meditation

Meditating on not saying something stupid and regretful to my wife

At night, my wife wears a night-guard from the dentist because she grinds her teeth when she sleeps. Often at night, before going to bed, she talks to me with the night-guard in her mouth and I find it extremely annoying. My hearing is not the greatest and, in spite of the fact that her English is near perfect, English is her second language which can sometimes make her more difficult to understand than if she was a native English speaker. Combine these two factors with the night-guard, and her speech sounds mumbly to me, which often frustrates me more than it should. 

Tonight, was one of those nights. I came home after spending several hours at the jiu-jitsu academy for kids classes followed by team pictures for my daughter’s wrestling team and, when I got here, it was relatively late and my wife was already ready for bed. My daughter and I both needed to shower and eat dinner, and while we were each getting squared away for the evening, my wife began talking to me about something. She had the night-guard in and I immediately got irritated. 

As I felt myself growing increasingly more annoyed, the thought came to me that I had not yet eaten dinner. I was hungry, tired, and wanted to take a shower. Maybe my irritation had nothing to do with my wife talking to me with her night-guard in her mouth. Maybe I simply needed to eat, clean up, and sit down. It then occurred to me how many of our marital spats might be avoided altogether if one or both of us simply acknowledged that the thing we think is bothering us is not actually the thing that is bothering us. 

Life is funny this way. Very rarely is the perceived problem the actual problem. There is often more going on beneath the surface than what presents itself at a superficial level. But it can be very difficult to go deeper when we are always in a reactionary state to the stimulus that is right in front of us. Without a buffer between ourselves and our environment, the world bumps into us and we bump back into it. It’s like a never-ending pinball game of actions and emotions. 

The very fact that I did not react to my wife when she was talking to me with her night-guard in, in spite of my being hungry, tired, dirty, and grouchy is unusual for me. It is not in my nature to keep my mouth shut when something irritates me. I have a long history of speaking up with the wrong words at the wrong time. I’m very good at making things worse. But I have noticed that something has been different with me lately. Something has been changing. 

I’ve observed that I am not nearly as reactionary as I used to be. I have far fewer knee-jerk reactions to the things that annoy me. In fact, I’ve noticed that fewer things annoy me these days. I have no doubt that this change that has taken place within me is the direct result of a consistent meditation practice. 

For quite some time now, I have been extremely disciplined about setting aside time every morning to meditate before I leave the house. I try to do this before my wife and daughter wake up. Along with my other prayer and spiritual reading, meditation is an essential part of my morning routine. In fact, it is probably the part of my morning I look forward to the most when I wake up each day. 

There are many different forms and styles of meditation and I have tried several over the years, but the one that works best for me, and the one I have stuck with for the longest, is called centering prayer or contemplative prayer. There’s just something about this particular style of meditation that really resonates with me and, like I said, I look forward to my quiet time each morning. 

It took a while before I started to see results from my meditation practice which was a bit frustrating when I first started out. Like most of us, I wanted to see immediate, noticeable results. I wanted instant gratification and instant transformation. Spiritual change is often slow change, however. Unless you have some kind of life-changing white light or burning bush experience, you are likely to have what I have heard referred to as “the educational variety” of spiritual experience. That is, if you practice consistently, change will come slowly, over a long period of time. 

As I said, one of the changes that I have seen from my meditation practice is that I am less reactionary. It’s as if meditation has given me a built-in pause button that allows me to process stimuli for a moment before reacting to it. This buffer between the world and my reactions to it has saved me from making things worse on multiple occasions. And what is most interesting to me is that this pause simply comes. It’s not something I initiate. I’m not doing it. It’s just there.

If not getting myself in trouble by saying something stupid and regretful when my wife talks to me with her night-guard in were all that meditation gave to me, it would be enough. Meditation has become one of the most important things that I do every day and, as I said, I look forward to it each morning. I can honestly say that there is no other single practice that has had a greater impact on my mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being than meditation. But I know I have only scratched the surface on the depths of this practice and I look forward to going deeper. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

The gifts of the spirit are meant to be given away

The more I mediate, the more I crave silence. The more I pray, the more I yearn for solitude. The more time I spend in silence and solitude, the more I want to share this experience with others. 

God moves in us in mysterious ways. He changes our hearts and shapes our wills. He draws us ever closer to him, whispering in the quiet spaces, “I love you. come to me.” 

