Contemplative Currents Podcast

Seye Kuyinu
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Gentle reminders, mindful contemplations for those seeking to explore the depth and essence of our being, the glorious Mystery that we are. seyekuyinu.substack.com

  1. 3D AGO

    Love in the midst of intense suffering

    I could not find a more appropriate title to this one. Earlier this week, I was lost in thought after watching someone narrate their harrowing experience during a visit to Mauritania. There seemed to be so much poverty, so much suffering. I could almost smell death just watching the video. I mean, things felt ominous at the same time conclusive. Like, there was no possible way a place like that could ever blossom. But of course, this was me getting lost in my own thoughts and assumptions. Admittedly, this was also a video, one perspective, and from this person’s viewpoint. It got me thinking about my own experiences when I have visited slums and homeless shelters and environments where death felt real and lurking in the background. Oh, sometimes the ICU is another place to feel all of that. In these moments, I realize how freaking easy it is to speak about God when the sky is soft and the music is blasting fast and hearty music, and the barbecue grill is lit and afrobeat dances with the rising smoke. It’s so easy to see God when a long-yearned-for promotion hits or when we see the view of a well-mowed meadow and small dandelions dance to the soft blowing wind. Oh, the sun needs to be golden in these moments and then, suddenly, we see God. Oh! It is so easy to see God when love feels close and it wraps our imaginations in warmth. In those moments, God feels like an explanation of beauty. We then point there and there and there and say that’s God. But when suffering slaps us in the face and there’s no poetry, no comfort, no meaning in sight, then what happens? When struggles, real human struggles, hit us and we are confronted with our own humanity, confronted with the gore that life sometimes comes embodied as, then what next? Where then is the same God that showed up obviously in the blessings? Well, I think this is usually where a lot of philosophical debates crash and the religious gymnastics that wrap up the Divine as a feel-good mechanism starts to crumble— the neat mold of goodness that we have ascribed as God. Oh, I am not doubting any goodness in all of this. I am just trying to shed light on a different perspective. And that perspective should start with a different type of question. Perhaps the question when we see or hit suffering should not be ‘where is God in all this’? Once again, a question like this presupposes an entity, a finite thing that sits outside of suffering. Or an entity who can snap his fingers and make all things beautiful but sits cowering in helplessness at our own helplessness. An entity that basks in careless undecidednesss or maybe even in a secretly silent pleasure picking and choosing who gets to enjoy their experience of living and which 2 year old dies of cancer. My friend, if God is only what feels good, shows up when our oxytocin levels are up, then suffering is obviously a contradiction. Either God disappears or God becomes cruel in the midst of that suffering. But the question should evolve, our contemplation of what the Divine is, should really ask, “what do we even mean by God in the first place?”. There’s another way to look at it. Another way to SEE it. To do so, we have to be brave enough to sit with what is actually present in suffering(not the story or the interpretation) but what is there in the suffering…the pain, the fear, the loss. We want to face it squarely. We want to look deep into its face. We want to bear the pain even if the result of that pain is total obliteration. I bet if anyone has come out of that tomb of death after staring into that void, you know you come out experiencing something so glaringly obvious. Oh only if you stare that death in the face till it dissolves. It becomes so obvious that the resultant is the revealing of Self, the unveiling of The Lover, the company of the Fourth, That which has been there all along. Oh, it becomes so obvious that there is nowhere one can go without THE KNOWING. That part, that Knowing, it turns out, is not touched by suffering. It is the part(and whole) that simply knows. Oh, that is Awareness Itself. See, if God is excluded from suffering, then suffering sits outside of reality itself. That doesn’t make any sense(not like sense is needed for any exploration of reality). And no, suffering isn’t divine. Pain still freaking hurts. Suffering is not glamorous. But our relationship to suffering is what we eventually come to see. We may begin to understand how suffering is not something we can own. It is not personal. No one has ever created suffering, so how can one control suffering to turn it off? Instead, we can turn to it. Yikes! We SEE what it is made of. In that exploration, we may also find that the Divine does not intervene in suffering(surprise surprise). The Divine is the ground of experience itself and suffering is part of experience. God is the field in which both beauty and suffering appear. How can this even be true? Well, you have to see it. If only we can allow ourselves to see it, then the same ground can allow both a child’s laughter and a battlefield. Sorry, there’s no clean resolution in this one! And maybe that’s the point. Any view of God that removes that tension too quickly tends to become comforting and then collapses in its shallowness. So maybe we don’t resolve it but stay with it, letting both truths stand side by side: suffering is unbearable and calls for response. At the same time, in the deepest layer of reality, it remains unchanged by it. From this standpoint, we don’t explain away suffering. We meet it more directly. Something to think about: if the same awareness is here in both myself and the one who suffers, then separation must thin out. Compassion then, is no longer a moral rule but the obvious move. And in that, I feel compassion for those that suffer, I see my suffering in it, and the suffering of humanity. I see God in all of it. Contemplative Currents is a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are, is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity. Thanks for reading Contemplative Currents! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com

