"Nested meditations" author uses clever wordplay to disguise deceptive teaching

There's nothing inherently wrong with the technique of "nested meditations," but the man who's popularizing it is using it to promote Roman Catholic mysticism. As reported by Nicki Gorny of the Toledo Blade, September 28, 2018 (link in original):

There’s something therapeutic about wordplay.

At least, there is the way Kevin Anderson does it. In a poetic format the local psychologist calls “nested meditations,” he watches how one idea can shift into another and then another.

Consider how the confessional “I live with self-doubt,” for example, turns into the defiant “I live with self-doubt / no more.” Add one more line to the nested meditation for a more visual metaphor: “I live with self-doubt / no more / than a lone pine tree doing its evergreen thing.”

“It’s what I call a playful form of cognitive therapy,” Mr. Anderson said. “How do you get to new thoughts? Well, this is one tool. You can play your way to new thoughts.”

Mr. Anderson, 58, of Monclova, introduced the nested meditation format in 2003 with a self-published book, Divinity in Disguise, that drew praise from Spirituality and Health magazine as one of the best spiritual books published that year. More than a decade later, he continues to explore and solidify the format in his recently released Now is Where God Lives: A Year of Nested Meditations to Delight the Mind and Awaken the Soul.

The devotional-style book is available online, including at the author’s website, thewingedlife.com, as well as at Reger's Church Supplies and Religious Gifts, 4100 Secor Rd., and Gathering Volumes, 196 E. South Boundary St., Perrysburg.

Mr. Anderson will have copies available at a book signing at 7 p.m. Monday at the Monclova Community Center, 8115 Monclova Rd., Monclova. He will read and perform several of the meditations at the event.

In the years since Mr. Anderson introduced the idea of a nested meditations, he’s seen it embraced by readers, some of whom write and send him their own meditations, he said. He’s also seen it picked up by pastors, teachers, prison-ministry leaders, and others who either use it themselves or encourage others to try their hands at it.

That’s a welcome development to Mr. Anderson, who sees benefits in the reflective nature of the meditations and the way they can take a writer in a unexpected directions.

A nested meditations starts with a phrase, then repeats it, and adds another line for a second stanza; the same pattern goes for the longer third stanza and the even longer fourth stanza. The trick is to add onto the preceding lines in a way that changes their meaning without changing their words: Maybe that’s adding punctuation, hyphenating a word, or playing with a double meaning.

Take “I want to leave this world awake,” a phrase that Mr. Anderson said he found himself scribbling about a year ago as he reflected on the implications of his late mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. When he played with the words, he explained, he came across a new meaning and a different image: “I want to leave this world a wake / of love behind the speedboat of my years.”

“You don’t get to the next line by thinking, What else do I want to write about my mother dying?” he said. “You get there by looking at the words.”

The unexpected places those words can go can be good for the writer.

“By getting out of the rational mind and into the playful mind,” Mr. Anderson said, “we can stumble on interesting stuff. That’s what nested meditations are about.”

Mr. Anderson draws many of the thoughts and images that appear in Now is Where God Lives from his day-to-day life, often universalizing and spiritualizing them as he plays with them. The spirituality that’s thematic throughout the book is particularly influenced by his Catholic faith and the mystic saints within that tradition; he specifically draws on the theology of immanence, which, rather than understanding God as a faraway presence, understands Him as saturating all things.

That idea is referenced in his opening meditation, which, reflecting the title of the book, begins “Now is where God lives.” For readers who engage with the book as a devotional, it sets the tone as the meditation listed for Jan. 1.

Mr. Anderson said he plans to encourage attendees at Monday’s signing to try their own hands at nested meditations. Those interested in learning more about the format are invited to attend.