Our job is to listen, to submit to the stillness wherein God resides, for it is there that he is found. This is why “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed (Mark 1:35, NIV).” But Jesus did not stop there and neither should we. 

Jesus went off in solitude and prayed in silence so that he could hear the Father, but then he returned to his community. As important as it was for him to commune directly with God, it was equally important for him to share God’s word and God’s love with the world. The gifts he received from the Father had to be given away in order for them to mean anything. 

This is the work of faith. We trust God enough to give him our time and our attention. We give him our lives. In turn, he gives us salvation, joy, peace, comfort, and so much more, but he gives us these at a price. 

The price we must pay is that we do not get to keep these gifts to ourselves. We cannot hoard God’s love and his blessings. We must give freely of what we have been given, for to try to keep God’s blessings to ourselves is to lose them. 

In order to maintain and grow in our relationship with God, we must sacrifice our selfish desires, aspirations, and fears at the altar of love. We have to die to our old ways and old attitudes so that we can be reborn in God’s image. God, who is eternally giving himself to us through the very fact of our existence, requires that we, too, give ourselves to others in the same way. 

This was a difficult lesson for me to learn, and I still forget it often. I am not living for me. I gave up my life the day I turned it over to God in prayer many years ago, and I reaffirmed this commitment when I died and was reborn with Jesus in baptism last year. My life belongs to God and to those I would serve by his grace, love, and mercy. 

So when I meditate, I am not meditating for myself. The silence is not my own. I am neither its cause nor am I the final recipient of its blessings. It connects me to my creator so that I may be more conscious, present, and attentive to the needs of others. I am merely a vessel. 

Likewise, when I pray, I am not praying for myself. My prayers are not for me alone. They are to make me more useful to God and to my fellows. The solitude within which I seek God gives me the courage, wisdom, and compassion with which I may go into the world to do God’s work. I am merely a servant. 

Jesus gave his life for me so that I may give my life for him. Whatever peace, inspiration, and comfort I receive through grace in prayer and meditation is a gift not for me to keep, but to pass on to others. I am merely a container to be filled by the spirit that overflows from within me for others to experience God’s loving mercy. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Guidelines for a morning prayer practice

I tend to overcomplicate and overthink things, and this often results in my being overwhelmed and overextended. If I don’t have a routine and a structure to my day, I can be all over the place and the time will get away from me without my ever having actually accomplished anything. It’s not that I just sit around doing nothing, but that I lack focus, or rather that I get overly focused on the wrong things or too many things and gain no headway on anything. 

I’ve never been diagnosed, but it’s quite possible that I have some level of ADHD. When I was a kid, ADHD diagnoses were much more rare and, not being physically hyperactive, I suppose I didn’t cause enough trouble to warrant attention. It wasn’t until I was in my early 40’s that it occurred to me that ADHD doesn’t necessarily mean a person has to be physically hyperactive, but it can also mean that they are mentally hyperactive with no outward signs of hyperactivity at all. 

Following this train of thought, I reflected back on my life and my complete inability to pay attention to things that didn’t interest me, coupled with an absolutely laser focused obsessive attention on things that did. In school, I either got A’s or I got C’s and D’s. It all depended upon my level of interest in the subject or the teacher. Eventually, I found things outside of school that interested me more than school and I stopped attending altogether. 

Fast forward many years and this dichotomy of inattentiveness toward things that don’t interest me and obsessiveness toward things that do still rings true. It’s both a blessing and a curse, a double-edged sword if you will. However, by accepting to the best of my ability the truth of who I am and how my mind works, I have learned to harness this aspect of my nature as more of a feature than a bug. 

As an aside, I have a friend who insists that there is no such thing as ADHD. He states that there are two types of people: farming-minded people and hunter-gatherer-minded people. Farming-minded people, he theorizes are those who can sit still, stay in one place for extended periods of time, and pay attention, even when it’s boring. Hunter-gatherer-minded people, on the other hand, are always active, can’t sit still, and tend to be always on the go, unable to stay focused on the mundane, but capable of completely obsessing over that which interests them. 

