Evocateur – a blog by John P. Schuster

Practice 10 – Step Back: Find Essence

March 19, 2024 evoker Practice

This is not any map you know. Forget longitude, forget latitude. Don’t think about the shortest distance or plotting the most direct route… you cannot divine how this path will lead you finally into the labyrinth of your own heart Jan Richardson Summary: When we step back, easing up on our focused seeking, something not seen before steps forward. If our intentions are good, and our aspirations beneficent and inclusive of all, formerly unseen dimensions[…]

Practice 9 – Release the Future

February 27, 2024 evoker Practice

All his life has he looked away to the future, the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Yoda Summary: This may be the most radical practice of the ten practices. Our attempt here is to go beyond the thought patterns that so often create anxiety, “stuckness” and their consequent tensions. So much of this comes from time pressures and how we view the future. We ease up on our constant attention to and[…]

Practice 8 – Be the Water

February 12, 2024 evoker Practice

Everywhere I go the world offers me its busyness. It does not believe I do not want it. Mary Oliver Summary: Many metaphors carry significance and meaning all by themselves, without elaboration. The name of practice 8 is one of them. Numerous positive associations come from this water metaphor—non-resistance, going with the flow, being easy-going and letting go of demands from the smaller thinking, non-aware, self. Here is our homage to the Tao, effortlessness, westernized[…]

Practice 7 – Grow the Love, Accentuate the Kind

January 30, 2024 evoker Neuroscience, Practice

Have compassion for everyone you meet … You do not know what wars are going on down there, where the spirit meets the bone. Lucinda Williams Summary: All the practices urge us to attend here to our mental and heart practices intensely, with vigilance, and way past what is seen as normal, or even reasonable. Our heart training, the giving and receiving of love in all its forms, is usually mixed at best. Parents and[…]

Practice 6: Accepting Over Getting

January 15, 2024 evoker Practice

Living in the gift of every hour Let all that is eternal within me welcome the wonder of this day. John O’Donohue Summary: We develop the habit early on of gaining and getting. We acquire things like food to survive and money to sustain ourselves, and then soon after things like accolades or titles to embellish our self-opinion. Practice #6 is about balancing out this gain/get meta-habit. To go past the acquire-at-all-times mode, we need[…]

Muzzling the Mystery: the neuro-science of (dis)enchantment

January 2, 2024 evoker Neuroscience

We got our kids presents this year again. We may be helping them apply for college or get to practices so they can keep advancing their sports performance. Let me ask you a question. Did you spend much time over the holiday helping them go deeper into the mystery of life and this season? Oughtn’t we put life’s mystery and meaning above cool presents and better times? So much mystery is in the air around[…]

Practice 5 – Going Humble and Grateful

December 1, 2023 evoker Gratitude, Humility, Uncategorized

Gratitude is the wine of the soul. Go ahead and get drunk. Giving thanks for abundance is greater than the abundance itself. Rumi Summary: Humility and gratitude are fundamental. They are like blocking and tackling in football and throwing and catching in baseball– the basics. All psychological growth, loving relationships and spiritually tuning in depend on these two foundations: and they feed each other. They deserve our attention. Humility and gratitude sound like virtues in[…]

Practice 4 – Letting Go of Our Inner Editor

November 17, 2023 evoker Practice

Points of view, opinions: enough already “It is our deep attachment to this false or manufactured self that leads us into our greatest illusions. Most of us do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.” Richard Rohr Summary: Inside our heads mental traffic is playing out on the visual screen and in our chattering voice. This is all day, every day. One big segment of this traffic is our inner[…]