Our Summer Course is back again this year following a very successful resumption last year. This year Noel and Bryan are joined by Regina Doheny, former principal of Scoil Phadraig Naofa. Tullow. She is also a fully qualified Leaderhsip and Life Coach and a Mentor with Oide.
This course will be especially helpful for those win leadership positions and for those charged with promoting wellbeing of children and staff across the school. Last year’s course filled up very quickly, so early booking is advised. Places are limited to 20 participants. Click on the image or here to find out more or to book your place.
Feel free to pass on the links to our online resources to anyone you think may be interested in introducing meditation into their classroom!
Small Kindnesses by Danusha Laméris
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”
Reflection by Noel Keating: This simple poem about everyday kindness reminds us that in our modern secular society we have created an artificial divide between the spiritual and the profane. Yet our meditation teaches us that everything is imbued with spirit – we are, each of us, innately spiritual and even if that fact remains hidden from us it is made manifest in ordinary, everyday acts of kindness. The poet describes a myriad of brief moments of exchange, the essence of which we can so easily miss. And she asks ‘What if they are the true dwelling of the holy?’
Isn’t it a beautiful concept to see each of these occasions as a temple where the holy dwells? And to allow ourselves to see each example of kindness as a blessing, as an unspoken ‘Namaste’ where we recognise the divine in one another. May our meditation awaken us to the value of such moments; may it prompt us to consciously create such acts of kindness ourselves, creating simple blessings as fleeting temples, in our ordinary encounters everyday. May our meditation always remind us that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily concrete incarnations of life.
The Dalai Lama was once asked how he would describe his religion and he replied ‘My religion is kindness.’ There’s another famous saying the Dalai Lama often repeats from the Buddhist tradition: ‘All the unhappiness in the world comes about by people seeking their own happiness. And all the happiness in the world comes about by people seeking other people’s happiness.’ Meditation changes our way of seeing and, hence, our way of being in the world. Meditation makes us kinder persons.
