Overcome The "Demon" Of Work With The Desert Fathers/Mothers

Grateful to be here with you,

And let's get into our topic,

And then we will do a guided practice together,

And then I'll kind of guide you out of that at the end.

So,

The story that I wanted to share with you,

That I'll reflect on a little bit further down,

Comes from the Desert Mothers and Fathers.

The Desert Fathers and Mothers,

They started in the,

And lived in the fourth and the fifth centuries of what we call the Common Era now,

Is the way that most people refer to it,

And they lived mostly in Egypt,

Kind of around the Delta Nile area,

And before we dive into this story about kind of being driven by the demon of work,

I want to say a little bit about who these Desert Mothers and Fathers are,

And so that we can understand the context from which this story comes,

And then apply it to our own contemporary drive,

And maybe challenges to always feel like we need to be doing,

And working,

And achieving in order to feel,

Say,

Good or worthwhile,

And how much of a distraction that drive can become to our meditation,

Or contemplative,

Or spiritual practice.

So that's what we're going to focus on today.

So let me dive into a little bit about who these Desert Mothers and Fathers were.

They emerged in the Christian tradition particularly after the Roman Empire,

Under the Emperor Constantine,

Legalized and then promoted Christianity as the sort of state religion of the Roman Empire,

And you have to put this in context,

Which is prior to the legalization of Christian practices and faith in the Roman Empire,

There were these great moments of persecution where the Roman Empire was trying to stop the spread of Christianity and the Gospel.

So when Christianity became legal,

This was a massive culture shift,

And then it became not just legal,

But the predominant religion of the Empire,

And not everyone saw this as a good thing in the early tradition,

Especially the Desert Mothers and Fathers,

And what they desired was a kind of what they talked about as a purity of heart,

Or we might talk about it as a single mindedness,

That comes from a practice that they called asceticism.

Asceticism may or may not be a word that you're familiar with.

It comes from this Greek word,

Eskesis,

And the original use of this word actually came out of athletic training.

So eskesis was understood to be a kind of training or discipline where you would direct your energies in one area in a particular way,

Or maybe you'd even restrict those energies,

In order to move your energy and your growth into a higher purpose and or goal.

So you can think about this in terms of physical training.

There's an asceticism,

Let's just say if you're a runner and you're training for a marathon or a race,

You're going to give up some of your time and some of your energy,

Maybe some sleep,

To get in your runs and your workouts so that you're able to achieve that higher goal.

Well,

The Desert Mothers and Fathers took this idea from athletics and they applied it to spiritual discipline.

And what they thought was,

You know,

When Christians were being persecuted under the Roman Empire,

That there was a sort of natural asceticism.

There were deterrents to you actually wanting to do this and follow this tradition and this person that started the movement that we think of as Christianity that was originally just called the Way.

It was the way of those who were followers of Jesus before it became what we think of as Christianity.

And they saw that in order to have this kind of eskesis or asceticism after Christianity became not just legal but maybe even,

You know,

You could have mixed reasons for wanting to become a Christian because it would advance your standing in the Roman court,

Say for example,

Because it was now the state religion.

So they wanted to return to this kind of purity of purpose and intention and they wanted that asceticism back.

They also took to heart Paul who wrote in 1 Thessalonians 5,

He says to pray without ceasing.

And so they withdrew to the deserts.

They lived often in caves and in kind of loose-knit communities,

But they each had their own kind of cave or cell as they came to call it.

And then they withdrew from society and they tried to cultivate this kind of purity or single-mindedness of heart to seek God.

And I think if many of us today could meet some of these characters whose some of their stories are preserved,

They would probably seem really extreme,

Maybe even a little crazy to many of us today.

They engaged in extreme forms of fasting from food and from sleep and obviously from sexual contact.

They were celibate.

And they would,

One of the first things that they would do when a new person would come to join these desert fathers and mothers as a new disciple,

Is they would memorize the entire psalm book,

Which if you're familiar with the Hebrew book of Psalms is 150 long poems and they would be memorizing them in either Greek or Latin depending on what their native language was.

So that they could,

Even when they were working or doing other things,

That they could be constantly involved in the repetition of prayer and scripture and it would just be right on their tongue and ready.

Now these guys and gals are really fascinating on so many levels.

They really form the foundation of what later becomes monasticism in the Christian tradition.

