Vocal Sound
The final element in our focus triad is vocal sound, which hones our attention skills as we exhale sounds during our deep breathing. Although even silent repetition of a meaningful phrase can help us focus, a quiet voice gently speaking or singing a few words of Scripture, a prayer, or a hymn establishes a more consistent deep breathing pattern and improves cognition by engaging our auditory system. When we sing as we exhale, we intensify our emotional experience and soothe our nervous system while activating higher thinking centers in the brain.[13]
This is perhaps my favorite part of the focusing exercise. I have tried a variety of ways to bring sound into my God-focused deep breathing. Sometimes I sing the lines of a hymn, one at a time; other times I make up my own songs, using the Psalms or other Scriptures. There are times when I read lines of Scripture or use passages I’ve memorized, even well-known ones such as the Lord’s Prayer (as Ignatius suggests) or Psalm 23. When I am speaking rather than singing, I like to play classical music in the background at a very low volume, which likewise has been shown to enhance cognitive functioning.
Faith and a Few Minutes a Day
Dr. Andrew Newberg, perhaps the most respected neuroscientist studying the effect of spiritual practices on the brain, has used brain-imaging techniques to observe the brains of thousands of people—some from a variety of religious persuasions and others with no religious bent—as they engage in some combination of these three elements. These studies document positive changes in the neural circuitry of the participants, some of whom spend hours at a time engaging in the practice. Newberg suggests, however, that it only takes about twelve minutes a day to gain optimal benefits, with observable changes in our brain chemistry in as little as two months.
Newberg adds a fourth important aspect to God-focused deep breathing, which he calls “faith”—an interesting choice of words, given that he is a self-proclaimed agnostic. Specifically, Newberg encourages us that setting a goal for our focusing exercise, and believing that it will help us accomplish that goal, enhances the effectiveness of our practice.[14]
Personally, I can think of no greater goal than to bring all the powers of my attention to bear on my relationship with the One who created me to know him intimately. When I first began practicing God-focused deep breathing, it took me out of my comfort zone, but over time I recognized that it is a gift from God, a way to engage my whole being—body, soul, and spirit—so that I might move more quickly to a meaningful time alone with him. This is only one of the benefits, but for me it is the most powerful.
PRACTICE
GOD-FOCUSED DEEP BREATHING
ESTIMATED TIME: 12 MINUTES A DAY
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
PSALM 131:2
May God himself, the God who makes everything holy and whole, make you holy and whole, put you together—spirit, soul, and body—and keep you fit for the coming of our Master, Jesus Christ.
1 THESSALONIANS 5:23, MSG
IN GOD-FOCUSED DEEP BREATHING (GDB) it is absolutely critical to use all of its components to help you concentrate on what you are doing. For example, when you inhale, you focus on your breath as you count silently, and when you exhale, you focus on the words you are speaking or singing, continually bringing your mind to the moment. The more comfortable you are with each part, the better you will be able to do this.
We will practice each one alone and then put them together, beginning with deep breathing.
Deep Breathing
Your breath must be diaphragmatic, which means that your stomach visibly rises when you inhale and falls when you exhale (many people think expanding their chest is deep breathing, but it is not). For this practice, you will breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth.
Try a few deep breaths by placing your hands on your stomach to feel the movement. Inhale as you count slowly from one to five, about once per second. Then pause for a second, and exhale as you count from one to five again.
Once you’ve established a pattern of inhaling and exhaling from the diaphragm, move on to simple movement.
Simple Movement
While any repetitive movement can work here, one of the simplest ways is to place your hands with palms together in a prayer pose, fingers touching. As you exhale, tap your fingers together one at a time, beginning with your thumbs. In the beginning, when your exhalations are shorter, you will probably only tap through the hand once. Over time, however, as you begin to inhale and exhale more deeply, you can repeat the movement as many times as necessary while exhaling.
Once you feel comfortable with this, move on to vocal sound.
Vocal Sound
There is a vast variety of Scripture passages, hymns, or even self-composed songs you can use to give sound to your exhales. To begin, it is helpful to use something you are very familiar with so that you can close your eyes and relax through the process. To that end, we will start with the hymn “Amazing Grace.”
Take in a deep breath, and as you exhale, quietly sing one line of the hymn. On your next exhale, sing the next line. If you find that a full line is too much, do half of the line instead.
Once you feel comfortable doing this, move on to the final step—putting it all together.
Putting It All Together
Find a comfortable position in a quiet place and eliminate external distractions as much as possible. (Once you’ve mastered GDB, you will be able to engage in it anywhere you go, but first you need to become familiar through practice.) Place your hands together, palms open in a prayer pose, with both feet resting comfortably on the ground. Use the template below to begin.
Inhale: Count slowly and silently to five as you take in a deep breath. Pause briefly.
Exhale: As you slowly release the air, tap your fingers together while softly singing, “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound.”
