Walking Meditation

Walking Meditation: Thich Nhat Hanh

Murfee Labyrinth

“People say walking on water is a miracle, but to me, walking peacefully on the earth is the real miracle. The Earth is a miracle; each step is a miracle. Taking steps on our beautiful planet can bring real happiness.

As you walk, be fully aware of your foot, the ground, and the connection between them, which is your conscious breathing.”— Thich Nhat Hanh, The Long Road Turns To Joy, a Guide to Walking Meditation.

For many years, I would walk around the block in my neighborhood for twenty minutes before going to work at the hospital. The quiet walk calms the committee meeting in my head. Putting my feet on the earth, even the pavement of the street, appears to reconnect my head to my body as I become “grounded.” When I am outside, I always realize there is a world more significant than the one I live in.

There is a power greater than myself. I have trouble meditating by simply sitting, but some movements, such as walking, can lead me into that meditative journey. The Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the most well-known meditative walkers. This pocket-sized book contains simple mindfulness exercises to think about as we walk.

Thich Nhat Hanh introduces us to several methods of following and listening to our breath as we walk. My pattern became to breathe in on the right foot and breathe out on the left. This was similar to walking the labyrinth and paying close attention to the path. In mindful walking, as I stayed with my breath, I saw no more rooms available for that committee to meet in my head.

Thich Nhat Hanh compared walking to eating, nourishing our bodies with each step. With each step, we massage the Earth. When the baby Buddha was born, he took seven steps, and a Lotus flower blossomed under each step. Thich Nhat Hanh suggests we imagine a flower blooming with each step.

We can also practice mindful walking anywhere, between meetings, in hospitals, at airports, and when walking to your car. The Buddhist monk also offers several poems to recite while walking: “I have arrived, I am home, in the here, in the now. I am solid. I am free. In the ultimate, I dwell.”

Joanna. joannaseibert.com

Loving Without Understanding

 Loving Without Understanding

“And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us, but we can still love them. We can love completely without complete understanding.”—Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It (University of Chicago Press, 1976).

I remember being in Missoula, Montana, visiting our daughter, Joanna, and her husband, Dennis, with our oldest grandson, Mac, and his dad, John. Our hotel is directly on the banks of the Clark Fork, and the river is racing by our small porch on the first floor in real time.

We are mesmerized by watching the high-speed water, but the sound of the raging river enters our being and, indeed, runs through us. It calms. It soothes. In its orchestral movement, it is peaceful. It sounds like a wind instrument, perhaps a distant Native American flute. Sometimes, it has the “Om” sound chanted in yoga and Eastern meditation.

We begin to know the stillness of sitting or standing, and observe the wonder of something too magnificent for words as it rapidly passes by. We can become so relaxed that we fall asleep.   Water, moving or still, has healing powers we cannot understand.

I watched Robert Redford’s movie A River Runs Through It with all of our children and most of our grandchildren. We can often quote lines from the film and respond to them. Stop now if you have not read the book or seen the movie, because I will spoil it for you.

The story is about the Maclean family, a father and two sons, Norman and Paul, growing up fly-fishing in Missoula, Montana. The words quoted today are near the end of the movie, preached in one of the father’s last sermons.

I could almost hear Norman’s father when we rode by that same brick Presbyterian church yesterday on the way to get ice cream. The father indirectly talks about Norman’s younger brother, Paul, who died an early traumatic death related to his addictions.

As I watch and listen beside the Clark Fork, where the Macleans lived and loved a century ago, I also think of those I could not understand but wanted to love completely. Today, my prayers are to continue to try to hear these words from Norman’s father about them. Of course, there are also those I cannot understand and may never want to love, even a bit, much less completely. I pray to see them in a new light, seeing the Christ in them.  

Loving without understanding may be on the path to unconditional love, God’s love. It is also the balm to heal our differences. Om.

Joanna  https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Celtic Spirituality: Celtic Sacred Life of Hospitality in Community

Celtic Spirituality: Celtic sacred life of hospitality in community

         “I sought my God;

    My God, I could not see.

    I sought my soul

    My soul eluded me.

    I sought my brother

    And I found all three.”

In the Celtic hospitality tradition, God is present not only in Nature but also in our neighbor, ourselves, and especially in the stranger. This is a sacredness in relationships. I am told there is no word in the Irish language for private property. Faith is lived in a community that combines periodic seclusion with community and mission. Anamchara, or soul friends, spiritual friends, or spiritual directors, are essential relationships. Women are regarded as equals, and communities are not hierarchical. Monasteries rather than parishes are the basis of the church. The Celts value education, art, and music.

We traveled to Iona off the western coast of Scotland twice and would return in a heartbeat. You don’t simply stumble on Iona, however. You really do have to want to go there by ferry, down a one-lane winding road, and finally walk over on a ferry onto the small, three-mile-long island in the Inner Hebrides, where Columba brought Celtic Christianity to England in 563.

Here, the breathtakingly illuminated manuscripts of The Book of Kells is believed to have been written at the end of the 8th century. Iona is considered an exceptionally “thin” space where the membrane between the spiritual and the secular is extremely thin. This was our experience as well. You walk a lot, eat good food, worship outdoors in the ancient abbey and a decaying nunnery, listen to the wind and waves, study high crosses, wear warm clothing, and watch the sea change the color of the abundant million-year-old rocks by the shoreline.

I often meet with spiritual friends who describe Celtic Spirituality when they have no name for it. This seems a sign of the universality of this type of spirituality. The sacred presence of God in each of us is a start.

Again, further reading might include Philip Newell’s Celtic Benediction, John Miriam Jones’s With an Eagle’s Eye, Esther de Waal’s Celtic Way of Prayer, and John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara.

Joanna    https://www.joannaseibert.com/