More and more of us are recognizing the benefits of meditation, but the idea of twenty minutes at a time is rather daunting. The idea of two such pauses in the day is beyond our comprehension. Fortunately, research shows that even mini-meditations throughout the day can have huge health benefits.
A few days ago I came across this excellent article with six ideas for pauses throughout the day, that enable us to relax in the present moment and renew ourselves. It started me thinking – what are the events of the day that are most likely to prompt me to pause and meditate? Here is the list I came up with.
1. Shower meditation.
Shower time can be the prefect opportunity every day to rest in the moment. It is a great metaphor for washing away the past and cleansing the mind. Notice the temperature of the water as you step into the shower, and the feel of its spray on your skin. Lather the soap and breathe in its fresh fragrance. Imagine it washing away your broken places and bringing healing to your open wounds. Watch the water disappear down the drain and imagine your anxieties disappearing with it. Imagine that the stress from your fears, worries, and problems is flowing away, out of your body and down the drain. Take deep cleansing breaths as your cares float away.
2. Walking meditation.
Most of us spend some of our day walking – whether it be as a deliberate form of exercise or just the necessity of getting from place to place. I have become very aware of that over the last few months while my walking has been inhibited by a painful foot. Yet it is easy to take that walking practice for granted.
Focus your attention on the act of walking. Stand still for 30 seconds before you begin. Stretch your muscles, take some deep breaths in and out. Take notice of your steps as you walk – are they strong and vigorous or halting and hesitant? Do they reflect your love of life or your cares and worries? Take notice of where you walk – of the cracks in the pavement and the weeds that grow, of the people you pass and the vehicles that drive by. Dwell on the experience of each step and the journey it is taking you on.
3. Let Go meditation.
The constant swirling of anxieties and worries in our minds are often what make it impossible for us to relax. Find a quiet place to sit, put your feet flat on the ground, have a straight back, and take a deep breath. Imagine it soaking deep into your lungs, your bloodstream and throughout your body. Let your breath go and quietly repeat to yourself: Then quietly repeat to yourself: “My body is at ease and relaxed” Take another deep breath and quietly remind yourself: “my heartbeat is normal, my mind is calm and my spirit is at peace. Keep repeating this until you have let go of the tension and felt your body relax. Take another deep breath and smile!
4. Have a Mindful Tea of Coffee Break
Leaving our desks and spending a few minutes in the kitchen to make a hot drink can provide a nice break. If we add mindful noticing, this time can feel even more enriching.
Turn the process of making tea or coffee into a meditative moment by slowing down every action, even if it’s only slightly. Choose a scripture like “for he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things.” (Psalm 107:9) to repeat while you prepare your drink.
When you reach for your mug, treat it as if it’s something precious. Notice how it feels in your hand – is it cool, or warm from the dishwasher or sink? Notice how the tea bag feels when you pick it up and place it in the mug. Watch how the boiling water pours into the mug, and how the tea bag starts to turn the water a rich brown colour. Or grind your coffee and savour the rich aroma of the beans. Pour water into your french press or other coffee maker and watch it change colour. Pour it into your mug and once more savour its rich aroma before you drink it.
Noticing each individual step of the process can help us appreciate the present moment more. Instead of seeing this time as meaningless, as just a necessary thing to do in order to create a drink, we can use this time to remember that every moment can feel like a special git from God, even the seemingly mundane ones, if we just take time to slow down and notice.
5. Eat with Mindfulness and Gratitude
About a third of workers eat their lunch at their desks, and a quarter admit to answering emails or using their work phones during lunch. Separating the eating of lunch from our work, is an important and often intentionally relaxing and refocusing process.
If possible move away from your desk – preferably out of the office, though probably not in a crowded restaurant. Sit on a park bench. Begin with a prayer of gratitude, possibly with the words “Jesus you are the bread of life”. Look at your lunch and appreciate the fact that you have something to eat. Admire the colours of the food. Notice how it smells before taking a bite. Then as you eat it, focus on how it tastes, and how the texture of it feels on our tongue, gums and teeth. Doing this, even just with the first two or three bites, can help our lunch feel more satisfying, and may also help us feel a little more in control of our time and our experience in the moment, rather than feeling that we are in a never-ending rush.
6. Bedtime Meditation.
Taking a few minutes to relax and commit the coming night to God is becoming an important mini-mediation for me. I keep the prayer to welcome the night that I wrote last week on my bedside table. I sit in bed, relax my body, take a few deep breathes in and out and say the prayer quietly. I sit in silence for a minute allowing the anxieties and worries of the day to surface. I commit these to God then say the prayer again before turing off my light for the night.
