatian exercises take you through all different parts of scripture to talk about that one of the most powerful ones i've ever done the song of solomon [Laughter] oh man those breasts like fawns vividly imagine what what are the fawns what are they standing by are they in a glade i almost lost it like lost it in addition to song of solomon uh there's an ignatian spiritual exercise where you are on the boat with the disciples after the crucifixion and you look on the shore and there's a man making breakfast and you get off the boat and peter you know he's crazy jumps in the water swims to the shore the rest of us pull the boat in do the right thing we go over and this guy's cooking fish it's jesus we didn't recognize him at first and uh jesus then does the feed my sheep thing but what i love about ignatius is he like twists it right so then jesus asks you feed my sheep and so like as you sort of visualize and get in this scene it becomes so real and so vivid that when jesus turns to you whoa like there's this opportunity like it just got real uh and so that's another like you know really right down the center road of christianity form of meditation that is super powerful i practice meditation to try to reframe the environment around me so i can get a better perspective slowly i've been getting into it i'm not very good at it but i do practice it i have found that i am much calmer i'm able to deal with stress a lot better i'm not overreacting to things i guess the intensity level is probably more in the medium zone where it should be too low rather than a high intensity and so it's really helped me to calm down and process things better

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so i can ramble a long time about meditation it's a you know i don't know maybe the pillar of my spirituality the primary way i know and understand god and that's okay i'm a methodist we have a quadrilateral uh but uh well you guys sent some pretty great questions i wonder if we just want to go through and kind of address these questions on meditation and some on meditation and medication that was a that was uh mike trying to type on his phone in the car driving if i i've made this pledge to myself i would never tweet from my phone because i there's like a 90 chance i'm gonna make a typo compared if on the computer it's only like a 10 chance and that was really dumb but we need yeah so the the tweet that went out was we're doing a podcast on medication any questions and uh you're all a bunch of smart asses so we got some good retorts okay ryan murphy with probably the best question on meditation how do you not fall asleep that's a really good question because it is it's tough i when i i was like a total newbie and i when i went to my assisi retreat which i've talked about i think on the podcast before but i went to this uh week of silence in assisi italy and we were just thrown into meditation i mean we would get up and meditate for an hour together in the morning all sitting in this quiet room and you heard everybody's belly grumbling and shifting in their seats because you're just sitting on the floor for an hour not moving and your spine's not used to that the analogy i've used before is kind of like if you rolled like a bottle of water and then stop it stops at the curb and then you look inside and the water's still going um like it was just like the the meditation was this curb and everything in life and all the the addiction to constant movement constant noise constant something has to be happening that we live in i mean we can't i don't think we i think we underestimate how noisy everything is you can't open a web page without a hundred advertisements being on it you go you're we're just constantly bombarded by so much you can't take it all in you just get used to the noise and when you actually try to shut it all down all that internal stuff it just felt like it was just boiling and raging inside and the first few minutes especially of every time for the first you know a few times we're just like ah it was almost painful it was like this quiet that was disturbing um to the noise that once you know it's like extreme boredom or extreme whatever and all of a sudden though not all of a sudden gradually that begins to settle and the settling is i suppose the point i suppose is like that's that's the point of what you're doing coming into this different sort of space of being where you're not controlled by the noise you're not controlled by just whatever's the loudest impetus whatever you're feeling right now but you start recognizing and seeing those feelings and that noise as something separate and you can let it go some of this is just you've got to do it and go through the pain you'll have to fall asleep a few times probably you know you'll have to get used to being still in a moment and your body is like i guess when i do this this is when i go to sleep if i'm just going to stop but i think some of these practices that's why we've tried to give you some with with the liturgies we've been making some concrete things that you can do like pick a word pick a phrase or focus on this breath or focus on this scene whatever this sort of form of meditation is those are some kind of training wheels in some way of being able to to sit still and not just fall asleep but eventually as you gain more control of your mind and of the stillness when you're able to just move to the stillness faster the noise doesn't have so much control over you the sleeping thing won't be as big of a deal because you're gaining some sort of like control over yourself you have some sort of mastery over your sight and your awareness and your emotions so i think really you just got to do it and there are some i mean as i went through that week i was experimenting with things that i don't know if they're you know i was just trying things because you had all this space and i knew i i you're not like good meditation uh you don't want your mind wandering so if you have some point of focus that you can kind of keep your awareness sharp