ISM Guided Meditation
Here is a 20 minute guided meditation to help you get started. It is facilitated by Dr. Juliet Rhode-Brown. Each step is marked by a gong and contains an introduction followed by silence for individual meditations.
ISM SUMMARY
ISM (InterSpiritual Meditation) is a seven-step contemplative process that can be shared by people from many perspectives and traditions. It can be practiced alone and in community with others. It pulls together key elements of contemplation and meditation shared by many traditions. In this process we gather in the language of silence and experience inter-connectedness. Joining in stillness, we don’t impose on others our own personal beliefs, rituals, or the names for our absolute truths, deities, or God. We honor and celebrate the wise and compassionate practices of all traditions. We discover a profound unity within our diversity. We flourish in the love, peace, compassion, gratitude, and the strength of our shared wisdom. We are of one heart. Quietly, each in our own way, we join in the following seven stages together. The sound of a bell leads us from one stage to the next.
Through a process of systematic journaling and meditation on each of the seven steps, you will forge and refine a meditation that is rooted in one tradition, and/or the contemplative wisdom your have gained a variety of teachers, traditions and your own life experience.
Please remember that Steps 1–4 are contemplative. Meaning, as you focus on each step, you will bring to mind your personal journal summaries for that step. These summaries, that might include the wisdom from one or more sources, will provide the focus for your contemplation.
In Steps 5–6 you enter into a non-conceptual focus on your chosen object(s) of meditation. This focus be can be a meditation you already practice (for example, Centering Prayer, Transcendental Meditation, Breath or Mantra) or one that you have personally discerned for this meditative process. If you don’t already have a specific meditation practice, the breathing meditations explained in the two books will provide you with a place to begin. Your exploration of various types of meditation through our custom search tool, will also help you to refine the focus for these steps of meditation.
Finally, in Step 7, you return to the contemplative mode as you formulate the dedication of service to others that you have developed in your exploration and journaling.
Recommended Books
These books are highly recommended for this course.
Our goal is to create a contemplative practice that helps us to
- be heathy, happy, grateful, loving, mindful, wise and in service to others;
- draw on the wisdom of one or more authentic secular and spiritual traditions;
- harness the potential of our personal spiritual styles;
- cultivate a practice that honors the diverse practices and perspectives of others.
This course engages contemplative experience, intellect, and interpersonal sharing. Our classes contain the following elements:
- Selected readings from “InterSpiritual Meditation.”
- Selected readings from “Meditations for InterSpiritual Wisdom.”
- Supplementary written, audio, and video resource materials.
- Weekly audio and video instructions by the teacher on each step on ISM.
- Daily individual and guided meditations.
- Weekly live webinars recorded for later listening.
- Personal journaling and reflections on each step of the meditation.
- Worksheet Journals for each of the seven steps in the meditation.
- Work with a dyad partner and mentor.
My intention is to provide you with a process to engage in the inner art and science of meditation in a way that is compatible with your own life experience, spiritual perspectives, spiritual learning style, questions, chosen tradition, and the teachings and examples of others. It is meant to help you to recognize, cultivate, and utilize the special capacities of consciousness that can be your internal allies for transformation. It is also meant to help you bring together practices and perspectives you have gained in your previous studies with other teachers and traditions. In this way, these seven steps will provide a container in which you can include accumulated wisdom from may sources.
Your journaling will help to marry your intellectual understanding and your contemplative and meditative experience into a single, coherent, and comprehensive practice. Based on the extensive writings in your journal, you will create brief summaries of your personal purpose, content, and focus for each of the seven steps of contemplation and meditation. Each step in your meditation will be based on the summaries of your journal writings.
This online course also contains poems, stanzas, and scriptural passages from many spiritual traditions that pertain to each of the seven steps. These will help inspire and stimulate your own contemplative process to be recorded in the journal. If you have your own favorite poems, writings, songs, etc., to stimulate your journaling, please utilize these as well