    8 min

  2. MAR 22

    This Moment Does Not Need Your Help

    You wake up to the clarity of the present moment. Then the mind steps in with deadlines, memories, and unfinished business. The peace feels lost. This piece looks at that tension. On one side, there is the direct seeing that only this moment exists. It is not a slice of time. It is a living field where everything unfolds. On the other side, there is the pull of plans, tasks, and past experiences. The sense that you need to move ahead and handle life. The shift may come through the recognition of the body. You begin to notice a subtle tension. A readiness. A leaning toward the future. As if something important is waiting in the next moment. It is something to see. From this view, the moment is already complete. It carries everything it needs. Action still happens, but not from force or control. It arises on its own. What remains is simple. Notice the urge to move ahead.See it clearly.Let the moment unfold. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com

    7 min

  3. MAR 16

    Resting in the arms of the Lover

    Every single morning, about sixty of us gather in silence at 7.20am. We spend twenty minutes sititing in stillness. Then a poem is read, or a verse, a passage from a novel, a song lyric, a fragment of something really powerful, written by a thought leader. And then, one by one, we share how it landed. We say a short prayer and close up the Zoom room. What I most often leave with is a word. A phrase. A single sentence that has somehow found its way under my skin. The best way I know to describe it is a word/phrase that I want to lick over and over again like licking a lollipop, rolling the flavor slowly over the tongue, not rushing to the center, savoring the sweetness as it opens. This is, in fact, what lectio divina is. Lectio is the ancient practice of sacred reading where you let the word you mule over to consume you. Here’s the thing: when we consciously direct attention away from the noise of content, away from the mind’s endless commentary about reality and toward a single unifying word or phrase, we begin to see, with a kind of gentle shock, how much of our world is constructed story. How much suffering lives in the gap between what is happening and what we are telling ourselves is happening. The movement of attention from the headspace into the body is itself a type of homecoming to what is. We begin to notice what rest is, bodily sensations become more vivid, mental patterns become visible. And mystery, rather than threatening us, begins to feel like welcome country. It’s to me like the joy of seeing a new level in a game of Zelda. Or like traveling to a country for the very first time. I built Hold (you can find it on holdwithin.app) , a free Contemplation app, for exactly this…to give a thought, a phrase, a prompting, somewhere to live and breathe. To hold it without needing to resolve it. You can work with it so slowly, so closely, that it begins to dissolve the very sense of self that picked it up in the first place. Using technology, you can be brought to remembrance during the day this jewel that becomes the gateway in which that self melts. Hold will be available in a few weeks as I iron a few kinks with the iOS app. I have been sitting lately with one phrase, and I will share with you how it’s landing for me. It is: resting in the arms of the Lover. I let it ask its questions. What is rest, really? What is rest, REALLY? Is it not the dropping of the shoulders, the releasing of everything that has been quietly clenched? Letting go of our assertion that things must go as we want it? And what are these Arms? Are they not the very arms that instrument all of existence — the groundless ground through which everything rises and to which everything returns? What is it to rest in that which is objectless yet creates all objects, to trust in that which cannot be known? All there is, is the Master. All there is, is the Lover. And to rest in those arms, it is the most radical act of trust we can demonstrate. Oh, what it means to trust in God. Is this not what it means to say ‘you are my shepherd, I lack nothing!’. Oh friends, oh friends, oh friends — look at this spacious space in which everything exists. Is this not the Lover? How can I fully rest in the arms of this Divine Lover? Contemplative Currents is a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are, is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity. Thanks for reading Contemplative Currents! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com