with and trying to stay fully present in this being like the seer here this this awareness that is just much deeper than we often have to just by surviving the noise we shut down that awareness we're not aware of exactly how this food tastes and that was one of the things i noticed as i was meditating a lot all of a sudden i was like food tasted better you know like art was richer you like when you learn how to not just shut down stimulus if your mind is fully there and present and you taste a bowl of spaghetti that spaghetti can be like divine um i really can't i think that's part of what's so beautiful about this practice and so learning to overcome the sleep and not judging yourself the the thoughts will come of like oh man i am totally thinking about that television show right now or i'm totally thinking about uh yeah anything anything you'll notice that and don't get mad don't get frustrated just see that you're aware of that there's some part of your brain that's still stirring see it and let it go and you know offer it to god um just let it be and and as you keep doing that as those distractions come and you just continually kind of let them go and give them over to god they'll start coming fewer and far between it's going to be hard at first but with practice you'll get better at it now if you keep practicing meditation and you're serious about it and you keep falling asleep by clearing your mind of the distraction of normal chaotic thought meditation will reveal things and maybe what meditation is revealing to you is you do not sleep enough hours every day yeah that's a big thing like if you literally can't get through a 15 meditation without falling asleep you need to increase the amount of hours per day you sleep like it's that americans are chronically chronically undersleeping people europeans as well but americans are worse um so that's that's part of the problem that said even if you're really well rested the first few times you try especially some forms of meditation like centering prayer where you get this very relaxed state you're gonna fall asleep which brings us to one of the hallmarks of good meditation which is non-judgment there's no such thing as a failed meditation session right we're like metric driven success people today and that's not a great mentality for meditation you don't win meditation you don't master meditation you practice meditation it's about awareness it's about focus it's about intention okay oh so i didn't say some of the some of the things i was doing in a cc um i don't know if any of these are legitimate but i tried them i would like one of the things i would i guess it was a sort of centering prayer-ish thing but i would take like a word i went through i remember one of the meditations a word of the lord's prayer at this like incredibly slow rate like every other breath or like yeah i think it was every other breath or something i'd say another word like our you know and then like father and just being and letting those words kind of little thing like those are just little things i was thinking of or you know um trying to imagine like picture uh when with breath using really using breath has been important for me um letting letting your breath kind of be this the the anchor of of your focus and you even if you're a really imaginative person you can you know imagine something with your breath like inhaling grace and exhaling it into your world or um light or uh all sorts of stuff um but breath is is an important thing i think yeah and so breath meditations are uh a staple or a classic form of meditation either where you're just aware of your breath and not controlling it or specifically doing breathing exercises both those things are very potent they're not the most accessible like that's something you definitely got to practice but they can be very powerful you just don't want to hyperventilate uh steve dougherty says i'm currently digging into transcendental meditation it's expensive criticized while also hailed as wonderful thoughts my first thought is how is it expensive and i'm not being maybe like expansive maybe it was a typo i mean i'm not going to criticize typos you can glass houses right since i've i've told the facebook people were doing a podcast on mediation and the twitter people are going on on medication so but thanks to my meditative practice i have grace with myself and i'm not going to judge my actions but uh so i'm going to go with expansive it's expansive criticized while also hailed as wonderful thoughts yeah i get why people freak out over transcendental meditation it's about the annihilation of self through mantra and most of the commonly used words in transcendental meditation are eastern non-judeo-christian forces yeah freaks people out doesn't scare me i don't know why that couldn't be claimed into a church context that people wanted to use christian words or phrases in a trans well phrases would be tough transcendental but any sort of thing you can repeat uh you could use a greek or hebrew word and be i think neurologically the same but the criticism comes from the fact that as a distinctly outside the church non-christian practice i i get why it scares people um but i don't you know if you're exploring it was eating mcdonald's i mean it's like yeah it's i guess why do we why do we get so afraid what are we so afraid of i can build a tribal thing well no it's not just a tribal thing right so if part of our view of reality is that there is god who is a being and a force of good there is also a belief in the church that there is a devil a lucifer and an army of demons who are up to no good and the concern being if we can pray to god we can also pray to these other principalities and forces of the air that's i think what's driving that but if you're trying to pray to god by using other forms of prayer with different language how does that work well so praying to these other people what what if what what if i was doing transcendental meditation going somebody's totally going to shut this off now but you know what i