Either way, not wanting to be a victim of my own mind, I have had to develop certain tools that make it possible for me to focus on what matters and accomplish the things that need to get done. Perhaps the most important tool in my toolbox is routine. Having a set routine, at least to the degree that it is possible without being overly rigid or driving my wife crazy, helps me get more of the important things done without my mind wandering to all of the unimportant things that distract me from my goals. One of my most important routines is my morning prayer hour. 

Almost every morning, I wake up at around 5:30am to do my morning prayers. Some days, I wake up earlier and some days I give myself the grace to wake up later, but it usually averages out to around 5:30am. This time is significant because it’s an hour before my daughter wakes up to get ready for school and I need that full amount of time to give the time to my prayers that feels best for me. 

One challenge with whatever condition I have, whether it be ADHD or hunter-gatherer mind, is that I can even overcomplicate prayer. For this reason, I have created a set of guidelines for myself that keep me on track. I don’t always adhere to these guidelines perfectly and if I tried to, I’d probably get burned out, but I use them as guardrails to ensure that I stay the course. 

The guidelines I made for myself are strict, but the order is not strict. In fact, the order is one place where I give myself flexibility so that I can follow the spirit, as it were, and also so that I don’t get bored. Keeping this in mind, here is a list of the things that I require of myself during my morning prayer hour. Again, the order changes from day to day. 

  1. Biblical Reading: I use the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ daily Bible readings for mass which I receive in my email inbox every morning. This allows me not to have to think about what to read from day-to-day. The readings are provided for me so I can save that creative thought energy for some other task. 
  2. 20 Minutes of Silent Prayer: I use the Centering Prayer app. I’ve been using this app for quite some time now. It’s free, simple to use, and follows Father Thomas Keating’s guidelines for centering prayer. There are plenty of other prayer and meditation apps out there and I’ve tried several, but this one just seems to suit me for now. 
  3. Spiritual Reading: This is where I really let the spirit guide me. I have a stack of books next to my prayer chair and I am in the middle of several of them at any given time. Did someone say ADHD? Some of these books are old books of spiritual wisdom, some are more modern, and some are books of spiritual quotes or sayings. Some days I read a little bit from a few of them and other days I stick to just one. This freedom keeps me interested which is what makes the practice sustainable for me. 
  4. Spiritual Writing: Every day, I write and publish something for my blog Meditations of a Gentle Warrior. These are short prayer-like poems (Psalms?) which serve multiple purposes for me. On one hand, they help me listen to what I feel like God is saying to me and to channel that creatively. On the other hand, these prayer-poems are an act of sharing. I put them into the world with the hope that some reader somewhere may feel moved by upon reading them and, therefore, by God through them, bringing that person closer to him. Additionally, I feel called to creativity and writing is one way by which I answer that call. 

As I stated above, these are merely guidelines. I follow them to the best of my ability, but I’m not perfect. That said, at night when thinking about the following day, I always take this prayer hour into consideration. My time with God in the morning has become the most important part of my day. With it, I feel closer to him. Without it, as my therapist once said, “It’s amazing how quickly things fall apart.” 

Adhering to this structure may seem burdensome to some, like it robs one of spontaneity and creativity, but I find the opposite to be true. By starting my day off with structure, with a routine, I don’t have to think about what I’m going to do first thing in the morning. I know exactly how the first part of my day is going to go, give or take. By not wasting precious energy and attention on the beginning of my day, I am therefore freed up to direct that energy and attention elsewhere, like on my daughter and my wife. 

It’s important to note that I did not develop this routine overnight. It has been worked out over a long period of time with things added and removed as the spirit directs me, but I have been using this iteration for a while and it seems to be a good fit for me for now. As my wife says to our daughter, “Subject to change.” It’s a practice and the important thing is that it requires practice. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Driving in the moment

I’m old enough to remember driving without a GPS. In fact, when I started driving, computer programs like MapQuest and the like did not yet exist, so we couldn’t just type our location and destination into a computer to print out our route. We simply had to know where we were going. If we couldn’t figure it out, we had use a map or ask for directions. 

As a teenager, I don’t even think I wrote directions down. If I didn’t know how to get where I was going, I’d ask someone and then I would just go. If I got lost, I would either find my way or I would ask for help, usually by calling someone from a payphone to guide me in the right direction. Once I went somewhere, especially if it was somewhere local, without even trying, I could get there again from memory. 

