A different person reads each section. We pause after each reading--sitting quietly for a minute or two after the 'whole' is finished.
Then each person is invited to quote the phrase that somehow 'spoke' to them.
After everyone has had a chance to speak, we read the whole thing again. Same process--only at the end each person is invited to say, in a minute or two, something about what it was that spoke to them.
There's no cross-talk or conversation. We 'just' listen--and do our best to 'hold' what each person says with interest.
Then we meditate for 20 minutes. At the end, anybody who wants to can speak again.
Finding practices that slow us down to savor and steep in wisdom is one of the most helpful and healthy things we can do for ourselves.
Here's the lectio we used this morning:
---
Being alive is itself an expression of mystery. The clues to
our real nature are always around us. When the mind opens, the body changes, or
the heart is touched, all the elements of spiritual life are revealed. Great questioning,
unexpected suffering, original innocence--any of these can require us to open
beyond our daily routine, to 'step out of the bureaucracy of ego,' as the
Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trunpa counseled. Every day brings its own calls back
to the spirit, some small, some large, some surprising, some ordinary.
--Jack
Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
I want to tell you right now that the basis of this whole
teaching is that you’re never going to get everything together. As long as
you’re wanting to be thinner, smarter, more enlightened, less uptight, or
whatever it might be, somehow you’re always going to be approaching your
problem with the very same logic that created it to begin with: you’re not good
enough. As long as you’re wanting yourself to get better, you won’t. As long as
you have an orientation toward the future, you can never just relax into what
you already have or already are. To me it seems that at the root of healing, at
the root of feeling like a fully adult person, is the premise that you’re not
going to try to make anything go away, that what you have is worth
appreciating. But this is hard to swallow if what you have is pain.
--Pema Chodron, Start
Where You Are
At the heart of the deepest spiritual understanding and
experience is paradox. There is so much we want to exclude, yet at the heart of
reality, in the heart of God, everything belongs.
--Richard Rohr (Everything
Belongs, [paraphrased])