Though what we think of it now,

If you've ever been to like a Benedictine or Trappist monastery or other,

It looked very different than what we would think of as a monastery now.

And they also predate these mothers and fathers,

Sort of predate the divisions that we're now more used to in the modern world between the east and the west.

And I would say they predate that division in,

We have a strong division between western Christianity and eastern Christianity,

But in some ways too I find this fascinating similarity between these desert dwellers and some of the yogis that you hear described that still to this day and for centuries have lived in these caves in the Himalayas,

Where they withdraw from society and practice this asceticism.

The intersections to me are fascinating and I kind of wondered,

Knowing this place in northern Egypt would have been situated right on the silk roads of trade in the ancient world,

That there may have even been some fascinating encounters between say some of these Christian monks living in caves and people of other traditions who would have been coming through.

We don't really have any documentation that that ever happened,

But I like to dream that that would have been a fascinating thing to explore.

They were also very democratic.

You'll notice that in a world,

Ancient world dominated by men,

Of course we're still in a world dominated by men,

But even more so then,

That they were very democratic.

They were both mothers and fathers.

They were not particularly interested in priesthood or kind of having positions of authority,

But people eventually came to seek them out in the desert for both spiritual and worldly counsel.

People who were politicians would come to ask them questions and seek guidance.

People who were sick both maybe mentally,

Emotionally,

Or spiritually,

Or physically would come for healings.

So I mentioned earlier that their teachings come down to us in a collection of kind of sayings,

The sayings of the sayings of the desert mothers and fathers,

Pithy sayings.

Some of these,

And this is where we get a little bit into their worldview and the place of demons that we'll talk about and what they mean by that,

After this intense asceticism,

Some of these desert mothers and fathers,

According to these writings and stories,

Seem to have developed certain powers and be what we might think of as clairvoyant type powers.

Or in the yoga tradition,

They're called the siddhis,

Right?

They're these interesting capacities that Patanjali talks about as capable of being developed in the third chapter of the yoga sutras.

So these are sort of gifts of the fruit of their intense spiritual work and discipline.

Some of these included healing,

As we've talked about.

People would come to them and experience miraculous healings.

Some of it was just seeking this power for wisdom.

Some could,

Say,

See events from a distance of space or time and predict or know things about people that they would not have ever told them or otherwise know.

And they could apparently,

In some cases,

See other dimensions of reality.

And one of those dimensions that we'll talk about are what they talk about as the demons.

So to talk about these demons and then how we might apply their understanding in our lives,

They really,

You have to understand that they saw their lives in the desert as a spiritual battleground.

Some of you might be familiar with the writings of C.

S.

Lewis.

His screw tape letters may become the closest to this kind of a worldview that we could think of in our more modern world.

So for them,

They went out into the desert to do a battle,

A spiritual battle.

And they could,

Through developing of these powers,

See parts of reality or other beings that maybe we don't typically see in our daily lives.

Some of them were demonic,

Some were angelic,

And some were even perhaps more neutral.

So for these desert mothers and fathers,

They definitely,

In their accounts and their understanding of the world,

Had experiences of being able to see demons.

And that was the word that they used for them.

Now what's interesting is that as they interacted with these demons,

In some cases,

They came to realize that these demons don't have power to actually sort of control or access or possess the human will.

They can't get in at that deepest level.

Only God can sort of dwell in there.

Now the caveat here that they would say is unless we totally consent,

If a person is sort of tempted and invites the demon in,

Then it can start to take over.

And I'm not going to get into demonic possession and that kind of thing.

That's a total kind of different realm from what we're talking about.

This is more mundane in their world.

So these demons are real for them,

And they cannot get into our deepest levels of our will and take over.

But what they can do is that they can influence us by offering suggestions in the form of different kinds of thoughts.

Now some of you,

If you're familiar with centering prayer,

This monastic and desert tradition of working with thoughts has been integrated into the practice of centering prayer.

Thoughts can be what we think of as mental,

Like cognition,

Thinking about something.

But they can also include things like desires,

Feelings,

Emotions,

Memories,

Reflecting on something that's happened in the past,

Or even anxieties about the future.

So some of these monks that had developed these powers of seeing the demons and other non-corporeal beings witnessed how the demons would watch as the demons would tempt some of their brothers or sisters from across the way.

And they would observe this and then take lessons from it.

And what they saw is that these demons would dangle certain thoughts in front of their other monks in order to tempt them.

So a couple of examples.

