ECC Inner Work Practices
The outer work will never be great if the inner work is small.
Meister Eckhart
Below you will find Five Foundational Practices for inner work. But in life, there are actually many opportunities and ways to practice. In fact, everything can be a practice.
Any discussion about practices must begin with explanations from some of our many teachers.
We need practices to help us realize that our minds and emotions
are on cruise control, unconsciously trapped in a repetitive,
even obsessive pattern that limits our ability to see or to truly understand.
Richard Rohr
Every act, every breath, and each step
can be practice and can help us to become more ourselves.
Thich Nhat Hanh
What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree
on the quality of your approach. When we approach with reverence,
great things decide to approach us.
John O’Donohue
Find your practice and practice it.
Find your teaching and follow it.
Find your community and be faithful to it.
Otherwise, you will tend to float around with no accountability system
for what you too easily “believe” in your head.
Your own ego will end up being the decider and chooser moment by moment.
James Finley
Five Foundational Inner Work Practices
In Service of Development of Being
1. Life as THE Field of Practice
2. Presence — Attention
3. Contemplation — Prayer
4. Community - Relationships - Council
5. Self-observation, Non-identification
Identification and negativity offer abundant material for inner work
Reading these two daily meditation emails (among others) are a good starting practice:
Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC)
The Five Foundational Inner Work Practices are explained in greater detail below.
We have found that when you keep your practices, your practices will keep you, and you will know you are on the path to live the truth at the center of the image you were born with.
If you would like to learn more about our inner work and practices we invite you to a conversation.
Dave Kraybill, ECC Convener kraybill.1@gmail.com
Five Foundational Inner Work Practices Explained
Life as THE Field of Practice
The premise of Life as THE Field of Practice is, life is school. Everything in life is curriculum that is in service of the development of being. Whatever shows up becomes your practice.
The practice deepens when you develop an appreciation of the sacredness of all life. A helpful aim or intention is to show up as authentically and fully alive as possible. This intention creates the container for the practices that follow.
Presence — Attention
The intention of the Practice of Presence is to realize that the present moment is the only reality we can truly experience. We can do our inner work only in the present. When we are not present we miss opportunities we require.
To be present, we must cultivate the ability to pay attention with openness and curiosity.
James Finley names a related intention; “to learn to be a healing presence in the midst of an all too often traumatized and traumatizing world. [The ability to remain present] helps us to stay grounded and present in the midst of suffering, and not be so easily thrown or overwhelmed by it in our ongoing sensitivity and response to it.”
Attention creates, brings aspects of things into being.
Attention is not just another ‘cognitive function’:
it is… the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world.
The type, and extent, of attention we pay changes the nature of the world
that we experience. The whole illuminates the parts
as much as the parts can illuminate the whole…
The world we experience — which is the only one we can know —
is affected by the kind of attention we pay to it.
Iain McGilchrist — The Matter With Things
Learning to be present is an art and takes practice — in fact,
that’s what spiritual practices are about.
They help us cultivate awareness so that we can
become more present to our lives and the miracles
that are unfolding around us at every moment.
Understanding the Enneagram, 363
Presence cannot be easily defined.
Presence can only be experienced.
But I know this: True presence to someone or something
allows them or it to change me and influence me —
before I try to change them or it!
Richard Rohr
Contemplation — Meditation — Prayer
A contemplative orientation produces a different way of seeing. Seeing wholes first, then distinctions. It's a way of knowing with a different mind: beyond rational (ego), to non-dualistic, non-judgmental, non-defensive, seeing with an “undefended mind.” It is a way of listening with the heart, while not relying entirely on the head. This is called “seeing with the eye of the heart.”
The contemplative / meditative practice is infused into everything we do. It becomes a way of living, a way of being.
Contemplation is a long loving look at the real.
Walter Burghardt SJ
Contemplation is any way one has
of penetrating illusion and touching reality.
Parker Palmer
It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart.
Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Community — Relationships -- Inclusivity
Inner work is both an individual and communal practice. We need the experience and support of other individuals, and of communities of practice. In this regard we are committed to the principle of radical inclusivity.
This practice makes "relationship" a priority consideration over most others factors. It values a relationship with another as more important than what is being discussed, decided or acted upon. It reminds us to see the world through a relational lens, to see everything as inter-connected. Inter-being is one word for this.
A true sense of community creates a strong sense of individual personhood….
True individuals create true community. And true community creates true individuals.
They are not conflicting. Because we’ve so often experienced bad community
and individualism instead of true personhood, we see them as somehow in conflict.
The life of the Spirit is a life of relatedness and relationship.
The prophet leads us into that life of relationship to be in union with nature,
the moment, the person, the prayer, the community.
As soon as those moments of relationship are cut off,
we cut off the possibility of community, and we cut off the possibility
of being a people of any real depth.
Richard Rohr
All transformation is relational.
Terry Chapman
A conscious relationship is one that calls forth who you really are. . . .
[Instead of looking to a relationship for shelter]
we could welcome its power to wake us up in areas of life
where we are asleep and where we avoid naked, direct contact with life.
This approach puts us on a path.
It commits us to movement and change,
providing forward direction by showing us where we most need to grow.
Embracing relationship as a path also gives us practice:
learning to use each difficulty along the way as an opportunity to go further,
to connect more deeply, not just with a partner,
but with our own aliveness as well.
John Welwood, Journey of the Heart: The Path of Conscious Love,
Council
The practice of Council helps men develop three challenging but important capabilities:
1. Deep listening – Like many people, men are notoriously weak listeners, typically listening critically with an intent to provide a viewpoint or advice. In Council, men practice being fully present, using the art of deep listening to hear without judgment, fixing or giving advice.
2. Shift our primary locus of attention – Men spend most of our time inside of, and operating from, our head space. In Council, we practice shifting our method of perceiving and acting beyond the thinking, judging brain. We know the heart to be an organ of spiritual perception. We practice placing our attention in the perceiving heart space and the sensing body. With practice comes the ability to harmonize all three "centers," — called “three-centered awareness” — which creates a bigger mind. We need both head and heart to be grounded in our physical and sensory body.
3. Become more authentically open and vulnerable -- Men regularly report they don’t feel heard, they have no one with whom they can share in confidence their internal thoughts and feelings. Within the confidential Council space, we share our personal stories in ways that become increasingly more open, authentic and vulnerable. Without an open heart and the ability to live from the heart space, traits such as empathy, vulnerability, compassion, forgiveness, and love are severely limited, or simply not possible. These are the traits the practice of Council helps develop.
Self-observation; Non-identification
Self-observation is the foundational first step of active inner work. As self-observation is practiced, one will begin to see many different aspects about oneself. We notice how we have taken ourselves for granted and justify everything, while being full of criticisms and judgments of others. Once we begin to uncritically observe the world inside of ourselves and how it manifests outside, we can no longer self-justify, no longer judge, no longer find fault with others.
Non-identification is an effort of attention. We separate the automatic tendency to feel that everything is about me, happens (just) to me, or defines who I am. It is the realization that, this is not me and not about me. It just is.
Self-observation is how we become aware we are in this state. In the process of non-identification, the feeling of attachment is withdrawn from what is being observed. There is an energetic sense of inner separation from what is observed. One’s life force is being withdrawn from a fragment of the self, from a story, a memory, sensation, an acquired way of being.