mean like well that would be that would be i would be calling out to a power that is not divine and so i think why people forgot is because you're using the names of eastern deities to do transcendental meditation which whatever like oh you are using eastern deities yeah i got you yeah yeah i got you from from from sure yeah yeah okay so that's why people freak out about it it's that and then it's also uh this look inward to find transcendence right and so we tend to in the church have this view that god is out there and not in here ironic because we say that jesus comes and lives within our hearts right but i understand the view that i don't have any problem with meditations that turn inward because i believe jesus is in there that i will turn inward and find my savior you know but i i get i do get the hesitation and the concern and i get the criticism so if you're gonna do transcendental meditation and you're a christian and that's important to you like understand what the word means like it's pretty easy there's a lot of this stuff even on youtube if whatever word it is look it up there's going to be this is why i love modern society some legit practitioner from india who will explain it and say you know who the word is calling out to so that's that's wicked so if you have to you have to pick a pre-assigned word for for transcendental meditation of a name of some god or can you the ones you're going to find online for transit implementation meditation are overwhelmingly going to be gods or concepts of divine from eastern spirituality so of the divine yes which obviously in the eastern context is a totally different thing than a western context it's that that brahman sort of god what i believe we're out of empiricism and into my opinion if you're just saying a word it's a nonsense word to you i don't think it matters you know what i mean especially if you don't believe that that god exists you know i mean like if i said some french word and i don't speak french i'm not channeling some french energy into my life sorry this is a side note but don't you think that it's weird like in a lot of conservative christian circles like it seems like we assume that there are a bunch of gods the way that we are afraid oh we think they're demons that worship song like oh god is higher whatever it is i shouldn't yeah this song i've never our god is greater yes our god is high who are we talking about yeah higher than who i'm taking off my christian mystic hat i'm gonna set it over here i'm gonna pick up it's a little dusty but i still got it my southern baptist hat i'm gonna put it on look at that yeah all right doesn't fit as well as it used to it's got a bible bookmark here's the deal it's one of those little ribbons that comes from the center of the page [Laughter] there are no other gods with god but there are powerful demons who were active in the world in old testament times and people spoke to them by name and they claimed to be gods in order to deceive people so god's truth so we're singing worship songs about those demons that our god is like better and of course we are because we're being true to the inerrant truth of scripture right and so if if if the bible refers to in the old testament other gods which are really demons then our modern worship songs should as well all right my bad everybody now i'm going to take my southern baptist hat off pick up my christian mystic hat and say the god that we worship and do not entirely understand is the source of all and all these fears we have about lesser forces in the world are misplaced that's not to say that evil is not real and bad things don't happen but if we truly believe that there is a god and that this god is powerful and this god cares for us we can put great trust and assurance in that and i don't feel the need to sing a song about how my god is greater than other gods i just think god is great

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i find that days that i do meditation or weeks where i'm taking part in more frequent meditation i'm just at ease and i'm thinking a little more clearly and just kind of the daily things that i go through in school and in life they seem a little bit less rigorous if you will it seems very simple and that attracts me because it's something i've never really tried out before

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parker roberts said any resources for ignatian spiritual exercises love the meditations on olight we're going to do a full thing right that's coming yeah we're going to do a full ignatian release i don't know if that'll be like combined with like our music releases or a standalone thing one thing you guys have to understand there's not some massive liturgist business organization michael and i have semi-regular phone calls where we talk about things we should do and then at some point actually do something so you're hearing you're here with us right now as you're hearing the full business plan of the liturgists uh now in the meantime we figure out what our release is gonna be there are resources but they are text so you're going to read and sort of um self-guide your self-guide yourself you're going to guide yourself through the these these exercises you can also go to retreats and you don't have to be catholic they'll let anybody come to these retreats um and and be led through them but obviously you've got to go fly somewhere you've got to spend time in this like house with these people that lead it i really want to do it it sounds like a fantastic experience but how long is the retreat well they vary it depends on what kind you want to go to there's somewhere you can like if there's one near you you go every weekend or you can go and stay for four days and just like power through it and speaking of uh letting our business plan out you could also come to the liturgist conference yeah because we're gonna be unveiling all sorts of lovely things at that and uh there'd be a really good chance that we would be doing some meditative practice together as part of that experience