Month: December 2019

There are times when, though we lower our bucket down into the well of meditation, the source seems to have dried up. What is the point of it all? we cry.  And yet, unknown to use, there are many mountain springs deep down, so that, if we persevere, then our well begins to fill again.

It is the same in any marriage or committed relationship. The American author Madeleine L’Engle, writing in Two-Part Invention, observes:

The growth of love is not a straight line but a series of hills and valleys. I suspect that in every good marriage there are times when love seems to be over. Sometimes these desert lines are simply the only way to the next oasis. Most growth comes through times of trial.

And so it is with the practice of meditation.

Society can only be renewed by renewing individuals. And in order to do this we have to give individuals the opportunity to contact their own inner resources. As the psychotherapist Ira Progoff once observed:

We gradually discover that our life has been going somewhere, however blind we have been to its direction, and however unhelpful to it we ourselves have been.  We find that a connective thread has been forming beneath the surface of our lives, carrying the meaning that has been trying to establish itself in our existence. It is the inner continuity of our lives. As we recognise and identify with it, we see an inner myth that has been guiding our lives unknown to ourselves.