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Welcome to OneLife Ministries. This site is designed to lead you prayerfully into a heart experience of Divine Presence, Who is Love. This writer is an interspiritual-contemplative Christian. Interspiritual is open to the wisdom and practices of varied faith Paths, and does not see any one Path as the sole means of relationship with the Divine. I hope persons of varied faiths will find inspiration here, and this site can contribute to the unity of faiths in a world that needs religions to be a vital means of healing. Indeed, "God" can be whatever image helps us trust in the Sacred, by whatever means Grace touches us each. Please share this ministry with others, and please return soon. There is a new offering daily. And to be placed on the daily OneLife email list, to request notifications of new writings or submit prayer requests, write to briankwilcox@yahoo.com .
Blessings,
Brian Kenneth Wilcox MDiv, MFT, PhD
Interspiritual-Contemplative Teacher, Author, Workshop Leader,
Spiritual Counselor, and Chaplain.
Brian encourages support of the 4-Star organization Compassion, which supports children worldwide; see www.compassion.com .
Scripture
If one hides the evil, it adds and grows. If one bares it and repents, the sin dies out. Therefore all Buddhas say that the wise do not hide sin.
*Buddhism. Mahaparinirvana Sutra.
The sin which makes you sad and repentant is liked better by the Lord than the good deed which turns you vain and conceited.
*Islam (Shiite). Nahjul Balagha, Saying 44.
9But if we are honest about our failure to the Divine Presence, the One is faithful and just to release us from our failure and to cleanse us from all not right.
*Christianity. I John 4.9, Author's Rendition
Spiritual Teaching
A Tibetan story tells of a meditation student who, while meditating, believed he saw a spider descending in front of him. Each day the menacing creature returned, growing larger each time. So frightened was the student that he went to the Teacher to report his dilemma. He said he planned to put a knife in his lap during meditation. So, when the spider appeared, he would kill it. The Teacher advised against the plan. He suggested, "Take a piece of chalk, and when the spider appears, mark the letter X on its belly. Then report back.”
The student returned to meditation. When the spider appeared, he followed the advice of the Teacher. He reported back to the Teacher. The Teacher spoke, "Lift up your shirt and look at your stomach." The young man did: there was the letter X.
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In Prayerful Silence we meet ourselves. We find that much of what we fear from others, or think badly of others, is a projection of passions in ourselves. These things may be outside us, but they are often in us.
We should not forget that the opposite is true. Often the good we see outside, good we have denied in ourselves - often due partly to negative religious teaching -, is the good we discover, through Communion with the Divine, to be within our selves.
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Ken Wilber, et al., in Integral Life Practice, affirm that working with our shadow is essential to spiritual growth – not an option. What is the shadow?
The term “shadow” refers to the “dark side” of the psyche – those aspects of ourselves that we've split off, rejected, denied, hidden from ourselves, projected onto others, or otherwise disowned.
The aim of allowing our shadow to come forth in meditation, observing it, and working with it, is to reintegrate the energy lost through the repression.
One of the greatest benefits of shadow work is that is frees up energy that would otherwise be spent shadowboxing within ourselves. Maintaining our shadow is hard work! It takes a lot of energy to be constantly camouflaging undesirable aspects of ourselves from ourselves.
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Ironically, years ago, after beginning intensive meditation practice, I discovered a positive shadow quality I had repressed and was uncomfortable allowing into my consciousness and experience. That quality was joy. I had, due to varied life circumstances, become habituated to sadness, depression, unhappiness, a lack of joy. This made joy, oddly, and desirable quality.
So, see, when we open the body-self to the Divine in Quiet meditation, we can discover precious treasures there. Then, we need to work with acknowledging them, and may need help from another person – possibly a therapist or spiritual director, or both – to dissolve the repression and integrate the quality.
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Confession and penance is, at a more subtle level than these outward rites, this very process of integrating the shadow. By looking honestly at the shadow quality and allowing it to be, which can be at least temporarily painful, we are doing a more important work, generally, than any going to confession and penance as an outward act. This inward process is a sacramental act within the self.
The confession is your agreeing inwardly to what you see and feeling it, from the pain of allowing it to be present to consciousness, to the integration of it – and this is a subtle form of forgiveness and reconciliation. The forgiveness is release from the negativity, or repression; reconciliation is the union of the lost energy back into the body-self.
Working with the Shadow in Meditation
A Spiritual Exercise
The following I have practiced in dealing with my shadow elements. I share this practice as given in Ken Wilber, et al., Integral Practice. A key to doing this exercise is not to get into guilt and self-judging. Many persons who have been in religion have been hurt deeply by low-level teachings on matters like sin and judgment. This exercise is not about feeling bad; this is about applying graciousness to your human fallibility, learning to love yourself, and opening to a Presence that loves you unconditionally and has no interest in making you feel worthless, unworthy, or bad. This exercise is about the power of unconditional Love to free us, and this freedom comes from honesty, not self-criticism or any “god” judging you and me. So, let us proceed:
1.Notice what you are feeling and how this shows up in your body, both physically and energetically.
2.Relax the tendency to judge, suppress, or otherwise react to it, and just allow it to be what it is, embracing it with awareness.
3.If your emotion is about someone or something, relax your relationship to the object. Let the emotional energy be there. Notice that it is arising within you (rather than happening to you, as in “she makes me feel this way.”). Relax into full responsibility for your emotional patterns and energies.
4.Feel the energy of your emotion and the situation or relationship in which it is arising. Breathe and allow the energy of the emotion to flow. Notice how that can take place constructively rather than destructively. Take several deep breaths and notice how the emotion changes as it is channeled and circulated.
[Unless you have been taught about circulating energy, here, I recommend you simply breathe deeply and relax. This is all you need to do here. If you do this, you will notice a sensation of energy unfolding in the body, and this is like a flower unfolding its petals. This is the releasing of the repression - which is simply knotted energy. Repression becomes expression.]
5.Pay attention until you recognize the transitory nature of the emotion and allow its energy to self-liberate, like water boiling into steam, as fire, unobstructed, and positive expression.
Responding
Reflect prayerfully on the Tibetan story. Pray about its meaning for your life? Your relationship with other persons? Your relationship with yourself? Your relationship with God?
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*OneLife Ministries is a ministry of Brian Kenneth Wilcox, SW Florida. Brian lives a vowed life and with his two dogs, Bandit Ty and St. Francis, with friends and under a vow of simplicity. Brian is an ecumenical-interspiritual leader, who chooses not to identify with any group, and renounces all titles of sacredness that some would apply to him, but seeks to be open to how Christ manifests in the diversity of Christian denominations and varied religious-spiritual traditions. He affirms that all spiritual paths lead ultimately back to Jesus Christ. He is Senior Chaplain for the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office, Punta Gorda, FL.
*Brian welcomes responses to his writings or submission of prayer requests at briankwilcox@yahoo.com . Also, Brian is on Facebook: search Brian Kenneth Wilcox.
*Contact the above email to book Brian for preaching, Spiritual Direction, retreats, workshops, animal blessing services, house blessings, or other spiritual requests. You can order his book An Ache for Union from major booksellers.
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