Visio Divina

As you can probably tell by now, I love taking pictures. I fact, all the photos on this blog are mine, and ones captured spontaneously, as part of my day-to day life. One day, when I was reading about meditation, and meditative practices, I realized how my photography practice was also a form of meditation. It made me focus on something, and in a very detailed way, not unlike another form of meditating I enjoy - candle gazing. Nothing else seemed to matter but my subject, and what I saw was miraculous, even Divine.

I later learned about the term “Visio Divina,” (Latin for “divine seeing”), a form of centering prayer, with images or other media. It is prayer with the eyes of the heart. And similar to the practice of Lectio Divina, a method of praying with scripture.

When I see something to photograph,I zoom in (even without a great zoom on my camera) tp see the most minute of details. The “veins” on a leaf, the lines on a tree bark, the Fibonacci sequence in a sunflower. Evidence of a higher power, call it God or whatever else, is everywhere.

This process brings clarity, rengeneration, insight, and many times, naturally - healing on some level.

Maybe it’s the same feeling I have when I look at Byzantine iconography, or at images of Mother Mary (in spite of not being religious, or even Catholic or Christian).

Rudolph Steiner (who, if I was given the opportuity to meet any three people in history, would be on my list), had talked in his lectures about the healing benefits of meditating in a sequence of images of the Madonna (mostly by Raphael), originally under supervision in a clinical setting as a new form of therapy. An interesting book on this subject is Healing Madonns: Exploring the Sequence of Madonna Images Created by Rudloph Steiner and Felix Peipes for Use in Therapy and Meditation by Christopher Bamford.

Cheers to finding images to contemplate on, that open our hearts to the Divine, whatever that is to you.