Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung, September 6, 2022.
A renewed interest in meditation practices is growing in our country. It is being used to increase consciousness, to improve health and vitality, to deepen one’s spiritual life and to offer a counter way of being conscious of our everyday experiences. It is also being evoked by more individuals pausing in their lives to ask: What kind of world is being shaped and insisting we accept its terms, values, assumptions and prejudices, as well as its beliefs, all of which can indoctrinate us into a world view that we may not be aligned with?
If we fail to pay attention to these often-subtle changes and shifts, we can become victims of the illusion of freedom. Pausing less to analyze, which is often ego-driven, one sided and reductionistic, and more to meditate, which draws us closer to our most authentic selves and to the implicit holiness of the ordinary, can improve our understanding. It coaxes us beyond information to a deeper transformation of who we are and are becoming.
To cultivate a practice of meditating opens us to experience the daily round of our lives in greater depth. Each day we are asked by a variety of sources—news outlets, shows, movies, advertising, podcasts and political maneuverings, to remember and accept certain circumstances and conditions, and to forget others. We can then fall asleep in this din of forces to what is truly remarkable. I have discovered that meditating can cultivate a different attitude as well as a fuller way of imagining the world’s ordinary particulars as tinged with the sacred qualities of life.
In contrast to egoic, one-sided thinking, in which power is accumulated under the guise of analysis, meditation is more wholistic; it does not explain, it illuminates understanding. Meditation leans toward recognizing the interrelatedness of all parts of what at first glance seems so diverse, even antithetical to one another. Meditation allows, even welcomes, paradox, contradiction, as part of the fabric of life; it is closer to the image of weaving, of creating a tapestry rather than reinforcing the independence of life’s complexity with no underlying unity.
One of meditation’s most important qualities is that it can lead us to wonder, that is, to envision the ordinary happenings of each day—a brief contact with a stranger, an act of courtesy, a moment of self-forgiveness or forgiving another, the sounds that gather around one during a morning walk—as instances that evoke gratefulness for what might have seemed trivial before.
Meditating slows us down, even for the space of 20 minutes if one chooses to find a time each day for silence and solitude. Even taking a moment to become aware of our breathing, and to notice how often each day we move breathlessly from one task to another increases our conscious awareness.
Meditating awakens us to the beauty of our heart and to our sense of being embodied. It reveals how we might take in the world we inhabit at a single moment, with all of our senses and to feel joy in the process.
Meditating can also reveal where our lives are unlived or possibly needing renewal and revision. We may imagine how our inner life is disconnected from the outer social world we traverse daily.
It can also assist us during times of illness, misfortune, loss and grief by finding a place for such suffering within the larger fabric of who we are and to what we are destined.
A meditative practice can shift us from skating across the surface of posessions, distractions and future plans and promotions by reminding us of what we all paossess in common: this very moment of vulnerability and promise. We can be present only to the present. That itself is a gift worth acknowledging in meditations of gratitude.