The reflection goes like this:

Be still and know that I am God.

Be still and know that I am.

Be still and know.

Be still.

Be.

If we go into prayer with this, leaving a space between each line, we make the journey from God-out-there to God-within-us.

Something about the shortening of each line and the final "Be" brings us to the inner place of contemplation.

Of course, there are many other aids to meditation. Each is designed to facilitate the same journey of awareness.

In stillness, we realise that God is within us.

Some people light a candle or incense, using light or fragrance to achieve stillness.

Others may use music or words like maranatha - come, Lord Jesus.

Also, body awareness can help meditation, deep breathing and muscular relaxation.

Whatever method is used, the aim is stillness, a calmness that settles over us, unwinding physical and mental tension.

When we can achieve that, there comes the 'knowing' that can't be put into words.

I have tried all of the above methods and have always struggled with what I call "head noise," a busy brain disturbing peaceful intentions.

I see myself as a tree with upper branches full of chattering birds.

I cannot make the head noise go away.

However, I have learned to hear the chatter without engaging with it. Instead, I focus on the stability and stillness of the tree trunk.

That seems to work.

In recent years, age has given me new tools to work with.

One of these could be considered a nuisance. It's the gap when a word disappears.

When I write, I have access to the words I need, but that is no longer so with speech.

There are holes in the fabric of talk.

Nouns - and especially proper nouns - will disappear and leave me stranded like a fish on dry land.

Not long ago I wanted to tell someone that a good friend, a children's author, had died. I could not remember my friend's first name.

There was an embarrassing silence.

The next day it came to me. Her first name was the same as mine. It was Joy.

I know these lapses are common in people my age, but I did not anticipate how they would benefit meditation.

When names disappear there comes a new spiritual awareness of unity.

Naming is necessary for order. Society would not cope without it. Yet the naming of things also tends to separate.

I wonder if that's the meaning of the Biblical story ‘The Tower of Babel."

Language divides the oneness of creation.

So what has this to do with meditation?

When a noun drops out of sight, it leaves a little gap through which we see the Oneness of everything.

It's a Oneness usually cloaked in layers of words, and seeing it is a gift that comes with age.

When we experience it, all we can say to God is "Thank you."

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

Wise writings from the Church touched something in me that was formless yet real and was waiting to be acknowledged.

I think that many of us start meditation after realising this world doesn't meet our deepest desires. Human ambition has its place but it doesn't satisfy spiritual hunger.

Once we begin meditation, it becomes an internal compass to steer our days.

When I've been busy and have missed morning meditation, my day can seem fragmented and lacking in energy.

It is important for me, that my morning begins with Jesus, the Word made flesh.

You may meditate in the evening, and will probably choose an aspect of the Trinity, or the Mother of our Lord, whatever is important for you.

I usually begin with something from the daily reading. Some people meditate on a single word. Others choose an image.

Whatever we use, is a path, or signpost, a way to a space beyond words.

Of course, words do invade our quiet because our minds are likely to chatter.

We are like a tree deeply rooted, with birds chirping in the branches. We let the chatter continue and go gently beyond it to our deep roots.

What do we bring to meditation?

I believe the most important thing is openness.

By this, I mean we are not divided.

We try to avoid thinking about what we don't like, and we don't hold fast to what we do like.

A divided mind tends to make God too small.

When I can accept the oneness of God in everything, I find peace.

In day to day living, we rely on our senses to describe reality. We know what we can feel, hear, taste, touch, smell.

In meditation, we come into contact with the formless reality we describe as spiritual.

Actually, it is our senses that take us from form to the formless, and the Church in her wisdom has always known this.

Candles, flowers, music, statues, spoken word, incense, raiment, stained glass - all of these can escort us into meditation.

Occasionally I've been asked, "What happens in meditation?"

The answer is, "Nothing and everything."

Those of you who meditate know exactly what this means.

Meditation is not a ‘happening' exercise. It is about the prayerful connection that takes us beyond ourselves.

It is a real experience of Jesus' words to his followers. "I am in you as you are in me."

And the day that follows has a sense of wholeness that is difficult to describe. An ordinary day, yes. But everything in it seems part of a oneness.

There is a feeling that we are all drops of water in the ocean of God.

Meister Eckhart put this another way: "The ground of God and the Ground of the soul is one."

