Mindful Living My wife and I celebrated 45 years of marriage in August. I have made many commitments in my life, but two of them stand out as having shaped me, as having been deeply formative influences on the person I am today. Those two factors are marriage and meditation. While we married at a…
Mindful Living We all want to be loved. My youngest granddaughter has been staying with us for some time now and has grown increasingly close and loving. She will often tenderly stroke my arm when I’m playing with her or reading a story. And, just before she leaves for crèche each morning, she used to…
Mindful Living We are all called to live life to the full. That calls us to live beyond the limitations of the ego. Psychology teaches us that in the first part of our life we need to develop the ‘ego’, as part of our survival instinct. We need a healthy and balanced ego, which provides…
Mindful Living We are all called to live life to the full. That calls us to live beyond the limitations of the ego. Psychology teaches us that in the first part of our life we need to develop the ‘ego’, as part of our survival instinct. We need a healthy and balanced ego, which provides…
Mindful Living These articles on meditation each month are written to point towards a contemplative way of being in the world and to nourish in readers an awareness of who they are at the deepest level of their being. It is not particularly helpful for anyone to take a single article and to draw inferences…
Mindful Living Thinking hinders the coming into awareness of the unconscious, including our awareness that the spirit of God dwells in us. It is through contemplative prayer that we are able to experience, albeit to a very different degree, the kind of experience Jesus had in prayer with his father. Christian dogma and doctrine, important…
Mindful Living While walking one day, Jesus caught sight of a person who had been blind from birth. We can be confident that just as Jesus didn’t ignore him neither will he ignore us. The Lord considers us worthy of his attention. While this person had been blind from birth, the parable nonetheless speaks to…
Mindful Living Meditation awakens us to the illusion of separateness. When we see only through the ego, everything becomes a competition, a comparison. It is all about ensuring my survival, my security, my salvation. But meditation awakens the heart and gives rise to a more expansive way of seeing. And when that way of seeing…
Mindful Living Derek Scally’s new book, wryly entitled ‘The Best Catholics in the World’, is a thought-provoking and timely book which raises some important questions for thinking people – why did the Irish for so long submit themselves to the authority of the clergy and the hierarchy? One of the lay people he interviewed for…
Mindful Living In my last article we explored the lack of spiritual consciousness in modern secular society and the capacity of meditation as a universal practice to awaken and deepen personal spiritual experience, whether such experience finds expression in secular or religious terms. This way of looking at spirituality is very different to the traditional…