When I traveled through different states, I would pick up the state map at a welcome center or a rest stop and stuff it in my glovebox in case I needed it. For years, I traveled up and down the east coast visiting family with nothing more than my memory, a set of handwritten directions, and a handful of free state maps. My friend and I even traveled to the deep south multiple times a year for blues festivals, putting tens of thousands of miles on my car and, except on a few rare occasions in new places, almost never got lost. 

This all changed when I became a commercial coffee-equipment repair-technician fixing espresso machines and such in and around Washington DC. I was only on the job for a few days when I realized I was in over my head. I had to travel from store to store fixing coffee equipment, in and out of the city, and time was of the essence. 

Now, I was driving for a living in an unfamiliar and confusing place, and especially if I wanted to get home at a decent hour, I couldn’t afford to get lost. GPS units had been out for a while at this point – I remember my father showing me the one he had – but they were still very expensive. After driving in circles between DC and Arlington, VA one day for about an hour trying to figure out where I was going, I finally broke down and made the investment. 

That was nearly twenty years ago and I have been using a GPS in one capacity or another ever since. I’ve been through several dashboard or windshield mounted units, but now it’s simply an app on my phone. Specifically, I use an app called Waze these days because it offers free, crowdsourced traffic, police, and hazard updates which are updated in real time. 

Waze is great and I am sure that has helped me avoid many hours worth of traffic jams, as well as tickets from police speed traps. For this reason, I have found myself using it even when I know where I am going and how to get there. I realized recently, however, that this convenience does not come without its cost. 

At some point in recent years, I started having anxiety about being stuck in traffic, in tunnels, and in any other situation I feel like I can’t easily get out of. It’s something I’ve been working through in therapy and also with my prayer and meditation practice. In spite of having made an amazing amount of progress in this area, I still have moments here and there when my anxiousness gets the best of me. 

One such incident happened a month or so ago when we were meeting some friends in the Baltimore for dinner. In order to get where we were going, we had to go through the Harbor Tunnel and, having never been to this particular restaurant before, I had Waze up on my phone to tell me where to go. It was getting late, it was dark, and I was exhausted from a particularly long week. 

As we approached the tunnel, I began getting anxious. Recognizing whet was happening, I started to think through the situation a bit in an attempt to overcome this feeling that was welling up inside me. Then, the thought came to me, “Is God anxious about driving through tunnels?” 

What this really meant, at least in my mind, was, “What part of you is anxious about driving through the tunnel? Is it the part of you where God resides or is it something else?” I then said a prayer asking God to give me the courage to get through this moment and he did. My fear began to fade, I drove through the tunnel, and we got where we were going. 

After a nice dinner with friends, we got in the car, and I began driving home. As we approached the Harbor Tunnel this time, I could see on Waze that there was traffic building up inside the tunnel and, because of this, the average speed in the tunnel at that time was around 20mph. I immediately panicked and pulled off the highway onto a side street. 

I don’t know what it is, but the thought of being trapped in traffic in the tunnel was simply too much for me and I decided to find a different way to get home. Waze rerouted me and I ended up driving through the city, eventually finding myself entering the Fort McHenry Tunnel which had no traffic backing up in it. This unnecessary detour added at least thirty minutes to my drive home, not to mention what it did to my dignity. 

Over the next few days, I stared to notice a pattern, however. Everywhere I went, I put Waze on to get there. If it showed delays due to traffic, hazards, or whatever, I would start to get anxious. This happened even when I wasn’t in a hurry. 

Then it occurred to me that I was doing this to myself. I was causing myself unnecessary stress by using Waze to look into the future and then obsessing about problems I didn’t even have yet. I was using my GPS to take me out of the moment and it was messing with my peace. 

So I decided to try an experiment. For the foreseeable future, I would go old school. I would stop using Waze, or any other GPS, to get to places I knew how to get to. If I was worried about traffic, I would simply have to leave earlier to account for it, but other than some initial GPS withdrawal, a funny thing happened. I stopped worrying about what was up ahead, and I started focusing on what was in front of me. 

My GPS was taking me out of the moment. It allowed me to abdicate responsibility for my timeliness and even my speed, and, instead of using it as a tool, I had started relying on it to make decisions for me. I was serving my GPS more than my GPS was serving me, and it was distracting me from being present to what was actually going on around me. 

