Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

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The Life-Changing Practice of Meditation

By Anita Mathias

So, a couple of years ago, almost on a whim, my husband Roy and I took an intensive eight week course in Mindfulness at the Oxford Department of Psychiatry! (and at the famous local psychiatric hospital, the Warneford!!)

I didn’t really know what Mindfulness was, but I “knew,” we should do it. You can imagine how annoyed Roy felt!!

As it turned out, it was an amazing course, filled with many new ways of thinking and being. We learned and practiced different meditations such as the body scan, walking meditation, meditations when experiencing difficult things, and mindful movement (i.e. yoga, “yoga is meditation.”) While, unsurprisingly, not many stuck, those that did were life-changing!

I am learning the art of stopping and taking a breath, though the three step breathing space, a four minute meditation. It sometimes feels as if I am too busy, too stressed, too behind, running too late, to stop and take a few minutes to just breathe for heaven’s sake… but doing that settles my mind and then I am so much more effective. In fact, it is a cure for the racing mind, the busy heart, and the slumbering spirit…stop, breathe, calm the mind.

“Sitting meditation” is what I practice most often. Forty minutes, the optimal meditation session, takes you, your mind, body, and spirit to another, generally peaceful and joyful state, and I aim to spend forty minutes a day on meditation, though I do it according to need—sometimes two sets of twenty minutes which some teachers say yields maximum benefits, sometimes four sets of ten minutes which calms me and gives focus before I work, or deal with difficult tasks, thoughts, and emotions.

I found learning meditation so helpful that Roy and I are currently doing a 12 week advanced course in Mindfulness at the Warneford, led by Willem Kuyken, Oxford Professor of Mindfulness; it’s a mind-changing and joyful experience.

So here are some personal benefits I have experienced over the last two years of regular meditation, some of them accidental and unexpected!

1 Better Sleep

I often listen to a guided meditation by Mark Williams or Jon Kabat-Zinn to calm my mind, which usually has a hundred thoughts, questions, and things to resolve. I am calm and sleepy by the end of it and drift off to sleep easily. Meditation for me is a gateway into sleep.

2 Focus and Creativity

I frequently meditate, just for ten minutes, before beginning to write, and it helps focus my mind. It is a brilliant investment of time. I was interested to read that Juval Noah Harari who condensed the history of humanity into Sapiens, 464 bestselling pages meditates for two hours a day, and says he would not have been able to  focus on the important themes and events in the morass of world history without the practice of meditation.

If my mind is scattered and distracted, meditating before I settle down to write helps me focus, an essential skill for creative work in this culture in which the internet, with its invitations to distraction, its gratification of idle curiosity, and its addictive dopamine surges make focus more difficult.

3 Weight Loss

This is possibly an accidental benefit, a synergistic, serendipitous connection… though perhaps not. But since I started meditation in May 2017, I have lost 30 pounds, over two stone.

One day, I realised that my Fitbit showed that my weight had dropped for each week I had been meditating, and hypothesized a connection. Then I worked with a health coach, who suggested  meditating twice a day for 20 minutes (to lower cortisol, the stress hormone which prevents weight loss) and texting her after each session.

I have now pretty much broken the habit of emotional eating and snacking, and though I have more weight to lose, I am hopeful because your trajectory is more important than where you currently are. And I am trying to eat more mindfully, actually savouring food.

4 Relief of chronic pain

I had crippling, life-affecting pain from sciatica for over a year (and, amazingly, was healed from chronic pain after an Oxford Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery PRAYED for me in church!!!).

I worked with a health coach and got Sports Massages, but then she tried removing the pain without placing her hands on me, but simply by meditating with me… and, lo and behold, it worked.

So I used meditation when pain gripped me. It calmed the mind, it relaxed the body, and, astonishingly, pain left while I focused on my breath. The benefits of meditation for chronic pain have been well-documented by Jon Kabat-Zinn, and in this Atlantic article, for instance.

5 A Pathway into Prayer

For me, meditation is a pathway into prayer. Sometimes, my mind is racing, and my emotions feel turbulent, and I know it would take a long time to settle down to prayer. So I do a ten or twenty minute guided meditation until I am calm enough to enter the presence of Jesus.

