This week my ladies at York CI are in lock down. This means that they are unable to enjoy this gorgeous Spring weather. Their meals and medications are delivered to their rooms while the prison is searched with a fine toothed comb for contraband. Can you imagine being stuck in the same room with someone you love for five days? Imagine sharing an overcrowded space with a haphazard group of women. A moment of peace and quiet becomes the most valuable gift they can grant one another. Please include my students and all the inmates and staff of York in a loving kindness meditation.

As I thought of my classes for the veterans this week, I decided to focus on meditation and for me, meditation is a form of prayer. Ann Lewin, in the lovely anthology of poems, Women Pray, edited with introductions by Monica Furlong, compares prayer to bird watching. It is not a question of what you do that causes a bird or a spiritual experience to occur. We need to focus instead on being and wait.

Practicing patience and slowing down is a profound spiritual practice. Manavasi Parthasarathi, an Indian teacher of Sanatana Dharma who has studied sacred scriptures for most of his life, just sent me a transcript of a lecture he gave in an elderly home. The topic was preventing falls, but his solution, to slow down and to pay attention, was both physical and deeply spiritual. If we can’t slow down and know ourselves we will fall off a ladder, actually or metaphorically, damaging our bodies as well as our souls.

Click on this Kingfisher link to read Ann Lewin’s poem. You can print it out if you choose.

After reading the poem, simply sit and follow your breath without trying to manipulate it in any way. Where do you feel movement in your body as you breathe? What is the temperature of your in breaths? Your out breaths? What is the humidity? Are you breathing predominantly through one nostril or the other? (This naturally shifts throughout the day.) Does your breath flow in and out like a continuous ribbon? Or are their breaks between your inhalations and your exhalations, or your exhalations and your inhalations? Can you rest in these pauses and wait? Are you comfortable adding a mantra to the observation of your breath? As your mind wanders, simply note if it was a sound or a plan or a story or a …. that distracted your attention and return to your posture, your breath, your mantra if you use one, and wait. No expectations, no judgment. Space, silence, and expectancy (different from a specific expectation) are enough, “but sometimes, when you’ve almost stopped expecting it, a flash of brightness gives encouragement”.