WHAT IS MEDITATION?

            Meditation is a Christian practice but, in the west, it isn’t much practised. Which is a huge shame because not only is it a pathway to knowing God, but we are coming to discover that it also improves health.

            On the health front, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, at the University of Massachussetts Medical Center in the United States is using meditation with great success in his stress reduction clinic.[1] And Dr. Jackie Gardiner-Nix, assistant professor at the University of Toronto and chronic pain consultant at St. Michael’s Hospital and at Sunnybrook and Women’s College Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, is using it to help people with chronic pain conditions.[2] Meditation is also being used in the counseling office.

            In the medical field, what is practised is being called “mindfulness meditation” and is said to be taken from Buddhism. The medical version is actually godly meditation minus God. Everything that is taught and practised in mindfulness is Christian meditation except that, for our secular society, no one is ever told its real origins in Judaism/Christianity and that they are practising a way to encounter God. Wouldn’t it be interesting, though, if mindfulness really took off, and what Satan borrowed from God and used in Buddhism actually became, for people practising it without Buddhist influence and teaching, something that sensitizes them to the true God who is all around us, and a tool to prepare people for salvation?

But I digress. Back to what meditation is.

            Meditation is owning each moment of our experience, be it good, bad or indifferent. It is being fully aware of the present moment. We sometimes hear stories of people who have a near death experience and how that turns their life around so that they are more alive, they appreciate everything about life, and they savour all their moments. That is meditation except, in meditation, we bypass the near death experience. If you get the idea from this that meditation is a way of living rather than something you do now and again, you would be right.

            So how do we get to that place of living all our moments without a major trauma kicking us there? We practise. We practise by taking time in our day to deliberately pay attention. Pay attention to what? To anything. It doesn’t really matter for purposes of learning how to be aware of our present. It could be our breathing, walking, eating, a Scripture, ____ (you fill in the blank).

            Sounds easy, doesn’t it? It is easy. It’s also profoundly challenging. It goes completely against the way we normally live. If you pay attention to the thoughts passing through your mind at any given moment, you’ll find that your mind is mostly in the past and sometimes in the future, but hardly ever in the present and what is going on right now. Worse yet, we live chunks of our life on auto-pilot. We often do our mundane chores this way. Sometimes we even drive this way.

            “So what”, you may say. Well, there are two significant “so whats”.

            First, we use a lot of energy regretting the past, wishing we had done something different, reliving past hurts and traumas, wishing things had been different, longing for what is gone, or conversely, worrying about the future, fretting over “what ifs”, wondering how we’ll get through some of the things we think are looming ahead of us, and so on. This is energy we could be using to live well now, to heal physically and emotionally now, and to relate well to people and to God now. Worse, all that striving and fretting can make us sick (e.g., stress-related problems) and can interfere with our faith (e.g., “If God is so good, then why did He allow ___”).

            Second, for those of us who want to know God, in what time zone does God live? Laying aside the fact that He is eternal and for Him “a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day” (2 Peter 3:8)[3] so that, from His point of view, time is a non-issue, for us who live in time, when and where is God? Is He in our thoughts of the past and the future? Or is He here with us now? He does, after all, call Himself “I am”.[4] And have you ever noticed how much God talks about the importance of now? Consider: 

Matthew 6
11  Give us today our daily bread. 

Matthew 6
34  Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. 

Hebrews 4
6  It still remains that some will enter that rest, and those who formerly had the gospel preached to them did not go in, because of their disobedience.
7  Therefore God again set a certain day, calling it Today, when a long time later he spoke through David, as was said before: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.”
8  For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken later about another day.
9  There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God;
10  for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his.
11  Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following their example of disobedience. 

Colossians 3
23  Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart [being fully present to it], as working for the Lord, not for men,
24  since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. 

2 Corinthians 6
1  As God's fellow workers we urge you not to receive God’s grace in vain.
2  For he says, “In the time of my favor I heard you, and in the day of salvation I helped you.” I tell you, now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation. 

            So, if we’re passionate to know God, we need to be passionate as well about now, and living in the now. If today is the day of salvation, and the Greek word for “salvation” includes our healing and deliverance as well as our forgiveness from sin, then let’s get out of yesterday and tomorrow and live in today. In other words, let’s meditate! 

Exercises 

            Below are two exercises for you to do over two days. They will allow you to check and see if what is said in this article is true of you. 

Day 1 

Take 5 minutes out of your day and go to a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. Take a position that’s comfortable to you. Then, in the silence, pay attention to the thoughts that run through your head. After five minutes, decide. Is it true that most of your thoughts were about things from the past (including hurts and wounds from the past) and things in the future (include in the future, your list of things you need to do). 

Day 2 

Again, take 5 minutes and go to a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. Take a position that’s comfortable for you. Then, in the silence, pay attention once again to the thoughts that run through your mind. Only this time, as each one comes, look at it, see what it is, make no judgments about it being good, bad or indifferent, then deliberately let it go. Letting it go is not as easy as it sounds, so don’t get discouraged if you struggle with this, especially if a thought with a lot of strong emotion comes to your mind. This is practice, remember, and it will take a lot of practice to get perfect at letting go.