There's a story of a monk kind of looking around and he sees a demon touch another monk on the stomach.

And in that moment,

The monk decides to break his fast and grab more food,

Right?

And therefore breaking the virtue of temperance or moderation.

Another one,

These monks would try to stay awake and they would fast from sleep.

And so he would see a demon go kind of touch the eyelids of a person.

And then that monk would sort of give up and go to sleep.

So you get the idea of how this kind of worked.

Now seeing this,

And then of course they would talk with each other and people who came to visit about this,

And eventually some of their experiences and stories got written down into these sayings of the Desert Mothers and Fathers.

But seeing this led these monks to a very close observance of their thoughts.

And the goal of that close observance wasn't to become sort of anxious and scrupulous,

Though we probably all know people who turn it into that,

Or you can turn it into that.

But rather the purpose was to begin to discern good thoughts from evil thoughts,

Or temptations we might say.

In fact,

Evagrius,

One of these who wrote his own thoughts down,

Came up with what he called,

He started categorizing his thoughts into eight different kinds of thoughts.

And some of you who might be familiar with later Christian tradition,

This train of thought from Evagrius in the desert into later medieval Christianity led to what we think of as the seven deadly sins.

They took his eight and I think they smushed two of them together,

So they got the seven deadly sins.

So you can see how important this is to much of our thinking,

Even though I think the way these monks thought is very different from how we think about it things today.

So let's pause here for a second and ask,

What do we make of their experiences and stories today?

Now some might take what their experience was on a literal level.

Others are,

Who have commented on some of these stories or the sayings,

Have focused on the psychological experience.

This idea that whether or not demons are real beings out there,

That we can all have this experience of maybe some of the thoughts coming from our non-conscious mind or from dreams or from the subconscious,

However language you want to use for that.

So what I want to suggest is for our purposes today,

That we can note that some thoughts do seem to come from within,

Right?

If we start to discern and notice our thoughts,

They originate from within ourselves or some desire that we have or maybe something that we really think about a lot that comes up frequently.

And then other thoughts really do seem to come from just outside of ourselves.

I think we all have experiences of like,

Wow,

Where did that come from?

Particularly if it's like a really dark thought about ourselves or about someone else.

So we can,

Whether or not you would take them literally about their actually being demons out there,

I think these are different ways that we can think about and learn from them.

So that was all by way of kind of set up to get you thinking about the worldview in which they're thinking.

And now we can turn to this story about the demon of work and then apply it to our own relationship with work and trying to balance that with play and with prayer and meditation.

So in this particular story,

One of these clairvoyant monks looks over and sees another monk working outside of his cell.

He was probably doing something like making baskets,

Something that they would do in the ancient world.

Actually,

These monks,

They needed to have at least enough to be able to keep themselves alive,

Even though many of them ate very little.

So they would do a simple trade like basket weaving and then sell or trade in the local marketplace to get enough food to at least stay alive.

So he was probably doing something like that,

Like making a basket.

And for these monks,

Work itself is inherently good.

It's something that God gives each of us to do in order to support ourselves,

To develop our own innate skills and capacities,

To provide for our families,

Perhaps,

If we have families or for our community,

And to give something of value back to the common good of the community.

Now in this story,

Every time the monk would come to a point in his day to take a pause,

And he might be pausing to pray,

They would pause throughout the day to pray the psalms or other kinds of prayer or meditation.

So he was pausing to care for the needs of the soul or to rest,

To take care of the legitimate needs of his body.

Every time the monk would do this,

This other monk would see this demon kind of jump up and get on his back and start to whip him.

Literally,

This is how they described it,

That he was whipping this monk,

Who of course didn't see the demon directly or feel it.

And what he was whipping him with was the thoughts that he must continue to work in order to accomplish several things,

And it could be different things.

But whatever it was,

It was driving that monk to keep working.

It could be in order to please God,

To say,

I need to do more in order to be acceptable to God,

Or maybe an anxiety about whether or not he'd be able to provide for himself or for his brother monks if he didn't keep making more baskets.

And in this way,

This monk was driven to just complete exhaustion,

And that ultimately led to him being unable to focus enough to do his prayer or his meditation or to even be able to get good rest when it was time.

Like,

He would rest but he wouldn't actually get rejuvenated.

We can all relate to this,

Which is why I want to retell the story.

