How about a New Year’s resolution to dedicate some time every day to meditation? Not lip service or telling yourself it's a good idea, but really sitting down and meditating. James Ishmael Ford graciously highlighted some of my work with “The Examen” of Saint Ignatius in a sermon he gave a week ago Sunday at the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist church in Pasadena, California. As an experiment, I removed almost all of Ignatius’s theology, but I didn’t intend to make him some hidden agnostic Zen Master. I just wanted to see if the Examen still had any teeth in a more agnostic context. The jury’s still out. Here’s a link to my piece, Looking at The Particular Examen of Saint Ignatius with Fresh Eyes.

A Meditation on Meditation 

Getting a handle on a difficult term

James Ford January 5th, 2026

The following is substantially the sermon I delivered for the worship service at the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist church in Pasadena, California, on the 28th of December, 2025. If you are wondering what the hubbub is when people speak of “meditation,” perhaps this will help…

When I’m off for a Zen meditation retreat, I’ve long since stopped being mildly annoyed when friends respond to the news with something like, “Oh, I wish I could take off for a few days and just chill, too.”

Zen meditation retreats are many things, but chill is not something I would call one. Nor relaxing. Nor getting away.

What I realize is that when people use the word meditation, it really needs further definition.

Here is one way to begin to look at that term, and to consider whether it might actually be something of use, and if so, what kind of meditation might one seek.

I’ll start with a brief exploration of what people sometimes mean when using the word. And then a bit deeper of a dig into one or two ways of meditating that might be useful to many. And maybe tease another kind of meditation for those who are throwing themselves deep into the quest for meaning and direction.

I recall many years ago visiting the renowned San Francisco Zen Center. They have a tiny bookstore, which I like to drop by and investigate when I find myself at the Center. This time I noticed there was a small sign on offer. It read “Don’t just do something, sit there.”

I delighted in the pure counterculture of that sign.

In a sort of bottom-line sense, meditation usually means something we do with our heads. Often it is bringing our heads and our bodies together. Depending on who you’re talking to, meditation can be body scanning, that is noticing and usually relaxing parts of our bodies. It might involve visualization, or a somewhat similar form of guided meditation. It can be as simple as reflecting maybe on the day.

And. There are forms of meditation rooted in religious traditions, like Buddhism’s practice of loving kindness or Christianity’s Lecto Divina, reading sacred scriptures mindfully. Some meditations note thoughts or feelings as they arise. Others incorporate breath practices ranging from counting or following the breath to kundalini yoga using the breath to awaken energies. While still others are other kinds of body practices ranging from walking meditation to Qigong or Hatha yoga.

To begin a list.

For most secular forms of meditation might be particularly of interest.

The most probably most famous of these is Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, MBSR to the initiate. It’s a program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn who was then a professor at the medical school at the University of Massachusetts in Worcester, and who would become the founder of the school’s Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society. Looking at his program, it is at its core simply dropping religious language from the ancient Buddhist meditation manual the Satipatthana Sutta, that is the “Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness.”

That text while probably drawing on sources that may go back to the historic Buddha himself, is generally believed to have been compiled in the first century before our common era. Kabat-Zinn expanded this meditation manual with other practices like guided meditation and yoga into an eight-week course he called that mindfulness-based stress reduction.

It has become wildly successful in the medical community to aid in stress management, chronic pain, and all in all offering a sense of general well-being. He and his associates moved beyond claims and applied controlled experiments to understand the why of it. Feel free to google for details. (Here’s a link directly to them) Out of his and his associate’s work MBSR has become a complementary discipline in treating depression, hypertension, and immune disorders.

However easily adapted it might be to secular uses, its worth noting meditation is rooted in religious or, if you will, spiritual sensibilities. The original goal is not that sense of well-being science has found in many of the disciplines.

With that the distinction between prayer and meditation can be a bit difficult to unravel. In Judaism prayer is often seen as more corporate action, the words addressed to God in a temple service for instance. While the word meditation is often reserved for private contemplation. For Christians while again prayer is often seen as directly addressing God, meditation often involves mentally unpacking a teaching, perhaps from scripture for spiritual solace and growth.