I’m not blaming Waze for my anxiety. Anxiety is a complex, multifaceted issue. However, one of my main anxiety triggers is projecting too far into the future. I have a very strong imagination and when I predict the future, it’s always the apocalypse. I am, therefore, happier and more at peace living in the present moment whenever I can. As silly as it may seem, in addition to my meditation and mindfulness practices, driving without a GPS unless I truly need it is just one small way I can help myself do that.

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

With practice and grace

The task of a person called to live a contemplative life is to notice things, to observe God in everyday occurrences, in mundane interactions, and in the places people normally do not look for God. But if God is, isn’t God in everything? Like Adam and Eve in the garden after eating the forbidden fruit, isn’t it we who are hiding, not God? 

The call to contemplation begins as a whisper. It’s a fleeting glimpse into eternity that leaves us wanting more. In a moment, God catches us off guard and grabs our attention. He pulls back the veil and we get to see what he sees, and feel what he feels. But as quickly as he reveals himself to us, he withdraws, leaving us full and empty at the same time. 

In what feels like his absence, we long for his presence. We begin to sense, to know, that nothing less than perfect union with perfect God is going to be enough. And yet there is something in the way. We can’t quite get there no matter how much we want to. 

God is always present, constantly pouring himself out, in and through us, but we are not always present to and for him. We have to practice. Awareness takes practice. Consciousness takes practice. Stillness takes practice.

As we practice, as we awaken to God’s presence, God’s presence begins to awaken within us. More and more often, we start to feel him acting through us, we begin to see him in our life as it unfolds before us, and we start to see and hear him in and through others. Over time, with practice and grace, God-consciousness becomes the rule, not the exception. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Evolution of a blog pt. 1

Every day, for quite some time now, I have been writing and publishing a short blog post for my Meditations of a Gentle Warrior blog. I’ve been doing this for several years and, other than missing a day or two here and there, and a couple of longer periods where I thought I had quit altogether, I have been faithful to this practice. I honestly can’t even remember how or why I started, but I do know that I got the idea of posting daily from listing to an interview with Seth Godin who has been writing and publishing a daily blog post for well over a decade.

My blog didn’t start out as what it is now. In fact, if I remember correctly, I was posting on an entirely different site than the one I’ve been using for the last few years. The name has also changed over time. At first, I don’t think it had a name. Then, it became Holistic Budo. 

Sometime before my first martial art teacher, Joe Sheya, passed away, I had started doing a form of qigong, a mind-and-body movement practice for developing so-called internal strength, to supplement my hapkido and Brazilian jiu-jitsu practices. Upon hearing that I was studying qigong, Joe said to me, “That’s good, but don’t make the mistake I made by thinking your qigong practice is separate from your martial art practice. Find a way to integrate them.” 

The name Holistic Budo was meant to embody this idea of the integration of the holistic arts with the martial arts, with budo being the Japanese word for ‘martial arts.’ I thought that I would use my blog to document my journey through the arts, but art tends to have a mind of its own and the idea we start with is not always the art we end up with. In spite of my intentions, Holistic Budo evolved into my writing short philosophical posts wherein I shared experience, wisdom, or advice for living a better life. 

Sometimes I wrote about something I had experienced throughout the day. Sometimes I was writing to myself, basically giving myself advice for how I could have handled a situation or experience better. Other times, I imagined that I was leaving a trail of literary breadcrumbs for my daughter should she need it someday if I were no longer here to talk to. Eventually, wanting a name that better reflected what the blog had become, I changed the name to what it is now, Meditations of a Gentle Warrior. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Pray without ceasing

There is so much temptation to argue with the world over worldly things and I often give in to that temptation, but every time I do, it leaves me feeling empty and disappointed. Specifically when I engage in online debate, whatever dubious, fleeting pleasure I get out of trying to be right is quickly replaced by hollow dissatisfaction. Even if I perceive myself as having won whatever debate I interjected myself into, the cost is almost always greater than the reward. 

What is there to even win? What will I gain compared to my lost time, attention, and happiness? The answer is little to nothing. In fact, it’s not even a net zero. I inevitably end up feeling worse than when I started after having wasted precious minutes and hours focused on something other than what is actually good, healthy, and fulfilling. 

