11th Step

Christian Meditation as an 11th Step Practice

Welcome

 

“Meditation begins with a call that awakens us out of the coma of self-
preoccupation.  We are called, we are chosen.  Meditation is our response to   
that call from the deepest center of our awakened consciousness….by          
letting go in meditation we learn how to love”    
Moment of Christ - John Main, O.S.B.

 

 

 

We are a group of men and women from 12 step programs, following the teachings of John Main and the World Community for Christian Meditation. We are not a replacement for, nor are we affiliated with, any 12-step program of recovery.  We are here to share this ancient path of contemplative prayer as a way to practice the 11th Step:

“Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”
Step 11 of the 12 Step Programs

“Perhaps one of the greatest rewards of meditation and prayer is the sense of belonging that comes to us. We no longer live in a completely hostile world. We are no longer lost and frightened and purposeless. The moment we catch even a glimpse of God’s will, the moment we begin to see truth, justice, and love as the real and eternal things in life, we are no longer deeply disturbed by all theseeming evidence to the contrary that surrounds us in purely human affairs. We know that when we turn to Him, all will be well with us, here and hereafter.”
12 Steps 12 Traditions.

This web space is intended to provide an opportunity for people in 12 Step recovery to connect with a support system for meditation. We honor the traditions of 12 Step recovery. Anonymity, the spiritual foundation of our recovery, reminds us to put principles before personalities. We therefore maintain anonymity at the level of press, radio, films, and digital media, such as the Internet, and we encourage the principle of attraction rather than promotion in our public relations efforts. If you would like to present an introductory workshop for Christian Meditation As An 11th Step Practice, we can help.

Contacts: cm11thstep@gmail.com

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The Present Moment - Fr. Laurence Freeman OSB

In meditation we stop thinking of the past and future and learn to live fully in the present moment. Unfortunately, God often seems absent to us because we are not in the here and now.

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The Practice - Fr. Laurence Freeman OSB

Meditation is experiential. That is it is a way of experience, rather than a theory or of thought at all.

Meditation is an incarnate way of prayer.  The body is not a barrier between us and God. It is the sacrament of the gift of being which God has given us by creating us.

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Time is sacred

There is a sentence in Father John’s teaching on the mantra which gives a valuable insight into the journey we are making. It is a very simple sentence. “If you chop and change your mantra you are postponing your progress in meditation.”

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How Do We Pray?

St. Paul said that we do not know how to pray, but the Spirit prays within us.  (Romans 8:26) This is the key to understanding the real meaning of Christian prayer.

It suggests that we learn to pray not by trying to pray, but by giving up, or letting go, of our trying. And instead, learning to be.

This opens access to the deeper prayer of the heart where we can find the ‘love of God flooding our inmost heart through the Holy Spirit he has given us” (Romans 6:5) This is pure experience, beyond thought, dogma and imagination.

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What is Prayer?

A very old definition of prayer described it as “the raising of the heart and mind to God.”  What is the “mind”?  What is the “heart?”

The mind is what thinks – it question, plans, worries, fantasizes. The heart is what knows – it loves. The mind is the organ of knowledge, the heart the organ of love.

Mental consciousness must eventually give way and open up to the fuller way of knowing which is heart consciousness.   Love is complete knowledge. Read more »

Meeting the Other

Truth lies behind every fear. To find it we must unmask the fear.

At some point along the journey we begin to understand that meditation is teaching us the most important of all lessons: how to love and be loved. We learn this lesson not intellectually but with the incarnate reality of our life…learning it establishes a bond between us and the world we live in.
Whatever benefits may accrue to us through our meditation, they are not there merely for us to possess.  They become the common benefit of all, because there is less and less of an ego to possess the peace, joy and liberty that meditation brings.

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Total Transformation

Our meditation is essentially a response to the direct summons of the gospel to leave self behind.  It is heard by each one of us personally and uniquely because the Spirit of Jesus which makes the call felt, dwells within the heart of each person uniquely.

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LETTING GO

We all begin the journey of meditation enchained, addicted to different things – to sweets, to self-indulgence, to fantasy, to the past.  And we all begin the path of meditation at different points. 

The path of meditation leads us out of all slavery, all enchainment.  It is a way of liberty.
It is only necessary to begin exactly where we are and to follow the road that stretches out before us.

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The Light of the Word

“The psalmist praised God by singing, ‘In your light we see light.’ This clarity is felt as joy. Seeing the light is the
essence of joy and so it is the only secure basis of contentment in our life.”

 

When we talk or think about meditation, it is very easy to get carried away by theory.  And meditation is an extremely exciting and wonderful mystery to talk and think about. But the talking and the thinking have a great inbuilt danger, which is that we do not go beyond the words and the ideas and instead remain looking at a reflection in a mirror.

We are so fascinated by the reflection and so unaware that the mirror distorts whatever it reflects, that we fail to turn around and see the real thing. Seeing the real thing means doing the real thing. It means actually meditating, actually putting in the time each morning and evening, to see the real thing. Read more »

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