The Home Altar

In recent weeks, I’ve been able to share a visualization exercise with several people about two important temporal postures that can dramatically affect our own sense of well-being and our relationship to the world around us. The visualization uses two concepts to help a person orient themselves in space-time.

Facing

Facing refers to the current orientation of our attention and focus. Our intention, care, and observer energy are directed at this time period. There are three fairly concrete directions and one esoteric/mystical direction. We can be past, present, future, or timeless facing.

Past facing involves the conscious intention to examine the past through memory, feeling, story, body-memories, and conversation. This can be as academic as reading and researching history and as deeply personal as a moment of grief or savoring a past triumph. Past facing holds gently that these things have already happened as far as we can tell, and that while we might be able to reframe or change the interpretation, we cannot change the reality of what did happen. The question for this space is “so what really happened?”

Present facing involves conscious intention to give our attention to the present moment. This may be through a focused activity like doing the work in front of me, or a more gentle awareness like mindfulness, noticing, meditation, or body work. It can even be deeply embodied like savoring the meal you are eating right now, mindful sipping of coffee or tea, or the enjoyment of physical connection with another person. Our attention is here and now. The question for this space is “so what’s here now?”

Future facing is our conscious effort to imagine what has not happened yet. It can be as goal oriented as practicing for a concert, taking an exam for a job, or filling out a planner for the month ahead. It can also be more soft focused, like imagining a plot for a book, daydreaming about an upcoming event, or mutual conversation about a shared dream for a good thing that has yet to come. The question for this space is “so what comes next?”

Timeless facing is the potential for incredible stillness that allows us to let go of time as a construct, experiencing, however briefly, a taste of eternal now where all sense of linear, cyclical, or spiral movement simply ends. It’s sort of the absolute zero of consciousness and a rare state that some of us might never be aware of experiencing. There are no questions here because thought is still.

In each of these modes, what moves is attention, intention, and focus. In the fourth, even attention itself dissolves like a spoon in the Matrix.

Dwelling

This aspect of our temporal posture is less about attentiveness and more about the felt sense of time in our bodies. Here we engage the sense of motion, velocity, gravity. Which phase is pulling us in and won’t let go.

Past dwelling can looks like rumination on what happened, time traveling body memories from previous overwhelming experiences, nostalgia, or even the forgetfulness that can come as we age- “In my imagination I’m 35 year old me”. In it’s most extreme form it can look like despair, “my best days are in the past, everything good is already behind me”, or “Everything has already been so hard, and I’m so beat up that I can’t even imagine a future.” Some forms of dementia leave a person permanently past dwelling because those synapses are what still works and the present is unintelligible.

Present dwelling is the embodied awareness that I am right here, right now. Its best version is an embodied mindfulness that marries movement and action with awareness and curiosity. Present dwelling can go off the rails though, when it becomes impulsive and arbitrary, behaving as if now won’t have consequences then. We have some many ways in popular culture to describe this phenomenon, fear of missing out (FOMO), You only live once (YOLO), do what feels good, I’ll be mellow when I’m dead. Successful present dwelling in contemplative life needs to be paired with the ability to shift through the different facing postures.

Future dwelling is the sense of racing ahead of everyone into the future. In it’s best sense it can be a space of wild innovation and creativity, being able to connect the dots and write the plans as if the moment had already arrived. At the same time, this race into the unknown can leave us anxious, fearful, constantly scripting entire dramas of what may be with no anchor in what is possible or likely. In the most somber sense, future dwelling is always racing on to what’s next without examining what happened or what is, it is finally, a race to the finish line, which for a human life is our final breath and the stillness of death.

Timeless dwelling is a way of articulating that not only has attention and awareness of time dissolved, but that the sense of the self as a separate container has dissolved as well, therefore the relationship of self to time becomes a non sequitur. This is a rare occurrence. The kinds of experiences related to this kind of dwelling are very intense moments of ego-dissolution, like near death experiences, profound psychedelic medicine journeys, mystical union through contemplation where the self and the Godself become indistinguishable spatially and temporally, and also the harrowing experiences like forms of psychosis, total catatonic dissociation, and traumatic psychedelic journeys.

Combination Move

We’re curiously complex creatures, and so we are capable of dwelling in one space and facing another. If I set an intention to prepare my schedule for the week ahead and look at how that will affect the prayer and meal schedule for the house, I can be simultaneously present dwelling and future facing. If I meet with a novice and we review their past month and the outcomes of their rule and what they learned in that time, we can be present dwelling and past facing together to help surface wisdom.

For folks who have endured instances or chronic traumatic stress, they can end up past dwelling and future facing at the same time. Everything that was too much, too fast, too soon in the past overwhelms any sense of the present and the future looms large as an ever present deliverer of new threats.

Sometimes during the healing and integration process, we borrow energy from our dwelling space and lend it to another space through our facing. For example, the felt sense of community in the present can be offered to a lonely past self through past facing attention and kindness.

As an exercise

This framework gives us an opportunity to tease out whether thoughts and feelings about a particular part of our story are a form of conscious attention and intention, or a felt sense of being “somewhen”. Even drawing awareness to the distinction, and then to the interplay, and the ways we can use different combinations to show deep compassion to both the dwelling place and the focus of attention for every part of ourselves can be a real help. Relativity teaches us that space and time are like a unified fabric, meaning that each somewhere is different, even if we return to a place, because it is a different somewhen. Mindfully relating to the mystery of time is another way to bring a contemplative lens to the actions of our everyday life.

As you practice today, can you notice the subtle shifts in your facing? What about your dwelling? Does that stay more steady? If your sense of dwelling changes, can you pay attention with loving curiosity to what is happening in those moments? How does understanding your temporal posture open your heart to telling a merciful story about what it’s like to be you today?

Be gentle with yourself, you are worth it.

Peace and Everything Good,

The Rev. JM Longworth, OEF Spiritual Direction and Trauma Care

https://www.sdicompanions.org/sdi-profile/GreenMtFriarOEF/ To book an appointment: https://calendly.com/greenmtfriaroef