Buried in that is a definition I’ve seen around that while a bit triumphalist has some use. Here prayer is talking to the divine, while meditation is listening. The reality is that in both cases we’re being invited to our deepest encounters with the real. So disdain for the one is probably not as useful as one might think.

But what does this encounter with the real mean?

Well, several things.

Finding ways to give ourselves a little space and to look at what we’re up to can be an enormous gift. And honestly, this is the point of my sharing this meditation on meditation here and now, in the luminous moment of our moving from year into year. And with that finding ways to address the hurts both in our own hearts, and those of the world.

And while there are disciplines I consider going even deeper into the matter, here’s an example of that kind of meditation, where mental health and maybe some larger intimations of connection can be found in the adaptation of ancient spiritual practices.

An old friend of mine Ken Ireland is a former Jesuit. Although I’ve been told by friends there is in fact no such thing as a former Jesuit. I know him as a Zen practitioner who has lived for the last decade in Dharmsala, you know the Dalai Lama’s homebase in India, and because of visa issues for the past year in Thailand.

In his personal life Ken has adapted the famous Ignatian “Examination of Conscience,” also called the “Examen” in a secular, or at least somewhere in that area in a very interesting way. Like with MBSR, I see possibilities for the secularly minded. As well as for others on more specifically spiritual paths. With his permission, I share it here.

“Ignatius (who developed the large practice of his Spiritual Exercises in 1522) recommends undertaking the Examen for a relatively short period of time, 10-15 minutes, at three distinct times every day: upon rising, before the mid-day meal, and upon retiring. In the morning, as your day is not yet filled with conscious and unconscious actions, you resolve to reflect and remember what you are going to look for if you have identified a ‘chief characteristic.’” This is the nub of the discipline, seeing who you really are. Not what you would like to be, but who you are. And this is found in discovering that chief characteristic.

Ken continues. “Usually, you will hone in on what you’ve determined is your greatest obstacle to living in freedom and love - some trait, a repeating negative pattern, a persistent inner dialogue, resentment or prejudice. This becomes a tool that helps focus your review of the day’s events. It is almost always a moving target. You might work with a spiritual director to figure out a useful self-interrogation.”

So, with that invitation, Ken’s version of the steps of the Examen. There are a lot of parts to unpack, but here and now, I’m just giving the bare bones.

First: Quiet yourself. Become aware of the simple goodness of the universe. We see the gifts of life, the blessings of this human world through faith, the eye of love. Be thankful.

Then: Look within to see clearly, understand accurately, and respond generously to what is occurring in our lives.

Then: Review the history of the day (hour, week, or month) in order to see concrete, specific instances of the influence and activity of what we have identified as our chief characteristic. These can be detected by paying attention to strong feelings that may have arisen in situations and encounters. Over time more subtle feelings will become apparent.

Then: Examine these instances, our actions, reactions, words and feelings to see whether you have collaborated with deep inner guidance or yielded to the influence of evil in some way. Express gratitude and regret.

Then: Plan how to use our own inner guidance skillfully to avoid or overcome the negative influence of the chief characteristic in the future.

I’m quite taken with Ken’s secular Examen. It definitely fits the bill for a vital and useful kind of meditation. In his and Ignatius’ invitation, we see both our best and our worst. The real made personal.

And. In my own practice, you may have heard I’m a person of the Zen way, the discipline is less discursive.

That said, there are many mansions in the ways of mediation. Which brings both disadvantages and advantages. To my mind the disadvantages of Zen and its cousin mindfulness, mindfulness as an ancient Buddhist practice; includes less clarity on direction, less focus on accomplishment. But includes the advantages of finding perspective, of seeing who we are and how we exist within a web of relationships with other people and the world itself. And so something I’ve found might well be worth all the bother.

Maybe even something to try on in this new year, rife as it is with opportunities for hurt and healing.

