This and the following fourteen blog posts earlier are from a retreat with Ilia Delio at Santa Sabina in San Rafael. I'm sharing what I learned and the ideas I am reflecting on.
To be itinerant does not mean to keep on the move all the time, it means not getting fixed on ideas and positions that have drawn us in the past. We can enter into deeper levels through acceptance of ancient means of disciplining the body found in yoga and contemplative prayer. We have capacities within us to enter into latent levels of new ways of being in the world. Our minds create the world we inhabit rather than the other way around. The brain is plastic and changes through interaction with the surrounding environment.
The mystics have trained brains disciplined to focus on union with the divine. We all have the capacity for this kind of focus and deeper experience of God but we deny ourselves the practice that would attain it.
Even after taking time to seek God in deeper moments of contemplation and retreats, when we return to the world we allow ourselves to go back to the so-called "normal" life that is fragmented, thinned out and false to who really are at heart.
We have to learn to live from the inner world outward instead of letting our interior whole self take its cues from the outer fragmented world. The deeper we turn inward the more in tune we are with the reality that lies at the heart of all matter, and that reality is God's love.
Reflections from Ilia Delio retreat based on her new book A Hunger for Wholeness: Soul, Space, and Transcendence.