    4 min

  4. MAR 6

    Doorways to the mystery of being

    What if the most wondrous thing you could ever encounter is something you've never actually left? In this essay, I walk through four movements releasing origin stories, opening the aperture of perception, dimming the noise of self-concept, and the practice of remembering ..that point toward something prior to all of it. Not a philosophy. Not a doctrine. Just a crack in the ordinary, and the strange light that comes through it. Includes a short contemplative practice at the end. For anyone who has ever suspected that mystery is not a problem to solve, but the ground everything is standing on. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com

    14 min

  5. FEB 23

    The Big Wide Open Drop Of Surrender

    I sit on a bench in my backyard everyday, silently observing what nature is doing. In these cold season, I'm well familiar with the dormancy of grasses that grew before my eyes just a few months ago. And the trees, their greenery stained the dew with their luscious green. But now they are dormant. The three of them. You see, there is something about sitting still long enough that the world stops performing and just simply is. Not like it was performing before. I was the one who stopped performing. Clearly, the yard doesn't know I'm watching. The grass doesn't straighten itself. The trees don't rehearse their sway. Everything here, just unselfconsciously alive, and I find myself quietly undone by it all. As the wind blows from time to time, the wind chimes chime and the branches bend to the wind's blowing. There seems to be no single sense of reluctance or negotiation. There’s just this immediate, complete obedience without protest. I am ever so in awe of how nature does not fight the weather. It receives it. It becomes it. I stare at the branches and they don’t brace themselves against the gust while calling the gust an enemy. It simply moves, and in moving, it demonstrates something I have spent decades trying to learn: that all my ‘gra gra’, all my resistance is not strength. It was never strength at all. We have been taught to show all our muscles when we just needed pure understanding. The understanding that we are not separate from it all. That the most alive thing in the yard is also the most surrendered thing in the yard, it calls the structure of inner resistance— the propped up ego into check. Oh the birds! Let me tell you! The birds have started to visit the feeder and my supplies are running short. This one I’m looking at— a cardinal, it would appear that it never complained about how cold the earlier month has been. None of them could have language for complaint. They just didn’t show up to grace this shed. And now, they just arrived, ate what was there, and flew away again to only-god-knows-where. I'm brought to my knees in abject recognition of how pure and simple everything is. The birds didn't earn the feeder. They didn’t work for it. They didn't deserve it more today than yesterday. They just showed up, and the feeder was there. Why did I even buy it? I thought I was the one choosing to bring beauty into this backyard. But lil ol me doesn’t see sometimes that I’m moved in ways I couldn’t possibly know. I’m brought to my knees again at this recognition. It's the simple formula — if it's happening, it is just pure mystery. Oh, how oh, can I be in partnership with it rather than complain, grumble, murmur about the cruelty of the world? The nincompoops who fail to pick up the dog poop after themselves. The stranger who is perceived to be rude. The morning that didn't go as planned. I catch myself mid-murmur sometimes, mid-sentence in some internal trial where I am simultaneously the prosecutor, the judge, and the only one in the courtroom. And I have to ask: what exactly am I protecting? What territory am I defending that was ever truly mine? Isn't his rudeness the beauty of a god that takes the shape of rudeness? Isn't the chaos we see in the world the perfect setup for wonder to take full shape? I don't mean this as spiritual bypass …like a tidy reframe to avoid the sting of things. I mean it as something far more unsettling: that the whole theater of difficulty, of inconvenience, of other people's unresolved selves bumping into mine — all of it may be the very instrument through which something larger is working. The friction is applaudable, such a sick, sick design. Isn't my constant pull and toggle to control the world just my illusory belief that “I”, the ego, the small s— self, have a power of my own? That somewhere beneath the performance of preference and opinion and scheduling, there is a self-pulling lever that’s authoring outcomes and shaping days? The deeper I look, the less I find myself. And the looking continues because there’s a belief that if I look long and hard enough, I will find the self that has been doing all of this. I never do. And somehow, that is the most relieving thing. And yet those desires — the ones I carry, the ones that embarrass me, the ones my moral and spiritual uprightness try to go to battle for and against, are the assigned backlog items in which the universe, sic god, sic life, uses to make the whole world whole. Nothing is wasted. Not even my failed ambitions, not the longing, not the small daily wanting. Even my resistance to resistance is folded into the unfolding. Oh my gosh! Isn’t that wild?? There is nothing outside of it. There is no position from which I can observe the whole and remain unincluded! That’s so freaking marvellous!!! You know, marvellous as in... ‘marvel’ + ‘us’ Today, like every day when I remember, I drop deep into the wide arms of this Tender Grace. Knowing I've never done anything my entire life. Knowing I've never owned anything my entire life. Knowing that my amazing success was not mine, my failures included. Keenly aware that I live, I move, and have existence in That which could and would never be fully known. The bench holds me. The yard breathes around me. The chimes ring once more, unprompted, as if to say yes, this. exactly this. I sink into this contemplative inquisition where the question is more important than the answer, and the answer dissolves the one who is asking, I share these seeds with you, my Friend. It is these question: * what is life made from? * what is it that brings life to my being? * what is my being? In other news, I’m excited for my upcoming app that I believe could support your contemplative practice. The app, Hold, will be immediately available for Android and iOS. Contemplative Currents is a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are, is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity. Thanks for reading Contemplative Currents! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com

