Inner Work

For the week of June 25, 2007

Our Inner Home

Just as we need a physical place to call home, a place of safety, comfort and nourishment, of familiarity and relaxation, of warmth and kindness, we also need an inner home. Through our spiritual practice we can carve a home out of the unruly and at times embattled wilderness of our inner world. By our inner work we build, furnish, improve, maintain, and occupy that inner home, which calls for as much effort and care as we put into establishing and maintaining our physical home. The general tenor of our thoughts, the patterns of our emotional responses and the character of our awareness condition and define our experience, this one and only inner space of our life that we carry with us, like a turtle in its shell. Even more than our physical home, the quality of our inner home determines the quality of our life.

Directed attention and mindful awareness of bodily sensations, thoughts, and emotions build our inner home. Prayer furnishes it with love, warmth, kindness, and joy. Meditation improves, cleans, and maintains our inner home, while always acting in accord with conscience adds a higher floor. And presence enables us to inhabit our inner home, to actually live within ourselves, within our life.

To live in true comfort, we need a home where we feel accepted and befriended. To feel comfortable within our inner home, we need to accept ourselves as we are. We work to improve, but toward our goals rather than to escape what we do not accept about ourselves.

Our physical home requires energy from external sources, for which we arrange and pay. Likewise, we need sources of inner energy. One important source comes through the air, through energy breathing. An even stronger source descends through the higher reaches of prayer and meditation.

Once our inner home reaches adequate readiness, we can invite guests. Our openness to and connection with other people gives them a welcome and honored place within our inner world.

Ultimately, we allow the walls to dissolve and our inner home to expand as it merges with the greater world of the sacred. At that point the distinction between inner and outer disappears and our life becomes a prayer lived in and as the sacred spirit. Tastes of this can flow to us even now on days when our practice surges higher.

For this week, notice the state of your inner home. How is it to live inside your life? Is it furnished and maintained well? Do you inhabit it? See what needs attention and work on the necessary repairs and improvements.

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