This month we are starting a short weekly opportunity for teachers to meditate together and to chat about their experience of meditation in the classroom. We will start with a small group of teachers who have already signed up, but places will remain open until Monday, 20 February 2023. Later in the year we will consider opening it up to drop-ins but for the moment we will manage it as a closed group. If you would like to join this small but intimate group, please email me on meditationandchildren@gmail.com – you can unsubscribe at any time.
We will meet on Zoom on Tuesday evenings from 8 – 8:30 p.m. (Irish time). You don’t have to join in every week, just whenever you can. We will begin on the first Tuesday after the mid-term, on Tuesday, 21 Feb 2023 at 8 p.m. You can log in any time after 7:50. We will start at 8 p.m. and finish at 8:30.
Our wellbeing grows when we access the well of pure being
Meditation teaches children that they are loved and that they are intimately connected to the source of Love. Children describe this by saying that meditation helps them to feel the goodness inside. As their meditation practice deepens throughout the school year, they discover that this is who they are – they are the goodness inside.
A Special Free Online Series for Young Meditators Aged 16 - 45
Many of our personal problems and those we face as a society require a deeper response which calls us to make contact with our own centre. Young meditators (16-45 years) are invited to join a free online series of workshops with WCCM entitled Fully Alive: Making Contact with our Own Centre. The first event – just 30 minutes long – starts tomorrow, on 11 February 2023 at 1 p.m. To try it out, click here.
This series will be led by meditators sharing their first-hand accounts of meditation with respect to the theme covered. The series will touch on important topics of one’s personal growth, such as vulnerability, life purpose, the environment, and the balance between action and contemplation. The series consists of 8 sessions, running from February through October 2023. Each session will focus on a different aspect of meditation, with a general introduction to what meditation is, its benefits, meditation and mindfulness, and the balance between action and contemplation, among other themes. Each session will be led by a meditator who will share his / her first-hand accounts of meditation with respect to the theme covered. To find out more, click here. Please feel free to share this link with anyone you think may be interested.
Noel Keating will give a talk entitled Meditation Awakens the Heart at the Parish Centre in Balally, Dublin on Friday evening 03 March 2023. The event will run from 7-830 p.m. and will include the talk, a group discussion and a 20 minute meditation.
Imaginary Conversation by Linda Pastan
You tell me to live each day
as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen
where before coffee I complain
of the day ahead—that obstacle race
of minutes and hours,
grocery stores and doctors.
But why the last? I ask. Why not
live each day as if it were the first—
all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing
her eyes awake that first morning,
the sun coming up
like an ingénue in the east?
You grind the coffee
with the small roar of a mind
trying to clear itself. I set
the table, glance out the window
where dew has baptized every
living surface.
Linda Pastan “Imaginary Conversation” from Insomnia. ©2015 by Linda Pastan.
James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man contains an account of a three-day retreat at Belvedere College, the Jesuit school in Dublin. Joyce describes in troubling detail one of the sermons which focused vividly on hell and its eternal suffering. The Catholic Church of that period was strong on occasions of sin and guilt. That was very much a part of the Church I grew up in in Ireland in the late 1950s and the 1960s; we were constantly reminded of the dire consequences that awaited us if death would come like a thief in the night and we were in a state of sin.
I prefer the poet’s approach! In the second verse she proposes ‘Why not live each day as if it were the first’! And, every new day is, of course, the first day of the rest of your life! Why not live it with the ‘raw astonishment’ of an unsophisticated, innocent, open-eyed child. As Mary Oliver’s little poem, How to Live a Life goes: ‘Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.’ The poet asks us to pay attention to every little detail; to notice, for example, how ‘the dew has baptized every living surface’.
Meditation improves our ability to pay attention. By bringing all of our attention repeatedly back to our word and away from the constant turmoil of the human mind, we build our capacity to pay attention to what is happening in every present moment. We discover anew the simple joy of being.
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