John Dupuy on Interior Work and Integral Practice
I can describe what I've gone through, but I won't try to hand it to you as a prescription. Spirituality isn't something you accept secondhand. It's an encounter. You have to meet that deep reality yourself, or else what you're left with is recovery that has no practice behind it, religion stripped of practice. When that happens, everything drifts outward. The externals take over and the inner life gets ignored, and at that point the whole thing stops helping. It turns into a problem.
Read the gospels we actually have and you'll notice Jesus keeps pointing inward. Go into your closet in secret and pray, he says, and your father who sees in secret will reward you. The instruction is to do the interior work. He's forever slipping away from his disciples and the crowds, heading off alone to a mountain to pray, basically to refuel. That impulse is sitting right there in the source code of the Christian scriptures, and it may be the part that popular Christianity has let fall away, particularly in the United States.
There's been a return to interior practice lately, through Thomas Keating, through centering meditation and centering prayer. I practice centering prayer myself, and I teach my students a version of it that I've stripped of the theology. The basics are simple. Put on the headphones, which will carry you into that deep space. Settle your attention in your heart. Surrender to your higher power, whatever that means to you right now, and trust that your sense of what higher power is will grow and deepen the longer you stay with the work. When the mind drifts, and it will, bring it back. Keep a word to return to. Surrender to it, and just remain present.
It's a genuinely powerful practice, and paired with the audio technologies available now it becomes something that can really change a person. People notice results fast. Sometimes the very first session, almost always within the first few weeks.
Something else came to me only in the past few days. We talk about integral practice, about the need to train both the interior and the exterior. Most people, when they head to the gym or run through a workout, can get it done in roughly 40 minutes. So here's a balanced way to think about it. Forty minutes of hard, committed physical exercise every day, and alongside it, 40 minutes of hard, committed interior exercise. That's how you honor the inside and the outside at once.