stay tuned for that like we've always wanted um the whole idea why we call this the liturgists the work of the people that's what the liturgy means um we want your not just listening here but we want your involvement we want to find some way of practicing this kind of stuff with you guys like we hear from each other on social media anyways but we want to find ways of getting in the same physical space with some of you and telling each other our stories and practicing some of these things together and so we're going to be more intentional about that as the years unfold so stay tuned i'd love to hear on the balance between corporate and individual worship practices and where meditation fits into that entailed into another question it's a great question many of the foremost voices in history seem to have general solitude as their way what's realistic for family men and women now you guys are pretty awesome yeah as far as the corporate thing uh why don't you take the second one but that corporate thing i i guess i would ask how big do you want your church to be uh that might i mean maybe eventually in the bigger churches they'll be able to handle some of this stuff but it is especially in the west and especially in protestant churches and especially even more in evangelical churches you try to pull out some some meditative but like apaphatic practice in the middle of a service sorry i was just i was picturing it i've tried it oh wow i say this from experience but we didn't have a big church for that sort of reason i'm sure um but i try this stuff i mean we'd be like not long i mean i wouldn't take a half hour but we might take 10 minutes or something and do some sort of meditative practice and i think for our community they liked it some of them were weirded out by it they didn't know because they're not used to it we uh we do events believe it or not we haven't done them in a while but we included times of contemplation and reflection in our like large events like hundreds or even thousands of people in a room and people were really excited about it if you do it well yeah you probably have to stick especially since people aren't used to it yet probably stick with corporate stuff with the easier like the ignatian stuff might be pretty cool to try with bigger groups shorter sessions of some sort of centering or contemplative prayer um maybe i don't know try it guys small group is a fantastic fantastic forum for christian meditation yes so my church uh actually has a centering prayer group and they get together and they you know sit together for uh 25 30 minutes and they do centering prayer they've actually done our centering prayer which i was quite honored they did that and so they spend this time together in quiet contemplation and then afterwards they spend a few minutes discussing together their experience right so they reflect and then they together reflect on the reflection yeah that's great it's you want to do ignatian spiritual exercises get four or five people who are also into that idea and work through them together and after you do the expect exercise sort of sort of quietly some people even will gather in homes and each person go to a different room and you you spend your your time in reflection you come together and talk about your experience that when i've talked to people done that they've described that as being some of the most potent spiritual experiences they've had in their lives yeah i've done that we've had a house structure we did that for a while and and something you know there's like something about a table when you eat together there's a bond that happens with people when you eat together i think there's some it's really kind of profoundly uh connecting to just sit in a room in silence it's a weird thing like to do that together you're not speaking with one another you're not even like really looking at each other necessarily but you're present with each other and you can you're all of us are aware that we're all here and i i heard her belly grumble right then and she like that that it's kind of an intimacy about it and uh i don't know the people that were part of that house church with us i i feel this kind of bond that isn't i don't think would have happened without that so it is an interesting i think it could be used more corporately uh and we got to get creative with it those of us that plan liturgies and liturgical spaces large or small i always encourage liturgists if you will to to be slow and be careful with your your people you're not just that's not your free reign to just do whatever you want i don't think like you're part of a group you're part of a an ethos you're part of a culture and uh you should tend to that carefully and when it just with groups it takes you need to be slower and do things with all of us in mind if you want to be a good shepherd you know but that doesn't mean you shouldn't slowly be leading people somewhere and little bits of silence if that's maybe for your church that would be some that would be huge some you just take 30 seconds of silence and we could all use some of that and and as as your churches grow and develop finding ways of incorporating some of these because these are profound and you'll know when you start practicing it there are profoundly impacting exercises this meditation is i don't know how my spirituality well i guess i had prayer like you said prayer is a form of meditation but uh some of these other practices i don't know how i would do it my spirituality without them at this point they are pretty central to how i experience god and then to the second question of this historical idea of solitude being the way you're right the prayer masters the desert fathers the monks these are people who seek solitude for long periods of time guess what if you've got a nine to five two kids a marriage your path to god is probably not seven hours a day of meditation okay what works what's pragmatic what's available to you you don't need to be a monk you don't need to be a desert father you can take 30 minutes that