Bringing Gentle Attention to Discomfort
One of the most beautiful aspects of mindfulness is this willingness to embrace the full range of human experiences, even deep unrelenting resistance to prayer. That’s just what Carrie did:
I softened my gaze, took some deep breaths, and leaned into my resistance with a mindful willingness to see whatever was really there. With this more tender, less judgmental mind-set, I was reading in the Bible one day about prayer. (I could read about prayer, I just couldn’t do it!) And these words stood out:
As soon as we learn the true relationship in which we stand before God (namely, God is our Father, and we are His children), then at once prayer becomes natural and instinctive on our part. Many of the so called difficulties about prayer arise from forgetting this relationship.
Since prayer was definitely not feeling natural and instinctive, I decided to meditate on my relationship with God. Mostly I saw God as, meh, sort of aware of me. But during that difficult period of my life, it felt like He had thrown me into the deep end of the pool so that I could “learn.” The reassurance that “there are great things to be learned here” did NOT comfort me. I felt like I was drowning, gasping at God: “I can’t trust You. I don’t want to trust You! You don’t really get me. Maybe you care in some big, cosmic way, but I’m drowning here and You’re not doing anything to help! Never mind! Just stay away from me!”
It made me cry that this was my belief about God. It was not my real belief. I should say, it was not what I was taught about God. But oh boy, you bet it was my perception. No wonder I was having trouble praying.
Goal setting and bulldozers had not created the environment where this insight could unfold. Mindful curiosity and quiet, pondering meditation did.
This insight created space for me to approach God from a more authentic place. Now I could bring my fear that He was untrustworthy, and my hurt, into conversation with Him. I approached Him as I really was and created space to experience Him for who He really was, not just my guarded, distorted perception of Him.
What I experienced was His patient enduring love. That increases my capacity to tolerate the betrayals and confusing “lessons” of my mortality.
It’s really hard, dare we say impossible, to have life experiences go through us and not have them affect how we see God. Staying authentically, fully present in our relationship with Him, allowing ourselves to experience the full range of reactions to Him, with mindful curiosity and wisdom, allows us to peel back and shed the disillusionment and false perceptions we cling to about God.
It took years for Carrie: Let me say that again, it took years. But now I crave prayer and see it as a personally transformative means of experiencing divine love. And I don’t even need sticker charts! ~Carrie L. Skarda, from the book she co-authored with three others, The Power of Stillness (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2019), 67-68