    8 min

  6. FEB 8

    The Messy Ground Is Holy Ground

    I tell you, it seems like most of my life, I have waited for “this part” to be finally over so I can just move on to other good things. Like when I was in the University. I hated it so much! Life seemed impossibly hard. My classes were difficult to understand and quite honestly, I was disinterested in most of my courses because I was more focused on making ends meet(in my immediate situation) than learning about lipids and “the anastomosis of the heart”. Oh, I hated exam season too, particularly because I had a lecturer who wanted to be bribed before he’d let anyone pass his exams. Yes, true story! It was kind of the small corruption that captured the larger indignity of my whole experience. I was not financially buoyant. My parents were struggling to make ends meet, and meanwhile, my own ends couldn’t even meet anything! Not to talk about having three meals a day. I know this does sound like the beginning of one of those grass-to-grace stories. I don’t even intend for it to be that way(and there’s no success story on this one). But what I am saying is I was broke, hated school, no longer cared to be a medical doctor, and to make matters worse, I schooled in Northern Nigeria, which was an incredibly humid, dry, and hot location compared to where I grew up. So even the physical experience of being in school was so darn frustrating. My gosh! I just wanted to finish, get my degree, and finally start to work and make my own living. That was the finish line! Everything beyond it was where real life would start. No? I just wanted to leave and finally make real money and be an adult! Nobody told me! Well, nobody told me. Nobody told me that this would be yet another spiral. “When I get a job, I will finally breathe!” “Oh, when I get a better-paying job, I will finally be happy.” “When I move to a better city, then I’ll feel alive.” “When the political climate shifts, then I’ll relax into the life I’ve been meaning to live.” My goal post has shifted again because when I retire and finally own that plot of land with two cute donkeys, three goats, and egg-laying chickens, then, then, I will finally have arrived. To be honest, a part of me still does this. A part of me can’t wait to be retired, cash out on my 401k, sip pina colada from the rewards of past investments, chil on my four-acre plot of land with all the donkeys, chickens, and goats I can enjoy tending. And more realistically, my mind finds comfort in hoping that the political climate changes because perhaps then there would be a beautiful conclusion for me, and I would finally stop living in this limbo and enjoy the life I’ve been wanting to enjoy. But I’m not bamboozled. Not anymore. I know exactly how this plays out. There will always be yet another thing waiting for me to finally conquer once I escape this particular reality. Interestingly, coincidentally, all the mystics have been here, seen it, seen through it, and they’ve been hinting at this since like forever. Lessons from Mystics of old I was shocked and inspired when I read about St. John of the Cross, who spent years in a prison cell, literally a closet, beaten once a week, starved, humiliated by his own religious brothers. Yet he didn’t write his most luminous poetry after the cell. He wrote the poems that we so enjoy reading during. He didn’t wait for the suffering to end before touching something …eternal. The dark night was literally his terrain. Meister Eckhart, the great Dominican mystic, once said something that still rattles me: “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is ‘thank you,’ it will be enough.” Not thank you for the life I’m going to have. Not thank you for when things finally shift. More like…thank you for even this. Isn’t that outrageous if you think about this? Or if you’re in a funk, how can you really relate to this? The Desert Mothers and Fathers, one of them, Abba Moses, when asked for advice by a young monk, simply said: “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” Not go find a better cell. Not wait until the conditions improve. Sit. Here. Now. And let this be the teacher. Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching(Chapters 6 and 28) pointed to the same thing: the valley doesn’t become fertile by climbing upward. It receives everything precisely because it stays low. The Tao doesn’t hurry, and yet everything is accomplished. It so happens that while I recognize the internal movement …the reaching, the leaning toward some future where things will finally be arranged in my favor, there is a growing recognition. A slow, almost reluctant, clear seeing. This path... where I am... is the only way. It is literally the only place I can be and the only place I need to be. Of course, with this kind of leaning, we are bound to question: is this some form of resignation? A giving up without trying? A spiritual bypassing dressed in contemplative spiritual garbage talk? Well, in this clear seeing, I tell you what: There is a weird, might I say, psychotic—acceptance that where we are is exactly where we need to be. And that acceptance, when it is full, comes with a strange enjoyment. Not enjoyment like pleasure or entertainment. More like the enjoyment of a river that has finally stopped fighting its own current. The enjoyment of my weight, your weight resting fully on the ground. Brother Lawrence, the 17th-century Carmelite monk, spent decades washing dishes and repairing sandals in a monastery kitchen. He wasn’t waiting for a more spiritual assignment. Or like the prosperity gospel disease of evangelical circles, he wasn’t waiting for someday God blessing him with plenty of money. He(as the books about him now calls it) practiced “the presence of God” among the pots and pans. He wrote: “The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer.” I bet you, he didnt’ have some superhuman equanimity. He just stopped making the distinction between where God was supposed to be and where God actually was, which, for him was right there, in the greasy water, in the worn leather. Oh, I think he even suffered severe pains late into his life. Ramana Maharshi was once asked by a devotee: “How long will it take to reach Self-realization?” He replied: “Self-realization is not something to be gained. It is already there. All that is needed is to get rid of the thought ‘I have not realized.’” In other words: you’re not on the way to the way. You’re in it. This way—with all its mess, all its discomfort, all its unresolved spirals—is the way. I am no longer bamboozled Yeah, I am no longer bamboozled waiting for ‘good times’. Unfortunately Fortunately, the spiral doesn’t stop. The next thing I’m waiting for will arrive, and right behind that one too, is another waiting. What shifts for me now is not the circumstances, situations and scenarios I am in. What shifts for me is the relationship to where I stand. And somehow, this shift is also in the body, in the breath, in the way I stand, the recognition of the ground I stand on. That ground is the only thing that’s real. And in that realness, I am fully carried. Ah! It’s just this very moment. Totally complete. Contemplative Prompts * What are you currently enduring that you’ve been treating as a hallway to somewhere better? What if the only thing you can change internally is the orientation you have. So instead of a hallway, could it be a room you were meant to inhabit? * Where in your life are you postponing enjoyment, presence, or peace until a condition is met? What does that postponement cost you today? * Sit with Abba Moses’ phrase: “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” What is your “cell” right now? What might it be trying to teach you that you’ve been too restless to hear? * Can you recall a time when something you desperately wanted to escape became, in retrospect, the very thing that shaped you most deeply? What does that suggest about where you are now? * What would it feel like, not as an idea but in your body, to stop leaning forward? To let your full weight rest on this moment, this ground, this life as it is? Did you read this one? If you liked this one, I bet you, you’d like these other posts: Contemplative Currents is a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are, is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity. Thanks for reading Contemplative Currents! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com