A couple of years ago I wrote a brief piece for the Buddhist magazine “Lion’s Roar” offering a simple five-step guide to a basic mindfulness meditation practice.

I think sharing it here may be a good way to conclude my little meditation on meditation. It’s not Zen, which adds more wrinkles to the matter. But instead is a basic review of that core practice adapted by many in many times and places, including the good Dr Kabat-Zinn.

1. Choose a quiet and uplifted place to do your meditation practice. Sit cross-legged on a meditation cushion, or if that’s difficult, sit on a straight-backed chair with your feet flat on the floor, without (if you can) leaning against the back of the chair.

2. Place your hands palms down on your thighs (or knees) and take an upright posture with a straight back, relaxed yet dignified. With your eyes open, let your gaze rest comfortably as you look slightly downward about six feet in front of you.

3. Place your attention lightly on your out-breath, while (at the same time) remaining aware of the environment around you. Be with each breath as the air goes out through your mouth and nostrils and dissolves into the space around you. At the end of each out-breath, simply rest until the next breath goes out (of its own accord). For a more focused meditation (with fewer opportunities for distraction), you can follow both out-breaths and in-breaths.

4. Whenever you notice that a thought has taken your attention away from the breath, just say to yourself, “thinking,” and return to following the breath. In this context, any thought, feeling, or perception that distracts you is labelled “thinking.” (There are more advanced forms that slice and dice the distractions for finely. But “thinking” really will do.) Thoughts are not judged as good or bad. When a thought (or sensation or feeling) arises, just gently note it and return your attention to your breath and posture.

5. At the end of your meditation session, five minutes, ten, or half an hour, or perhaps a full hour, bring calm, mindfulness, and openness into the rest of your day.

The good folk at Lion’s Roar provided lovely illustrations for the piece. One in particular showed the meditator fully engaged. They had a relaxed person sitting with arrows pointing out from all around her body.

I wrote back about how the illustrations, as pretty as they were, and they were, missed the deeper point of this exercise. We’re not trying to project ourselves out into the world in this practice but allowing ourselves to encounter the world as it actually presents itself to us. That real once more. Or, at least to come as close as such can be accomplished given the limitations of our senses, and our endless proclivity to put a story on everything.

The twelfth-century Japanese Zen master Eihei Dogen in his essay, Uji, “Being Time,” put it like this:

“When the self advances and confirms the ten thousand things, the world, is called delusion. But when the ten thousand things come to the self, that is called awakening.”

In my note to my editors at Lion’s Roar, I said the arrows should be pointed toward the meditator.

They wrote back how that was lovely, but they paid good money for the illustrations and they were staying.

I suspect there are several lessons to be gleaned from that exchange.

So. A little grist for the mill. Something that might even be of use as we move out of this lamented year into, well, who knows what we’re moving into.

And, if you’re wanting to go deeper still, there are other types of meditation, as well.

Zen, for one. The way of my heart…

https://youtu.be/esU-3IC2J9E

The Test of Suffering

After he read my last post, my friend James Ismael Ford asked, ”And then what are the consequences of much of Buddhism in the West's proximity to the self-help industry? I look forward to your analysis.”

James, Who am I to be splitting hairs in what appears to be a somewhat technical Buddhist dispute about suffering and the causes of suffering? Suffering, real and imagined, is the reason why our Western version of Buddhism gets entangled with the Self-Help Industry. It’s hard for me to be objective. I’ve got a pony in this race. It was a very personal experience of suffering, both real and imagined, that led me to a cushion in a zendo. That’s factual, and I am not alone. And this personal experience has helped me with what I will call “a working position” for my own life--If it helps relieve suffering, it is worthwhile.

The question itself is not easy. Without trying to be all super Zen and theological, it is a bit like the challenge that the Fifth Patriarch announced in the Platform Sutra. The head monk wrote for the gradualist position, “Little by little, one small speck of suffering at a time, wipe the mirror clean and do your best to keep your house in order,” while our disruptive hero, Hui Neng blasted the Big Bang Zen position, “The mind is not a mirror. It’s all Suffering and it’s not. Open your eyes to Emptiness. That’s always here.”