And it led to this constant stream of internal self-criticism and judgment of never feeling like I have enough,

Like I'm doing enough,

Or like ultimately I am being enough.

In this story,

This is how the demon works.

This is how it wins and keeps them from the purity of heart and intention that we talked about as the goal of these monks in the desert.

The demon of work had kept this monk from his true purpose,

Which was to seek God in all things,

To offer up the good work that he was called to do for the benefit of all,

And to grow in spiritual maturity.

And again,

These were Christian monks,

So they saw that maturity is growing towards a deeper relationship that ultimately led to union with Christ,

With God.

The desert fathers and mothers actually had a name for the kind of spiritual malaise and depression that sets in when we're constantly driven by that demon of work.

And they called it acedia.

I think that's how you pronounce it.

It might be a-kay-dee-ah,

But I think it's pronounced acedia.

And they called this a vice,

And it manifests itself as a constant restlessness,

Often accompanied by a deep feeling of exhaustion and perhaps also despair,

If we add an emotional level to that physical exhaustion.

And that acedia prevents us from being fully present to anything,

Frankly,

But it prevents us from being present to the actual goodness of our work when it is the right time for us to be doing our work.

And then,

When we stop working,

That acedia keeps us from being present,

Fully present.

It keeps us feeling like we're not doing enough,

Which prevents us from enjoying those times that we set aside for our prayer or meditation or for being with the people that we love,

When it's legitimately a time for us not to be working.

It steals our joy.

And the reality is that when we're present,

We can experience joy.

We can experience that enjoyment in good work,

In time to set aside for our prayer and our meditation,

In time to be with the people that we love.

It is a total absence of presence.

And I would even,

If I was writing this,

I might write that with a capital P.

It's always driving us towards some unknown future that's driven by anxiety,

Where we think we'll finally figure it out and enjoy life.

But,

As you know,

If you've had any experience in life,

That that moment of,

As long as we keep that out there somewhere in the future,

It never arrives.

This demon might be something like what the philosopher Joseph Pieper,

20th century philosopher,

Calls total work.

He saw even then the drive in the modern world for work to take over everything that we do and that we can never turn it off.

And so this demon might be like what Pieper was talking about as total work,

That really has successfully lodged itself in our cultural imagination.

And then,

Of course,

We appropriate that and experience the suffering in our daily life.

Very curious how these mythological stories have resonances across different cultures that have never interacted.

So we've talked about these Christian monks,

We've talked about indigenous wisdom,

We've talked about yogis,

How they all sort of see this in different ways.

We were talking about how that moment never arrives.

So,

However you personally sort of understand these kinds of demons and thoughts,

Whether you take that in a literal sense or maybe a more spiritual or psychological sense,

I think we've established that we're all relating to that constant drive to do more and the kind of nauseating feelings of unworthiness,

Of despair that these monks called the vice of acedia.

If we can all relate,

Then the question becomes what to do about it.

And the desert mothers and fathers offer,

I think,

A response that might feel surprising to us at first,

Which is in some ways do nothing.

Their first response is nothing.

Now,

Ultimately,

They're not going to stay with do nothing because eventually we kind of would give in.

The demons were relentless in these accounts.

They would not give up.

But they did mean do nothing in a particular way,

And that's what I want to unpack.

Our first response to all thoughts,

Whether they come from within ourselves or from outside,

Is to first do nothing or to not respond.

Or,

As I saw it on a bumper sticker one time that I wish I could find and put on my own car,

It said,

Don't believe everything that you think.

Don't believe everything you think.

Sometimes things that pop into our head are not the first thing we should react to.

So this not reacting opens up the space for what we think of as discernment.

And the root of that word in Latin for discernment is the same as our word for discretion.

It's the ability,

Especially when our discretion is combined with patience and prayer,

It's that ability to determine which thoughts we want to follow and follow all the way through into good action and which thoughts should simply be ignored or let go of or healed perhaps or even or surrendered to grace in some way.

So Saint Benedict,

Who wrote a rule that has become the rule for some of the monastic Western traditions,

Writing in the 6th century and an inheritor of this desert tradition,

He writes in his rule,

When evil thoughts come into one's heart to dash them against Christ immediately and to manifest them to one's spiritual father or teacher,

We might say.

So his advice is that when the evil thoughts come into our heart and we recognize them as such,

He's got this image of dashing them against Christ.

I think he's playing on that image from the Psalms that is this difficult,

Violent image of dashing the Babylonians' babies against a rock when they're taken into exile.

