The Child Within

As a person who from time to time has lived with anxiety issues, it has often been suggested to me by a number of healthcare professionals I take up some form of meditation and mindfulness practices.  Mindfulness is a very ‘in’ word at present and appears to be a hot topic in Western psychology. It seems everyone is taking up mindfulness meditation. It is said to allow someone to cope with difficult and painful thoughts, feelings and sensations. Mindfulness exercises give a person back some sense of mastery over their thoughts and feelings. Many will say that when they are overly anxious they have no mastery over anything. Rather than having the sense of being pushed around and bullied by their thoughts and feelings, people learn through mindfulness to have some agency or control over them. A dictionary definition describes mindfulness as ‘a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique’.

Although these days much mindfulness practice is secular in character, partly through its promotion to the executive world by such people as Jon Kabat-Zinn, its roots lie firmly in Buddhism, a fact which continues to fascinate me.

Buddha lived long before Jesus, about five hundred years in fact, who taught our problems and suffering arise from confused and negative states of mind. He also taught methods for gradually overcoming our negative state of mind, which includes such things as anger, jealousy and ignorance, and he developed practices which help develop positive human qualities such as love, compassion and wisdom.

One question I asked myself when I first began practicing Buddhist styles of meditation was whether these practices could help me come into a closer relationship with God, who for me, as a Christian, is the source of love, compassion and wisdom.

The Church has for much of its history recognised the sign of God’s Spirit in secular philosophy and even in other non-Christian religious traditions. Thomas Aquinas, just to choose one example, used the philosophy of Aristotle as a basis for his theological output. It would be interesting to hypothesize that if Thomas Aquinas had come into contact with Buddhist Philosophy, what would he have made of it?

Christianity is sometimes said to be long on content, but short on method and technique. And many today believe that Buddhism, or at least some aspects of it, is providing Christians with practices and techniques by which they can enter more experientially into the content of what they believe. People like Thomas Merton, John Main, Laurence Freeman and David Steindl-Rast, all coming out of a Christian Monastic setting, have looked the East to fill this gap between content and practice.  I personally have a trust in these giants of the Christian Monastic Tradition. So with an open mind, I continue to follow meditation practices borrowed from the East, even from time to time, finding myself meditating with Zen Buddhist practitioners.

I am reminded by the words of Jesus when he said, ‘unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven’. In both Christianity and Buddhism, we are reminded that humility and openness are essential for those on a spiritual journey. I therefore pray that the child within may continually see the light of day.