Season 2 Trailer

				S2 TRAILER TRANSCRIPT
Season Two of Opening Minds, Opening Hearts was made possible by a grant from the Trust for the Meditation Process, a charitable foundation, encouraging meditation, mindfulness and contemplative prayer.

Welcome to season two of the Contemplative Outreach Podcast, Opening Minds, Opening Hearts. I am one of your co-hosts, Colleen Thomas.

And I'm the other co-host, Mark Dannenfelser. It's good to be with you again, Colleen, for this season two.

It's also a great joy to be meeting and getting reacquainted with so many different people in and around this Contemplative Outreach Community. Contemplative Outreach has been around a long time, so we're drawing from this deep well of contemplatives.

One of the things that was so exciting and really inspiring from last season was everyone we talked to was so grateful to us for having these conversations. I remember that being a theme. There's just so much gratitude that we're talking about Centering Prayer.

Contemplative Outreach as an organization has this overall vision. And much of this was the work of Father Thomas to sharpen our vision about what we're doing here and where it's all going.

There are these principles and guidelines that we use a lot to help remind us and we're going to unpack one of those this season. And It's about this idea that the contemplative community is this growing, expanding, evolving community. It is about going deeper into the practice, and how that both connects us and also opens us up and expands us.

How can we introduce what this contemplative prayer is all about? How do we help them to practice it in a simple way? Keating really gave us a real simple and practical way to cultivate this type of prayer.

At the heart of centering prayer is this relationship with the divine that transforms us. And then we have the gift of His teaching that really takes us through this process of how we are being changed from the inside out by the prayer, it's really revolutionary.

The practice is a way of opening ourselves up to the gift of contemplation. Contemplation for me is a gift that only God can give. And what I mean by that contemplation is it is that immediate being present to the moment in love. That for me is what contemplation is. And there's no practice that can guarantee that. And in many ways I think that almost any practice you do is a way of saying, yes, this is the gift I would like to have and it's up to you God and your freedom to give it to me or not.

There was a deep spiritual hunger that the Christian church was not responding to, because the tradition of contemplative prayer had remained closed within monastery walls.

I knew nothing about Thomas Keating, nothing about the contemplative tradition and nothing about meditation. And I sat in his teaching that evening and it was just a grace filled moment. I really took to the teaching into the practice, like a bee to honey, it was salve for my soul.

And Father Thomas opened the door of the monastery to the common world, essentially, and in a way packaged, ancient prayer tradition that looks and acts very much like Eastern forms of meditation, and called it centering prayer.

He spoke universal truths using Catholic language or using Christian language. And he was using the language of the tradition to speak universal, the big truth, so small truth and big truth. And so Thomas Keating was doing this in his own way.

This idea of God as ultimate reality, a God of this God of everything, you know, of all things and, and of our whole life, and that we're in relationship with that God, God is not some distant thing, but is as close as our own being our own breath.

And so wisdom practices are really in service of helping us tune into that heart and be able to see and know from there. And Centering Prayer is such a particular practice in surrender. Centering Prayer or any good wisdom practice helps us see that it's just really not about ourself, right? But it isn't not about ourself. We ourselves in a relational field. We are in relationship to everything. And I think the collectives help us to notice that and to recognize that and to come to a coherence with that and then find our place in that whole.

The changing needs is particularly important for Contemplative Outreach right now, approaching 40 years of its existence in the world, perhaps Contemplative Outreach, who is maybe in the final stages of grief at the loss of Father Thomas Keating. And so we're really exploring in this movement, who do we want to invite into our community right now of Contemplative Outreach who may not be as present as we would like to be? And this was important to Father Thomas too. And when you read the principles and the guidelines, it's very clear that Father Thomas was deeply, deeply invested in sharing the prayer with everyone, including people of different faith traditions, including people who care for the marginalized and the oppressed.

You don’t need to be a Christian to practice centering prayer. Mindfulness was born out of Buddhism and you don’t have to be Buddhist to practice mindfulness. Each of us are being mindful now as we sit and talk and listen to one another. Yoga born out of the Hindu tradition, but you don’t have to be Hindu to practice, and centering prayer born out of the Christuan contemplative practice, but you don’t have to be Christian to practice because it is a non-conceptual practice.

We are going to talk with guests about how does the prayer impact their relationships in interspiritual and interfaith communities? How are the needs of younger contemplatives, contemplatives, millennials and younger? And how are they responding to the prayer? What are our unique needs in this digital era? People of color who are not as present in contemplative spaces as we would like them to be.

The vitality of Centering Prayer in the future is going to come really from the depth of practice and the fruits of the spirit and the transformation of the human person so that it doesn't matter if this person is married with kids, celibate, a nun, gay, straight, transgender, that all of these, all the boundaries, that the kind of cultural spots, not as essential as the actual living practice and the living spirit that is overflowing through the person. That's the vitality I think of the future.

How do we reach people in marginalized communities? I'm really excited to continue these conversations, make new friends with our guests.

Yeah, I can't wait to begin, and I’m looking forward to having all these conversations.

FADE OUT