Friday, February 17, 2017

Quiet Time

Holy Ground

If discovering the meaning of life is what you want to do, I recommend that you stay where you are, even if it's a crummy little town. Find a comfortable place, close your eyes, and then wait for the voice that will eventually come to you. It's the voice of God, and don't ask me how I know. Everyone who has heard it over the centuries has also recognized it immediately...”
Douglas Brouwer (dougsblog.org)

Meditation has been around for thousands of years, mostly associated with the Buddhist and Hindu religions, though we know that both Jesus and Mohammad took themselves away from people and into the wilderness to pray. The second you say this word, meditation, to a modern Westerner, however, you see the eyes glaze over and the denials rise up. “I've tried that,” they say, “I just can't do it. I can't still my mind. First thing I know, I'm making my grocery list.” And so on, and so forth. Me, too. I come up with every excuse in the world. But here's the deal: I think it's the word “meditation” that is the problem. It conjures up chanting monks and Om's ringing around a room. It feels strange, other worldly.

And yet—the desire to know God, to connect in some individual and personal way with divine wisdom is a seed deeply planted. I think we should simply change the word. What if we called it Inner Time, or Silent Prayer, or Time-Out. What if we were simply to take five or ten, or even fifteen or twenty minutes per day to sit and do nothing except to be silent and tune in. We might get comfortable and quiet enough to doze off for a few minutes, but that silence between sitting down and falling asleep, and the quietude between being asleep and getting up again—that liminal time, that threshold between worlds—that is the zone of intersection where much can happen. That is the meditative state. And, we all reach it.

Building that few minutes of silent affirmation into your busy day—doesn't have to reach Nirvana, doesn't have to strive for enlightenment—it can just be, well, quiet time. Time for you to listen within to what the Divine—the Self, with a capital S—has to tell you. You don't have to go into the wilderness, or to the mountain top, or to some shrine, or sacred cave—because that holy place is right inside you. It's wherever you are. You are holy ground.

                                                                        In the Spirit,

                                                                            Jane

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