In meditation, we know this ground as love.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

Unless you can genetically inherit religion I am most certainly not Catholic.

My Irish grandmother was Catholic, but I think she had God whipped out of her by the nuns at Erskine College at age 13.

She was one of the naughtiest girls in her year, and the reckless auburn-haired nymph apparently spent more time being scolded, whipped and made to open and close a door silently a thousand times to teach her to never slam them.

She went on to be an artist's model, dancer, and horror of all horrors, wife of a man brought up in a well-heeled Church of England family.

Her Catholic was both self-exorcised and sent into exile.

Still, there is something about Catholicism that interests. So much so that I was moved to tears at the feet of Mary in a cathedral in Prague, and I became heady with the smells of frankincense and old wooden church floors.

Last Sunday I went to my first ever mass. How peculiar.

I am not strictly a religious person at all.

I am neither a believer nor an atheist.

I have no interest in what other people believe in.

I certainly don't attack people for their beliefs or non-belief.

I grow tired of intellectuals pouring scorn on religion.

I don't understand the point of the haughty and articulate people who take pleasure in trying to break the spirits of those people who only have faith as a means to survive life.

I can grow angry at so-called prophets and religious demi-Gods who use religion as a means to grow wealthy.

There are bully believers and bully non-believers, and all of them are needlessly cruel.

Back to being a fake Catholic.

U2 sang, "I still haven't found what I'm looking for".

Lately, the lyric has played on my mind, and I don't even like U2. (Possibly a sin against God in itself.)

The closest I come to belief in some higher power is portrayed in the Robin Williams movie "What Dreams May Come". I find believing in anything without multiple scientific studies a little tricky to swallow.

In this movie, which despite Robin Williams is not a comedy, the after-life resounded with me in a semi-spiritual way.

So I assume given all these things I'm a curious agnostic. (Great name for a clothing brand.)

Prayer for me is easy.

I figure there is no harm in it, and without sounding 'fruity' or 'nutty' or the whacky combo of 'fruity and nutty', it seems to work.

I don't pray for wealth, and a tall dark stranger. I just chat away to friends and family who have left this mortal coil. I believe it's called 'covering my bets'.

Close friends are both strident atheists who I refuse to argue with. There's no point. Other close friends go to new age born again services (cringe).

This is not an option for me. I find any group activity involving arm waving and bad singing of popular songs, with lyrics changed to praise the Lord, both awkward and mortifying.

I'm far too ‘British' to close my eyes, and reach up to the heavens, though I'm perfectly OK with them doing it if I don't have to witness it. Continue reading

• Polly Gillespie describes herself as a...talker, writer, wonderluster, provocateur, fighter for social rights and justice, flawed but a work in progress. Her passions are listed as writing, radio, interviewing, provoking and laughing...

A quarter of the 2000 prisoners, guards and management in the overcrowded prison regularly practise meditation

It has transformed life in the prison. Suicides are down 40 per cent; there have been no reports of violence since 2012; solitary confinements are down 50 per cent. Continue reading

But as David Gelles observes in his new book, that contrast is dissolving, perhaps for the better.

In Mindful Work, Gelles, a business reporter for The New York Times, catalogues the nascent trend of establishing employee well-being programs that promote mindfulness, an activity that is perhaps best described as doing nothing.

More precisely, mindfulness means drawing one's attention to the sensations of the present moment, and noting, without frustration or judgment, any mental wanderings that get in the way.

It can be done anywhere—at your desk, on the subway platform—and at any time. Decades of research suggest that setting aside time for mindfulness can improve concentration and reduce stress.

Gelles first reported on the rise of corporate mindfulness programs in 2012 for The Financial Times, when he described a rare but promising initiative at General Mills. In the years since, similar programs have popped up at Ford, Google, Target, Adobe—and even Goldman Sachs and Davos.

This adoption has been rapid, perhaps due to its potential to help the bottom line: Aetna estimates that since instituting its mindfulness program, it has saved about $2,000 per employee in healthcare costs, and gained about $3,000 per employee in productivity.

Mindful employees, the thinking goes, are healthier and more focused.

I recently talked to Gelles about why mindfulness programs are sprouting up and what happens when you expose a practice unconcerned with materialism to the forces of capitalism. The interview that follows has been edited and condensed for the sake of clarity. Continue reading

Sources

• The Atlantic
• Image: Psychology Today

Condiments pass across the table at the raising of an eyebrow or flick of a finger.

