Welcome Back! Season 4 Trailer

				Opening Minds, Opening Hearts Podcast Season 4 Trailer

 

Mark: Doing the podcast these past four years really keeps Centering Prayer in the ongoing, larger, emerging spiritual conversation. When we began, this was important to me, this idea of engaging in dialogue, because Centering Prayer still has something to offer across disciplines. And Thomas Keating was talking to people across faith traditions, and welcoming new perspectives and new thoughts, and allowing his perspective to be continually opened by what he was learning. Centering Prayer doesn't just belong to the ancient Christian tradition; it shows up in most every other contemplative and meditative tradition across the globe, and it still has something to say today. In that sense, it's a living tradition.

Colleen: Often, we're asked how is it that we pick our topics for the season? And it's a good question. We have a small team. Really, it's just Mark and I, and Rachael, our producer, keeps us on track along with a couple of our colleagues, who we're delighted that you will get a chance to hear from this season. But the answer to that question of how we determine the theme for a season is really that we listen to what's stirring both in the larger Contemplative Outreach community and in the general atmosphere of our cultural and spiritual landscape.

From the beginning, now four years ago, wow, we've hoped that this podcast would put Centering Prayer in conversation with this emerging conversation, as you were saying, Mark, to share the prayer as our mission says, but we don't want to just preach to the choir, so to speak. Our hope is that people who are seeking deeper meaning and a practice that supports awakening hearts would find, through this alternative medium, a podcast, something that makes their hearts burn.

Mark: Yes, exactly. 

Colleen: At the COL Global Conference in Atlanta in 2024, I met in person three of our guests who will be joining us this season, and I didn't know it at the time, but I left Atlanta with the vague sense of this idea for a theme. What these guests all had in common was that during the global conference, they were talking about healing and transformation through a very practical lens, because they were centered in other systems or disciplines that demanded a solution to suffering. They needed a way out, or were committed to the work of serving others by offering themselves as companions to those suffering. They were people whose lives had been transformed by Centering Prayer, the practice, offering a relief from the circumstances of addiction, incarceration, mental health issues, clinical depression, anxiety, or any manner of dis-ease of the body and mind.

And as I witnessed these conversations, I was never personally engaged in these particular dialogues about varying forms and manifestations of trauma, but these separate and linked conversations I witnessed, I found myself wondering, what does or would Father Thomas have to offer to this dialogue today?

And then I also realized you, Mark, are a therapist. 

Mark: Yeah, I am. And so, the image of the Divine Therapist is very appealing to me. 

Colleen: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: Because healing through addiction and incarceration, mental health, that's where this work becomes really very real. It's not abstract anymore, it's about actual lives.

What Thomas Keating called Living the Life, and what he referred to as the human condition. This is true for all of us, and there's something powerful about that, 'cause in those places, people aren't looking for ideas or concepts. They're looking for something that actually helps, something that can meet them in the middle of their suffering, all of us.

And what struck me is that this is exactly where Thomas Keating was pointing us to. He talked about the spiritual journey as healing the emotional wounds of the false self and even naming addiction as a kind of universal pattern for that. 

Colleen: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: So for me, this season is really about that question: what does divine therapy look like when it meets our real human pain?

Because if Keating's right, then the healing of the wounds of a lifetime is happening right there on the cushion, so to speak, and right there in the middle of our everyday lives. 

Colleen: Great question. What does divine therapy look like when it meets real human pain? 

Mark: Yeah.

Colleen: As I experienced it at the conference, when people talk about their suffering and their experience of healing and transformation through Centering Prayer, they talk about it through a very personal lens, and Thomas Keating did something really profound and very skillful.

He laid a framework for the spiritual journey and the human condition using these various models, existential, philosophical, psychological, even anthropological. And he introduced a science, if you will, of the heart's journey to oneness and transforming union. And this is all important, and I encourage everyone to study his teaching on the human condition, but at the end of the day, this process of awakening and transformation can really only be known by way of the heart, by way of experiencing longing and opening.

