Hello. Welcome to this page. How do you read this word?

This one. And this one?

Are you fully here, or are you thinking of the next click, the next glance, what you are going to do in the moment just about to occur?

Are you thinking of what you want rather than what you have in front of you.

Let us quieten down together. Let us live the slow life. Let us know how our breathing is taking place.

Let us now, read about what one may call the meditative life.

***

You sit and watch the sky darken in the evening. The white and blue turn to grey and black. The air is less hot than it has been all day. Your body sweats less. Down on the street, a neighbour walks past in a hurried walk, looking at her screen as she goes. There are sounds of the radio from the house below.

The sky is a little darker, every minute. Night is here. Even though men and women remain awake, and their artificial lights deny and defy the settling in of darkness, there is nothing that can blot out this dark, still night.

The dark, still night is arriving. Mosquitoes, crickets. The moon. The stars. As if the darkness of the earth is the illumination of the vast universe, as one gazes at stars thousands of light years away.

The meditative life is a life lived, truly, in the now. It is a life of an intense and intimate awareness, that all that occurs in it is a theatre to which one is witness, and like a true witness to art, one is fully and deeply touched by all that happens, yet one is more than that experience.

This life of intense presence to the occurances of our existence is the meditative life. Here, we are not denying the pain, and not chasing the gratifications. It is the only life in which healing can occur. It is the only life where pain can be seen, and allowed to exist, and the inherent, joyous aliveness of being can be realised, irrespective of whether life gives us pain or pleasure.

When a person comes to therapy, the therapist may, by their way of being, by their listening and their non-verbal and verbal responses, shape the experience of therapy towards a meditative one. The person may feel their pains more, the person may feel their capacity to witness them more, and the person may realise that the pains are a finitude in the landscape of their consciousness which is an infinity, far more than those pains, far more than their solutions.

To allow oneself to be fully vulnerable, is also to be healed. The know deep sorrow, without any defense, is to also know love, softness, and union.

At times, if the interest arises, the therapist may encourage the client to try a practice of meditation, a practice being the meditative approach to life distilled into a particular action. Attending to the breath can often be such a practice, without religious or spiritual beliefs being involved. By practicing, every day, attention to one’s own breath, one may learn more deeply what it means to simply be present to what happens.

Eventually, the practice is only a way to enter the meditative life in all aspects of one’s being.

Thank you for reading till the end. Perhaps you feel more still, than you did when we began. Or perhaps you don’t. Either way, we have met through these words, when your gaze fell upon them.

A meeting of two beings is always precious, more so when experienced in the stillness of being.