It is the beginning of a new month and the summer season is in full swing. Here in Seattle we have just gone through the hottest June on record, and this week expect more record breaking temperatures. Keeping the garden watered has taxed my ingenuity and not surprisingly I start thinking about succulents that don’t need much water.
My new prayer garden reflects that. I have taken my favourite prayer from the month and used its central words to create focal points for my morning meditations.
What are you doing to aid your meditative practices this month?
photo credit: http://wayneforte.com/picture/anointing-his-feet-2/
Meanwhile, Jesus was in Bethany at the home of Simon, a man who had previously had leprosy. While he was eating, a woman came in with a beautiful alabaster jar of expensive perfume made from essence of nard. She broke open the jar and poured the perfume over his head. Some of those at the table were indignant. “Why waste such expensive perfume?” they asked. “It could have been sold for a year’s wages and the money given to the poor!” So they scolded her harshly.
“Who was this woman?” We know where it occurred, the extravagant cost of the perfume and even the container that it was in, we not definitely who she was. There has been much speculation over the centuries about who and what she was but no one can be sure. Most people assume the worst and think that she was a prostitute, as Luke suggests or it might have been Mary as John suggests. To the disdain and rejection shown by those eating at table with Jesus we add our own disdain and rejection to this woman.
Possibly her rejection was just because she was a woman. We forget that in Jesus time and culture women did not eat together with men. Perhaps she was rejected because she made the dinner guests feel uncomfortable – the generosity and extravagance of her gift might have been contrasted with their own lack of giving. Or perhaps she was someone unacceptable within the society – if not a prostitute then maybe ill or poor, or maybe she was a Gentile. We don’t know for sure.
What is Your Response?
All of us have times when we feel like this woman kneeling at Jesus feet. We want to share our loving gifts lavishly, but feel that they are unappreciated or misunderstood.
Sit quietly for a few minutes and think back over your own life. Remind yourself of situations in which you have felt misunderstood and unappreciated. Now imagine Jesus taking up your gift with love and gratitude, fully appreciative of all that you have done.
Write down your response.
He Qi Woman anointing Jesus Feet http://www.heqiart.com/
This story occurs just a couple of days before the Last Supper and the foretaste of the communion feast. I wondered is this because this story challenges us to think about all those that we still exclude from our table fellowship. Jesus has embraced the outcasts and is eating at their table – the tax collectors, and Simon the leper are there but they are unwilling to welcome this woman.
I think that this woman is unnamed because she represents all the nameless and rejected ones in our society whom we still refuse to welcome to our table – people that we aren’t willing to listen to because they are different from us or unacceptable in our own Christian culture.
What is your response:
Who, I wondered are we still unwilling to welcome to our table? Whose voices are we unwilling to listen to and whose offerings are we unwilling to embrace?
Sit quietly for a couple of minutes with your eyes closed. Imagine your dining room table with a group of friends around it. Who would you invite? Who would feel excluded and why? Write down your impressions. Listen to the song below. What would it take for you to live in God’s freedom and come to God’s table as this song suggests? Pray about your responses and ask God if there is anything you need to change.
In my creative journey recently, I have been traveling down business lane, reviewing options for producing prints of my art work and methods for sharing them with the world.
I am aware of the irony involved in this undertaking. As with many aspects of life, opposing forces must be held in tension on the journey. I make art work by hand as a way to keep creativity and individual expression alive in the face of the homogenizing force of our visual culture’s global communication systems. Yet, ironically, those very systems are the mechanism to share my individual creative expressions!
I recently read a Facebook a joke about art journaling. The gist was “why buy something for $7 when you can make it yourself for $76 worth of art supplies? It’s funny because it is true. Many people ‘liked’ the post but one responder hit the nail on the head when she commented that what we are after is not the product but the creative experience. Certainly, there is an art journaling market that has risen in response to this internal hunger.
Keeping a visual journal, or art journal, is a sanctuary for creative expression, a way to nourish the soul. It is one way we celebrate and express our lives and make our individual voices heard. We record a view of our lives, creating an individual cultural product in the process.
The photo above is an example that I created this week to commemorate the delight I felt at once again being blessed with heat, new tree leaves, the color of green, and the miracle of shade after a long cold winter. Summer felt like it had arrived in mid-Spring so I took time to lay in the grass, admire the green, and soak in the life giving energy of the sun.
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Cynthia A. Julian: artist, writer, teacher, woman of faith and contemplative practitioner. It is my nature to create. I ‘discovered’ mixed media art journaling about four years ago. I practice art journaling because I find it satisfies my hunger to create and results in unique expressions of my life’s journey. Visit my website This Creative Journey, where this article was first posted to see a portfolio of some of my creations.