One diner sees a neighbouring table's empty water jug and rises quietly to fill it.

A mix of religious and non-religious, the group had never met until a month ago.

Most of them had never visited this place.

Now, 30 days later, they share a close connection but can scarcely remember the sound of each other's voices.

When their voice boxes are finally awoken after a month of disuse, one man declares "silence has become my friend".

Another calls it the most radical experience of her life.

After a hugely busy year, writer Dame Joy Cowley was feeling "about as sharp as a wet cornflake".

So she switched on her email out-of-office - and disappeared for a month.

But her email bounce-back message wasn't the Rarotonga beach break brag.

"Terry and I will be on a silent retreat from Nov 2 to Dec 7. We will not have internet contact at this time. Joy," was the message.

For a month Cowley and her husband lived at Island Bay's Home of Compassion, which functions as an urban monastery.

The mission was rest, renewal and reflection, in the oldest tradition of the Catholic Church.

The twist was that it all had to be achieved in complete silence, save for a 15-minute daily chat with a spiritual director.

For Cowley, spirituality and creativity are inextricable.

"I wouldn't know the difference between meditation and writing."

She already wakes at 4am every day to savour half an hour of quiet before the emails begin and the phone starts ringing. But even for her, spending an entire month in silence was hard work.

"You really have to look at yourself very closely. There are always bits of ourselves that we would like to discard and you have to accept those." Continue reading

Article and Image:

• The Dominion Post

Looking is oddly different on the stationary bike. Before I sat on this machine, before the business with the hip, I walked. All the time, miles every day, and it was like I had my looking with me on a leash. That was why I walked, a big part of it anyway. I loved the feeling of the moving eye. The neighbourhood streets were mostly always the same, so I used to pretend my gaze was a lens fixed on a rolling cart, a camera dolly. I would try to walk as evenly as I could so that I could film everything I was passing. And this, for some reason, allowed me to see it differently, put things into a new perspective. It's similar to that other game I like to play. Make a box shape with both hands using thumb and index fingers. Look through, click. There in the little box — or the walking Steadicam — is what you normally see, along with the idea of seeing what you normally see. Which makes it completely different. And this, I'm finding, is what happens when I get myself up on the seat and start to pedal. Continue reading

Sources

• Sven Birkerts in Aeon
• Image: Theracycle Blog
  

Sven Birkerts is the director of the writing seminars at Bennington College in Vermont.

It is one of a number of Catholic schools in New Zealand that has adopted the practice of teaching Children to meditate

Principal Celeste Hastings said the school had introduced meditation so children could learn the importance of taking time out.

"In this day and age, when everybody can be really busy, we think teaching kids the skill of slowing down and just having a bit of quiet time is a life skill, really. It's asking them to stop and just be a little bit reflective."

Parent Francesca Ngan said it was a great initiative.

Her son Zachary Lorenz, 9, told her it made him feel calm. "It is really quite lovely."

It was hoped the whole 218-pupil school would eventually participate in the classes, taken by Sister Ema Konokono from Our Lady's Home of Compassion.

Source

• Stuff.co.nz
• Image: Stuff.co.nz

The results published in the Archives of Internal Medicine provide hard data from the first long-term randomised clinical trial of its kind on the topic.

"These findings are the strongest documented effects yet produced by a mind-body intervention on cardiovascular disease," said lead author Robert Schneider, director of the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa.

'The effect is as large or larger than major categories of drug treatment for cardiovascular disease.

The NZ$4.6 million study was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. Scientists tracked 201 African American men and women with an average age of 59, all of whom had narrowing arteries in their hearts. Participants stayed on their current medication and were randomly assigned to either a meditation group or a control group that was given 'conventional health eduction classes.'

Comparing the two groups, researchers found that those who practiced Transcendental Meditation decreased the likelihood of death, nonfatal heart attack and stroke by 47 per cent. People in the meditation group experienced significant drops in blood pressure, stress and anger, which could help explain the results, the researchers said.

Transcendental Meditation was made popular by the Beatles during the flower power era of the 1960's and is also practiced by celebrities such as Richard Branson, Jerry Seinfield, Moby, and author John Gray.

Source

• Straits Times
• Answers.com
• Image: Mail Online