To reintroduce the Self-Help Industry: there are as many valid reasons to put some money down and sit in a hotel meeting room for several days listening to Werner Erhard as there are to shy away and continue a relatively boring day to day routine. (For the record I have spent far more than several days with Werner’s programs and think that my dollars were well spent). Weighing the positive and the negative is actually not much different from the way I list my personal reasons to distrust Buddhism, to avoid the teaching or dive into the Tao. It’s a choice.

I am no expert. Here in Bangkok, I live by myself, and spend much of my time alone. Of course I am not a recluse in a cave in the remote hinterlands of China; I have cable and wifi. I meet and talk with other people, family and friends, though by choice in small doses, but most importantly I have time to meditate, read, reflect, and write; I feel an obligation to use this gift wisely. I haven’t answered my own question, but I am inching closer to what I have at stake in any answer, and as I do I feel a great deal of gratitude that I have been given enough freedom to explore the question.

I try to sit for at least two, sometimes three periods a day. It is something I look forward to, now that I am almost 80 and have given myself permission to sit in a chair. Recently I started to end with a private ceremony. I wanted to put an end to my formal meditation and boot up the computer with some equanimity. One of the English versions of the Heart Sutra allows me to acknowledge that all there is is the moment right here in front of me. I feel some confirmation that in fact I am Buddhist, at least in the sense that I want to see an end to suffering, mine as well as other peoples’, and most importantly, that I am willing to dedicate myself toward that goal.

Suffering is not fun. But I have observed that there isn’t just one kind of suffering as if it had a unique DNA marker. I have explored the kind of suffering that comes from some indulgent interpretation of past events or being deprived of some imagined right to exercise my power and grab what I think I need. Then I stand back and see how different that is from the unimaginable suffering of innocent settlers in the kibbutzim on the borders of Gaza and the equally horrific suffering of Palestinian mothers and children caught in crossfire with nowhere to turn, I know that my petty suffering is just that, petty and self-serving, and there is almost unendurable suffering. There is no way to take back the actions that have caused it.

In my next post I will examine the Self-Help Industry through the Test of Suffering.

A Weed Wacking Roshi goes to Mass

 Blue Cliff Record 22

My friend James Ford recently wrote a heartfelt piece about attending a service in Boston's King's Chapel. I’ve been looking for a response. I had several questions about his almost lyrical reflection on the juxtaposition of hearing mass using a truncated version of the English Catholic Reformation's arcane liturgy in a handsomely endowed Unitarian church.

I emailed him to say, as long as it has some singing and dancing, I suppose I could hum along, but I confess, I was initially put off by a koan master’s flirtation with 15th-century ritual. The practice of Zen, at least in my experience, has tended to strip away some of the mystery surrounding these observances.

But further examination exposed a new level of entanglement and possibility.

Seekers and Quakers, Ranters, Diggers, and Collegiants

James is a well-trained, thoroughly modern koan master. He is also an ordained Unitarian Minister, so he has set aside some Church orthodoxy and its insistence on creedal formulations of the mysterious. All well and good. He, I, and the Boston Unitarians are on the same page.

I also know from our conversations that he is trying to look at the tumultuous spiritual landscape of right now from a Zen perspective. His interests include traditional Christian denominations, evangelical churches, fringe spiritual movements, and the relatively small but growing number of Western Buddhist practitioners from various Asian schools. After some digging, I discovered that King Henry’s abrogation of Rome's authority unleashed a tidal wave of non-conforming religious expression that was similar and even more stormy than our own, but most of the ramifications lay hidden beneath the doctrinal garb of our inherited religions.

I stumbled upon a YouTube series of lectures by Alec Ryrie, Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, London. He’s a committed Christian, and he’s also brilliant. Of course, I had studied the history of what we call the early Reformation, at least enough to satisfy my Jesuit examiners, but my training was focused through the narrow lens of the Counter Reformation, which my order spearheaded.