This is the last of my series of posts on sleep and rest. It seems appropriate to remind us that the ultimate rest of all is the rest of God – the Sabbath rest – not a rest of exhaustion at the end of a busy week, but the rest of delight and accomplishment, the rest that says “Well done good and faithful servant”, the rest that looks around at all that has been done and says “It is good”.
This kind of rest in hard to achieve in a world that insists we never have enough – not enough stuff, not enough time, not enough “friends” on Facebook. Our society thrives on discontent and the quest for more. I sometimes wonder if its lack is part of what contributes to our sleeplessness on other days too.
So enjoy this prayer. Read it through slowly, savour it, take it to heart, and create for yourself a Sabbath rest.
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Other posts in this series:
On Screen/Off Screen Is It Hurting Our Sleep?
Let Us Rest With God – A Prayer
What’s the Problem With Insomnia
The discussion on Tuesday’s post What’s the Problem With Insomnia has made me realize that this is an extremely important issue for many of us. It is easy to make the excuse however that waking in the night is normal and then ignore the factors in our lifestyles that contribute to our sleeplessness. I wrote about this several months ago and hope that you will forgive me for repeating some of what I said then.
Sleeplessness is often more a function of our lifestyle than anything else. We can’t just blame the electric light however. Lack of time outside in the sunlight, lack of time in the dark at night, lack of exercise, stress and the inability to relax our minds before we go to bed can all contribute to lack of sleep. Inner Body Research has some great suggestions for those who struggle regularly with insomnia, including some simple ways to diagnose what may be the underlying cause of the problem. No wonder the sleeping pill industry is booming.
The problem is getting worse and our technology contributes to it. A few months ago I read this interesting article Reading On A Screen Before Going to Bed May be Killing You.
You’ve heard that using screens before bedtime can mess with your sleep, but new research suggests the problem is even more serious.
Reading from an iPad before bed not only makes it harder to fall asleep, but also impacts how sleepy and alert you are the next day, according to new research from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, said the findings could impact anyone who uses an eReader, laptop, smartphone, or certain TVs before bed. Read the entire article
This was not good news for me because I love to read before I go to bed and reading on my tablet means I don’t disturb my husband. Even before I get into bed, Tom and I often watch a movie on our TV before we retire – not necessarily good either.
As I have already mentioned, sleep is one of the essential rhythms of life. Without adequate sleep we soon cease to function properly, without any sleep, a condition that is fortunately fairly rare, we will die. Not only does the biphasic sleep pattern I talked about in my previous post seem more natural, there is even evidence that a siesta in the afternoon boosts our memory and cognitive functioning.
Faith and Sleep
Faith practices can also help us relax and enter into that sleep which is indeed a gift from God which as you know is part of the reason that I write prayers for both the morning and the evening. If we want to sleep properly a rhythm of prayer throughout the day can really help.
- In her article Christian Meditation – God’s Gift for Healthy Sleep Deborah Kukal talks about the important part that meditation on psalms can play in helping us relax and sleep. So when you’re struggling in the night, remember David’s words, and let God’s peaceful gift of meditation fill your soul with comfort, and your body with rest. read more
There are other Christian practices that can help too.
- Lectio divina and a reflective reading of scripture before we go to bed is a wonderful way to relax and go to sleep in the presence of God. Intentionally disconnecting from my laptop or kindle at least 1/2 hour before I go to bed and indulging in a meditative practice like lectio divina much a huge difference to my night’s sleep.
- The prayer of examen which helps us to review the day in the presence of God, encouraging us to leave the cares and worries we have encountered in God’s hands, is another wonderful way to end our waking hours. I have done this sporadically over the years and realize I need to reinstitute this practice.
- Breathing prayers which encourage us to breathe deeply and regularly can also be of great value. Evidently many of us spend most of our lives breathing too shallowly and deprive our lungs and other organs of the oxygen we need to remain healthy. More than that it can relieve anxiety, stimulate our immune system and even alleviate the symptoms of trauma. Read more. As you know I love to write breathing prayers and have found them to be wonderful tools for relaxing me.
- Centering prayers provide a way for all of us to sit in the contentment of the moment, shutting out the noise in order to focus completely on God. This is not a practice that comes easily or naturally to most of us which is probably an indication of the stress that we live under. If you don’t know much about this form of prayer I would heartily recommend Basil Pennington’s classic Centering Prayer to you.
- Prayer beads are, for many, a great stress reliever and can be a wonderful way to prepare yourself for sleep. You might like to design your own prayer to say with your beads before you go to retire for the night.
Many Americans are heading towards one of the most unrestful weekends of the year – BBQs and celebrations of July 4th with friends. So I thought that I would post this as a reminder for all of us to take time to rest in the midst of our partying and celebrating – no matter where in the world we are.
This prayer is part of a series I am posting this week on rest and sleep. There are the other posts so far:
What’s the Problem With Insomnia
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