Meeting St. Francis and St. Clare on Good Friday

St. John’s Cathedral in Hong Kong moments before Good Friday’s service

I came to Good Friday noon-day service at St. John’s Cathedral with unusual anticipation. My wife’s lung cancer was in its 19th month, and she had already outlived the very first diagnosis of 4-12 months that she had received in a blurry life-rearranging moment in September, 2022. The reality since that day has been like flying into – and out of – a fog bank: after the first 11 months of total unpredictability, the last 8 months have become unexpectedly stable. She has low energy, which is a real problem, but her health issues are no longer keeping us on high alert.

Through the ups and downs of this journey, my singular mantra over the last 18 months has remained a passage from Cynthia Bourgeault’s Eye of the Heart:

All roads eventually lead to a mysterious waiting in emptiness . . . The heart will always know what it wants, deep inside, and does not need to be reminded. Do not use your mind to create scenarios for your heart. When the time is right, the heart’s own speaking will be clear (122).

For the first time in my life, I copied down a passage on a 3 x 5 card – “mysterious waiting in emptiness” – and posted it on my nightstand as a reminder to let go of future expectations. 

It seems, then, that Zella and I came to this Good Friday service in a posture of waiting, seeking wisdom from Jesus himself, who knowingly walked the kenotic path to the end. 

“Mysterious Waiting in Emptiness:” Dealing with a Cancer Diagnosis

Enjoying a family dinner at Fernando’s in Macau in August, 2023

Introduction

Still burdened by a three-week quarantine for travel in and out of Hong Kong, eleven months ago we escorted our son, Micah, to the Hong Kong airport and wished him well as he headed off for his sophomore year at Santa Clara University in the Bay area. In that first week of being empty-nesters, Zella, now able to focus on something besides getting Micah off to college, commented that she felt a shortness of breath that we should investigate. After school on Friday we went to her doctor, who advised us to get an X-ray to see if that revealed any concerns. An hour later we were given the disconcerting news that her right lung contained a large quantity of fluid, a white covering glaringly visible on the scan. The doctor told us to go directly to the hospital.

A pleural effusion (fluid) of the right lung

For the next two weeks, a team of doctors explored various explanations, including multiple cancer diagnoses that changed by the day. But we were totally unprepared for the final verdict delivered by our lung specialist on Saturday afternoon: Zella had a rare and serious lung cancer called mesothelioma, a disease caused by asbestos, a carcinogenic insulation material used in many buildings in the US. Very few people in Hong Kong contract mesothelioma, since asbestos is not commonly used in construction here. The doctor delivered this news to her alone, informing her that, statistically speaking, she had between 4-12 months to live. A simple Google search confirmed the severity of this form of cancer, for which there is no cure.

Fire and Water: Centering Prayer and the Yearning for God

I was able to grab a quick photo with Cynthia at a Wisdom School spiritual retreat at Lake Cowichan, British Columbia in April, 2019 before we began our afternoon with a Centering Prayer sit.

Introduction

Can you have too much desire for God? This is the question that has been circulating in my mind during the summer holidays. Two weeks ago—June 28 to be exact— I wrote a note to a fellow traveler on the spiritual path sharing this question, but I veiled my thoughts, unsure how directly I wanted to share such a personal concern. To have been more plain about it, I would have said, “Regardless of the highs and lows of my personal life, there is always this gnawing feeling of wanting to ‘find the divine’ or ‘know the truth about the universe’ or, to paraphrase Joseph Campbell, to have the ‘experience of being alive.’ It’s always there and I don’t know what to DO about it!”

What Happens in Mindfulness: Grace and the Holistic-Intuitive Model

Many students like Nikki find meditation to be a valuable experience, but it’s hard to explain why. This entry explores John Teasdale’s What Happens in Mindfulness in search of a persuasive rationale for the power of mindfulness practices.

Introduction

When I think of the biggest changes in my three decades of teaching, at the top of the list is the role that mindfulness has come to play in education. In the watershed year of 1979 Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn first introduced his now famous 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course to chronically ill patients at a hospital in Massachusetts. The startling results of the program initiated what has become a global movement implementing meditation and other mindfulness practices to reduce stress.

My own first memories of mindfulness came in the mid-90s when I visited the towering spiritual giant Father Basil Pennington, who was commissioned by the Pope to bring contemplative Christianity’s version of mindfulness called Centering Prayer to a global audience. Despite my initial interest, it wasn’t until 2012 when I traveled to Assisi to meet Cynthia Bourgeault, representing a new generation of Centering Prayer advocates, that I finally committed to meditation, which had transformative effects in my life in short order. Yet a year into my practice I wrote, “I still don’t know what I am directly ‘achieving’ with my daily practice; little seems evident in my 20 minutes of silence.” I still wholeheartedly credit meditation with a major life shift, which has impacted everything in my life, including the entire second half of my recently published The Wisdom Way of Teaching. But in the back of my mind I was frustrated by not being able to explain how and why meditation works, limiting the effectiveness of my teaching.

Discernment and Darshan: Perceiving the “Things Themselves” at Life’s Crossroads

My parents and I after Sunday mass at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado

“I do have this feeling of bodhisattva consciousness that came to me this weekend . . . I do feel called to be a bodhisattva.”

• Written to a friend about a month before my visit to St. Benedict’s.

