Chapter 1: What practices help maintain peace between meditation sessions?
Welcome back. Today, we're going to look at one of the great struggles for all meditators, especially as they begin.
Chapter 2: What are arrow prayers and how can they be used in daily life?
That's how do we keep stability, peace and equanimity between the meditation sessions?
Chapter 3: How can we adapt meditation practices to our daily activities?
It's a difficulty that meditators have faced in all traditions from the very beginning.
Chapter 4: What is the glance of the heart and how does it enhance meditation?
We sit into formal practice, we're being guided by a teacher of some kind, and everything seems to be working well. And then the bell rings, we go back into ordinary life, and we find the peace disappearing almost immediately. In the Christian monastic tradition, one of the ways in which keeping the peace between the sessions was taught was two particular practices.
the practice of what was known as the arrow or aspirative prayer, and the practice of the glance of the heart.
Chapter 5: How can short moments of prayer stabilize our attention?
I'd explain both, and I'm sure you'll find at least one of them useful. The arrow prayer or aspirative prayer, coming from to aspirate, to breathe, was the idea of holding oneself to a practice in between formal sessions of meditation.
Chapter 6: What methods can help integrate peace into a busy life?
such that at least once an hour, more if one needed it, one paused for a very quick, short session of prayer. These became known as arrow prayers because they were seen as arrows fired up to heaven that connected the meditator with the ultimate transcendent experience of divine presence.
I'm sure you've seen those movies in the past where people scaling the walls of medieval castles would fire an arrow over the wall attached to a rope and so be able to climb the wall and get to a place of safety. This is exactly what these practices do. Now, what were those arrow prayers?
Well, they were very short lines from scripture or from traditional prayer or simply the divine name uttered in a prayerful way. that were supposed to be combined with a mindful moment of awareness. The words themselves aren't magic. Instead, it's a practice of re-tuning the attention, rather like switching on a radio and just checking if it's tuned into the channel once more.
So what could those arrow prayers be for us? we might like to name the particular qualities of awareness that we want to hold on to, like peace or calm, equanimity, stability, or simply love. All of these words and the virtues associated with them make perfect arrow prayers. We take a deep breath in, and internally, without being heard by anybody else, we utter these words as we breathe out.
Sometimes it can help if possible to stand still or to place one's hand on the solar plexus and feel the movement of breath in that moment. But again, these are instantaneous and momentary. There's no huge disruption to the activity that you're involved in. And obviously, we keep them appropriate to the activity we're involved in. If you're driving, you try not to close your eyes, for example.
Instead, we make sure that the breath is inhaled, the word is uttered, we feel like we have tuned back into the practice, and we move on. Some of the more traditional arrow prayers were things like Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in you, or simply praying the name Jesus or the name Mary. These were prayers that were known by everybody, not just the monastic practitioners.
And they were often taught to lay people in the midst of very busy lives as a way of touching in with presence, with divine awareness, with stability. The second practice I mentioned was the glance of the heart. This is a practice taught particularly within the Carmelite tradition, an order of desert monasticism within the Christian monastic tradition.
The glance of the heart is simply turning one's attention inside just for a moment and allowing the heart, the center point of ourselves, that inner chamber that we spoke of so many times before, to be illuminated by our attention for a moment, just a moment.
If you imagine, it's like a child who's wandering around a shop, but who runs back every so often just to check that mom or dad are still where they left them. In exactly the same way, we choose to draw our attention back just for a moment to the awareness of the divine presence within us. It's always there. It's the very foundation of our being, the matrix in which we live and move and breathe.
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