Jean-Guilhem Xerri is a psychoanalyst and medical biologist, who has developed a practice of controlling our thoughts.
“The Desert Fathers, Christians who took shelter in the
deserts of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine between the III and VII centuries,
lived as hermits in huts, caves, in trees, or even on top of a stone pillar.
They searched for a life of solitude, manual labor,
contemplation, and silence, with the goal of growing spiritually. Convinced of
the intimate union between the body, soul, and spirit, the Desert Fathers—who
we could also say were the first therapists—developed recommendations to heal
the “sicknesses of the soul.”
According to the Desert Fathers, uncontrolled thoughts are
the origins of some of the sicknesses of the soul. They identified eight
non-psychological sicknesses of a spiritual origin, classified by the monk
Evagrius as: greed of any sort, a pathological relationship to sex, a
pathological relationship to money, sadness, aggressiveness, acedia (an illness
of the soul expressed by listlessness, boredom, laziness – a precursor to
slothfulness) vanity, and pride. These eight generic diseases have a
pathological source: narcissism, which the Fathers called philautia, excessive
self-love.
Guarding the heart, in Greek nepsis (vigilance), is being
attentive to everything that happens in our heart. It is a spiritual method
which aims to free man of bad or passionate thoughts. It invites us to observe
the thoughts which penetrate our soul, and to discern between the good and the
bad.
Thanks Thomas
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