ken wilson online

Talking to experienced blogger Garret who suggested I distinguish between”praying brain” blog entries and  “lectio” entries.  Makes perfect sense.

On the praying brain: I love reading science, especially on the emerging understanding of what is happening in the brain during prayer, especially of the mystical variety.  Prayer is something everyone does but few people understand or have a vocabulary for what’s going on when we pray.  Much prayer is experienced by the person praying as a kind of pious anxiety: a mulling over one’s problems or the problems of those for whom we are praying with a vague sense of aiming the mulling in God’s direction.

But that’s not what keeps the mystics coming back for more.  What keeps the mystics coming back for more is the awareness that prayer helps them get through their day.  I discovered that about eight years ago, after I went through a mild depression associated with the grief of losing my father after a long illness.  I wanted to keep praying, but prayer was just too hard.  So I started to experiment with some new prayer practices: using a prayer book with set prayers (I later learned this was called “fixed hour prayer”) and the practice of silence as in the “slow down your inner-grinding-ruminating thoughts” variety.  All the while I was reading science and stumbling into some of the new research on prayer from the studies done on praying brains.

And I learned that when the researchers look at the praying brain of meditating nuns of buddhist monks, they discovered very discrete patterns of brain activity, most of which have the effect of counter-acting or soothing the “fear-fight-flight” response.  Bingo. This is what most people NEED when they pray.  It’s what they WANT when they pray. But it’s not something they’ve ever LEARNED TO DO in their prayer.  But it can be learned.  And it appears that our brains wired to learn these practices.  More to come.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 16th, 2008 at 6:37 am and is filed under the praying brain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.