In spite of this, I still find myself battling the temptation to get involved in things that don’t really concern me. It’s not even that I am drawn in by some righteous or noble cause, and I’m not trying to create some great change through debate. It’s my pride and vanity driving me to engage in this pointless conflict for the sake of conflict. The truth is most people are not arguing online to have their minds changed anyway. Rather, I’m simply trying to seem smart or to prove others wrong. This is not the path to heaven or even contentment. It’s quite the opposite, in fact. 

Case in point, after the recent election, I found myself engaging with some posts on my social media feed. I then shared an old friends post which expressed a controversial political opinion. Adding to this, I created a post stating a dissenting view on my own post, hoping for validation, but expecting negative attention.

As time passed, I started getting comments on my posts. I engaged with some of them. Others I ignored. But what I started to notice was that, even when I was not on social media, I was thinking about what comments others were making on my posts. What did the think about me? What were they saying about me? Who else agreed with them? Was I upsetting people? How was this affecting my public image? All of this self-centered fear drove me to check my social media feed on my phone over and over again for hours. 

The more I checked my phone, the worse I felt. This was not because people were criticizing me and my point of view. I expected that and I could have predicted exactly who would do so, as well as what they would say. I felt worse over time because I began realizing just how fruitless this activity was. More so, it was becoming clear to me that, aside from this not adding value to my life, it was actually detracting from my joy, my peace of mind, and my ability to focus the things that truly matter. 

Most importantly, however, I realized that all of this time spent worrying about what other people were thinking or saying was time I was not thinking about God. That is, instead of engaging people in political debate on social media, I could have been praying. I don’t mean on my knees prayer, which I do at the beginning and end of the day, but “praying without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)” through meditation, contemplation, spiritual reading, Christian podcasts, or service work. By obsessing over worldly matters, I was ignoring my higher calling. I was ignoring God. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Leaves floating downstream

When my daughter gets a song stuck in her head, for whatever reason, listening to the song on the radio helps free her mind of the song. So quite often I hear her voice from the backseat of the car saying, “Daddy. [insert song title] is stuck in my head. Can you play it?” She tends to be extremely sincere and generally honest, so I at least believe that the song is stuck in her head, but I’m not entirely sure whether this trick of playing the song to get it out of her head actually works or not, or if she just uses this as an excuse to ask me to play the song for her.

Either way, I typically humor her. I don’t mind playing music she likes while I’m driving. It helps me understand her a little better and it’s an opportunity for us to bond. There are times, however, when I simply want to listen to my music, either because I’m simply not in the mood for hers or because I want to expose her to something new. She tends to be fairly understanding, at least as understanding as a child can be, and it gives us a good reason to talk about music, which is something I have always enjoyed. 

Tonight, maybe I simply wasn’t in the mood to listen to the song she said was stuck in her head or maybe I was just being stubborn, but when she asked me to play a song to relieve her of the torture of it running through her mind, I said no. But I wasn’t being cruel. I turned it into a conversation about intrusive, obsessive thoughts, something I have struggled with for as long as I can remember, and a healthy way I have learned to manage, or even transcend them. 

When she told me that the song was stuck in her head and she couldn’t make it go away, I explained that I have the same problem sometimes. In fact, we all have minds that often seem like they are entirely out of our control. Even when we want them to be quiet, they simply won’t and we live with the constant chatter of hope, worry, anger, fear, frustration, excitement, anticipation, shame, regret, etc. running through our minds. Sometimes it is so loud and chaotic that it almost seems quiet, but it is anything but. 

We think about the past, the future, and all the things that have happened, could have happened, may happen, or may never happen, and we are rarely, if ever, simply at peace in the present moment. This, I explained to her, is one of the reasons I meditate every day. “Really?” she asked. “Yes, dear,” I replied. “When I don’t meditate, my mind races, obsesses, and does all sorts of crazy stuff to drive me crazy. Meditation helps to quiet my mind down a bit, or at least makes me less susceptible to getting carried away with the thoughts that bombard me from every direction.” 

I then explained that, in the style of meditation that I practice, known as centering prayer, I pick a simple word that I can repeat whenever my thoughts become intrusive or my mind wanders. I sit quietly and, when thoughts arise, I simply say the word in my mind as a way to let the thoughts go. I don’t try to fight the thoughts or deny them. Rather, I acknowledge them with my word, and let them gently go on their way. “It doesn’t matter how many thoughts arise or how often, I explained, only that I return to the practice of repeating my word every time I need to return to center.” 