    12 min

  7. FEB 2

    What Milo Taught Me About Desire

    I have had a lot of background conversations about my orientation towards the concept of Prayer from the last post, the one called Pray, Not As Prey. These conversations have circled around questions I've been living with for years: What do we do with our desires? How do we hold our wanting without being consumed by it? Is there a way to pray that doesn't feel like begging an indifferent universe? I want to share something small that's become another doorway into how I see these questions, courtesy of the most patient being I've ever known. I have a 9 am check-in with my teams before my day kicks into full gear. This has happened every single workday for the last 5 years since working mostly from home. Milo has learned this rhythm and so he’s been used to me giving him treats right before the meetings begin. Originally, the treats have been my small indulgence to keep him occupied before I disappear into my day. These are treats that would take him about 20 minutes to chew to get him preoccupied. When he was a puppy I made this a thing so he would not chew up my baseboards or get in trouble doing things he shouldn’t. But over the last 5 years, through some ‘canine efficiency’, he has reduced the amount of time he consumes these treats to about 4 minutes. I am talking about large chews that take smaller dogs days to chew. And the darn packaging would write “long-lasting entertainment”. They lied! Now, here’s the challenge! I’m facing what I call ‘my daily heartbreak’. Well, our daily heartbreak. After one supposed-to-last-twenty-minute treat, he comes back for more! But here’s how he does it: he doesn’t beg, he doesn’t whine or scratch or bark. He’s the most patient dog I know...perhaps the most patient being I’ve ever encountered. So instead, he sits quietly beside me and stares at me. Not just for minutes! Not just for an hour! He stares at me for hours on end. HOURS! Daily! I tell you. I am not even joking! At this point, you’re probably like ‘oh, then just give him some more’. I do! But it gets to a point where you know it can’t be healthy feeding him treats that much, especially when it affects his eating, compromises his wellbeing, shorten perhaps, the very life I’m trying to protect. So, just waiting, with an unwavering focus that would put most meditators to shame, his eyes track my every movement, his body remaining still, poised, and hopeful. The entire architecture of his attention bent toward just one freaking simple single possibility: one more treat, sir. But I need YOU to understand this. He stares at me for roughly three hours daily and I’m not EXAGGERATION! Three hours of patient, quiet, unrelenting hope. DAILY! Now, seeing him do this day after day, I am often so moved to something beyond pity. It’s more like grief mixed with helplessness mixed with a strange, aching recognition of my own hopes and longing. How can he want something so badly, sit so patiently waiting, and yet unsure why nothing is happening to satisfy this desire? If only he would let go. If only he went to lay down in the patch of sunlight by the window, played with one of the darn toys he’s refused to play with, chased the shadows that move across the living room floor. His suffering through waiting and hoping I’ll throw him a bone (pun very much intended) would not be so acute, so prolonged, so utterly consuming. In caring for him, in witnessing his suffering, in realizing there’s very little I can do besides either giving him a lot of unhealthy food or withholding what he desires, I find there’s no way I don’t care for his well-being. My refusal is an act of love, even as it looks to him like denial. Even as it feels to me like cruelty. And then the reflection here for me, as it always does when sitting long enough with anything real, is: What if... just what if he had the ability to know, to be satisfied that I have his best interest at heart? What if he could hold both his desire and his trust simultaneously? Would he not realize that what he currently has is enough, and that in the right time, he would be rewarded with what is actually good, not just what he thinks he wants? I sit with this question. I turn it over like dough, kneading each corner. Turning it around in the mind, turning it over to myself: What