I used to calm myself and resolve things through prayer, but prayer for me can be work; it’s conversation; it takes energy, and, at night, it uses the mind which I want to simmer down. Meditation, especially the two practices I use most often, Sitting Meditation, and Lying Down Meditation, calms the mind and body, and creates the necessary conditions for fruitful prayer, which for me happens when I actually “see” the face of Jesus, and am in his presence.

6 Problem-Solving.

I love the “Sitting with Difficulties Meditation.”  You get super-calm through breathing, and then face the difficulty…an emotion, task, person or situation. It is a half an hour meditation, and during the course of it, I usually know exactly what I should do about the difficulty, and what the next steps should be. If it is an inter-personal hassle, sometimes I have a better understanding of the person’s behaviour, and more compassion, and forgiveness comes more easily. Sometimes, I just take the difficulty and leave it in God’s hands to do what he wants with it. It functions as a Serenity Prayer, accepting the things I cannot change, and changing the things I can. And it cuts problems down to size. Some annoying situations and random people one can just blow off.

7 Emotional and Mental Health

Meditation helps me calm my emotions, and achieve a (sometimes temporary) serenity from which productivity flows. It gives me space to confront my thoughts and the emotional niggles and dissatisfactions which otherwise would be shoved underground to emerge in a perhaps harmful form.  When under stress, a 20 minute guided meditation is a way of checking out, like taking a small boat out to sea, and when I return, I am so much calmer.

Emotional health is not something I have focused on… In my teens and twenties, I focused on my intellectual life, reading, reading, reading; in my thirties and forties, I began to focus on my interior and spiritual life. A health breakdown, almost five years ago, made me begin to take my physical health seriously. And now, I am also trying to be more cognisant of my emotional life, not just interrogating what I think about people, situations, projects, commitments, holiday destinations, but also what I feel about them, for emotions, the iceberg beneath the surface, control more of our actions and behaviour than we realise. Our intuition and emotions carry a lot of wisdom, for perhaps the heart, the gut, the unconscious is smarter than our thinking mind.

8 Connecting with the Body

Meditation is teaching me to reconnect with the body, and its wisdom and signals. Hey, Anita, your stomach is tightening, your breath is constricting, be careful of this person, this situation, this commitment, this demand. Hey Anita, your heart is beating faster, your mind is racing. Stop. Meditate. Slow down. Slow down.

Thoughts create actual molecules in our bodies, raising levels of stress hormones like cortisol or adrenaline, bonding hormones like oxytocin, or “happy chemicals” like the neurotransmitters serotonin or dopamine. Just as bodily tension or pain stresses the mind, the mind causes psychosomatic physical pain and tension. Meditation calms both mind and body, increasing both physical and mental health and productivity through the power of the mind.

9 Learning to be Present

This is something I am beginning to learn, but the practice of paying attention, though practices like the body scan teaches me to come into my body and just be present… for instance, when I am physically uncomfortable or bored in Yoga class, or in social or group situations. It is so rare in our distracted age to either listen or be listened to with full attention that increasingly people pay therapists big bucks to do just that.  The practice of meditation is helping me learn to be really present, and really listen to people with my full attention, and, of course, when you do that you learn far more than what they saying, for, unless you are dealing with a practised con-person, the eyes, face, and body speak their own language.

How can you learn to meditate?

I went to classes. However, if you need to learn promptly or haven’t the time or finance right now, I’d suggest

Mark Williams’ wonderful book Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World which has a meditation CD included, on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

Or Jon Kabat-Zinn’s great and encyclopaedic book Full Catastrophe Living on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

Or Jon Kabat-Zinn’s magisterial meditation CDs on Amazon.com or on Amazon.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: random Tagged With: Chronic Pain, Creativity, Emotional Health, focus, jon kabat-zinn, Mark Williams, meditation, mental health, Mindfulness, peace, Prayer, Productivity, sleep, weight loss

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Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India

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Wandering Between Two Worlds: Essays on Faith and Art

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Francesco, Artist of Florence: The Man Who Gave Too Much

