Quiet our busy minds

Every culture and most religions have found ways to help people quieten their busy minds. One word that is often used to describe these techniques is the word "meditation".

I find it helpful to see us as having two minds: one is based in our brains, organs evolving over 40 million years to help us all survive - and the other, a deeper mind sometimes linked to our heart, sometimes called our soul.

Where our “survival mind” is frantic and obsessed and out of our control – this deeper mind is quiet, sure and at peace. It does not clamour for our attention. It does not compete with our survival mind. 

The survival mind knows nothing except competition: it evolved winning, foreseeing and defeating threats, eliminating rivals.

For many of us, it is so dominating that we rarely even have the chance to glimpse our deeper minds. And because our survivor mind is so obsessed with destroying rivals, it is possible to think of it deliberately distracting us from knowledge of our deeper mind, maybe because our hearts are not focused on survival.

As I say, all cultures and all long-lived religions have developed ways to help us control our "survival minds". Over the last term I have worked with our students to make sure they had at least one tool when they need to quieten their minds. The method I used was to focus on their breathing (there is more about that in the link above).

I have started this term with another useful method: a particularly Catholic technique, using repeated words. 

Older Catholics might think I am talking about the Rosary - but that is only one way of using repetition. The modern use of the Rosary as meditation only developed about 500 years ago, but the Desert Fathers of the third and fourth centuries used knotted ropes to count brief repetitive prayers (as Orthodox Christians still do in parts of the world).

Another form of repetition is walking, and many people use that to clear their heads. Often they do not think of it as meditation - but often it is - and it can also usefully be combined with other forms of meditation such as breathing and repetition.

The form of meditation we are using this term is based on the repetition of a single word or a short phrase. This was first recorded and outlined by an anonymous monk in the fourteenth century, and has been rediscovered and popularised in the last fifty years as Centring Prayer - a name I don't find that helpful for what is a great way of controlling our survival minds and becoming more aware of our Creator in our lives.