But he takes this and spiritualizes it so it's not quite so violent,

That we take our evil thoughts and we dash them against Christ.

And then it's interesting too,

He says that we should manifest them to our spiritual teachers or to a trusted person,

Somebody that it's safe to do this with.

And here again,

I think there's just profound wisdom.

First we do nothing,

Then we discern,

And if we discern that it is an evil thought that we don't want to follow,

We can offer that up in some kind of a sacrifice through our practice to,

Of course,

In the Christian tradition,

They're talking about offering them up to Christ or up to God or up to a higher power,

We might say,

Depending on what tradition you yourself happen to come from.

But that's only the first part,

That's the interior part.

He is equally insistent that we have to do something exterior with them so that the power doesn't,

And that relentless drive of the demons,

Doesn't get in where it starts to take over our will to the point where we actually say yes.

And once we say yes to the demonic thought,

Then it has more power over us.

And again,

In this tradition,

He says the other way to deal with this is to manifest them to your spiritual teacher.

And again,

I think there's really powerful wisdom here.

We can interpret spiritual teacher broadly here.

It might be what we think of as a spiritual director or teacher or pastor in a traditional sense,

But we can include a partner or a spouse,

A close friend.

We can include a counselor or a therapist of some kind,

A doctor.

And I have found and talked with many people that when we sort of vocalize and externalize these internal demons or thoughts,

That they lose some of their power.

And I think that's because in the desert tradition,

These demons,

They work in the dark.

They work in those places that we can't see.

And that's why some of these advanced spiritual teachers,

These monks were able to see the demons because there was like a divine light that was revealing them so that they lost some of their power.

It was a gift.

So when we bring these demonic thoughts or these,

If you don't like that language,

The dark thought,

The challenging thought,

The evil thought that undercuts our sense of well-being,

Our sense of worthiness that makes us just feel like spiritual crap,

Which I don't think God wants of us.

When we manifest them,

When we share them,

It's like bringing them out into the light.

And then suddenly the demons lose their power.

And we might still go back and struggle with some of those same thoughts and challenges again.

It doesn't mean they go away forever.

And we might struggle with some of them for our entire lives.

St.

Paul prays,

He talks about his thorn in the flesh,

And we don't know what that temptation was for him.

People have speculated over the years,

And I don't think we can know,

And I don't think we need to know.

But he says,

I prayed to God three times to remove that thorn in the flesh.

And eventually the response that he got was not the removal of the thorn,

But that my grace is enough for you.

My grace is enough.

So we do something,

We detach from all the thoughts,

We discern them,

We offer them up to something greater than ourselves,

To God,

To grace,

And then we bring them into the light with another trusted human person.

And that starts to dissolve the power and the drive that those demonic thoughts have over us.

Now,

Notice here for a second that this is exactly what every mature spiritual or contemplative or meditative tradition teaches us.

The first thing we learn,

And I don't care what tradition you're learning in,

And I've studied with just about everyone that I can get my hands on just because I'm curious,

Whether it's texts or with living teachers,

That one of the first things you learn when you embark on the spiritual journey and a contemplative path is to simply notice your thoughts without reacting to them,

Without judging them immediately.

And then the maturing process involves carefully learning to discern how you want to direct those thoughts or emotions or desires into good and beneficial actions on behalf of yourself and others and the community or the world as a whole,

You might say.

One of my favorite sort of simple definitions of mindfulness from Jon Kabat-Zinn,

He calls it non-judgmental moment-to-moment awareness.

And I would say that is a,

Even if the language of mindfulness that comes from Buddhism isn't present,

Say to these desert mothers and fathers,

That the idea of that non-judgmental,

That suspension of the thoughts,

Of judging the thoughts is crucial to all of them.

It's a foundation to all of these traditions.

Some of you here might be familiar with the centering prayer tradition,

Which is kind of my primary practice.

And in the third guideline,

There are four guidelines in centering prayer.

The third guideline says,

When engaged with your thoughts,

Return ever so gently to your sacred word.

When engaged with your thoughts,

Return ever so gently to your sacred word.

And notice how it's phrased.

It's very intentional.

When engaged with your thoughts.

First of all,

It doesn't say if.

So if you do any kind of meditation practice,

You know at some point you're going to have thoughts and engage with them.

So it just says when,

When that happens.

Notice that it also says,

It doesn't say whenever you have a thought,

Return.