Intrigued, she started throwing out some words she might be able to use to release the song in her head. At first, she chose “Stop,” as her word, but then I explained that it’s preferable to use a word that is softer and less of a command. “Remember,” I said, “The goal is not to resist the song, only to free yourself from it.” “Please” was the next word she chose. “That’s closer, dear, but it’s still engaging your thoughts. What we want is a word to remind us to let the thoughts go, not to directly engage our thoughts.” 

“Here’s a visualization I once heard,” I said, “That has helped me better understand the practice. Imagine your mind is a stream. It’s cool and calm, with the water quietly flowing by. On top of the water are fallen leaves. These leaves are your thoughts. As they float down the stream, you will be tempted to hold onto them or to follow them, but the goal is to let them be, to simply acknowledge them and let them continue to float downstream. Your word is there to remind you to let the leaves go and to keep your mind on the stream itself.” 

As I explained this all to her, it occurred to me that it may be a bit much for her to comprehend. After all, it’s a bit much for me to comprehend and I’m the one practicing it. But then I realized that, even if she doesn’t understand or utilize this practice now, it’s something she can recall when she is ready. I merely planted a seed, a seed I wish was planted for me earlier in my life, but which I am grateful to have received when I did. 

We pulled up to our home and unloaded the car. I went upstairs to take a shower after jiu-jitsu class while my daughter sat down to eat. After my shower, I came down to eat and my daughter, now done with her dinner, went upstairs to get ready for bed. After she showered, brushed her teeth, and read for a while, my wife tucked her in and turned out the lights. As she lay in bed, from downstairs I could hear her every few minutes saying a single word. “Leaf,” she said and then some time would pass. “Leaf,” and some more time would pass. “Leaf,” she said again, until eventually she fell asleep. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

In stillness

“I invite you to sit still, sit straight, fold your hands and bow. Repeat after me:
Be still, and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10 NIV).
Be still, and know that I am.
Be still, and know.
Be still.
Be.” 

Followed by several minutes of silence, this simple, but beautifully powerful prayer is how Dr. James Finley closes out each podcast episode of Turning to the Mystics. In addition to leading theTurning to the Mystics podcast with co-host Kristen Oats, Dr. Finley is an author, clinical psychologist, retreat leader, public speaker, and former student of the late, modern mystic Thomas Merton. In each episode, drawing from his vast knowledge of and experience with the material, Dr. Finley gives listeners modern, practical perspective on the writings and teachings of various figureheads in the Christian mystical tradition. 

A now devout listener of the Turning to the Mystics podcast, which came into my life at exactly the right time (funny how God seems to always work that way), this prayer was on my mind this morning as I did my morning meditation. Being still has always been difficult for me, especially in the sense that God means it in this particular Psalm. I’m a worrier, a planner, and a doer. Sitting in silence for an extended period of time, being still and allowing God to be God, goes against every instinct I have. 

This resistance to stillness has come at a cost. Several years ago, I essentially worried, planned, and worked my way into a series of anxiety attacks. I had reached my limit, the jumping off place, where my best best ideas and my best thinking were no longer working. I was working two jobs, one of which was my own business, training jiu-jitsu as much as I could, and trying to navigate family life to the best of my ability, all while neglecting my physical, mental, and spiritual health. 

As covid swept through the world and things began to shut down, I crashed. Life came to a grinding halt and I, who had been running full speed for longer than I can remember, broke down. At the time, I had no idea what was happening, but it felt like my life, and my sanity, was ending. I couldn’t sit still, let alone be still, and I had no where to go. Forced to be with myself, undistracted by the hectic pace I to which I had grown accustomed, I crumbled under the weight of my own unresolved issues. 

Like so many times before, in this moment of desperation, I said a prayer. At the time, I didn’t know it was a prayer. I prayed on my knees every day upon awakening and before going to sleep, but this was not like that. This was my soul crying out for help. From the deepest part of my being, I admitted that what I was doing wasn’t working, that who I had become was not who I was intended to be, and that I couldn’t go on anymore like this. 

I’d like to say that I changed immediately and all was well from that moment on, but the truth is that it has been a long, difficult road from there to here. Along the way, I began working with a therapist, I left my job of twelve years and my career of almost twenty, I refocused my attention on my family and my health, and, most importantly, I was led back to my spiritual path in a deeper, more meaningful way than I previously thought possible. God is now at the center at my life where he belongs and it is easy for me to see where and how things went so wrong when, in spite of my stated beliefs and habitual prayers, my life did not reflect this simple truth. 