Inhale: Count slowly and silently to five as you take in a deep breath. Pause briefly.
Exhale: As you slowly release the air, tap your fingers together and softly sing, “That saved a wretch like me.”
Inhale: Count slowly and silently to five as you take in a deep breath. Pause briefly.
Exhale: As you slowly release the air, tap your fingers together and sing softly, “I once was lost but now am found.”
Inhale: Count slowly and silently to five as you take in a deep breath. Pause briefly.
Exhale: As you slowly release the air, tap your fingers together while singing softly, “Was blind but now I see.”
Continue this pattern through as many verses of the song as you can remember.
Further Ideas
While the breathing remains the same for all GDB, you can change your simple movements and vocal sound. Experiment with different things and you will find what works best for you. The goal is to do this for about twelve minutes a day, but any amount of time will produce some benefits. Other movement ideas include the following:
Engage in GDB while taking a walk, five steps inhaling and five steps exhaling.
Lightly clap your hands or tap your feet during the exhalations.
Fold your hands with fingers intertwined and gently squeeze them together several times as you exhale.
Other vocal sound ideas:
Recite memorized verses of Scripture, breaking them down into parts to match your exhalations. (Psalm 145 works great.)
Make a list of attributes of God and use one for each exhalation, giving silent thanks and worship as you do.
Use the “Jesus Prayer” throughout GDB: “Lord Jesus Christ . . . Son of God . . . have mercy on me . . . a sinner.”
Recite the Lord’s Prayer, using only a word or two for each exhalation: “Our Father . . . who art . . . in heaven . . .”
You can practice GDB when you are in a crowd, but instead of audible sound, sing or speak it in your mind. It’s a great practice to engage in when you a
re driving, in order to connect with God, calm your nerves, and prepare you for a coming meeting or other activity. This is also a wonderful tool to use with children. They love to see how their stomachs move up and down, and the finger tapping keeps them engaged. Teachers who would like to increase their students’ attentiveness can involve an entire class in GDB.
Be patient with yourself as you implement this practice. While you will experience immediate benefits, it won’t become completely natural until you’ve engaged in it for some time. Try different approaches based on the three core elements—breath, movement, and sound—until you find what works best for you. Given the unrelenting pressure of the distractions that inundate most of us, we will have to be intentional, determined, and consistent, taking comfort in knowing that God’s Spirit is working with us to change the very structure of our brains.
CHAPTER 05
MEDITATION—THE LABORATORY OF THE SOUL
A meditative mind can be strangely reminiscent of how we experienced the world as a child. We’re exquisitely ready for fresh illumination, hungry and wide open for novel insights, but at the same time, deliciously bathed in the present moment.
DANIEL BOR, The Ravenous Brain
ONE OF MY TWO ADULT SONS is the family tech expert, the one we turn to when our hard drives crash or our Internet is on the blink or we can’t figure out how to work an app on our smartphones. He is a true digital native, weaned on the family computer with the oversized monitor that loomed from a table in our dining room throughout his growing-up years.
When Jonathan was eight or nine, he became enthralled with a game that had something to do with theme parks. I never really understood how it worked, but somehow through the magic of programming he was able to design virtual amusement parks replete with rides, food stands, bushes, trees, and people moving along paths. I was particularly amused by the roller coasters that he worked on tirelessly; when done right, they produced tiny figures flying up and down the track in cars, screaming as carnival music played in the background.
As brilliant as my son’s computational skills seemed, the philosopher Martin Heidegger would say that his game relied on calculative thinking rather than meditative thinking. In short, meditative thinking, a capacity unique to our species, looks for the meaning behind an event, experience, person, or thing; calculative thinking, meanwhile, focuses on what is useful. As my son constructed bigger and better roller coasters, he was concerned solely with which keystrokes would produce the effect he wanted. He probably never pondered why certain people are thrill-seekers, or what an amusement park’s existence might reveal about the culture, or even what his own propensity to play the game for hours on end revealed about his soul.
While Heidegger wrote his Discourse on Thinking in 1959, long before the average person could even imagine having a home computer, his predictions about the rise of calculative thinking resonate with sober accuracy today. He observed then that people were becoming less and less interested in the meaning behind things. There in the infancy of the digital invasion, he was concerned that we would not be prepared to think deeply about the changes to come. Heidegger described this shift as more dangerous than the destructive potential of atomic energy and warned that “the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.”[1]
Many would say we are on our way to fulfilling Heidegger’s prophetic words. More and more we feel pressured to prioritize efficiency, multitasking ourselves into states of anxiety or exhaustion and rarely finding the space to really think about how we pass our time or what our relationship to technology might mean—to us as individuals and to our culture at large. There is no going back, we know. With the proverbial genie out of the bottle, our digital immersion will only increase in the years to come. So how are we to counteract this destructive inclination to blindly settle for what author Nicholas Carr calls “the shallows,”[2] where we master the art of managing information but fail to experience the joy of discovering truth—where knowledge is ever at our fingertips yet wisdom evades our grasp?
