Mindful Living
Noel Keating
This monthly column is focused on the benefits of meditation for adults and children alike. The practical benefits have been demonstrated beyond doubt through scientific research over recent decades. The regular practice of meditation gives rise to physical, psychological, emotional and cognitive benefits.
For this reason, meditation is now regarded as a beneficial intervention for many health and mental-health conditions. That, on its own, is reason enough to take up the practice.
However, given the hectic pace of modern life, not many families have considered introducing meditation as a family practice. But right now, because of the threat posed by the coronavirus (Covid-19), our typical lifestyle has been altered, suddenly and dramatically. The need for social distancing has had the effect of isolating family units, so that whole families are now spending much more time than normal in each other’s company. That presents an opportunity for doing things together that families might not otherwise have considered.
Over recent years many schools have introduced meditation as a means of promoting wellbeing. The Meditation with Children Project – an initiative of Christian Meditation Ireland – has seen over 50,000 children across Irish primary schools introduced to the practice of meditation. In over 220 primary schools all across Ireland, the whole school falls silent at least twice each week as they all meditate together in silence. While whole-school meditation creates a palpable sense of community, it is ultimately a deeply personal practice which mysteriously changes, for the better, the consciousness and mind-set of those who meditate. Now that schools are unexpectedly closed for the foreseeable future, if your child has been meditating in school, why not ask him or her now to teach the whole family to meditate? If you speak to your child about meditation, you may be surprised at their capacity to describe in their own words how it has benefitted them. My research in recent years has shown that children are able to give rich metaphorical description to both the practical benefits and deeper fruits of meditation. But remember that any such description will be in language appropriate to their age and cognitive development, so you will have to listen carefully to the undercurrent of what they actually say. And you will have to bear in mind that language can only point to the deeper fruits – no words are adequate to describe rich personal spiritual experience.
All of the wisdom and religious traditions of the world say that meditation promotes human flourishing; that it deepens our sense of self-identity, our understanding of who we really are beyond the ego. Meditation deepens our awareness of our transcendent nature – one might say that it teaches us that we are the song that God sings. Through the regular practice of meditation, we discover such insights – not as moments of bliss while we meditate – but through the traces our unconscious spiritual experience leaves behind. And although we experience such insights as being too self-evident to doubt, nonetheless they remain incomprehensible to the rational mind and defy description in words – in prose at least. As Heidegger observed, poetry is language in service of the unsayable and the vocation of the poet is to evoke the holy. The Irish Bishops’ Conference, in the booklet A Reflection on Mindfulness: Rediscovering the Christian Tradition of Meditation and Contemplation (Veritas: 2018) reminds us that Christian meditation is ‘intended to be a movement beyond mental activity about one’s relationship with the Divine, to communion with the Divine, through Christ’
You can’t satisfy your hunger by reading the menu in the window of a restaurant nor can you taste honey by licking the word in a dictionary. Likewise, the only way to appreciate meditation is to practice it. So why not take up the practice now at home as a family? Explain that meditation is about being still in body and mind in God’s presence – not thinking about God or about anything – simply being. When we attempt to do that we find that thoughts arise in our minds unbidden and typically we get caught up in them. But in meditation we choose to let them go by bringing our attention to a word. It can be any word but the Christian tradition recommends the word Maranatha, said as if it were four separate words Ma – Ra – Na – Tha. Although we will be distracted often throughout our meditation, we simply return again and again to our word.
As you grow in meditation, you will come to understand that while your thoughts and preoccupations keep getting in the way, what’s in the way is, in fact, the way. Even though you may repeatedly get caught up in your thoughts, you will also discover you have the determination and discipline to return to your sacred word, over and over again. You will come to appreciate that at the deepest level of your being that, in between the thoughts and beyond ordinary self-consciousness, your unconscious experience is one of communion with the Source of all being. And that mysterious experience will change you.