Calling a Stop with all three centers: Inner Task Series by Jeanine Siler Jones

Inner Task Friday (from our Mystical Hope book circles—final week for this task)

“Centering Prayer, with its emphasis not on clarity of the mind but on surrender of the heart, leads straight down into the heart’s depths, straight toward the point vierge. It becomes a direct encounter with the Mercy”. (Mystical Hope, p.56)

Meditation invites us to dwell within Hope, to connect with Mercy, to sink down into the deeper waters of our being. Thomas Keating described it as ‘taking a small vacation from yourself”. Our inner task invites us to practice weaving our experience of meditation into our daily living, a ‘boots on the ground’ way to catch ourselves in our over reliance on ordinary thinking and wake up (!) in Mercy.

This month: Call a stop with yourself and notice your mechanical ways of moving, feeling and thinking. The last three weeks we have focused on calling a stop when we notice aspects of mechanicality in each center and some of you have been working to notice each center separately. As we wrap up this month’s task, I invite you to engage all three centers in tandem this week. Call a stop, be alert to Self-remembering in all three centers together, and from your innermost center, notice and pause. Allow yourself to sink down into the deeper waters of your being for a moment. “…something of our being presses deep into the heart of God and begins to swim in the infinite ocean of God’s mercy.” (p.39) Sense and taste this connection with Mercy. Then begin again.