One proven means of counteracting these things is a practice rooted in our ancient history as people of faith: biblical meditation. Made in the image of God himself, our soul (encompassing our mind, will, and emotions) enables us to ponder life’s most critical questions—and, in fact, find fulfillment in doing so. This is perhaps why God challenged the Hebrew people to be diligent about keeping their souls (Deuteronomy 4:9), or why King Solomon promised that finding wisdom and discretion would bring life to our souls (Proverbs 3:22).
Meditation is a powerful way to engage our souls with focused intentionality that produces numerous benefits, some of which the Bible has long touted and others of which science has more recently affirmed. But first, what is biblical meditation, and how does it differ from similar practices so popular in our culture today?
The Uniqueness of Biblical Meditation
The term meditation is bandied about by a diverse army of proponents—from business executives to educators to talk show hosts to personal trainers—and the practices they promote are varied and nuanced. In general, however, most secular writing and teaching about meditation today refers to focusing and relaxation exercises (much like God-focused deep breathing, which I explored in the last chapter). Using some combination of breath and single-minded concentration, the emphasis is on calming the mind, but not necessarily stretching it.
While these practices are valuable on a number of levels and can be used to prepare our hearts for time with God, they do not fit the understanding of meditation that the Bible provides. There are two Hebrew words that are often translated as meditation in Scripture. The first, hagah, is an intriguing term used to describe everything from a lion growling over its prey to the sound of a harp being struck or a dove cooing. The idea is that of muttering or musing or talking to oneself in response to something. The other word, siyach, incorporates concepts such as bringing forth, musing, studying, and pondering.[3] Both words come together in Psalm 143:5: “I meditate [hagah] on all that you have done; I ponder [siyach] the work of your hands.”
Most references to meditation in Scripture call for a focus on God’s Word—his laws, statutes, and precepts. For example, as Joshua prepared to lead the people into the Promised Land, God told him, “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night” (Joshua 1:8). Similarly, the psalmist wrote, “I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways” (Psalm 119:15). Other topics identified for meditation in Scripture include God’s works, his ways or attributes, and simply God himself.[4]
Every human being thinks about God at some point. Those thoughts begin to establish pathways in our brain, whether we cultivate actual faith or not. And the truth is, our brains are capable of such depth and breadth that it seems we can never be fully satisfied, no matter how much we study, learn, or meditate on spiritual realities. Indeed, as one neuroscientist notes, “The more one contemplates God, the more mysterious God becomes.”[5] When I read this I couldn’t help but think of God’s reminder that his thoughts and ways are as far from ours as the heavens are from the earth (Isaiah 55:9); no one really comprehends God’s thoughts except his Spirit (1 Corinthians 2:11). As Christ followers, we will simply never run out of material upon which to meditate.
From the countless calls in the Old Testament to remember what God has done, to practical reminders in the New Testament epistles to fix our minds on complex issues like truth or loveliness or honor, God continually elevates the role of the human mind. From a biblical perspective, however, the mind is not limited to cognitive understanding. It encompasses everything from perceiving to feeling to judging to deciding. Vine’s Expository Dictionary describes the mind as the “seat of reflective consciousness,”[6] which points to the very capacity that sets us apart from every other species—our conscious
ness, our ability to reflect or to be self-aware.
Thus, Christian meditation is much more than a mental exercise; it is “the laboratory of the soul,”[7] where God does some of his most important work in transforming us from the inside out. Richard Foster explains that meditation enables us to create “the emotional and spiritual space that allows God to construct an inner sanctuary in the heart.”[8] I will end this chapter with ways to help us ensure this is taking place as we meditate, but first a look at the transformative benefits of this practice.
The Astounding Benefits of Meditation
There are so many beautiful promises in Scripture related to meditation: It can satisfy our souls like a gourmet meal, make us successful on our spiritual pilgrimage, and keep our minds in a place of peace, to name a few.[9] From a scientific perspective, meditation literally changes the structures of our brains, making them healthier in every way. Because of their neuroplasticity, whenever any human being ponders or muses on a deep truth or complex concepts, positive changes take place. But bringing God into the picture ups the ante. Here’s how neuroscientist A. B. Newberg explains it:
If you contemplate something as complex or mysterious as God, you’re going to have incredible bursts of neural activity firing in different parts of your brain. New dendrites will rapidly grow and old associations will disconnect as new imaginative perspectives emerge.[10]
The bursts of neural activity between two of these brain parts in particular—the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala—are significant for our spiritual journeys and give us insight into why meditation is integral to our formation as Christ followers. Stay with me here, because what I am about to share is a powerful reality.
The Wired Soul Page 7
