There are few practices which scream the 2010s like mindfulness meditation. (See my 2018 post on it for some then-recent data about the trend.) But while that particular surge of popularity may be over, meditation itself was far from a fad. In one guise or another, it’s been around for millennia, in cultures spanning the globe, and so it is certainly not going anywhere.
At first glance, it may seem surprising to bring up meditation in a series focusing on ‘letting the soul speak’. After all, isn’t the point of meditation to silence our thoughts? Yes and no. While yes, one of the aims of meditative practices is to witness our thoughts and let go of them, part of the reason we do this is to access different parts of ourselves that normally can’t be heard over the din of our thoughts and mental images. It’s a way, through lots of practice, we can enter into different mental states. Such states expand our awareness and allow us to see or feel more than what our normal conscious experience allows.
I’ll state for the record that I am far from an adept at this. I struggle to sit in meditation for more than a few minutes at a time. But I will say that, over the years, my limited practice (which evolved into being a mashup of mindfulness meditation and the contemplative Christian practice of the Jesus Prayer) has become a quick and easy way to quiet my mind and reset my mental state. So, while I may not be entering into the vastness of altered mental states, it’s still very valuable. For me it’s often a helpful ‘sacred-practice pre-game’ that helps me to engage with other practices less distractedly and therefore more deeply. And that’s far from nothing!
My experiences the past couple weeks feel representative. My mind has developed the unhelpful habit of fixating on the horrible things happening in the world right after I get up. (It actually feels like my mind has paired this with the process of making coffee. Brains are weird!) But, because I’ve been meditating off and on (more off than on) for close to two decades now, this can now be as much of an easy mental habit as the anxious racing is. So when I sit and start my “Lord have mercy”s, it’s been like flipping a switch: The mind stills and almost immediately loosens its grip on those anxious thoughts, allowing them to dissipate, leaving a much quieter mental state in their place. And that’s a much better place from which to engage in other practices.
And so in this way, it’s really a perfect practice for the purposes of this series. It’s hard to let the soul speak when the mind is running its mouth, so it’s very helpful to have ways of shutting the mind up for a few minutes.
If you’d like more information about practices like this, check out the links above.
Matthew Root 