Contemplative meditation

How Contemplative Meditation Opens the Door to Deeper States

Published On: September 26, 2024

In the autumn of 2006 I took up temporary residence in a small town in the mountains of New Mexico. Still wrestling with some fairly acute inner demons, I yearned for extended stretches of silence and remote, solitary nature walks.

My routine was simple: each morning I’d read a few pages of randomly chosen spiritual text from a variety of books that had accompanied me on the trip.

Once a nugget was found – and it rarely took long – I’d head off for a lengthy walk on a quiet, cedar trail nestled in towering pines on the outskirts of town. My goal each morning was to take a topic of interest – either from a reading or something troubling me – and essentially mull it until until a tangible sense of peace was found.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was engaging a process known as contemplative meditation. As opposed to more traditional meditative exercises where thoughts are ignored, contemplative meditation grants the mind free rein to explore, as deeply as possible, a particular topic.

As I’ve since come to see it, contemplative meditation says, ‘You’ve been granted a mind to explore the self and the world around it, so put it to good use.’ Conversely, traditional meditation says, ‘The mind is a wonderful servant and terrible master. So let’s let it rest and let your true Self take over now.’

“What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of action.” – Meister Eckhart

All that is needed is a reasonably quiet setting, a topic of interest, and a determination to explore it. The key to the process: focused attention.

For example, I might have chosen a topic like love, since like so many of us, my heart had been broken more than a few times.

So I’d ask: What is love? What does it mean to love? Is real love even possible for a human? Is love equitable? Does it have to change shape across time? Must love always be conditional? Could I love someone who committed a terrible crime? What if the crime involved someone I loved?

Almost always, I found this process illuminating and sometimes even exhilarating. By focusing intense attention on a single concept, my mind was given license to run, but only to the outer reaches of the subject itself.

“True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.” – Thomas Merton

I also found that when extraneous thoughts invariably invaded the meditation, by patiently and consistently bringing attention back to the target topic the mental restlessness slowed.

In fact, as someone who had never been much good at meditation, I found contemplative meditation to be a useful introduction to its more traditional cousin. As a result, over time I found meditation easier to practice.

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Contemplative meditation

How Contemplative Meditation Opens the Door to Deeper States

Published On: September 26, 2024

In the autumn of 2006 I took up temporary residence in a small town in the mountains of New Mexico. Still wrestling with some fairly acute inner demons, I yearned for extended stretches of silence and remote, solitary nature walks.

My routine was simple: each morning I’d read a few pages of randomly chosen spiritual text from a variety of books that had accompanied me on the trip.

Once a nugget was found – and it rarely took long – I’d head off for a lengthy walk on a quiet, cedar trail nestled in towering pines on the outskirts of town. My goal each morning was to take a topic of interest – either from a reading or something troubling me – and essentially mull it until until a tangible sense of peace was found.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was engaging a process known as contemplative meditation. As opposed to more traditional meditative exercises where thoughts are ignored, contemplative meditation grants the mind free rein to explore, as deeply as possible, a particular topic.

As I’ve since come to see it, contemplative meditation says, ‘You’ve been granted a mind to explore the self and the world around it, so put it to good use.’ Conversely, traditional meditation says, ‘The mind is a wonderful servant and terrible master. So let’s let it rest and let your true Self take over now.’

“What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of action.” – Meister Eckhart

All that is needed is a reasonably quiet setting, a topic of interest, and a determination to explore it. The key to the process: focused attention.

For example, I might have chosen a topic like love, since like so many of us, my heart had been broken more than a few times.

So I’d ask: What is love? What does it mean to love? Is real love even possible for a human? Is love equitable? Does it have to change shape across time? Must love always be conditional? Could I love someone who committed a terrible crime? What if the crime involved someone I loved?

Almost always, I found this process illuminating and sometimes even exhilarating. By focusing intense attention on a single concept, my mind was given license to run, but only to the outer reaches of the subject itself.

“True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.” – Thomas Merton

I also found that when extraneous thoughts invariably invaded the meditation, by patiently and consistently bringing attention back to the target topic the mental restlessness slowed.

In fact, as someone who had never been much good at meditation, I found contemplative meditation to be a useful introduction to its more traditional cousin. As a result, over time I found meditation easier to practice.