Tag: Practice of the Presence

Welcoming Practice

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

This piece is also posted on Carmen’s YouTube Channel here.

“To welcome and to let go is one of the most radically loving, faith-filled gestures we can make in each moment of each day. It is an open-hearted embrace of all that is in ourselves and in the world.”

— Mary Mrozowski, creator of the Welcoming Prayer

The Welcoming Prayer Practice created by Mary Mrozowski is a good sitting or “as-you-go” exercise. It was influenced by her training in biofeedback, Thomas Keating’s teachings on the False/True Self, and Jean Pierre de Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence.

It has three movements:

1/ Focus. Feel. Sink. Hearth. Touch. Drop in. Scan body. Become aware of sensation/s. Be present with them. You are befriending them by listening to them and feeling them and being with them, which helps them become unburdened.

2/ Welcome what you are experiencing in your body as a way to say yes to the Divine / Love /God / Presence / True Self. Wel-come = will/pleasure + cuma/guest. Say: “Welcome, frustration….grief…joy…fear…anger….”

You welcome only the physical or psychological content. You are not welcoming an external situation, like cancer. Author, mystic, and priest Cynthia Bourgeault reminds, you are not “passively aquiesc[ing] to situations that are in fact intolerable.”

3/ Let it go when you feel it is time. There is no need to rush. You might go between noticing and feeling and being with (1) and welcoming (2) for a while. When you feel ready, say: “I let go of my frustration, etc.” You might also add, if you feel comfortable doing so: “I let go of my cravings for security, affection, and control. I let go of my wish to change what I am feeling. I embrace this moment just as it is.” Please word however most helps you.

This practice helps unburden acquired emotional programs and heal the wounds of a lifetime by meeting them where they are stored, which is in the body. It moves us from our got-to-fix-it mentality and returns us to unconditionally loving presence. This letting-go is not final but is repeated over time as we return to this exercise, and as we practice this welcoming, we are unburdening and undoing emotional programs that keep us operating out of the small-egoic self. This practice returns us to the Center, to the Source of the Source or Ultimate Reality, Love.

Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems work (No Bad Parts) can be a help in adapting this practice to our needs, and a therapist and spiritual direction can support us also.

Cynthia Bourgeault sums it up well:

“’By the power of the Divine Indwelling active within me, I unconditionally embrace this moment, no matter its physical or psychological content’. And by this same indwelling strength, once inner wholeness is restored, I then choose how to deal with the outer situation, be it by acceptance or by spirited resistance. If the latter course is chosen, the actions taken – reflecting that higher coherence of witnessing presence – will have a greater effectiveness, bearing the right force and appropriate timing that Buddhist teaching classically designates as ‘skillful means’”.

The Nod

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

I hope you are well and taking good care of yourself. You can also listen to this piece on my YouTube Channel here: https://youtu.be/rT2JueVFKwQ

It is a hard time to be a human, in many ways. My spring semester of teaching was one of the hardest I have known. Students are both wonderful and truly struggling, and I am trying to be there for them. That, after years of trying to be there for students during the pandemic peak. So many students experienced the deaths of those they love, and there has been so much illness for students, of all kinds, including Covid, mental wellness struggles, and other significant life issues like being without a place to live and food precarities. Their lives have been upended over and again. Like many teachers, I try to be a steady presence of kindness for them.

After translating Practice the Presence by Brother Lawrence, the 17th-century sage I call the Friar of Love for his kindness and calmness, and living with him through his traumatic, precarious days of despot Louis the XIV and the friar’s being part of the 98% of non-privileged persons without access to education, a regular supply of nourishing food, and other human necessities, I am haunted by the feeling that that is where the system and those in power are taking us, wittingly or unwittingly.

After publishing and promoting a book (the two are synonymous now), after giving full-time teaching my all which includes co-designing and co-teaching a 200-seat asynchronous public speaking course, after doing many podcasts and interviews and workshops, and after spending last summer booked to the gills by hosting the Mystics Summit for Shift and by participating in the Bay Area Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute, both amazingly wonderful communities and growth opportunities, I decided sometime in April that I would make this summer my fallow time, and I am, outside family obligations.