I had carefully examined Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists, and, by extension, Jansenists, to achieve ecumenical coverage, but there were also many smaller splinter sects; historians call them the radical reformation. Who were they? They included the first radical Quakers, but also Seekers, Ranters, Diggers, and Collegiants. They questioned the very foundations of the Christian enterprise.

The events of these few decades were momentous. So much transpired that continues to shape our spiritual lives; the language of prayer; the separation of religious belief from philosophical discourse (I didn’t know for example that Baruch Spinoza had been a member of the Dutch version of the Quakers); the far reaching economic impact of King Henry VIII’s confiscation of Church assets led to secularization and the end of the total domination of the church-state.

Alec Ryrie says that battles are rarely determined by the pacifists. Who can dispute that? However, I am loath to give up my cherished position as a Skeptic.

John Earle. (c. 1601 – 17 November 1665) Whom I regard as an English Pascal (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) and his contemporary also felt that one had to take sides. But he is far less rarefied than Blaise. Earle presents the famous philosophical wager as a conundrum with a nihilist resolution: “Whilst he fears to believe a miss, he believes nothing.”

Can I believe anything, and do I really have to?

An Age of Atrocity

If I were an actual actor in the real drama of the early Reformation, I might have been forced to take a stance about my beliefs. I remember a conversation I had with my friend Avery Dulles (not sure if this was before or after he was elevated to the rank of Cardinal), but he was serving on some high-level ecumenical commission. He told me that he'd worked long hours on some presentation papers. Then came the meeting. It began with a prayer petitioning the God of the doctrinal points they knew they could agree upon. Then Avery stated and explained the Roman Catholic position. He was thanked and applauded. Then the other side’s theologians presented a similar paper outlining their position. They sat down and were politely applauded. Then together they worked out the closing statement: we can agree on X for Y reason, and we continue to disagree on the following points for Z reason. We were happy to have this exchange, and pray for our continued growth in the Spirit.

During the Reformation, one of those parties might have been burned at the stake. In those bloody times, the untimely deaths of the heretics or martyrs, depending on your side, could be made into myths, to warn succeeding generations, to train them in some self-sacrificial virtue, or remind them that some truths could never be compromised. The Inquisitions made decisions about who needed to be celebrated, who needed to be blamed, and what lessons the survivors needed to draw.

Thousands were tortured and executed. The authorities of the newly reformed English Church did it as well as the Catholics. In the Spanish Inquisition, it was a matter of life and death for the Jews, conversos, and dissenters who were murdered. 

A lot has changed in the course of a few centuries, but I don’t think that I can erase that part of history that is an affront to the sensibilities that are the product of my own time and religious culture. The Jesuit Saint Robert Bellarmine may have saved Galileo from the stake, but I am deeply troubled by his role in the execution of Giordano Bruno and Friar Fulgenzio Manfredi. The temptation for revisionists is to write out the parts of your history that don’t conform to your myth.

Koan Practice for Tudor England

We are already living in the 21st century. Before I introduce some koan practice, I would like to introduce perhaps a consideration, or a caution. Following Foucault, “. . . you cannot find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people.” (Michel Foucault, quoted in Dreyfus and Rabinow,“ On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 229. In this context the other people were the ancient Greeks.)

By chance, I started working with this elliptical koan that I unfolded from Yuanwu’s Commentary for Case 22 of the Blue Cliff Record.* I tried to apply Foucault's question about understanding bridging history. I began using a Buddhist technique to cut away the weeds. It dates from medieval China, about contemporaneous with William the Conqueror. Can the record of an ancient Zen master help me decipher the experience of an arcane ritual dating 5 centuries after 1066, during the reign of King Edward VI?

Theology and science fiction love time travel. Let’s see if religious studies linked up with Zen practice can be equally anachronistic. Paraphrasing Yuanwu, can a 21st-century Westerner have an authentic Zen experience? At least this might be fun.

