School of Meditation Weekly Teachings

Weekly Teachings 21/08/2011

The Stages of the Journey (2)

As we have seen meditation leads us to a greater awareness of our conditioning and hence to self-knowledge and ultimately freedom. One helpful way of entering the silence is to remember that all our thoughts are thoughts about the past or the future.

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Weekly Teachings 14/08/2011

The Stages of the Journey

“Meditation is a way of breaking through from a world of illusion into the pure light of reality”. (John Main)

The world of illusion that John Main refers to in this statement is the world we build up out of our thoughts. Many of us equate who we are with what we think.

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Weekly Teachings 07/08/2011

Why do we meditate?

Meditation with its one-pointed focus, whether on the breath, on movement or in our case on a mantra, is a scientifically proven way to relaxation both of mind and body.

Purely by paying attention on our word, our breathing and heart rate slow down by themselves and calm the fidgety body.

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Weekly Teachings 31/07/2011

Staying in the present moment

If we just watch our thoughts for a while, we realise quite soon that all of them are linked to the past or to the future. They whirl around our concerns about what has happened, in the form of memories, both good and bad, or about what might happen, our fears, hopes, desires and plans.

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Weekly Teachings 24/07/2011

The Power of Silence

The essence of meditation is stillness and silence. Silence is both external and internal. External silence is hard to find in our world today. We are bombarded by trivia and distraction through the media.

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Weekly Teachings 17/07/2011

Quotes about the Mantra in the Eastern and Western Tradition of Christianity

“The mind should unceasingly cling to the mantra until strengthened by continual use of it, it casts off and rejects the rich and ample matter of all kinds of thought and restricts itself to the poverty of the single verse.

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Weekly Teachings 10/07/2011

The problem of distractions

"I want now to address a particular question that we all encounter. It is the question of distractions. What should you do when you begin to meditate and distracting thoughts come into your mind? The advice that the tradition has to give us is to ignore the distractions and to say your word and to keep on saying your word. 

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Weekly Teachings 03/07/2011

The Journey of meditation (2)

Last week we talked about what may happen to us on our journey of meditation. We begin with enthusiasm, our commitment to the daily practice grows, but in time we inevitably meet with the ‘demon of acedia’. We start feeling bored and restless; we feel as if we enter the desert.

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Weekly Teachings 26/06/2011

The journey of meditation

The journey of meditation is in John Main’s words essentially “a pilgrimage to our own heart”, the most sacred place, where Christ dwells. Meditation is discovering “the life of the Spirit of Jesus within our human heart.” 

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Weekly Teachings 19/06/2011

Can I change my mantra?

In Christianity praying by repeating a set phrase or phrases has been a very well -established practice throughout the ages, just think of the ‘Our Father’, the ‘Hail Mary’, ‘Glory be’, and the ‘Jesus Prayer’ in the Orthodox tradition.

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