On my desk here, I have a few, well, really, quite a few, note cards on which I write reminders and chants. One has a reminder of my microphone type for when I am on Zoom and needing to adjust it, and another has the Buddha Medicine Chant. Others here and there say various things: “CALM & CONFIDENT,” “BE AUTHENTIC.” and “What do you need?”

That last one gathers more meaning lately. I invite you to ask it with me. “What do you need?” When was the last time you asked yourself, “What do I need?” I hear Love asking me, when I see this card: “What do you need, Carmen?”

I need to be kind to myself, even more and more. I need more kindness in the world. Both of these things I can in many ways control. I can definitely and gently increase my kindness to myself and to others.

One way I am kind both to myself and to others is I notice the kindness all around me and work with it to contribute further to it. It’s what stitches the world together. Here are a few examples from my life recently when I went to the grocery store.

My brief exchange with the woman in her 50s whom I love getting as cashier because she always offers a little extra bag for the meat that might drip and wears a mask and is a decent kind human. I have hypogammaglobulinemia, so I wear a mask wherever I go.

During an earlier grocery store trip, she noticed how I put down first breakables like eggs then light, squishable breads then frozen items and then canned goods, and she appreciated it, saying something like, “I do that too.”

The last time I went, I said as I unloaded to the belt: “You’re always so efficient—I’ll  try to keep up with you.”

She laughed, breezy like, that let me know she appreciated it.

Then when I got done unloading the cart, I went down to the end since the two teenaged guys with aprons on had stood around chatting and then left in a moseying kind of way. And I picked up one of my cloth bags, and without slowing or missing a beat, she said like a sister would, “How about I’ll finish these and you do bread.”

“Sounds good,” I said, and we made short work of it together.

Those things make the world go round.

When I almost let gravity take my cart into the road in front of the grocery store as I back-pocketed my receipt, I looked up to stop the cart and saw a young teenager driver in a car going past perpendicular to me. I waved appreciatively as they slowed a little and the teenager did the slightest and clearest head tilt up no smile. That was something.

We had communicated community. My wave of thanks, the teenager’s nod.

When I told a friend about this, she texted me back:

Yeah. Decency. 

Not difficult and yet so powerful 

The head nod is one of my favorite things ever 

So my aim in life is to give myself as many kind head nods as possible as well as to give others as many kind head nods as possible, in diverse ways.

May you be blessed.

May you be free from fear.

May you be safe from harm.

May you be strong and healthy.

May you have a calm, clear mind.

May you love yourself as you are.

May you know your own goodness.

May you experience love, joy, and wonder.

May you give yourself the compassion you need.

Thank you for reading.

Clover

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

Yesterday I picked a white clover flower and smelled it. I hadn’t done that in a while. A long while. I highly recommend it, if, like me, it’s been a while for you. Just an ordinary clover, wonderful fragrance.

Then this morning I pulled out the weeds around our few and struggling succulents beside the sidewalk and the grass there that’s extra lush because fed on the abundant rain we had in January and March. I started weeding yesterday, finished today. Lots of weeds. Often I think how much attention it takes not to, with the weed, also pull up a plant from a blown poppy seed that’s grown into an orange flower. This morning, again, a tenacious weed was in the exact same spot with a gently rooted poppy, bright as the sun. I had to be so careful not to bring the poppy up with the weed. There’s a lesson there to me.

Sean cut the grass and I weeded, and the front yard benefited and now looks like someone lives here who cares deeply about flowers.

After weeding, I walked to the marsh. Thinking I haven’t looked for 4 leaf clovers in so long. The weather was the kind that is the reason the word “perfect” exists. I was walking down the sidewalk and enjoying the blue sky thinking how my mom often says I am good at finding 4 leaf clovers. I’m very happy to be known to her as good at that.

Beside the sidewalk near a park, I bend to look. Cars are whizzing by. Just looking is a joy. It feels true self connecting. I did this so often as a kid, before so much in life had happened. Just looking is great, I think, and yet, I also think, Finding one would be super.

I’m doing this, bending to the 3-leaved green, much chopped in places by a lawn mower, when I heard a voice, “Are you okay?” I’d seen a fit woman in her 40s wearing a shirt advertising a race on it and running down the sidewalk toward me. “Are you okay?” sounds like she’s asked that before, as if she might be a doctor. In a moment, I stand up, considered how I look with my silver hair and beat up, silvering favorite jeans.

