Deepening Techniques, Part 1—Introduction
July 30, 2024 § 1 Comment
Download the series
I have created a page aggregates the posts in which I describe various techniques for centering down or deepening, shared from my own practice and experience. Here’s the link:
Deepening Techniques for Friends
When the series is finished, I will publish a pdf file for downloading on that page with all of the posts in one document.
Deepening techniques and spiritual formation
I think that spiritual formation is one of the more important roles that a Quaker meeting should play in the spiritual lives of those members and attenders who want it. By spiritual formation I mean, as Sandra Cronk put it in her School of the Spirit pamphlet Spiritual Nurture Ministry Among Friends, helping people
“grow in relationship with God and become more receptive to the work of the Inward Guide.” In practical terms, I see spiritual formation as efforts to help members to clarify their faith, to identify and mature their spiritual practice, and to integrate both their faith and practice into the Quaker way.
Our meetings don’t do a good enough job of spiritual formation. We don’t usually mentor newcomers. We don’t usually provide programs that expose our members to the various spiritual disciplines that might serve their formation, let alone teach these disciplines. We leave this process of self-discovery and maturation to osmosis, to chance, and to personal initiative.
And when we do focus on spiritual formation, we very rarely pass on techniques for deepening consciousness. The Christian tradition is in general very weak in its understanding of consciousness and the role it could play in spiritual development; Quakerism is only marginally better.
So I want to try to fill this deepening technique gap a little bit. I have a lot of experience with meditation in several disciplines, and I have a settled devotional practice that really works well for me. I want to share it here in a series of posts.
Much of what I will be passing on comes from yoga, which offers a several-thousand-year-old science of consciousness. Most of the rest comes from my time as a teacher of Silva Mind Control, which has a sinister sounding name but is a quite effective self-help and psychic healing toolbox with a quasi-scientific approach centered around brain wave science. Mind Control teaches some deepening techniques and their theory.
These techniques are just what I’ve come to for myself and they won’t work for everyone. We each have our own spiritual temperaments and the whole point of a Quaker spiritual formation program is not to inculcate but to invite, not to indoctrinate but to share, to explore together options that we might find fosters and deepens our spiritual and religious experience.
I feel this is especially important for the quality of our worship. I believe that deepening one’s consciousness is one of the most important things we can do as Friends to foster Spirit-led vocal ministry and the gathered meeting. The more people who have entered a deeper consciousness, the more likely the meeting is to be gathered, and techniques make a difference.
A personal outline of practice
So let me start in this post with just an outline of the routine I use when I meditate, which I’ll unpack in some detail in subsequent posts. My practice progresses through three phases or clusters of technique:
- relaxation with focus,
- starting with the eyes looking up,
- then breathing deeply,
- then focusing and consciously relaxing discreet sections of your body, working from the face down to the toes in concert with your breath; then
- prayer, broadly defined,
- affirmations in concert with with breathing and relaxation,
- inviting in the Presence, however, you define that, and
- projecting out your “mind forms” of healing and blessing; and finally
- meditation proper, that is, sustained inward attention on something that serves your deepening.
In the next post, I will start with the eyes.
Through the Flaming Sword 
Fabulous – thank you!
Linda xx