I like how the Hebrews talk about knowing. There's a Hebrew word yada (יָדַע), and it's understood as knowing as experience through the mind of the heart. So in this season, there will be some profound insight offered to us by our guests, but maybe not in the form of previous seasons. We'll hear a lot more about people's personal experiences. And we hope that in listening, you might find yourself in those stories and find where you are on your journey. 

Mark: Yeah, that's exactly it. There's a quote that keeps coming up, for me, framing the why of Season 4.

Colleen: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: It's from Invitation to Love, one of Thomas Keating's books, and he says, the purpose of divine therapy is to bring the unconscious motivations to awareness and heal the wounds of a lifetime. 

Colleen: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: Every time I come back to that line, it lands differently. It's just keeps opening up for me because Keating isn't talking about surface-level healing. He's not talking about just managing symptoms or gaining insight or trying to fix yourself. He's suggesting it's something deeper and more holistic is available to us when living the contemplative life.

Because when he says the wounds of a lifetime, he seems to be acknowledging that so much of what shapes our lives is below our level of consciousness. It's part of the challenge, the patterns we carry, the reactions we don't fully understand, the ways we try to find security and approval and control and everything else.

A lot of that is often below our everyday consciousness. So these false programs for happiness are not random in a sense. They're survival mechanisms that just kick in to protect us. And they're rooted in our real experiences, our real attempts to survive, to adapt, make sense of the world. Nothing is wrong with that.

They're not bad to have these programs for happiness. It's just our investment in it or our willingness to let it go. So, I don't know, I think understanding the purpose, Centering Prayer, and how it impacts us is really important. Which is why we're taking an entire season to reflect on healing and Centering Prayer.

I think the silence of Centering Prayer, we're not trying to do anything in that, and it's really counterintuitive. We don't have to fix ourselves. We're just creating space so that what has been hidden from our awareness or consciousness can begin to surface in a gentle kind of way.

And over time, what we begin to notice is that awareness itself is not really that harsh. It's not condemning. It's not judgmental. It's actually the place where something like grace begins to emerge. And that to me, reframes everything because it means that even the parts of ourselves we struggle with are not obstacles to the spiritual path. In fact, the very places where healing is available to us. 

Colleen: I'm grateful for the community of Contemplative Outreach and the work that they do.

All of the volunteer chapter coordinators, volunteers. The service teams that support the chapters by doing the work of providing materials and training for facilitators, the folks who serve as facilitators on intensive silent retreats all over the United States, Europe, the Philippines, and South Africa, the community of Extension Contemplativa, our Spanish and Portuguese language community in the Caribbean, Mexico, and South America. Contemplative Outreach is a living, evolving organism made up of many members of one body. 

Mark: Yeah, 

Colleen: Led by the spirit, and as Father Thomas envisioned, we're continuing to share The Prayer, but we also want to continue to live into our guidelines for service. The first being that Contemplative Outreach is an evolving community with an expanding vision and deepening practice of Centering Prayer that serves the changing needs of Christian contemplatives. And in essence, it's saying Contemplative Outreach is a community. It's a living organism that's interactive, interdependent, dynamic. As a living organism, this makes me think, how do we continue in the work Father Thomas stewarded with regard to psychology, trauma, and healing? And this is the gift and the real pleasure that we have in this season to explore. 

Mark: Yeah. I mean, I just have to sit with that, what you mentioned about the living organism and how vast and wide and beautiful that is. Takes my breath away. And it's saying something about how universal all of this is.

I'm really looking forward to extending the conversations that you and I, Colleen, often have about Centering Prayer to include the many and varied voices within the Contemplative Outreach community, as well as with people from other traditions and different disciplines, especially that of psychology.

I'm grateful for this world community. I'm grateful that I happen to have the chance to be in this podcast co-host seat with you, which allows me to be part of perhaps some of the most important questions humanity can ask. 

Colleen: Well, it's a joy to be at that seat with you, Mark. 

Mark: Yes. So onward and upward.