A koan: The Family Jewels

When [Hsueh] Feng got to Te Shan, he asked. “Do I have a part in the affair of the most ancient sect, or not?” Shan struck me a blow of his staff and said, “What are you saying?” At that time, it was like the bottom of the bucket dropping out for me.”

(Allow me to decode some of the language: in 9th-century China, "enlightenment" in Zen practice--according to the ancient sect is possible. Feng reports that he experienced it, but apparently that doesn’t settle the matter. Can I include a modern Zen Roshi using the ancient prayer of the Church of England?)

Yen T’ou shouted and said, “Haven’t you heard it said that what comes in through the gate is not the family jewels?” Feng said, “Then what should I do?” T’ou said, “In the future, if you want to propagate the great teaching, let each point flow out from your own breast, to come out and cover heaven and earth for me.”

(The part of propagating the great teaching is not coded. We get the part about flowing from your own heart. Skipping ahead through several bouts of drinking tea and getting whacked, we move on to what Hsueh Tou’s disciple has to say about tracing the matter back to their root teacher, Yun Men, and mastering the art of snake handling. What is he talking about?)

“How many lose their bodies and their lives?” This praises Ch’ang Ch’ing’s saying, “In the hall today, there certainly are people who lose their bodies and lives.” To get here, first you must be thoroughly versed in snake handling. 

Hsueh Tou is descended from Yun Men, so he brushes the others away at once and just keeps one, Yun Men: Hsueh Tou says, “Shao Yang knows, again he searches the weeds.” Since Yun Men knew the meaning of Hsueh Feng’s saying, “On South Mountain there’s a turtle-nosed snake,” therefore, “Again he searches through the weeds.”

After Hsueh Tou has taken his verse this far, he still has more marvels. He says, “South, north, east, west, no place to search.” You tell me where the snake is. “Suddenly, he trusts his staff.” From the beginning, the snake has been right here. But you must not then go to the staff for sustenance.

Yun Men took his staff and threw it down in front of Hsueh Feng, making a gesture of fright.

Thus, Yun Men used his staff as the turtle-nosed snake. Once, though, he said, “The staff changed into a dragon and has swallowed the universe; where are the mountains, rivers, and the great earth to be found?” Just this one staff--sometimes it’s a dragon, sometimes it’s a snake.

(Then, after some detailed snake handling instructions, Yuanwu tries to encourage us by asking one of those pesky Zen Master questions.) Since ancient times, how many people have picked up the snake and played with it?

Personally, I prefer opera.

James Ford attended a truncated Book of Common Prayer service in a revered Unitarian Church. I hope that at least part of the motivation was aesthetic. And that’s perfect. He’s a Unitarian. I am what’s politely called a lapsed Catholic and an ex-Jesuit to boot. I find that after years of meditation, my love for the ritual of the mass has waned, but I won't rule out the power of the experience. Actually, I prefer opera, but then I am also gay, so it might be genetic.

But after doing some introspection, I am left seeing the similarity with my own situation as well as wondering about the huge waves that lie just beneath any attempt to deal with the numinous ocean that supports our lives. I am a skeptic as much as I am a Buddhist. There is a war inside about what to believe, what is worthy of belief, and what beliefs are pointers and which ones might simply be a smoke screen. I would like to remain neutral, but also realize that I don't want to set myself up, in the words of John Earle, as “a hapless peacemaker trying to intervene in a duel, getting shot by both sides.”

The contribution of the Zen practice here might be to clear the weeds from the battlefield and perhaps reveal the turtle-nosed snake. I can carry a staff, at least in my imagination. “The staff changed into a dragon and has swallowed the universe; where are the mountains, rivers, and the great earth to be found?”

For my verse, I’ll echo James with the two stanzas from Leonard Cohen’s “Treaty” that he uses to close his meditation:

I've seen you change the water into wine
I've seen you change it back to water, too
I sit at your table every night
I try but I just don't get high with you

I heard the snake was baffled by his sin
He shed his scales to find the snake within
But born again is born without a skin
The poison enters into everything


* Here is Case 22 and the portion of the commentary that I used.