Our Meditation with Children project has been running now since 2012 with new schools joining the initiative each year since it began. I am delighted that meditation with children as a whole-school practice has been introduced to over 250 primary schools across Ireland and that, as a consequence, well in excess of 50,000 children have been introduced to the practice. The model we followed was to offer staff training to the whole staff of interested schools and each teacher then introduced the practice to their own classroom shortly afterwards, so that very quickly the whole school fell silent and every class meditated with their teacher twice each week.
The drawback to that model was the challenge of maintaining contact with schools afterwards. As a voluntary initiative of Christian Meditation Ireland we had a team of about 12 facilitators willing to travel to any school in Ireland and I am very grateful to all who played a part, helping to spread the practice far and wide. However, it was not possible to maintain contact with the schools in the
months and years following its introduction, so it is very difficult to know in how many schools the practice continues today. I am aware that schools are under enormous pressure all the time and are inundated with revisions to curricula, new initiatives and school planning. I believe there are many schools which, having experienced for themselves the practical benefits of the practice for the children and school alike, continue to practice whole-school meditation at assemblies and in the classroom. I would love to hear from you if you would like to let me know how the practice is going in your school.
Every year since 2012 we have proactively promoted the practice, emailing schools across the country about our offer of free in-service and then visiting those schools who applied to join the project, delivering in-service to the whole staff by agreement afterwards. We are very grateful to all of the principals and teachers who were enthusiastic about the practice and who worked to embed the practice of meditation in their classroom and across the whole school.
In light of the difficulty of maintaining contact with schools, I have decided to cease proactive promotion of the project. I will be more than happy to respond positively to requests from schools and offer free in-service training (and re-training) as in the past, but I think the time has come to cease actively promoting the practice. In short, the project will become responsive rather than proactive from now on. It has been a labour of love for me and I am deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to work with so many enthusiastic facilitators, principals and schools over the past fourteen years. A special word of thanks to the children (now young adults!) who participated in my PhD research in early 2014. If by any chance any of those participants see this, know that I would love to hear from you too! Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir. Noel Keating, mnkeating@gmail.com
Our video timers and other resources will continue to be available – see for example the 5-minute timer on the right-hand side.
All of our timers can be accessed by clicking here and the short videos for teaching about aspects of meditation can be found on my Meditation for Wellbeing YouTube page here.
For teachers who would like to learn more or deepen their own meditation practice, there is a wide range of talks (with transcripts) that can be accessed and downloaded from here.
Into the Quiet, Love is Calling, Calling You to Meditate. Enter the Silence, the Stillness and Silence Where Peace and Joy and Love Await
Before & After Meditation
Some years ago we added two short songs to be used to before and after meditation. Click on the title of each song to play or download it. To download, click on the three vertical buttons after the play button.
Lord, when we meditate We trust your Love which never ends May it make us kinder To our family and our friends
How to Listen by James Crews
Listening is a form of worship,
but you don’t have to kneel
on the floor with folded hands
or mouth the perfect prayer.
Just open the door of yourself
to another, become the space
they step through to show you
who they are. This is holiness:
two people seated together
on the pew of a park bench,
at the altar of a kitchen table.
Even if no one says a word
for a while, receive the silence
until it’s like a new language
only the two of you can speak.
Reflection by Noel Keating: I love the opening line of this poem: Listening is a form of worship and how it captures the essence of our meditation experience. There is a delightful symmetry between the acts of holiness, of interpersonal grace, described in the poem and the personal, spiritual surrender implicit in our practice of meditation. The poem suggests that holiness arises when you open the door of yourself/ to another, become the space/ they step through to show you/ who they are; that very act of opening yourself to another is an act of radical hospitality.
Crew’s poem reminds us that true listening is never passive, even if no one says a word/ for a while. Whether we are sitting across from a grieving friend on the pew of a park bench,/ or at the altar of a kitchen table listening is an active offering that creates a spaciousness where the other encounters compassion and love. True listening requires us to lay down our own stories and to step beyond our own internal narratives; it means we must abandon our need for control, and simply be in the transformative, unspoken language of presence which becomes a new language/ only the two of you can speak.
The poet’s use of words such as the, pew of a park bench, or the altar of a kitchen table elevates the ordinary act of sitting with another person into a moment sacred encounter, giving rise to a meeting not of minds but of the genuine in each person. Such encounters are the fruit of our meditation practice which awakens the genuine within us, revealing to us who we truly are in the depths of our being and enabling that understanding to make us ever more responsive to the needs around us.
But the poem can also be seen as a metaphor for our meditation practice. In meditation you open the door of yourself/ to another, become the space/ they step through to show you/ who they are: we discover the Spirit of God who dwells in every human heart loving to all. And we discover this is who we truly are, that we have opened the portal to our own true-self. As John Main taught, prayer should not be a question of us doing things, but rather of us opening ourselves up, leaving the egoic-self behind and allowing the Spirit to transfigure our way of seeing the world.
What a lovely image it is to see meditation as two people seated together/ on the pew of a park bench! Does it not capture well the emotional and spiritual posture required when we sit in silent meditation leaving ourselves open and vulnerable to an encounter with the Divine. Does it not describe the reality of our lives at all times but one that we fail to see because we are so caught up in our egoic-self. In our meditation practice we learn to receive the silence/ until it’s like a new language/ only the two of you can speak. A language of the heart which the heart can fully apprehend but which the mind can never comprehend.
As John Main wrote: ‘[Meditation], in essence, is learning to stand back and to allow God to come to the forefront of life. … Do not try to unravel the mystery but allow God to unfold his mystery in your heart.’ In other words, true prayer is not a question of us doing things, but rather of us opening ourselves up, leaving the self behind and allowing God to take over. The act of sitting down to mediate is our way of opening the door to the spaciousness within us and our repetition of our mantra is our means of keeping the door open. In the beginning, repeating our sacred word takes effort, but eventually, the repetition carries us beyond language entirely. We learn to trust the silence, receiving it as a gift rather than an awkward void to be filled.