you would have spent staring at a flashing box on the wall and instead improve your spiritual health and neural capacity you know so research has shown that you don't necessarily get dramatically increased benefits when you go past 30 minutes a day if you go 60 minutes a day you don't get double the benefit you get 5 more of the benefits so 30 minutes a day is really a sweet spot so uh trust science there and don't worry about it what you can do is what you can do you know there's no need to worry about how much you meditate sorry if you meditate a lot that like it's really because it's totally normal i did it when i first started meditating but worrying about meditation like there's no bad meditation but like worrying as you meditate is not productive it's like it's like uh drinking a milkshake while you're on the treadmill done that you have not i have i have yeah i'm i'm a i'm a fat guy i told you my pizza buffet story by the way guys guys there's a lot of you now because i know you keep seeing me other cities and saying hello which i appreciate but i need you to help me meditation has not helped me with this so i need you all if you see me walking into a pizza hut at lunchtime i'm going to the buffet you have my permission to stop me okay that's the that's the best thing you can do you've asked how you can help me in my life you guys email me all the time i love your work how can i help you stop letting me go to pizza hut okay that's free i want to know about this milkshake [Laughter] well i get crazy ideas all the time because i read about the brain and i understand that our cohesive consciousness is an illusion and that we in fact are thousands of competing neurological loops with different priorities that then get summed up through our neocortex into action and so i thought for a while perhaps i can condition myself to enjoy an exercise bike it went actually a treadmill by associating it with milkshakes through positive reinforcement how did i use that as example that was serendipitous because i love that story so much and i i got really sick because you can't drink cold dairy while doing intense cardio so only you it was a negative i don't know anybody else that would do that as like some sort of experiment i can help it i have a problem oh we didn't talk about art much but well i mean so you kind of touched on it but we could go deeper because i love music but visual arts sculpture were harder for me yeah i get into poetry i get into prose yeah but to go to a gallery yeah i was like well there's that is a picture that one's pretty that one i don't get i'm kind of like that sometimes as well when i was doing a lot of meditation i noticed a marked difference with that i was i was able to i remember it was in the cc i was going to these cathedrals and stuff and looking at the art and the art was so alive things that i would never stop and look at a sculpture i underscore you know what's a sculpture but somehow sculptures were speaking to me it was amazing because all the all the all art um it does speak something of i mean that whoever made that art decided that it was done for a reason you know they decided that it expressed something and it's uh when you're so numb from the noise and from over stimulation we have constant entertainment constant information constant advertisement and the subtleties of art can be difficult uh to me when i'm engaging in a piece of art well it's almost like meditating there's this piece um called the symphony of sorrowful songs it's like a 27-28 minute piece and it takes it starts with these basses and what i heard is that the guy gretch goretzky uh i don't know how to say his name but wrote it as kind of a lament of world war two i'm not positive that's true but um but it kind of feels like it builds this tension right at the bottom it's like this stirring and he plays this one motif over and over and over and then it kind of starts building through the different uh on the different scale tones through the different instruments the cellos come in the violas the violins and it builds slowly for this like whole 28 minutes you know kind of finally it does a little change in the middle but then it comes back to it and then it just falls back down but you can't experience that people like we don't know how to listen to music like that really anymore where you experience a 28 minute thread of music as a thing it takes some patience it takes some awareness you can't just have it on in the background doing other things will drive you crazy it'll just feel like this tension you know but if you're listening to it and you experience the the building of it and the fall of it it's amazing it can be like this spiritual experience where you i think meditation can help us engage in art that can speak things to us that we might not be able to when we are so used to eating junk food all the time i think that's so much of what pop art is it's not that it's bad it's just it's like candy it it satisfies the quickest uh sense it's really sweet you know it's really spicy it's real it's like these sudden bursts of quick emotion um and the subtlety of if you're just chewing on jolly ranchers all day and then you have a fine glass of wine you know you're probably not gonna your tongue might be a little numb by the end of the day i feel i'm like a real candy guy myself so like i'll get sometimes those like sour gumballs like a whole pack of them if you eat that whole thing that next day your tongue is toast yeah like you can't eat that whole pack in one sitting that's a great visual and so if you're just if all you're doing is watching two minute clips of youtube videos and you're fast forwarding to the part you like you know like i mean everything about the media and the music understands like our attention spans are shorter and shorter and they have to get your attention faster and so the cuts are faster and then you watch a movie from like the 1950s and it feels like oh my god this is so slow and but that's how we're you know because we're just so 80d um meditation can help us with this i think because there are pieces of art that are so important for the human soul like they're like these these monuments of certain aspects of what it is to be a human being that many of us will never fully experience because we're so our tongues are so numb from all the sour gumballs we're constantly chewing on so practicing meditation not only as a way of appreciating art but actually appreciating art as a form of meditation i think is an interesting idea i meditate to find sort of a center of balance in my day to sort of reconnect myself with god and just to provide more somewhat peace and stability to uh my mind and my day

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daniel suiza if i mispronounce your name i apologize but you get the gold star for uh best question of this episode and possibly the history of the podcast wow i look forward on the facebook page where i've again said we were doing an episode on mediation i don't know if i can read this is mediation preferable to arbitration i get confused on the two no it's not done also is there irony in rushing to do a podcast on a spiritual exercise predicated upon slowing down oh man that's gold really is gold [Laughter] no there is not that because i would be judging [Laughter] oh man amazing well we were discussing that we feel like the liturgist has accumulated a very interesting and lovable group of people that's proof it is okay and then this is a question i really do want to cover from chris chapman on facebook how does a family medic meditate together or is it something to even attempt we have an eight-year-old 12 year old and a 14 year old we've already made a sacred space in our living room but haven't figured out how to add the kids my husband will have quiet prayer time at 5am before the kids are up i'm still working on a good time for me thanks that is a fantastic question because meditation is especially powerful for children well you wouldn't think so but it is and um my oldest daughter is wicked smart and also prone to some anxiety as a result my youngest daughter is very very very bright but just she's like the most grounded and centered human being i know and um i've been working with my oldest and teaching her how to do mindfulness meditation and centering prayer and also a type of meditation called a body scan where you go through piece by piece and become aware of your body and then let melt or relax or ease and that's really really helped her deal with anxiety so i think the trick to doing it as a family number one kids do what they see they emulate what they see so it's okay to say okay right now we're going to have some quiet time in the home mom and dad are going to meditate you know you have to say you're going to meditate with me if you just say it has to be quiet you can go to your rooms if you want but for 15 minutes we're going to have a time of quiet reflection it's not going to be long before the kids want to join you then when they do think about what i've done on a hearing prayer track where out loud i guide you through the process do that for your kids body scans for kids are great centering prayer for five minutes not 15 not 30 for five minutes where we just focus on our breath and focus on god's love especially teaching them to be non-judgmental to not worry about other thoughts there's no goal we're just going to be aware of god's love is incredibly powerful i think meditation for families it's kind of like running for families mom and dad can probably run a marathon right if they're serious runners it's not appropriate for an eight-year-old but it is totally appropriate for an eight-year-old to go on a minute or 30 minute walk run with their marathoning parent so you know you might have your 5 am meditation time and that's where you power lift if you will your mental practice but you might have a time before dinner after dinner where the whole family spends time in quiet reflection and boy is that a fantastic alternative to television so i would say you know don't aim high aim low if the whole family sits together in relative silence for five minutes and two minutes in somebody gets the giggles huge success right but just this whole idea of trying to take time and reflect and be aware is going to be really beneficial here's a great question how can we use our imaginations in meditation so we've talked about centering prayer straight down the middle of christianity we've talked about the ignition ignatian spiritual exercises right down the middle of christianity now i'm going to talk about some forms of meditation that are not unchristian but they aren't distinctly christian now i'm one of these everything is sacred kind of people uh i feel like i have moments where i am connected to and worshiping god because i'm holding my daughter's hand and so it doesn't concern me that mindfulness wasn't born of the church mindfulness is a fantastic technique in helping you find a meditative state of mind and the practice you invest in mindfulness pays dividends in centering prayer and pays dividends in ignatian spirituality because you have trained and conditioned your brain to enter a meditative state right so let's talk about imaginations because this is a really accessible way to pray meditation is about focus we don't have focus as a people we've trained ourselves to not have it so the ignatian spiritual exercises are all about what vividly imagining scripture so what if in a time of quiet where you begin by focusing on your breathing but instead of focusing on love and singing prayer as you would instead you imagine something so i'll give you an example from my own life i am writing a book writing a book takes forever writing a book that's going to get published apparently takes like 25 years because now i have an agent and i talk to editors and i get a manuscript i think this one's pretty good and i give it to somebody and they give you a bunch of notes you do a rewrite and you've passed a hurdle and then the next person gives you another rewrite and it can be really