Tools to Serve Truth, Part Three: Contemplation

Support tools for letting go what no longer serves us AND for learning to serve in Truth:

1) Gathering with a few others to review the scene before any action (just be sure they aren’t enablers)

2) Praying (remember the running out the door prayer-that is enough )

3) Contemplating  (which means watching and listening and hearing)

4) Receiving help (as gracefully as currently possible)

5) Taking a ‘do-over’ and humbly beginning again (as many times as needed)

Carolyn writes: For me contemplation is the commitment and willingness to hear, experience, integrate, become aware and come to know the subtler, inter-connected elements of everything that makes me, me—and me part of everything.   I don’t have a clear understanding of the technical differences between meditation and contemplation.  My understanding of meditation is only of the beginning level of sitting and clearing my mind in an effort to empty it of thought.  After years of trying, it still feels like a struggle. 

Contemplation seems more forgiving of the constant movement of my body and my mind. Contemplation is more noticing and allowing and listening with my whole body.  When I sit in contemplation, a kind of knowing comes to me from a place where it seems all wisdom is held.  I see this place of wisdom as one of the infinite facets of GOD.  

Many years ago I took a series of meditation classes in an effort to calm and clear my mind.  I remember being told to keep imagining a blank white canvas on which GOD could reveal GOD to me.  My canvas was never white.  It always appeared thick with layers of paint in many colors, shapes and texture.   I finally stopped struggling and gave into my colored canvas.  This is how I came to embrace ‘my’ form of contemplation. 

Sitting with my multicolored, multi-textured, multi-layered canvas, became a way for Wisdom to make herself known to me.  I would be with what I saw on my inner canvas and ‘wonder’ about it. My ‘wondering’ became a way to loosen the grip of my fears, beliefs and perceptions.

Self-Reflection: I sit in contemplation and I wonder…about whatever becomes to my awareness; and then I listen with all of my senses, and then, I come to know with all my senses.  In sitting this way, I come to know at ever subtler levels what is more Truth.