It says when you engage with your thoughts.

And there's an important discernment that we learn in our practice.

And that is the difference between having thoughts and Thomas Keating,

I'm going to borrow his metaphor here,

Having thoughts that are like floating by on a river like boats.

And we might just sit there and watch them be like,

That's cool.

That's a nice thought.

But it's when the sticky thought comes up,

The,

I don't know,

The anxious thought about something that's going to happen in the future,

The depressing or angering thought about something that happened in the past.

And then we start to have an emotional response.

And then we want to get in the boat and we want to drive that boat and we want to see what's going on with that boat.

Now we're engaged with your thoughts.

So the teaching and centering prayer and meditation is notice when you're engaged with your thoughts and then return ever so gently to your sacred word.

The sacred word is an anchor.

If you're familiar with the tradition,

It's not the meaning of the word that matters.

It's the intention of the word to say yes to the present moment and to the healing presence and action of God in the moment.

And notice to the ever so gently.

It doesn't snow.

The example I used above from St.

Benedict talked about sort of dashing your thoughts against Christ,

Which is not a gentle way of saying it.

Centering prayer emphasizes this ever so gently.

And I think there's another wisdom here.

And it's this idea that when we engage with those challenging demonic thoughts,

That they can.

.

.

That's when they start to wrestle with us and kind of take over.

So it's that gentle noticing,

Not judging,

And then returning to that intention to be present to God's presence and action that starts to loosen the power of these demonic thoughts.

It's like returning to an anchor in the present moment starts to derail that process.

So that's what I would offer in terms of,

I guess,

If there's a teaching here that I'm offering.

The full introductory workshop to Centering Prayer Meditation,

What we suggest is usually a short word of one or two syllables.

It does not matter what the word is.

In fact,

I always say it could be a made-up word,

But a short word of one or two syllables.

So some that we typically will offer in a session.

And I think there's even a slide that offers some examples.

Words like peace,

You could use the word that you might associate with a sacred teacher.

So some people will use something like Jesus.

Could be Buddha.

Could be presence.

Could be healing.

It could also be a word in another language.

My sacred word comes from a Hebrew word that I've been using for over 20 years.

Something about having it in another language is helpful for me.

It keeps me from engaging with it in a thought-provoking way,

Right?

Because when I use it in my prayer,

I don't want to be cultivating active reflection.

What I want to be doing is noticing thoughts and then returning to a kind of what we might call a more a field of open awareness.

Or as Cynthia Burgeault talks about it,

She talks about it as returning to a non-dual awareness where we are in union with God.

So it really becomes more symbolic than like a mantra where you would be focusing on the meaning of the word.

So let's practice together.

What I would ask is for you to think about in our practice,

Is there a recurring thought for you that you notice that comes up that drives you to always be working?

And work can look like different things.

It may be a job,

But it might just be other things that you're driven by.

So again,

Is there a recurring thought whether you want to hold that to yourself and bring it into our meditation?

And how does that thought as you think about it prevent you from not being able to enjoy the present moment?

Whether you are working,

Praying,

Meditating,

Being with others you love.

And then take that if you,

Whether you've shared it or you just have it in your own mind.

Let's bring that together into our practice together.

So hold that thought.

Simonette says,

It's not really a thought,

But more a feeling of inadequacy.

So thank you for that honest vulnerability.

I can relate to that sense of feeling inadequate and probably many others can here.

And the other piece that I appreciate about your example that you just shared is that you noticed that you noted that it's a feeling.

And I said earlier that you notice that you're not feeling it.

And I said earlier,

But I think sometimes we forget that the demonic thoughts that these desert fathers and mothers talked about are not only cognitive thoughts in the way that we think of it in our Western mind today,

But it's an umbrella term that can include feelings and it can include memories and it can include anxieties.

So inadequacy can totally be a thought,

A demonic thought in this sense.

And second guessing past decisions.

Yep.

Nothing will move forward unless I do it.

Yeah.

So I love,

You know,

Again,

If you read the story of these monks,

How one monk will be observing his brother or sister monk,

His or her brother or sister monk,

And seeing how the demons are out there kind of dangling little temptations out in front of them.

And so that I totally,

Your comment there about nothing will move forward unless I do it.

I totally resonate with that push and drive that can come up over and over again.

So great examples that you're all putting out here.

I'm going to read,

Actually,

No,

I'll read it at the end.