Introduction

I once again find myself unexpectedly at something of a crossroads. Two years ago as I anticipated the summer holidays, life seemed pretty clear. I had just finished my 30^th year of teaching at HKIS and had a very discrete and meaningful task: to complete a book summarizing my two takeaways of my teaching career, which I short-handedly call the yang of social conscience and the yin of inner awakening. In fact, I did submit (what I thought was) my final manuscript that summer, assuming I would then happily return in the fall to teaching Humanities I in Action and our Spiritual Explorations program, courses that manifest these two takeaways in the lives of my students every year.

However, on June 1^st, 2020 I received a text message from a guy whose name I didn’t recognize. Sean from Kinesiology Asia contacted me about an introductory kinesiology course in the coming weeks. Being stuck in Hong Kong during that first covid summer, I was overjoyed to have some in-person teaching about a topic that I found intriguing. But my initial glee in no way prepared me for what I found, for from the very first hour, energy medicine was mind-blowing, challenging what I had come to understand as reality. Somehow through kinesiology the body was able to speak to me in ways that would have previously seemed unimaginable. I always say, “Kinesiology isn’t like magic, it is magic.” During that first 8-day course I wrote in my journal, “Life will never be the same.”

“Life Will Never Be the Same:” Reflecting on a Life Inflection Point

Nora and I doing our kinesiology practice at Kinesiology Asia

Dear Readers,

I have been “missing in action” from this blog since last June after writing consistently and passionately for 10 years. What happened? As I mentioned in my first attempt to tell this story more than a year ago, I’ve fallen in love with something called energetic kinesiology, which is a healing modality based on Chinese medicine.

The last 21 months have been a deep falling into study and amazement of how this ancient energetic technology, transmitted through millienia of Chinese history, has now been combined with modern anatomy and physiology with the goal of transforming the whole person. I frequently say kinesiology is not like magic, it is magic. So, rather than writing blogs, I’ve taken more than 20 courses, read fascinating books, and most importantly done literally hundreds of energetic balances, some in person, but most at a distance sitting in my cloistered study at home during the worst outbreak of covid here in Hong Kong. At a distance means that I’m helping my parents in Nebraska, students in my Zoom classes, covid-infected colleagues, long-out-of-touch-friends, and — hopefully soon — Ukrainian refugees. That to me qualifies as magic!

Introducing the Wisdom Way of Teaching: Educating for Social Conscience and Inner Awakening in the High School Classroom

The Second Gaze: The Essence of the Spiritual Life

What do we mean by the word “spiritual” and what is the goal of practices such as meditation?
Franciscan priest Richard Rohr speaks personally to these questions in his comment, “The Second Gaze.”

Dear Students,

I know for the vast majority of you taking Spiritual Explorations the word “spiritual” sounds like something quite abstract and distant. Perhaps there have been moments in nature or a certain intimacy involving family or friends that seemed charged with some “energy” that is palpably different than “ordinary” life. Certainly such times can be described as “spiritual,” but I’m afraid that a fairly narrow understanding of this term takes us far from the busyness and stress of your everyday life.

Richard was the first Catholic priest to be interviewed on Oprah’s “Super Soul Sunday” in 2014.

It’s for this reason that I want to share a brief reflection by Catholic (Franciscan) priest Richard Rohr that he wrote for the first day of 2021. It has nothing to do with “extraordinary moments” dependent on certain external circumstances, and everything to do with one’s inner posture towards all of life. Richard works very closely with my own spiritual teacher, Cynthia Bourgeault, and so I know that this message comes out of the universal Wisdom tradition that I have embraced wholeheartedly in the last decade. Richard’s “The Second Gaze” is perhaps the most succinct summary of what we are trying to help you accomplish in a course like Spiritual Explorations. Here, I suggest, is the essence of the spiritual life.

A Walk in the Park: Groundtruthing Spiritual Experiences in One’s Being

Tai Tam country park where I frequently take walks in the late afternoon.
HKIS is the white set of buildings left of center.

Introduction

I’ve been writing this blog for a decade. I have written exactly 200 pieces, I discovered recently, when I posted my first entry in 2021. Certainly, this is the longest “dry spell” of these past ten years in which I’ve posted on average once or twice a month. Yet this paucity is not caused by an imaginative life gone dry, nor primarily due to COVID restrictions, although I have found it necessary to take long walks during the pandemic. Rather, my writing hiatus may be due to some inner stirring.

Matching Your Enneagram Type with a Spiritual Practice: Exemplars from the Class of 2021

Dear students, 

The beauty of the Enneagram is that it not only reveals with startling insight an individual’s strengths and weaknesses, but as a body-mind-heart system it also lends itself easily to the kinds of spiritual practices you have been doing throughout high school in our SPEX program. In this sense, it invites the intersection of the horizontal (your specific personality type) with the vertical (something larger than your type) for your psycho-spiritual growth.

This blog entry is an overview of the 9 types of the Enneagram through exemplars from the HKIS graduating class of 2021. Along with these examples, I also share a 6-9 minute video describing each type and suggestions for spiritual practices. The overall goal is to help you identify your type, specify a particular issue associated with your type that you would like to improve, and then offer a range of practices to help you become a healthier version of yourself. 

Before getting to the details of each type, you may want to view three introductory videos I made to introduce the Enneagram to SPEX (Spiritual Explorations) classes. Alternatively, feel free to skip these, if what you are really looking for is specific information to identify your type, issue, and practice.