How kind, I thought, answering, “Yes,” then thought to add, “Looking for 4 leaf clovers,” now face-to-face with her, still running.

Also, how interesting that looking for 4 leaf clovers is so uncommon.

Not finding any, I went to another park, trusting my gut, where I thought I might find more chances to spot a four leaf. In a couple of minutes, I had, in fact, finding two almost beside each other. I put them between two leaves and into my back pocket, carefully pressed and held together with an old receipt also in my back pocket and that I wrapped around the two leaves holding the clovers.

The secrets I decided to finding 4 leaf clovers are these:

  1. Remembering to look.
  2. Enjoying seeing all of the 3 leaf clovers and their beauty. Aka enjoying looking. Being in the green.
  3. Stopping looking for 4 leaf clovers as you’re looking. Just glance over the patch. You’ll find one! Maybe two!

Peace to everyone.

CÆDMON’S HYMN

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

“Cædmon’s Hymn” is a very early Old English poem, from around 650 to 680 CE, so 7th century. Our only source for it and for Cædmon’s life is Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bede describes Cædmon very much like the wealthy churchmen of Brother Lawrence’s day described the “uneducated” friar. Bede says Cædmon was an illiterate herdsman who lived at the Whitby monastery on the northeast shore of North Yorkshire. If that is true, we know for sure that he suffered very cold winters there, taking care of livestock.

The story of Cædmon has many versions. One says he couldn’t make music and so never played the harp or sang during gatherings. But one day he had a dream, and in it a man ordered him to “SING” something. Cædmon protested, saying he didn’t know how to sing, but the man in his dream insisted and Cædmon then sang about the Creator and in praise of God. The song he sang very much reminds me of my early childhood days of being in a church choir, and we sang “This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears, all nature sings and round me rings, the music of the spheres.” I wish it had included “Mother’s world” and “Parents’ world.”

Cædmon had miraculously received the gift of religious song and became (like Brother Lawrence) widely known to the monks as a faithful, singing, and inspiring “lay brother.” According to Bede, Cædmon also composed other religious stories and poems which demonstrated his gift to the monks. But the only surviving one today is “Cædmon’s Hymn.”

Because no tape recorders existed in the 7th century, I created a melody for it two decades ago (while swinging my children on the playground), and I’ve been singing it very often ever since. As meditation. It is calming and I love its theme of gratitude for nature. Every day I’m grateful for the miraculous gift of nature.

You can listen to me sing it on my YouTube Channel here.

After I sing “Cædmon’s Hymn” in Old English, I sing it in my modern English translation.

Nu sculon herigean      heofonrices Weard,                                           

Meotodes meahte     ond his modgeþanc,                                             

weorc Wuldorfæder,     swa he wundra gehwæs,                     

ece Drihten,     or onstealde.                            

He ærest sceop     eorðan bearnum                              

heofon to hrofe,     halig Scyppend.                                                      

þa middangeard     monncynnes Weard,                                               

ece Drihten,     æfter teode                   

firum foldan,     Frea ælmihtig.

Now let’s sing everyday Mystery,

Maker’s matter and kind mindfulness,

our Parent’s gift of Creation and their Presence.

Our Friend made each wonder’s beginning,

first they shaped skies as a roof

for all the earth’s children.

Then sacred Shaper, present Friend

made the middle-world,

the solid ground

for everyone.

For these gifts we thank the kind Beloved!

This was recorded during an atmospheric river. So you hear the sump pump go off for a few seconds and also at the end you slightly hear some rain pattering down.

My translation makes the language more inclusive while cleaving to the original spirit and the words’ etymological roots. You can see the literal translation below if you wish.

Literal Translation:

Now we should praise the heavenly kingdom’s guardian!

The Creator’s power and His thoughts.

The work made by the Glory Father,

the eternal Lord, who established the beginning.

He first shaped, for earth’s children,

Heaven as roof, holy Maker.

Then the eternal Lord, mankind’s guardian,

next made the solid ground, almighty Lord!