That brings us back to stillness. As I sat this morning to read, pray, and meditate, it occurred to me that what was once the most difficult thing in the world for me to do is now the thing that feels the most natural, the most necessary, and the most fulfilling. That, in spite of my resistance, obstinance, and even defiance, I can, and do, sit down every morning to simply be with God is nothing less than a miracle. 

In stillness, I find the peace, rest, and connection that no amount of running, chasing, or hustling was ever going to bring me. In stillness, I learn that life goes on around and without me, and that I do not have to involve myself with or react to every little thing that crosses my mind or my path. In stillness, there is freedom from boredom, worry, and desire. In stillness, I surrender to the love that sustains me. In stillness, I am allowed, or rather commanded, to merely be, to trust and know that God is God.

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Check your connection

We had a fairly big snowstorm hit us earlier this week. That is to say, for our area and the infrastructure we have in place to handle it, we got enough snow to shut things down for a few days, including my daughter’s school. As such, we have spent a lot of time together at home this week. 

While her mother and I worked from home, we let our daughter watch a few movie’s on her mother’s iPad in between playing outside, reading, doing art projects, etc. Since I need some degree of quiet to do my work, I asked her to wear headphones while she watched Shrek for the hundredth time. I’m not knocking Shrek by the way. It’s a great movie and, apparently, since I just found out it came out in 2001, it stands the test of time. 

Not a moment after she got set up with the iPad, headphones on, all snuggled up in her blanket, when I heard her say, “I don’t hear anything. Daddy, I don’t hear anything. It’s not working.” Not wanting to get up from my work, I decided to draw experience from my former career as a commercial coffee-equipment repair technician and I went into troubleshooting mode. 

  1. “Does it have power?” Yes.
  2. “Is it connected to the wifi?” Yes.
  3. “Is the movie playing?” Yes. 
  4. “Is the volume turned up?” Yes. 
  5. “Are the headphones plugged into the iPad?” Yes.
  6. “Is the wire plugged into the headphones?” Oh! No. It’s loose. It’s plugged in now. That worked. Thanks, daddy!

Problem solved, but, being in the middle of studying and writing about Christian theology and spiritual practices, this interaction got me thinking. Prayer, it seems, works a lot like this. 

One aspect of prayer is petitioning to God for answers to questions we have. We humbly ask him for guidance, inspiration, or discernment so that we can better understand and conform to his will. But sometimes we pray and pray, and the answers just don’t seem to come. 

It’s easy to assume that, when we can’t hear Him, God is just being quiet, that he is not answering our prayers, that we are being ignored, or that that we need to pray harder. But we rarely stop to think about our connection. What if we can’t hear him because our connection is broken? We know from Scripture that God does not abandon his people (Psalm 94:14) and that, if we reach out to him with a contrite heart and faithful intentions, his hand will be there (Jeremiah 29:12-13). 

The Bible also tells us that God is faithful (Deuteronomy 7:9), that he hears and answers our prayers (Psalm 34:17), and, above all, that he loves us (1 John 4:16). In fact, it also tells us that God knows what we need before we even ask (Matthew 6:8). The problem, therefore, is not likely to be on God’s end. When we pray and can’t hear the answer, we may need to check our connection. 

Here are a few questions worth asking yourself if you have been praying, but feel like God is not answering. 

  • Are your prayers sincere? 
  • Is there an answer in Scripture? 
  • Have you consulted with other Christians, perhaps with a spiritual director? 
  • Do you genuinely want God’s answer or are you simply waiting for the answer you want? 
  • Are you just avoiding making a decision and stepping out in faith? 
  • Is there something you have kept to yourself that may be blocking you from hearing God’s voice, something that requires confession? 
  • Have you turned your thoughts to someone else you can be of service to? This often helps distract us from our own selfish concerns, leaving room for God to speak. 
  • Are you simply being impatient? 
  • Do you leave space in your life to hear God’s voice? Do you have a quiet hour in the morning and/or the evening for spiritual reading, prayer, and contemplation? Or are you so busy that you couldn’t hear him even if he was yelling? 

I hope this helps. When in doubt, check your headphones. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh

To read my poetry, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior