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Valerie Brown
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Living from the Center: Mindfulness Meditation and Centering for Friends (Pendle Hill Pamphlets Book 407) Kindle Edition
by Valerie Brown (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.7 out of 5 stars 7 ratings
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Quakers are advised to begin worship by “centering down.” This is the first step in a Friend’s intention to wait in “holy expectancy,” to be drawn by the Light into communion with God. Centering prayer is also a practice used by Christian mystics to prepare for contemplation; and “centering” describes the meditation of a Buddhist in pursuit of that deep awareness called “mindfulness.” Valerie Brown is an explorer and teacher of centering practices, a Buddhist, and an active Friend. Drawing upon her own experiences and wide studies, she describes for Friends how these various traditions can offer us a better understanding and preparedness for our precious, elusive, mysterious, and simple practice of centering into worship. Discussion questions included.
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Print length
40 pages
Language
English
Publisher : Pendle Hill Publications (30 November 2014)
Language : English
File size : 170 KB
Print length : 40 pagesBest Sellers Rank: 1,269,528 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)101 in Quaker Christianity (Kindle Store)
149 in Quaker Christianity (Books)
4,688 in New Age MeditationCustomer Reviews:
4.7 out of 5 stars 7 ratings
About the author
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Valerie Brown
Valerie Brown is an author, ordained Buddhist-Quaker Dharma teacher in the lineage of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and the Plum Village tradition, facilitator, and executive coach specializing in leadership development and mindfulness with a focus on diversity, social equity, and inclusion. A former lawyer and lobbyist, Valerie transformed her high-pressure, twenty-year corporate career into serving leaders and nonprofits to create trustworthy, authentic, compassionate, and connected workspaces.
Her forthcoming book is Hope Leans Forward: Braving Your Way toward Simplicity, Awakening, and Peace (Broadleaf, 2022).
An accredited leadership coach, she is the Founder and Chief Mindfulness Officer of Lead Smart Coaching, LLC, supporting leaders to apply and integrate leadership and mindfulness for greater resilience, clarity, and creativity, and is a co-director of Georgetown’s Institute for Transformational Leadership.
Valerie leads an annual pilgrimage to El Camino de Santiago, Spain to celebrate the power of sacred places and is a certified Kundalini yoga teacher, engaging leaders to embody somatic wisdom and creativity.
www.valeriebrown.us
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Brian
4.0 out of 5 stars Commendable Work Linking Likeness and Honoring DifferenceReviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 21 August 2021
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The author is a teacher in the tradition of Plum Village, founded by Thich Nhat Hanh. In addition to being a Buddhist, she is a Quaker, or Friend, a member of the Society of Friends.
Brown seeks to show how Mindfulness and "expectant waiting" in Quaker Meeting, wherein Friends remain in silence, are alike and dissimilar. She discovered frustration by first trying to do Mindfulness Meditation in Quaker Meeting. This did not work. The basic difference is the intent.
In Quaker silence, persons, she notes, are in receptivity to God - this is referred to in diverse ways in the Quaker faith - often simply "the Light." In Mindfulness, the intent is to be receptive to one's own self-nature (Buddha Nature), wherein one moves through feeling and thought into intimacy with the aliveness within oneself, that one is. With this going within arises insight. In Quaker silence, insight is received through the Other and by divine grace. Hence, in Mindfulness, one does not posit a relationship to a Being other than one's own interdependent self with all - not self as ego or as individual person (ego and person are insubstantial concepts) -, rather, one discovers being in intimacy with that one truly is below thoughts and emotions. Hence, Buddhism is often referred to as nontheistic - "nontheistic," not "atheistic" ... the Buddha did not deny the existence of God, he treated it as a distraction from the work with self to be done to find freedom from suffering (dukkha), wisdom (prajna), and compassion (karuna) toward all beings.
Likewise, Brown introduces Centering Prayer. Centering Prayer is a theistic form of meditation. It is a prelude to formless contemplation, or Contemplative Prayer - also called Pure Prayer due to being free of all conceptuality. Hence, it is in theory more like expectant waiting than is Mindfulness. It is reminiscent of what Quakers call "centering down," wherein one progressively centers the self in wakefulness to the Divine presence as God and the movement of the Divine among the gathered community of worshippers.
Certainly, while Mindfulness is a nontheistic meditation and Centering Prayer, with its method of what Quakers call "centering down," is theistic, finally, it seems to me, one can lead to, even encompass, the other. The two are not as different as it appears in theory, even though they begin with a different premise.
Both Mindfulness and Centering Prayer logically lead to nondual awareness, and in this, the idea of God, the Light, Buddha, Buddha Nature - all conceptions personal and abstract -, are no more. Mindfulness leads to the experience of an intimacy with oneself, or Buddha Nature; but, here again, the meditation ushers into a non-conceptual felt-knowing, an experience, that can be called God - Thich Nhat Hanh has referred to "God" at times while being non-theistic. And to say, "I have discovered God," means, in nondual consciousness, "I have discovered my true self - the one Self-in-communion with all selves." This is so, for in God or in True Self there is not a separate other to posit a subject-and-object relationship.
Yet, for Friends who maintain a theistic duality, or Buddhists who retain a nontheistic duality, Mindfulness and centering in the silence have different ends due to the conceptual projection of opposites. Hence, it seems to me the author is demonstrating that the intent of Mindfulness and expectant waiting among Quakers differ for the premise "God" is in one, shaping the intent and ends, and not the other, likewise shaping the intent and ends.
I found the work somewhat repetitive and oft overlapping, due, I sense, to the author working to clarify the relationship of these methods different in underlying worldview and actual practice. Yet, this kind of work is needful, as we seek to create understanding among and of different wisdom traditions, seeing how they complement while not denying different aims and ends. We do no service by saying things like, "All religions are the same" or "All religions have the same goal." Brown pens a commendable work by doing just this honoring of the likeness and difference of two traditions' way of being in the silence. She honors they are not the same, even if they can lead to the same end - the phenomenal self finding its home within Being, the undifferentiated, formless Source that differentiates into the particular form each being is.
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Peace Maven
5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 15 March 2016
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