Steps for a Meditation
Source: Avery Brook
To be used with any object such as a rock, a glass of water, the flame of a candle, a shell or something from nature, whatever is chosen.
Choose an object for your meditation.
Begin by asking God to give you whatever you need right now or ask for discernment with a particular question.
Spend about five minutes on each step.
- What Have We Here?
Make simple observations. Don't worry about what you don't know. Don't rush ahead to meanings. Just relax and explore the object using all your senses. Enjoy it.
- What Might This Mean?
Now you have five minutes of silence in which to choose three or four of your observations that either struck you strongly, puzzled you, surprised you or came back to your mind repeatedly. Then use your imagination to think of how these observations relate to human life. Not your life in particular − anyone's.
What is God Saying to Me?
Now spend five minutes to choose one observation, and its possible meanings, that came home to you strongly or repeatedly. Or that puzzled or surprised you. And then ask God to show what this might mean for your own life.
- The Token.
Now spend three more minutes thinking of some very small thing you can do in the next 24 hours to betoken the message you have received. If journaling is part of your spiritual practice, write in your journal what you experienced.
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Take Lord, receive,
All my liberty, my memory, my understanding,
and my entire will, all that I have and call my own.
You have given it all to me. To you, Lord I return it.
Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only love of you and your grace.
That is enough for me.
(Ignatius of Loyola)
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Copyright © 2007 St. Augustine by-the-Sea
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