Let's see.

We're all experiencing something universal to the human condition and that it's okay.

And then we have ways of dealing with it.

So to guide us into actually doing a meditation,

I've got a quote here that I'm going to read comes from a recent writing of Pope Francis.

And to guide us into that though,

I guess I would invite you first to,

If you're in a space where you can practice,

To just put yourself into a physical posture that's going to support you moving into a meditation.

However you perceive of that,

If you're sitting or lying down or standing,

You might choose to close your eyes if that's comfortable and feel safe for you,

Or keep them open if you prefer,

But allow your attention and your awareness to kind of move internally.

And I always invite you to just explore,

Become curious about your posture and to gently,

Always gently,

Move into a physical posture or position that is going to support your ability to notice thoughts without getting caught up in judgment or attachment.

And usually what that means,

But I invite you to explore what it means for you.

Something in some way where you're aligning your spine and your shoulders and your neck and your head in a way that is comfortable and easy to maintain.

So you're not needing to slouch forward,

Especially if you're really exhausted from being driven by the demon of work,

Or you're not overextending yourself and over trying to hold tension to stay straight,

But just allowing yourself to come into a gentle,

Present physical posture.

And just doing that can be a radical act because you might notice,

Especially if you're driven by this demon of work,

That you maybe flip back and forth between the hunched over exhaustion and the rigid tensing about what's coming next or whatever.

And you might notice that you're just in a natural position.

And ironically,

Perhaps it's also a very natural position from which to be effective.

And that's a really,

Really important part of our body.

And I think that's a really important part of our body.

And I think that's a really important part of our body.

And ironically,

Perhaps it's also a very natural position from which to be effective in our work,

In our relationships,

In caring for our own health.

So we're looking for that middle contemplative way of alert,

But at ease,

Present.

You'll notice too,

That there's a kind of matching for you,

And this is going to be different for you.

So again,

The invitation is to really explore it for yourself.

But you might notice as you tune into that subtle physical space,

That there's a natural rhythm of breath that places you into that same kind of space.

Just stay curious and allow your body to guide you into that natural space on its own.

You don't need to do it.

You don't need to force it.

You don't need to worry about it.

Just allow it.

And I would suggest,

And I think the Desert Mothers and Fathers would agree,

That in that middle space is where we meet God.

It's where we meet our sense of purpose,

Our genuine desires to do good work and to share our gifts and skills with others.

It's where we meet healing.

It's where we meet what we might call our true self,

Our spiritual self,

Our soul.

I want to read you a quote from Pope Francis.

This comes from a recent book that he published called Let Us Dream.

He says,

The Voice of God,

On the other hand,

Speaks to the present,

Helping us to move ahead in the here and now.

What comes from God asks,

What is good for me and what is good for us?

The voice that is coming from God,

The voice of spirit,

Is always gentle and encouraging and giving us hope.

The demonic voice is always strident,

Accusational,

Playing off of our fears and our anxieties.

So as we continue this practice together,

I will invite through a few moments of silence you to again maybe call to mind that thought,

That demonic thought of work that drives you.

And if you feel like you're in a safe enough place to bring that out into the light,

To offer it to the healing presence and action of God.

And if you care to do so through the symbolic use of a sacred word,

You're invited to just silently,

Gently repeat that sacred word to yourself.

And then whenever you notice being engaged with that thought again,

Whether that's now today during our practice,

Or as you go throughout your days in the future,

Or you do a practice on your own in the future,

As you learn to notice that thought,

You just gently return to that sacred word that is the intention to say yes to consent to God's healing presence and action within the present moment.

And then as you begin to notice that thought,

You just gently return to that sacred word.

I'm going to be quiet for a couple of minutes and allow you to practice that on your own.

Okay.

So so so I'll begin to invite you always gently,

Always in your own time,

In your own will,

Because you're willing to stay and practice for as long as you like.

If you want to join us in being guided out of that practice,

Just invite you to maybe take the next couple of breaths to be a little bit deeper and richer.

When you're ready to start to bring some movement to maybe stretching your head side to side or wiggling your fingers and toes,

And opening your eyes if they were closed,

Particularly if you are driven by constant exhaustion.

Sometimes when you settle in like that,

Sleep comes pretty quickly or sleepiness even.

So if you need to take a big bare stretch and stand up,

Arms overhead,

That's fine too to get the blood flowing again a little bit.