Knock and the door shall be opened to you

-

  I feel like one of the biggest obstacles we face on our journey back to God is balancing our knowledge about God with our lived experience of God. At some point we must address more than just our mental understanding of God. We must engage in an intimate personal relationship with God that transforms us and uplifts our life as well as others around us.  

Jesus said: Knock and the door shall be opened to you; seek and ye shall find.

In this brief admonition, he reveals that the path of spiritual illumination is one that we must actively choose for ourselves.


We are invited over and over in scripture to “go within” to connect with God.

- Go inside our “closet” to pray

- ”Be still, and know that I am God”

- ”Get up and climb the mountain. So I got up and climbed the mountain and prayed to the Lord.” (one of my personal favorites!)


I think we can assume that, while the mountain Nephi is speaking of may have been a mountain near him that he climbed to the top of, we cannot reject the idea that this mountain he was told to climb is also speaking of “the mountain of the Lord” that we all must climb spiritually in our progression back to God.


I have learned that experiencing the things of God in our life requires a certain level of discipline from us. Which should come as no surprise because the word disciple comes from the same Latin root for discipline, discipulus which means student or pupil in Latin. 


I have been told by God that I must learn to quiet my mind and maintain my focus. Essentially I need to be in charge of my thoughts instead of letting them wander, jumping from subject to subject, never allowing any one thought to grow and take form.


That is certainly a discipline! Just try to clear your mind and meditate for 10 minutes, not to mention 30!


Now that we are at meditation, I want to sing its praises. I feel very strongly that we should all develop some sort of meditative practice in our lives. It doesn’t have to be “traditional” meditation, it can be some variation of it. If there are a handful things that have played a significant role in my spiritual growth, meditation is definitely in the top 3.


I started a meditation practice about 12 years ago. It was fairly traditional, in that I would sit quietly with my eyes closed and try to bring my thoughts back to a single point of focus. My favorite focal point was the phrase “Be still” with the rest of the phrase “and know that I am God” softly floating after it.

It certainly was not easy to develop this practice, but I persisted and I got to the point where I could easily sit and meditate for 45 minutes to an hour. Amazingly, I actually found great pleasure and satisfaction in my long meditations.


After a few years my practice began to change a little. Sometimes I would listen to a guided meditation, sometimes I would be busy and distracted in life and not do it at all for a few months. But I always felt the pull to come back to it. Nowadays I do a more embodied meditation, I incorporate breath work and visualization into it. 


A meditative/mindfulness practice has produced much good fruit in my life.


We live in a very busy and distracted culture. We can all benefit from slowing down, from being still and knowing God.


“Over the past forty years, neurological researchers have been proving what meditators have known for six thousand years. Science has found that meditation increases the gray and white matter in your brain. More specifically, it enlarges the structure that connects the right and left sides of your brain, known as the corpus callosum. That’s valuable because we tend to be very left brain-focused in our day-to-day lives. The left brain is in charge of critical, analytical thought–everything from language to balancing the checkbook and keeping track of responsibilities. But the right brain is the creative side. It’s where intuition, artistic ability and creative problem-solving reside. 

Meditation improves the connection between your analytical side and your intuitive side (that is, your critical mind and your creative mind), allowing your brain to start working in true harmony.”

(Emily Fletcher–Stress Less, Accomplish More p.27)


Most of us spend all day, every day functioning from our left brain, while our right brain is in a state of near atrophy. Yet, the human brain is physically divided in half. The size and shape of the right and left hemispheres are perfectly balanced. Why would we have been created with a 50/50 brain if we were only meant to use it 90/10?


Here is an interesting thought: The left brain is essentially in charge of the past and the future–reflecting on lessons learned and planning for what is ahead; the right brain is the part of you that is in charge of right now–the inspiration, intuition, creativity, music and awareness. 


Consider this in light of the beginning of this post. Learning about God is a left brain activity. Experiencing God is a right brain activity. It seems to me that if we can only experience God in the “Now”, always and only in the current moment, then we would be well served to strengthen our ability to spend more time living in the “Now” in our day-to-day lives.


I meant to talk about the masculine and feminine energies that make up our universe in this post today, but got a little side tracked. Even so, meditation fits under that umbrella, the left brain functions in a masculine energy and the right brain functions in a feminine energy.  

I think I’ll explore this more in my next post.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dear Men,

-
I am going to do a 2 part series. One for men. One for women. I have decided I will start with the men. Because, when all is said and done, it is the divine masculine in men that must be tapped into to create and be a space of safety for the divine feminine to show up.  A woman who is willing to expose her heart, to be vulnerable and open herself up–mentally, emotionally and physically, is very appealing to a man. It is sexy. It is what he wants.  The unfortunate irony is that if her man is not working on and being aware of his own issues, that makes him an unsafe place for her to let her guard down and expose her vulnerability. And yet, in most semi-healthy relationships, if the woman will show some vulnerability and let him see her pain, that will quickly polarize him into a more masculine energy—because she is embodying her feminine energy. So it becomes a bit of “Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?” My husband and I have gone back and forth with each other discussin...
Read more

THE FEMININE GIFT

-
 Men are meant to lead their wife and family under the guidance of Wisdom. We know that “Wisdom” means we are talking about The Mother. But what does that actually mean? What does that look like in our lives? How do we get past  “just discovering the abstract presence of ‘wisdom’ as a characteristic attributable to the Mother in Heaven”  and instead  “discover Her existence and acknowledge Her–otherwise we have not ‘found’ Her. When She declares ‘Whoso findeth me findeth life and shall obtain favor of the Lord.’, it should be taken literally.”  (D.S. Divine Parents talk) How do we “find” Her? And what do we do when we do find her? It’s all still a bit vague. I’m going to suggest that one very important role of women is to be that “connection” to Wisdom. To be the vessel through which Wisdom can flow into her life and particularly into her marriage. Remember, marriage is The Holy Order of Matrimony. It is the feminine’s domain. All women have as their birthright ...
Read more

Dear Women,

-
Image
I have really struggled writing this post. There are many directions I could go with this, but I've settled on describing what the divine feminine looks like in relation to the divine masculine I spoke of in Dear Men.  There is certainly some level of the divine feminine and masculine that we can all tap into, but its fullest expression can only be found in a relationship between the two.  A woman needs contact with an embodied conscious man in order to fully come into and experience her femininity. She needs to experience herself in relation to an energetically powerful opposite. A clear opposite. A decisive opposite. An opposite who knows what he’s doing.  We can do many healing practices to learn self love and address past trauma and open ourselves up, but without that divine polarizing experience there will be something huge missing.  Remember, men and women are opposites for a reason. Everything functions on polarity. With no up, there is no down. With no yin th...
Read more