LEARNING TO LIVE A CONTEMPLATIVE WAY OF LIFE
With
Dr. James Finley
THURSDAY EVENING:
October 11, 2012
6:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Registration
7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Transforming Trauma: Accessing the Spiritual Dimensions of Healing
A gathering devoted to exploring a contemplative approach to healing trauma and all
forms of suffering. The core insight of this approach will be presented and clarified by way of
examples and insights into the role contemplative experience plays in helping both the clinician
and client access spiritual resources that enhance healing. Dialogue will occur around these
topics: the nature of contemplative experience (mindfulness) and how it spontaneously arises in
the healing encounter; how compassion, how contemplative clarity and compassion guide and
enhance the process of healing; learning to be a contemplative clinician and a contemplative
client. Documentation will be provided that clinicians can use to apply for CEUs to their
credentialing board.
DAY ONE:
Friday, October 12, 2012
7:30 – 8:15 a.m.
Optional Mindfulness Yoga and Meditation (Included. Food Shelf Donation
Welcomed).
9:00 a.m.
Welcome, introductions, the day’s schedule.
9:15 – 10:45 a.m.
Session 1: How is it possible to live a contemplative way of life in the midst of
today’s world?
Turning to Thomas Merton to help us develop a basic understanding of what a
contemplative way of life is and a practical way to understand how we can follow it day-by-day.. Taking
as our guide the three directives: Find your contemplative practice and practice it. Find your
contemplative teaching and follow it. Find your contemplative community and enter it. Find in
Thomas Merton a specific language for the universal, mystical lineage of the awakened heart found
in the mystical traditions of all the world’s great religions. William Faulkner’s story of the bear.
10:45 – 11:00 a.m.
Silent Break: complete silence in the room and a spirit of silence outside of it.
11:00 – 11:15 a.m.
Silent Group Meditation
11:15 – 11:45 a.m.
Dialogue/Questions
11:45 – 1:15 p.m.
Lunch Break (Not Included)
1:15 – 2:45 p.m
Session 2: The Contemplative Way of Life
Developing the psychological and spiritual maturity that will be needed to sustain
all that lies ahead. The teachings of Guigo II on climbing the ladder to heaven in four steps: spiritual
reading (sustained receptivity to a beauty not yet thought about…grounding our path in experiential
humility), discursive meditation (quiet reflection on insights, glimpses, intimations received in silence),
prayer (the stirrings of the awakened heart –an inconsolable longing), contemplation (wordless
communion, resting in God resting is us) Noting parallels in The Cloud of Unknowing on attitudes of
spiritual maturity. Finding these teachings in the first three mansions of Theresa’s Interior Castle and in
the eightfold path of the Buddha.
2:45 – 3:00 p.m.
Silent Break
3:00 – 3:15 p.m.
Group Silent Meditation
3:15 – 4:00 p.m.
Dialogue/Questions
4:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Cash bar
5:00 – 6:00 p.m.
Dinner (Included )
6:00 – 7:15 p.m.
Session 3: Listening as a path of spiritual awakening
Jesus would begin his teachings with the call to “listen”. This talk explores
learning to listen so deeply that we can hear God speaking us and all things into being. This is the
listening stance grounded in God’s call in the Torah, to “Hear O Israel.” In Saint Benedict’s call to
monks to “Listen my child to the words of the Master”. The conference also explores the story in the
Buddhist text, the Gateless Barrier, in which a monk learns to surrender to a life of deep listening as a
path to awakening. This is dovetailed with Merton’s notion of life in the monastery in which “the young
monks lean sadly up against walls asking questions that have no answers and the old monks are silent
because they have given up interest in speech.”
7:15 – 7:30 p.m.
Silent Break
7:30 -7:45 p.m.
Group Silent Meditation
7:45 – 8:15 p.m.
Dialogue/Questions
DAY TWO: Saturday, October 13, 2012
7:30 – 8:15 a.m.
Optional Mindfulness Yoga and Meditation (Included. Food Shelf Donation
Welcomed).
9:00 – 10:30 a.m.
Session 1: Basic guidelines for the practice of contemplative prayer and silent
meditation as a path of spiritual awakening. Finding this way of meditation in the teaching of the
mystics. Noting Dogen’s teaching on meditation as non-thinking and on the koan tradition of mu,
cutting off the mind road.
10:30 – 10:45 a.m.
Silent break
10:45 – 11:00 a.m.
Group Silent Meditation
11:00 – 11:30 a.m.
Dialogue/Questions
11:30 – 1:00 p.m.
Lunch Break (Included)
1:00 – 2:30 p.m.
Session 2: The three questions of Thomas Merton: How is it going (your
intimate experience of your own life day by day)? How is it going with your surrender to the mystery that
has intimately accessed your heart and brought you to this place so that it might translate you into itself?
How is it going in your discovery of the second question bubbling up through your intimate experience of
the first question (awakening to the God-given Godly nature of waking up in the morning, the God-given
Godly nature of your laughter, of every tear that falls from your eyes)? Nagarjuna on the Buddha way of
realizing that samsara (the realm of suffering) is nirvana free of craving, reification and delusion).
How compassion embodies this contemplative way of life. Living this way so we can be healing
presence in the midst of the world. Martin Buber, Thich Nhat Hanh and Thomas Merton on inner
peace and compassion as the way of world peace.
2:30-2:45
Silent Break
2:45 – 3:00 p.m.
Group Silent Meditation
3:00 – 3:30 p.m.
Dialogue/Questions
3:30 – 4:00 p.m.
Ending Dialogue: The challenges and rewards of daily meditation practice.