meditation on mid-terms #4

Meditation on Mi-terms #4

Today I’ll be at the Health Fair in MBSC, talking with people about a healthy lifestyle that includes balance.

For students, and others, this includes breathing, eating, sleep, and paying attention to God’s presence, like we do in our ministry on campus: fellowship, justice seeking, being useful and progressive thinking about God. One of the things we do is meditate to help our sense of balance.

The yoga master used to say in response to the question: “What is meditation?” “Eat when hungry, sleep when tired.” While simple on the surface, the response is much deeper because most people in our circles eat and sleep on schedule. The problem is the schedule may not pay attention to when we’re hungry or tired.

Yesterday’s news contained a brief article on peoples’ perceived effective times for work. 55% said they were more effective in the morning, 20% felt more effective in the afternoon. On the surface, people are telling us we can’t really work effectively all day (but our schedules say we must). What’s a healthy response to that? The yoga master said, “sleep when tired”. When studying or taking exams, enough sleep is a must, naps are a good thing, too. And eat a little something when you’re tired instead of the gorging we are tempted to do.

Balance comes first when we breathe. There are various ways to breathe: deep breathing, meditating breathing, relaxed breathing, short breaths, all help us pay attention to the source of life. So I will encourage people to breathe—breathing is a good idea.

Today, pay attention to your balance and your ability to breathe, remembering that ‘nephesh’ (breath or wind) of God was there in the beginning, in the creation, in our fabric of being.

Genesis 1:1

1In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 3Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.