Noah Gundersen – Oh Death
February 7, 2024
Tag: spirituality
Lean into Darkness
February 4, 2024
And just when you feel like you have reached the blackest, sickest darkness, that is the time to lean in even further. When God feels out of reach, your only move is to become still, keep your ear to the ground and wait. The waiting itself will change you. And the answers are somewhere there in the dark and stillness.
Your Many Deaths
January 21, 2024
If you do it right, you will suffer many deaths in your lifetime. And if you do it right, each one will bring you closer to your real self. Believe it or not, everything that is happening in your life is working to bring about these little deaths, which will peel back the layers of your false self and allow the truest form of your being to emerge. Really your “false self” is just all the forms of you that existed before this and which must be shed, like a snake repeatedly sloughing off its skin. Other people may not even notice how you have changed, but you will feel like a new person, freshly alive in a new way (born again). It’s just the newest form of you – and you are destined to do it again.
Typhoon – The Sickness Unto Death
January 6, 2024
Old man in a rocking chair
You wake up, you’ve been living alone
After all these years
Surrounded by these shards of mirrors
God Is Outside Church
January 30, 2023
Do not be mistaken: God is not contained within the church – inside its walls or any of the structures the church has put forth to try and capture God’s essence. God may be there at the church building if you carry God there with you inside yourself. Or God may be noticeably (or not so noticeably) absent. God comes and goes as God pleases, so there are many places you might find God.
Practicing Presence: Internal Models
January 18, 2023
Meditation helps us access and internalize the good in the universe, letting it expand within us and become a resource we carry around all the time. The way we first learn to do this internalizing of any kind of presence is through our relationships with others. The people around us when we are growing up help us form some initial internal framework of what people and reality are like. We learn others are harsh and scary or that there is great good in the world – maybe both. We then carry around these internal representations and they “help” us interpret all the other things we experience. They also help us form “rules” or “models” we unknowingly consult while interacting with the world. This all happens most of the time underneath our conscious awareness, so these internal models are having an effect all the time without us knowing it.
Getting Started With Contemplation – Taking Stock Of What Is There
November 13, 2022
The first thing to do if you are wanting to start practicing meditation/contemplation is to start by paying attention to and “tracking” everything going on inside yourself. Your inner experience is complex. It is made up of your thoughts and feelings, but there are other things, too – physical sensations, imaginings, intentions, a million little impulses. Before practicing meditation/contemplation, your inner experience can feel out of control. The goal is not to completely control your inner life or eliminate all the “noise.” It is just to start with what is there and organize it a little to achieve a more centered experience.
Becoming Open
June 20, 2022
I’ve had some things on my mind for a while, so I thought I better write them down. I’ve come to believe prayer is just learning to be open. It is not about saying anything or changing anything. It’s about learning to open yourself and practice intimacy. I’ve spent a lot of time exploring my inner world and realize now that it was all so I could learn to let God in. And if you do that, you will soon learn to let others in. The whole goal then is to provide space (“hospitality”) inside for everything you are going to experience in your life.