In last week's newsletter I shared the first of five pillars of mental well-being: awareness. Instead of living on auto-pilot, with lives characterized by distraction, denial, and destructive, out-of-control rumination, we live with attentiveness and focus on what is happening in and around us. If you haven't
watched this video already, I encourage you to do so.
One of the practices I recommended in that video is meditation. Meditation has been an important spiritual practice since the beginning of time. It's referred to repeatedly in the Old Testament, and a little less in the New. But for some reason, Christians seem to have forgotten about it, and some are even afraid of it. They (mistakenly) associate it with Eastern religions. But read the any of the Church Fathers, or for that matter, read the more popular book "The
Way of the Pilgrim" (which is about an 18th century Russian peasant), and you'll see how important meditation -- and what we might more technically think of as "meditative prayer" or "contemplative prayer" -- has been for Christians for centuries.
What makes meditation so important today is that our modern world -- with it's stress and the constant "noise" of marketing, news, and media -- makes the deliberate practice of meditation almost essential in order to keep out minds clear and hearts from growing fragmented and spiritually stale. On top of this, improvements in the technology that allows us to study brain activity have allowed us to study the effects of meditation on our brains, and the results range from
promising to downright astonishing. We NEED this practice today, more than ever.
As Emily Fletcher points out in the video below, this is not because meditation is magical in any way ... it's because we are so stressed out and over-stimulated today that we need it so badly, and that's why the positive results of people who do it are so pronounced.
I'm sharing a video below that offers some good instruction about how meditation helps us, which also helps clear away some of the confusion about it.
Remember my caveat whenever I share a quote or link to an article: I am sharing this because it contains helpful information. I don't know enough about Emily Fletcher to say whether I am a "fan" or that I endorse all that she teaches. The same is true for Vishen, her interviewer. I'm only sharing this because what they say HERE is helpful, and important.
And yes, it's really helpful stuff. Pay special attention to what she says about how meditation is NOT a matter of somehow emptying our minds. We can't stop our brains from having thoughts, anymore than we can stop our hearts from pumping blood. Meditation is about training ourselves to exercise control over our minds, and -- as she emphasizes -- allowing our physiology to be restored. I hope you find this helpful. They don't get into a specific "here's how you do
meditation, step one, two, and three." In fact, there are a few DIFFERENT ways you can go about it (and some are more compatible with the meditation we read about in the Bible than others). Let me know what you think:
