The Benefits of Centering Meditation

by Kilian SC · June 24, 2015

Learners are usually told to be wide awake and alert in school. PAUL FALLER argues that quiet time for meditation has benefits for everybody.

A group of Catholic school learners exercise meditation.

Since 2012 the Catholic Institute of Education has been promoting meditation in schools.

Why? For one thing, it is an integral but forgotten part of the religious education curriculum.

More urgently though, the need to find a quiet place within the self becomes more and more important for our learners’ psychological and spiritual health and our own in a world that is constantly subject to noise and distraction.

The number of “assess your stress level” tests found on the Internet is indicative of the unbalanced lifestyle of our society.

There are many traditions of meditation and many ways of practising it. In this article, I want to introduce you to the way of Christian meditation promoted by the Benedictine monk, John Main, and the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM), which he inspired.

It is sometimes called the prayer of the heart because it consists in the simple act of listening within the heart.

In the words of the modern Sufi mystic Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee: “We bring the mind down into the heart, into the feeling centre of our self. And here we wait and listen, not to the sounds of the outer world, but to the silence that is within our self.”

One bird is turned outwards, interacting with the world around it. The other bird looks within the bath reflectively. These two dimensions are the active and contemplative dimensions of our lives, Paul Faller writes.

The two birds in the picture alongside represent two ways of engaging reality.

The bird on the right is turned outwards interacting with the world around it. The other bird looks within the bath reflectively. These two dimensions are the active and contemplative dimensions of our lives.

Unfortunately, in the world today we live almost exclusively like the first bird, constantly busy, never still, subject to stress which as it grows tends to aggression of one kind or another. What is the cause of this?

The fact is that we are seldom at home with ourselves as we constantly strive to become the image we and the media create for ourselves. We are never content to be who we are, the human made in the image of God.

Meditation, the activity of the second bird, helps to restore the balance. Meditation is a coming home to ourselves, a discovery of who we really are, and the beauty of the journey is that we discover at the same time the God who dwells at the centre of our being.

St Augustine put it this way:

O Beauty ever ancient, ever new.

Too late have I loved you.

I was outside and you were within me.

And I never found you

Until I found you within myself.

In order to meditate or listen within the heart we need to do two simple things: finding stillness of body in a relaxed but upright posture, and stillness of mind using a prayer word or mantra as a means of focusing and letting go of the buzz of mental activity going on within us.

Saying these are simple does not suggest that they are easy. However, we do not judge ourselves in meditation. Its healing effects are found, not in success, but in fidelity to the practice.

Meditation effects a gradual change in the practitioner. If you are considering to embrace the practice, you will want to know what its fruits are.

Those who have become regular meditators attest to a growth of the following characteristics in their lives.

This list you might recognise as the fruits of the Spirit given by St Paul in his Letter to the Galatians (5:22): love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and self-control. This is not surprising since it is the Spirit of God that we invite to work within us when we still ourselves in body and mind in the act of meditation.

Meditation has many other benefits besides, both physiological and psychological, too numerous to mention here, but well attested by rigorous research.

One might say that meditation is a healing process, bringing wholeness and balance to each dimension of the human person.

Those who have experienced the fruits of meditation will readily imagine what a different world we would live in if everyone adopted the practice.

That may be far from the actual case, but we can have a significant impact on our society by teaching it to the children in our care as part of their spiritual heritage.

Paul Faller is the coordinator of Religious Education in Catholic Schools at the Catholic Institute of Education.