would it be like if I realized that what I have is all I need? Of course, someone may say “that is you resigning or diminishing your desires and could be some form of bypassing”. But could we look at it clearly. Oh, I do have strong desires, desires that move through me like weather systems, powerful and undeniable. Can I commit them into what I’m calling the Well of Knowing, trusting that the Universe is not dead, not indifferent, but fully alive and responsive to deal with things as they should be? What then is the role of prayer since I see it not as a cry to an entity that needs those desires spilled out before taking action? Is prayer dead then? The question itself feels almost heretical in our age. But no, I don’t think it is. Maybe another way to see prayer is that it could be an invocation of truth to desire. It’s not the killing of desire, but the offering of it to something larger, something that can hold both our wanting and our wellbeing in the same hand. Once again, my desires aren’t mine. I could not have created a desire. They arise from the field of Nothing. It seems to me then, when I remember this—when I really remember it, not just think about it, then the ground on which I stand becomes the only stable ground. Not because it’s solid under my feet, but because it’s true. Literally. And in that ground, I am fully carried. I don’t have to carry myself. In that awareness, I am reminded that nothing needs to be added or removed. Just this —complete. In With Open Hands, Henri J.M. Nouwen writes, “A person with hope does not get tangled up with concerns for how his wishes will be fulfilled. So, too, his prayer is not directed toward the gift, but toward the one who gives it. His prayer might still contain just as many desires, but ultimately it is not a question of having a wish come true but of expressing an unlimited faith in the giver of all good things. For the prayer of hope, it is essential that there are no guarantees asked, no conditions posed, and no proofs demanded, only that you expect everything from the other without binding him. Hope is based on the premise that the other gives only what is good”. He continues, “Hope includes an openness by which you wait for the other to make his promise come true, even though you never know when, where or how this might happen”. Thinking about ‘the ground’, I think about the clarity of what the Buddhists would call cosmic interdependence, the understanding that nothing exists independently. It is obvious, isn’t it, that all phenomena and all beings are caused to exist by every other phenomena and beings. Oh, can’t we all see it? That our existence as human beings depends on earth, air, water, and other forms of life. Just as our existence depends on and is conditioned by those things, they also are conditioned by our existence. Our longings, our desires, they are part of the miracle of Existence! If they are truly emergent in me, then they belong to Existence. I call it that, you can call it God. And if that is true, if it is true that what I call my desire belongs to Existence, then the words of the writer of the first epistle of John, 5:14 may be pointing to something important. He wrote, "if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us, and we know we have obtained the requests."If we can clearly see that we are not separate from existence, that the many different things— rocks, flowers, car exhaust, Milo are expressions of us, and we are expressions of them, if we can see that existence is true to itself, we can learn to trust this ground. And that’s the hardest part! Geez! That, right there is what to practice— Trust! Reflection Prompts: * What are you waiting for with the same patient intensity as Milo? What would it mean to lay down that vigil, even temporarily? * Where in life might denial actually be an expression of love—either from yourself to yourself, or from something larger toward you? * What desires are you holding that might benefit from being offered to the “Well of Knowing” rather than carried alone? Suggested and related readings Contemplative Currents is a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are, is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity. Thanks for reading Contemplative Currents! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com

