Friction can arise in the best of relationships when daggers seem drawn. What the practice of meditation enables us to do is not to take such confrontations personally but to understand where they are coming from. Let me give you an example. Some years ago, a close woman friend and colleague sent me out of the blue a six-page letter demolishing my life and work. I did not take offence, as I realised this was coming from a dark place within herself. I wrote to say: the bridge is down, but come to lunch and let us rebuild it. She came to lunch; no reference was made to the letter, but she was clearly relieved that our friendship was not broken, and we have continued to be close friends.
Tag: meditation
Some practical benefits
Disenchantment with materialistic values has led to an awakening of interest in the many forms of meditation, from the 1960s onwards, especially mindfulness meditation, which has been adapted from Buddhist techniques. Its medical use as a contribution to various forms of psychotherapy has been widely embraced.
Meditation can also serve as a special preparation for a demanding task, such as a musician, dancer, or actor before a performance, or when we are faced with a major responsibility. Meditation may take the form of repeating a specific word or text, as with the Hindu and Buddhist mantra, the Islamic dhikr, and the Jesus Prayer. It can also focus upon a visual image, as in the Tibetan Buddhist use of the mandala (a Sanskrit word which means circle) as a focal point for one’s meditation.
Practice
There are some who take to meditation like ducks to the water, but for many of us it is a hard slog! Repeating a mantra at intervals throughout the day is straightforward, but the act of sitting quietly for half an hour, and not letting the mind be swarmed by endless distractions, can be very testing. There will be good days and there will be bad days. But we persevere! As a character in one of Samuel Beckett’s stories remarks, ‘I can’t go on. I will go on.’
Thomas Merton again
Speaking and not speaking
‘There is a time to speak and a time to keep silence … a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.’
Thus it is written in the book of Ecclesiastes.
In any close, long-term relationship there can be periods when one partner withdraws into silence and there is no communication. What is important is for the other partner not to rush in saying, ‘What’s the matter?’ A long-term relationship is a fine exercise in patience and listening. Each person is contributing to building the relationship while at the same time continuing to grow and develop their own life in order to be the full person each is meant to be. It is here that, once again, the simple practice of meditation enables us to be more alert to the silence in others, to that which is unspoken.
Tristram again
I previously mentioned Tristram Beresford. A mystic with a daily practice of long meditation, he was also totally involved in the world and its problems, but from a still centre. He once said to me: ‘As I grow older I find I live less from outward things. The more real events are those that happen inwardly and do not register on any scale of movement.’
Tristram
In the course of my long life there have been many people who have had a deep influence on me, and many from whom I have learned. One such was Tristram Beresford who farmed five thousand acres, and was agricultural correspondent for the Financial Times (for which he was awarded an OBE). What very few of his readers knew was that he was also a mystic; every morning before going to work he would spend three hours reading and meditating. Thinking how life is an ongoing journey, I recall the following remark of his:
The journey is from A-Z. I doubt if we get as far as Z in this lifetime; but it is a place from which we can look back and remember how it felt to be at the beginning of the journey. I conceive of Z as the ultimate state of perfect certainty – a complete absence of all doubt.
Compassion
Many people make donations to good causes such as poverty and famine relief, medical research, the RSPCA, and to charities assisting the ever increasing number of refugees. But there is another aspect of compassion which is much more personal.
When someone asks to share with us some problem or dilemma, we have to identify with them, get under their skin as it were, to empathise with them. We may not be able to find an immediate answer for their issue but by listening wholeheartedly their burden is often lightened. Once again, it is through the simple practice of meditation, of learning to listen within, that we become more aware and better able to hear the needs of others.
Time and tide
Shakespeare writes:
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat
And we must take the current as it serves
Or lose our ventures.
It was in 1959 that a colleague said to me ‘Why don’t you start a theatre here in Hampstead?’ Within 24 hours I had booked a hall for a year, and the following week the local newspaper carried a front-page headline: Hampstead to have neighbourhood playhouse.
I had no experience of running a theatre nor any financial know-how, yet within a few years it had an international reputation for new plays.
But it doesn’t always work! I once consulted the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Wisdom, about a project I had in mind, and the answer came, as from a very wise person: ‘Your idea is good but now is not the time.’
It is when faced with key decisions in life that the practice of meditation enables one to be able to intuit what action one should take – or not.
Struggling on
Often we are tempted to give up the struggle, be it the practice of meditating or simply the struggle for life. It is good, therefore, to be reminded of what one of the tramps says in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: ‘I can’t go on. I must go on. I will go on.’ As Jesus said, ‘No one, having put their hand to the plough and looking back, will enter the kingdom of God.’ We must forge ahead. Commitment is everything.