This triad’s autopilot stance is through the mental faculties.  Thus, some sort of sensory prayer/awareness is crucial. (Touch, taste, smell your way to the holy as Frederich Buechner says).  It takes them out of the dryness of their cognitive loop into a felt sense of their own experience.   They tend to become fascinated with spiritual ideas, concepts and inquiries. They’ve a quest for truth and meaning certain there is a truth that will make sense of a messy world.  The messiness of the outer world can feel overwhelming for this triad and they can become paralyzed in the inner space with all the thoughts searching for data and analysis.  

Integral Theory is oriented in this space and tends to draw many people from the mental triad.  If you consider the Integral notion of native perspectives:  3rd person (objective), 2nd person (intersubjective) and 1st person (subjective), then this triad tends to privilege the 3rd person which is why Integral articles can often have a felt quality of dryness.  The inward turn of meditation/contemplation can be an escape from the outer world rather than a truly contemplative experience.  The primary attraction/avoidance dance is: trust vs. non-trust.

Considerations in Contemplative Practice for Head Types: 

So, if we consider this type’s orientation towards 3rd person perspectives in a quest for meaning and truth, an antidote is often contemplative processes that take them into 2nd and 1st person experience.  This might include what Zuercher calls “dialogical prayer” which presupposes a holy Other.  So, that might include some sort of devotional prayer like body prostrations in which we bow to an image of the divine in humility.  I reside in this triad and as I do my prostrations, I see the massive white pine outside my window and I see it as a solid, elegant manifestation of Creation.  There is a quality of being humbled when standing receptively before the magnificence of the natural world.  I also do a heart prayer taught by Sally Kempton.  As I breathe, I breathe into my heart chakra and through the other side.  As I do this, I tend to first experience a felt sense of overwhelm because I begin to feel my body, my heart…emotion shows up.  My practice is to welcome the emotions trusting a more expanded Presence to hold them.   

Petitionary prayers can lift mental types from the potential dryness of the inner space.  When in earlier stages of faith, this may manifest as asking God to heal someone or grant a desired outcome.  As one matures, this may manifest as a simple holding of another in the expanded field of Presence…in the silence.  It opens the heart to another and offers a felt sense of interconnection.  Chanting does the same as it attunes one’s heart to the field of Love.  The whole body can attune to the music of the chant.  Body prayer is important.  One 5 says his tai chi practice allows him to attune to his entire body and has opened him to affective experience in surprising ways simply by practicing the forms with his whole self.

Communal prayer and devotion is helpful for head types.  The caution is that it is done not out of duty and obligation to the authority, but out of an intention/desire for connection (and to notice the ambivalence in making such connections).  I used to distribute Eucharist at Catholic Mass and often found a challenge in saying, “The Body of Christ” as I would be overwhelmed by the emotion of seeing the unique beauty of each hand: tender and young, manicured and flawless, tattooed and ringed, old and shaking, chewed fingernails, dirty and dry.  This exterior act moved Eucharist from a challenging concept to explain and understand to a felt sense of the universality of One Body.  

I’d like to share something Zuercher wrote that exquisitely articulated my experience of contemplative life in the natural world: 

Nature is ordered and planned, testifying to a providential Creator.  The vastness of sea, sky, and mountains offers consolation. While they may make a person feel small, they also make one feel safe in an ordered whole that does not overpower and where limits and boundaries are present. Things are in their fitting and right place. Everything has such a place in the world, and there is a Limitless One who designs this.

When I’d read the above, I’d just returned from a walk with my 17 month old grandson; we had picked leaves, pointed to changing colors, hollered at the tall tower in the woods, run up the steep hill leading to the creek.  Everything fit.  Everything belonged. I felt at home in the world. 

With all of that said, because these types live in the mental realm looking for truth, it is helpful to have one constant, steady practice which allows them to drop all thoughts, feelings and sensations and relax the mental busyness.  The above practices are supplements to this core practice.