    13 min

  8. JAN 24

    Pray. Not as prey

    I want to start this by expressing my immense gratitude for the outpouring of love from my last post. I received dozens of private messages that I am holding so tenderly in my heart. I still am. You see, when I look at my life honestly, without doubt, I see how generously it has been held. Oh, the words of support! Thank you! You know, I could never in a million years have dreamed or willed myself to what exists in this experience of living— a family that cares so so steadily, a career that feels quite honestly like a dream, a business and an income that sustains me very fairly, the company of the very best books there are in all lines of my interest, and most especially the very best friends I could ever have. If I had better friends than I do now, I would explode! If the world crumbled and came back with us all in it, I will find each and everyone again: including you, who reads this from your inbox. Oh, I am so blessed to have been given the opportunity to love as deeply as I do, in the way I do, even if it’s handed back to me, half-opened, arriving unfinished or heart-shattering. Oh, I would shatter it over and over again to reveal my true self. How could I express these blessings without pointing to my roommate, Milo, who teaches me lessons that could never be penned. His presence teaches me more and more the efficiency of moving without words, being without apology, and the joys of companionship with that which is not cut from the same flesh or the same blood(oh, I could write a longer reflection on this). Yet, given the current direction in which the wind blows in this hemisphere, if sustained, I stand the chance of losing all of it. Emmm…not metaphorically. Literally! And nothing has prepared me for this possibility more than the steady practice of surrender(that I write frequently write about here). I understand now why the image of the Muslim at prayer moves me so deeply. Facing east, bowing to the ground, rising only to bow again. What an image! There is nothing ornamental about it. If anything it is a bodily confession. Oh isn’t it what we are called to do daily? Isn’t it what I must practice daily? As my will tightens against Reality, caught in my own illusion of separation, I am reminded to surrender, to bow to Reality, to the glorious Mystery. Again and again. Again and again. And again and again. Oh this must be what it is to be baptised. To die and be buried under The Water, to rise again to the fullness of Reality. And over and over again, we plunge into the Water of Life till we are fully buried, rising up to newness. A way of dying: prayer Perhaps death does not arrive all at once. Obviously! Perhaps it gathers quietly, as the different systemic structures and the structures of self reach their limit. Sometimes through unbearable pain. Sometiems through the most heart-wrenching, gut-ripping heartbreak. Sometimes through the grief of real raw unbearable loss. Sometimes, through the possibility of being chained unreasonably by masked men at night. Sometimes, through the slow exhaustion of holding one’s self together. When that threshold is reached, something just must give. This is where prayer meets me now. You see, I no longer see prayer as a request or negotiation. Gosh, who would I be requesting to? An entity we pray to who has to see people die, break apart, separate from families, and only waits to move based on emotional requests, called prayer? Surely such an entity must be a monster. As I have written here before, prayer no longer functions for me as a channel for asking or pleading or emotionally cajoling, using manipulative language that lowkey sounds like one party is trying to blackmail the other. Instead, it functions as a solvent. A way of laying myself down until there is nothing…absolutely nothing left to protect, nothing left to argue for, nothing left to defend. And so I start with prayers as poetry, the words moving my soul as I drink of the beauty of words gliding through my tongue, the assonances and aliterations and metaphors and imagery, the magic of expressions moved through vibrations in the vocal cord. What miracle it is to have words! What miracle it is to evoke what is present here, right now. What miracle it is that my desires are aligned with the desires of the Universe, the Universe speaking through me, as me. What miracle it is that I am slowly melting in the words, and the words are no longer words as they melt into mutters and mutters into hums and hums into silence, where I cease to be. Where fear dissolves. What miracle it is to know that I have never had a will, as my supposed will breaks into unity with the Divine, and all I am left with is the ‘not my will, but yours be done’. And in this assurance, I am made alive again. In this assurance, I can just be. I can do what needs to be done and rest in peace when nothing needs be done. Is this not your prayer too? A prayer May Your will move us where our fear tightensThat Your wisdom speakwhere our understanding collapses.That You take my need to be spared, my desire to be in control, and do with it what is true,leaving nothing false standing. Selected posts on Prayer:A Prayer Of ExtolationA simple recipe for meeting the DivineOf Prayer and the Anthropomorphic GodA Prayer In LonelinessThe Nectar of True DevotionLife Takes Care of Life A wider list of my essays on Prayers, and a longer one on Surrender. Contemplative Currents is a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are, is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity. Thanks for reading Contemplative Currents! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com

    8 min
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Gentle reminders, mindful contemplations for those seeking to explore the depth and essence of our being, the glorious Mystery that we are. seyekuyinu.substack.com

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