The following article written by Thomas Keating was shared with Charles’ meditation group in 2003.
Deep rest is not only the result of freedom from attachments or aversions to thoughts, but also the feeling of being accepted and loved by the divine Mystery that we sense within us and that Christian doctrine calls the Divine Indwelling. In other words, our awareness of the divine presence begins to reawaken.
Rest grows deeper as our trust in God deepens, and the emotional doubts about our self-worth, impressed upon us in early childhood by various rejections or excessive competition with other siblings, begin to relax. Because the rest is so profound, the body rests as never before. The body is the storehouse of the emotional pain of early life as well as the consequences of trying to deal with that pain through coping mechanisms such as repression and compensatory activity. As a result, the hardpan of defense mechanisms around the emotional weeds of a lifetime begins to soften, the body’s extraordinary capacity for health revives, and the psyche begins to release its waste materials. Our awareness during prayer becomes a channel of evacuation similar to the evacuation channels of the physical body. The psyche then starts to disgorge the undigested emotional material of a lifetime in what might be called an attack of “psychic nausea.” Early emotional traumas were never fully digested, integrated, or evacuated because as infants and children we could not articulate our pain. We could not speak yet, or if we could, we did not have the language or the courage needed to express what we felt. Unarticulated emotional experiences that are traumatizing may be pushed into the unconscious where their energy remains. Emotions are energy They can only be dissipated by acknowledging or articulating them.
I call this third moment in the circular movement of Centering Prayer “the unloading of the unconscious.” “Unloading” refers to the experience of psychic nausea that occurs in the form of a bombardment of thoughts and feelings that surge into our awareness without any relationship to the immediate past. That lack of connection with the source of painful thoughts or feelings is what identifies them as coming from our unconscious. Evacuation of this primitive material is the fourth moment of the circle. Having carried this emotional pain for twenty or thirty years (or longer), the evacuation process may be extremely painful, but if it is prepared for by the discipline of a practice like Centering Prayer on a daily basis, then the trust in the Divine Therapist is there to enable us to handle it. We just have to put up with the turbulence; when it is possible to return to the sacred word, we return to it and start the circular process once again.
This unloading process may take place for some people rather soon after starting Centering Prayer, but usually not in a dramatic way The Spirit seems to start from the outside and work inward. But if there is an outside stimulus, the process may be more immediate and intense. Tragedy, accident, or psychotherapy may have loosened up this material so that some of it may be close to the surface of our awareness. In this case, a single period of Centering Prayer might provide enough rest for this material to break through our defenses and to come to full awareness. Jesus makes a strong point in the gospel that the Kingdom of God is active precisely in circumstances that from our point of view are unacceptable. Just as Jesus befriended the outcasts of society, so he befriends us in these moments of psychological unloading and tries to reassure us that what has come to consciousness is for our healing and that seeing it is not going to kill us. Therapists, I presume, try to make their clients well, and sometimes this involves bringing up a painful issue. Every now and then the therapist gets tired of waiting for us and says, “Let’s take up your distressing relationship with so and so.” And we respond, “Let’s wait until next week.” Similarly, when the Divine Therapist suggests, “Let’s take a look at that disturbing feeling and where it comes from,” we get spooked and think there must be a better way of getting to heaven. We bury our noses in some devotional book or practice, in work, entertainment, or some other preoccupying activity in order to avoid facing the real issues. But if we persist in the practice of Centering Prayer, the real issues will reassert themselves, and eventually our growing trust in God enables us to endure the healing process. (Much the same dynamic occurs when two people truly love each other.)
Where are we after having made the full circle? We are never where we started because now we have unloaded that which was stuck somewhere in the body. We might conceive of God as our deepest center and our true self as a circle around it. Our normal consciousness, as we saw, directs our attention to the circumference of our awareness where it is dominated by events and our reactions to them. Like someone at the movies, we get so absorbed in the story that we identify with the characters and may even forget that we are in the theater. Our normal psychological state is being dominated by life’s events and our reactions to them. We do not realize that external events and other people influence our worldview and predispose our choices.
Centering Prayer practice is the reverse. It is like going to a bad movie where, because we do not identify with the actors, we know we are in the theater and can get up and leave any time. But if we are attached to preconceived ideas and prepackaged values, it does not occur to us to get up and leave. We have not yet awakened to the fact that at the level of our spiritual self we are only witnessing what is going on in our lives and are not captive to the plot.
Thus, to return to, whenever a certain amount of emotional pain is evacuated, interior space opens up within us. We are closer to the spiritual level of our being, closer to our true self, and closer to the Source of our being, which lies in our inmost center but is buried under the emotional debris of a lifetime. We are closer to God because through the process of unloading we have evacuated some of the material that was hiding the divine presence. Thus, when in prayer we start the circular motion again, we are closer to our center. As a consequence, there is deeper rest. This inevitably causes more unloading of emotional junk–up it comes in the form of primitive emotions or emotionally charged thoughts that bear no relation to the recent past. When the storm subsides; we return to the sacred word. We are closer to our center as we start the process again. This circular movement of rest, unloading in the form of emotionally charged thoughts and primitive emotions, and returning to the sacred word is constantly bringing us closer to our center. So the circular motion in fact turns out to be a dynamic process resembling a spiral staircase.
The unloading process can manifest itself first in physical symptoms like a little pain somewhere in the body, a twitch, or an itch. An emotional knot that is close to the surface of the body may be unwinding. By temporarily directing one’s attention to that place, the discomfort usually dissipates rather rapidly.
When a certain number of superficial knots have been evacuated through the deep rest of prayer, the Spirit goes to work on more interior stuff. We may then experience a flow of tears. Most people have repressed a lot of grief in their lives for cultural or personal reasons. Now the body feels for the first time the freedom to do what was previously denied it. Similarly, in the beginning of practicing Centering Prayer, if we are exhausted, the body calls for sleep. This is not the purpose of prayer, but the body, if it is allowed to do what it has been forbidden to do, feels much better. When we are sufficiently rested, we will not fall asleep so often unless, of course, we continue making the same exhausting mistakes in our emotional lives.
As the emotions normalize, grief seems to be one of the first to be released, and that can bring a flood o£ tears. For cultural reasons men are a little slower than women at getting to this point. Tears are something
that the early Desert Fathers prayed for because they had the insight to realize, without knowing the psychology of it, that tears open the heart, soften harsh feelings, and wash away bitterness. They are a precious gift. What is surprising for people, if they are not aware of this process, is that the tears
do not come from any recent grief they can identify. To complete my discussion, if we keep up our practice–and I emphasize doing it, not feeling it–the rest does the rest! We keep returning, resting, evacuating more junk, enjoying more interior freedom. If we live long enough, we will come to the
Center.