Meditation on the Battlefield of Spiritual Growth

Spiritual growth can at times feel like a battle yet it is only our ego that complicates the process. We can keep battling the mental dilemmas or we can choose to follow in the steps of some of the greatest teachers of all time and begin to meditate and quiet the mind. Begin to just be alone with God.

Following is a quote from one of my favorite Christian mystics, St. Teresa of Avila, 1515-1582, not much has changed as she encourages her pupils to go within:

St. Teresa of Avila, “ . . . . "I do not require of you," says Teresa to her pupils in meditation,
 "to form great and curious considerations in your understanding: I require of you no more than to look."

 "So we will go straight to St. Teresa, and inquire of her what was the method by which she taught her daughters to gather themselves together, to capture and hold the attitude most favourable to communion with the spiritual world. She tells us--and here she accords with the great tradition of the Christian contemplatives, a tradition which was evolved under the pressure of long experience--that the process is a gradual one. The method to be employed is a slow, patient training of material which the licence of years has made intractable; not the sudden easy turning of the mind in a new direction, that it may minister to a new fancy for "the mystical view of things." Recollection begins, she says, in the deliberate and regular practice of meditation; a perfectly natural form of mental exercise, though at first a hard one.

“ . . . . "I do not require of you," says Teresa to her pupils in meditation, "to form great and curious considerations in your understanding: I require of you no more than to look."

Practical Mysticism, by Evelyn Underhill, 1915

The new year is a good time to begin a new meditation practice. Ten, twenty, thirty minutes a day, just be silent and go within. Do not force, do not push, do not imagine, do not seek; just be.

Beauty for the Body; Beauty for the Mind; Beauty for the Soul

Get your journey on! Your soul-journey.

                    

Cheryl Yale-Bruedigam, CYI-250
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About Cheryl Yale-Bruedigam

Cheryl Yale-Bruedigam, the angels’ author, has been writing spiritually for thirty years. With undergraduate studies in English and women's studies, she devoted over a decade of research and writing to women’s studies and women's spirituality. For the past five years, she has been diligently working in Angelology, as well as publishing a series of books on angelic guidance as well as "The New Age of Christ." 

Bruedigam is a certified yoga and meditation instructor. She lives in New Mexico with her husband.

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