Prayerful and Mindful Poems to Contemplate

  

Contemplating spiritual passages while knitting encourages those passages to take residence in the heart, according to Peggy Rosenthal's Purl One, Purl a Prayer: A Spirituality of Knitting.  During this peaceful activity, the knitter can settle down and open up to spiritual thoughts and feelings. While engaging in this practice, I collected a group of reflections on prayer and experiences of mindfulness that encourage spiritual activity; they are included in this post. They are from the Christian and Buddhist traditions.  

Prayer Scarf/Neck Warmer Pattern and Aspiration Instructions

Convert knitting into a resource for prayer.  Use the simple instructions below on how to open up your knitting with gratitude, fill it with focused prayerful intention, and conclude it in thankfulness and spiritual determination.  Also included is a pattern for a prayer scarf/neck warmer.

Spirit of a Dove Prayer Shawl and Mindfulness Instructions

           

Mindful knitting, someone asked me, isn't that redundant?  Isn't it impossible to lack mindfulness while knitting?  All I had to say was: frogging.  Knitters, you know what I mean.  Not only did I want to appreciate my time spent knitting but I wanted it to do more.  I mean, sometimes a sweater takes me two years.  An afgan, forget counting the months.  I wanted the hours to deepen my experience of knitting, my experience of myself, my experience of others.  I wanted knitting to become a spiritual practice; so I researched, and designed projects, and now I'm ready to share.  

Going to the Places that Scare You

I started a new job yesterday and have a buddhist nun, Pema Chodron, and my friends to thank for it.  I left teaching philosophy behind to return to my roots, working directly with people who truly need support.  Its been a while since my stint working as a case manager for people without homes in Chicago.  I was younger then and had more verve, or, at least, nerve.  This time around, I was offered a job working as a case manager for people with a dual diagnosis of a developmental disability and a mental illness.  Despite my past work experience, I hesitated.  I wasn't sure if I was up to the task.  My friends, however, had confidence for me.  With that belief in my ability and Pema Chodron's advice in Going to the Places that Scare You audio book, I took the plunge.  

Buddhist Bravery, Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, & Humor

For the past 5 years, my version of bravery has been putting on a stiff upper lip as I marched gently into a room of surly defiant teenagers hell bent on hating philosophy.  It was a war I often won by the middle of the semester, the peace flag murmurings of self-directed philosophical student reflection wafting in the collegiate air.  It takes a great deal of a certain kind of bravery to perform such a feat, knowing full well how critical and resentful students can be of their professors in these irreverent times. 

But, it seems, there is another sort of bravery, one that may require even more courage than this.  According to Shambhala, The Sacred Path by Chogyam Trungpa the "key to warriorship and the first principle of Shambhala vision is not being afraid of who you are."  Bravery is "not being afraid of yourself;" being "heroic and kind at the same time."  Now, the heroic and kind thing I had down with my students, but once you ask me to take this attitude toward myself, my knees get weak.  Well, they did until a couple days ago.  Now, everything has shifted and I genuinely get what it means to say that each one of us is at root basic goodness.  This doesn't mean that we all have the capacity to act the right way if we want to (although it doesn't preclude this either).  It means that at root life itself is good and we are blossoms of goodness in our appreciation of it.