The present moment as home in mindfulness of God – a spiritual autoethnography

This is a spiritual autoethnography. I focused on emergent, iterative, discovery-based research questions that I revisit in a form of spiral learning. The first was, ‘what is mindfulness of God and how might I cultivate it?’ My lived experience suggested my home was in the present moment with God. However, I was unable to be in the present because of anxiety. This led to a second question, ‘how can I reclaim my present moments from anxiety to be mindful of God?’ I discovered the roots of my anxiety lay in trauma of childhood separation. Through this experience of complete aloneness, I had to find my home in my own body. I recognized I did not live in all the rooms of my being. A deeper question emerged, ‘how could I be fully aware of and at home in my whole self to further reclaim my present moments?’ To be at home in the present moment with God I needed to be aware of my whole self. My embodied self only fully became home through awareness in the present moment, which became a graced spiritual reperceiving. My part was cultivating ethical mnemonic awareness, meditating on scriptural metacognitive propositions until they became metacognitive insights. This is part of my original contribution. I became aware I was in an implicit relationship of knowing with God, with moments of meeting. Part of this implicitness was an underground stream of symbolic knowing, my symbolic self. This adapted analogy of implicit relational knowing is also part of my original contribution. This ethical awareness crystalizes into an act of moral creativity where I reperceive God, myself, and others, recognizing the God-given creative word in each of us. I cultivate this mindful recognition, a novel application of mindfulness and recognition theory, in a unique mindful rule of life.