Looking in

Caverly Morgan is a woman with a mission. “The focus of my life is to bring more consciousness to my own life and hopefully others,” she says. To that end, she’s created One House of Peace, located at 1470 27th Avenue, a quiet space for people to focus on turning inward.

Morgan leads group meditations at One House of Peace, but most of her work is one-on-one consultations with individuals of all faiths looking to deepen their spiritual practice. She hopes to help her students quiet their minds enough to connect with their own inner guidence. “In terms of the still small voice inside, I’ve never met someone who didn’t have it,” she says, “but I’ve met plenty of people who can’t hear it.”

What is awareness practice?

It’s an experience of wanting to be more fully here for the lives we have. Meditation gets a reputation like, “Why are people even doing that? I guess it just makes them more calm or peaceful or whatever.” I can’t emphasize enough how much having awareness practice be my main focus means that everything else in my life comes through that focus. I make decisions differently than I used to.

How can awareness practice improve our lives?

If I’m unconscious that my thought patterns lead to suffering, I am bound to be run by them. But when I have the awareness: “Oh! Here I am again, more thoughts about the future and how I don’t have enough money,” when I recognize that’s what’s going on, that’s when hope enters the scene. I gain the awareness that it’s not the only reality there is for me.

What keeps us from inner peace?

I see some amazing themes in my consultations. No. 1: There is so much stimulation in our society that it’s very easy to forget what’s important to us. It’s easy to wake up and think, “Wait a minute. What am I doing with my life? I’ve lost touch with what’s true. I’ve lost touch with my deepest heart’s desire, and I’m just going through the motions.”

Another theme I see is that we all know the right answer. We know we need to be more present and take the time to turn our attention inward. A lot of us know that would lead toward a more peaceful life. There are a lot of studies now about mindfulness that even skeptics can’t argue with, about how much it benefits our lives to show up and be more present. So the big theme I see is that we know the right answers and we don’t know how to implement them.

How do we implement them?

I’ve witnessed incredible shifts in peoples’ lives from taking on even a five-minute-a-day meditation practice.

What do you say to people who find meditation boring or frustrating?

I would say, “Hallelujah!” You are someone who knows how to have compassion for the human experience. Even though the contents of our minds are different, we’re all up against the same thing. We all have minds that wander. The very nature of a meditation practice is to learn how to change our relationship with something like a wandering mind. … Fundamentally, what a meditation practice offers us is the experience of unconditional acceptance.

That’s hard.

We’re so addicted to the idea that we just need to be better people. “Life’s going to be OK once I’ve lost 5 pounds. If only I meditated every day, I’d be able to control my anger.” A person who’s practiced meditation for a long time probably doesn’t struggle with anger the same way as when they first started, but it’s not because they now know how to control their anger. It’s because they are in touch with that inner guide that can say, “Hey, come back to the present moment. Come back to that place of unconditional acceptance.”

So, we’re meditating and we’re getting frustrated and our mind is singing commercial jingles. Now what?

Use the breath as the thing that anchors our attention here. When a thought comes in, or a commercial jingle, simply notice it and bring the attention back to one. I’m a fan of counting the breath as a way of anchoring the attention. There’s nowhere we’re trying to get to. You count to 10. When you get to 10, you go back to one.

This reveals our habits of thinking. If, every time I try to get to 10, my mind is filled with thoughts about the future and what I’m going to do with my life, it’s helpful for me to see that’s a conditioned wagon-wheel rut that is easy for me to fall into. When I see it happen, I can simply label it “future anxiety” and return back to one.

<hr>

Try it now
Caverly Morgan’s simple changes for inner peace

Commit to daily five-minute meditations.

Make time each day to meditate, even just five minutes. Focus on the breath and use that to bring your attention into the present moment. Let all other thoughts go.

Cultivate silence.

Try spending 10 minutes with the TV, phone and stereo off. Eat one meal a day in silence, without multitasking. Try driving to work in silence.

Enlist a friend.

Group support is key to sustaining a meditation practice. Put something on the calendar with a teacher or a sitting group. Become a fan of One House of Peace on Facebook for a daily meditation thought, or visit www.onehouseofpeace.org for a schedule of group classes.

Clarify your priorities.

If your intention is to live your deepest heart’s desire, you will order your life to support that intention. Create time and space to be clear about what’s important so you can follow through.

If we meditate badly, is it still helping?

What a meditation practice reveals over time is that the voice that says, “I’m doing it badly” is the very voice we’re trying to get some space from. Most of us walk around believing we are what we think. And because of this, we struggle a lot. When we start a meditation practice, we can see that those thoughts are background noise and don’t have to be something we’re aligned with.

The most powerful part of a meditation practice is when we make the turn and realize that we do it because we love doing it. If I have this New Year’s resolution that I’m going to meditate and it’s all coming from this idea that I’ll finally be the right kind of person who can say I’m spiritual and I meditate every day, then that’s absolutely not sustainable.

But what if I say I’m taking five minutes a day to be with me and turn my attention inward, with the awareness that I’m giving my attention to other people all the time? If the foundation of that practice is a gift I’m giving myself, then it becomes something we fall in love with. At this point, no one could talk me out of that experience.