discouraging and so a lot of people use goal setting as a way to accomplish things and accomplish change in their life but after a while your goal of writing a book just seems kind of lame because it's day 417 that you've gotten up really early and opened the laptop and you're trying to find the motivation to write for two hours so i actually train my brain to keep writing using meditation there's this image of your consciousness that will help you understand meditation it's from a book called the happiness hypothesis have you heard this it's seat belt time if you haven't heard of the happiness hypothesis just go ahead and put on your your mental seat belt because i'm about to blow your mind picture an elephant and a rider right you ever seen someone riding an elephant which one is bigger elephant the elephant right which one is more powerful the elephant clearly which one is uh better at goal setting or forecasting the future the right the rider yeah so when you think about your competing loops you have two nervous systems really you have a conscious and you have an automatic or unconscious nervous system and in this analogy the elephant is your unconscious mind and the writer is your conscious mind it's all one thing but if you've ever had trouble making change in your life it's because you're trying to do it in willpower which is like trying to wrestle an elephant down a path that doesn't want to go on right so my elephant really likes pizza so even though i go i really want to lose weight i drive down the road to go to someplace healthy and there's pizza hut on the right i turn on the blinker and i turn in before i knew what happened because the elephant is in charge right meditation trains the elephant it's the only way to actually make change in your life and one of the most powerful motivations to the elephant is story forget facts forget awareness you can know that pizza is bad for you and i can know that when i finish a book i'm going to be happy the elephant doesn't care that only convinces the writer so how do i train the element with meditation i take time at least twice a week and i sit down in quiet space and i vividly imagine a book release party now this book release party probably will never happen the way i put it in my mind because in my mind everyone i care about is there people have fallen all over from the country that i work with and i appreciate my family's there and we're all together and i can hold in my hands i can picture it i can picture it right now this hardcover book and it's got pages they're cream colored i can thumb my hands through them i can grab a pen and i can start writing inscriptions to people that i care about who are standing before me smiling sharing and the joy of this moment now imagine doing that for 15 minutes how much motivation do i have to write a lot because i train the elephant that writing is good right so you can do that with any goal in your life if you want to lose weight and you want to run a marathon go ahead and take 15 minutes and imagine that big finish line it's got a big clock above it there's people cheering they're excited to see you finish the race and what happens you train the elephant so imagination is an incredible accessible easy form of meditation now let's up the ante a little bit you've heard me talk about mindfulness meditation well mindfulness meditation is nothing but awareness it's all it is so you think things all the time and you feel things all the time and you have this idea that you're in control and doing it on purpose but take a moment and you don't have to get in a special meditative state to do this you can just be on the couch and just listen to your own thoughts become aware that you're having thoughts become aware that you're having thoughts in your body take a moment and be aware that you're breathing feel the sensation of air entering and leaving your body as it enters what it's cool as it exit it's warm your body has changed its air and somehow become aware of your weight that gravity is pulling on your body where is their pressure where is their weight where's their heat where's their cool you gotta wear all these physical sensations you become aware of your feelings what do you feel what are you thinking congratulations that's mindfulness meditation you don't control or change anything now to take that up a level you could focus on your breath and as other thoughts happen they inevitably will it's okay you don't judge it you let the thought come and pass through and then you just gently return your attention to your breath your mindfulness meditating as you do that over time the chaos of thoughts is less and less they go from a fire hose to a garden hose to a drip and in time for some people they stop now there's no goal right here it's not like what's the goal of mindfulness meditation to clear your thoughts no it's just awareness it's amazing when you get good at mindfulness meditation you can mindful drive no road rage right because you're aware and you feel the hair on your arm stand up and you feel the rush and you don't judge it you simply observe it and doing that bypasses the limbic system's ability to make you angry is it distinctly christian no but when you do that a lot and then you turn around and focus on god's love you can burrow right in it's really really profound and powerful hmm all right i'm back in it back in it guys this is what i needed i hope it's what you needed to let's do it new year time to floss our brains time to train the elephant yeah thanks for listening um we've got great stuff coming up keep stay tuned you can listen to us at uh work make some comments love to talk to you about stuff the dot com slash liturgists.com and uh facebook and twitter and just come on engage with us we'd love to talk to you and again we'll have a conference coming up within the next few months stay tuned for that and more liturgies and more excitement so our show today has been sound designed and produced by joel marchand uh i'm science mike i'm michael gunger thanks for listening