Meditation, yoga, & the peace that passeth understanding
Whether we hurry-it-up Westerners realize it or not, relaxation is necessary for peace of mind and happiness. And in these extra stressful times, more people than ever can benefit from various organized forms of relaxation, such as meditation and yoga. Both of these are ways of quieting the mind and spirit, by focusing one’s attention on a single thought (meditation) or a physical position (yoga) that may be challenging to hold but that relieves stress by causing the mind to forget everything else but the bodily effort. (By the way, you don’t have to take classes to get the benefits; with a little practice you can learn to focus your attention on your breathing, your thoughts, & your movements so as to reach this state of occupying your mind so that it can’t worry. I do it frequently while running, stretching, & doing floor exercises.)
To take this discussion a step further, it seems to me that in all these instances of relaxing our worrying egos, we are reaching for (and hopefully finding bits and pieces of) nothing less than the “peace that passeth all understanding” from the Christian Bible. It’s been my experience over and over again that God is both within us and outside of us, and that our unconscious minds are part of the mind of God, so it stands to reason that by quieting our own conscious minds, we can touch on that peace, getting a measure of healing from it.
Many others in many different venues have indicated the same thing. After a Sunday school class last fall, I asked dreamwork teacher Karen Mori Bonner what advice I could give to people who asked me why they couldn’t experience God as vividly as I did, and her reply was, “Tell them to RELAX.” Liz Gilbert, in her bestselling book Eat, Pray, Love, writes, “‘the universe is a great spinning engine, & you want to stay near the core, in the hub of calmness–that’s your heart. That’s where God lives within you . . . . Just keep coming back to that center and you’ll always find peace.’”
Interestingly enough, relaxation is also a major technique for getting prayers answered. We may be afraid that if we relax we’ll lose control, but the larger truth is that it’s only by relaxing our puny egos into the vast creative power of the universe that we can actually accomplish many of our most cherished goals. More on that in my book.
Back to the subject of feeling good, if you want to feel the very best that you possibly can, get out there either literally or figuratively (such as on the ‘net) and help people who need it! Your “peace” may be momentarily interrupted, but that’s going to happen anyway as long as you’re human. And this carrying out of the second of Jesus’s two great commandments (to love thy neighbor)–and not merely the first (to love God)–is the key to that abundant life he promised us. Reach out and grab hold of it, it’s yours!