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The Story of Dirk Willems

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https://anitamathias.com/.../jesus-knows-the-best- https://anitamathias.com/.../jesus-knows-the-best-way-to.../
LINK IN BIO!
Jesus knows the best way to do what you are best at!!
Simon Peter was a professional fisherman. And Jesus keeps teaching him, again and again, that he, Jesus, has greater mastery over fishing. And over everything else. After fruitless nights of fishing, Jesus tells Peter where to cast his nets, for an astounding catch. Jesus walks on water, calms sea storms.
It’s easy to pray in desperation when we feel hard-pressed and incompetent, and, often,
Christ rescues us in our distress, adds a 1 before our zeroes.
However, it’s equally important to turn over our strengths to him, so he can add zeroes after our 1. And the more we can surrender our strengths to his management, the more he works in those areas, and blesses them.
A walk around beautiful Magdalen College, Oxford, A walk around beautiful Magdalen College, Oxford, with a camera.
And, if you missed it, my latest podcast meditation, on Jesus’s advice on refocusing energy away from judging and critiquing others into self-transformation. https://anitamathias.com/2023/05/11/on-using-anger-as-a-trigger-to-transform-ourselves/
https://anitamathias.com/.../on-using-anger-as-a-t https://anitamathias.com/.../on-using-anger-as-a-trigger.../ link in bio
Hi friends, Here's my latest podcast meditation. I'm meditating through the Gospel of Matthew.
Do not judge, Jesus says, and you too will escape harsh judgement. So once again, he reiterates a law of human life and of the natural world—sowing and reaping. 
Being an immensely practical human, Jesus realises that we are often most “triggered” when we observe our own faults in other people. And the more we dwell on the horrid traits of people we know in real life, politicians, or the media or internet-famous, the more we risk mirroring their unattractive traits. 
So, Jesus suggests that, whenever we are intensely annoyed by other people to immediately check if we have the very same fault. And to resolve to change that irritating trait in ourselves. 
Then, instead of wasting time in fruitless judging, we will experience personal change.
And as for us who have been judgey, we still live “under the mercy” in Charles Williams’ phrase. We must place the seeds we have sown into the garden of our lives so far into God’s hands and ask him to let the thistles and thorns wither and the figs and grapes bloom. May it be so!
Spring in England= Joy=Bluebells=Singing birds. I Spring in England= Joy=Bluebells=Singing birds. I love it.
Here are some images of Shotover Park, close to C. S. Lewis's house, and which inspired bits of Narnia and the Lord of the Rings. Today, however, it's covered in bluebells, and loud with singing birds.
And, friends, I've been recording weekly podcast meditations on the Gospel of Matthew. It's been fun, and challenging to settle down and think deeply, and I hope you'll enjoy them.
I'm now in the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus details all the things we are not to worry about at all, one of which is food--too little, or too much, too low in calories, or too high. We are, instead, to do everything we do in his way (seek first the Kingdom and its righteousness, and all this will fall into place!).
Have a listen: https://anitamathias.com/2023/05/03/do-not-worry-about-what-to-eat-jesus/ and link in bio
“See how the flowers of the field grow. They do “See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labour or spin.  Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of these. Or a king on his coronation day.
So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” 
Of course, today, we are more likely to worry that sugary ultra-processed foods everywhere will lead to weight gain and compromise our health. But Jesus says, “Don’t worry,” and in the same sermon (on the mount), suggests other strategies…like fasting, which brings a blessing from God, for instance, while burning stored fat. And seeking God’s kingdom, as Jesus recommends, could involve getting fit on long solitary prayer walks, or while walking with friends, as well as while keeping up with a spare essentialist house, and a gloriously over-crowded garden. Wild birds eat intuitively and never gain weight; perhaps, the Spirit, on request, will guide us to the right foods for our metabolisms. 
I’ve recorded a meditation on these themes (with a transcript!). https://anitamathias.com/2023/05/03/do-not-worry-about-what-to-eat-jesus/
https://anitamathias.com/2023/05/03/do-not-worry-a https://anitamathias.com/2023/05/03/do-not-worry-about-what-to-eat-jesus/
Jesus advised his listeners--struggling fishermen, people living on the edge, without enough food for guests, not to worry about what they were going to eat. Which, of course, is still shiningly relevant today for many. 
However, today, with immense societal pressure to be slender, along with an obesogenic food environment, sugary and carby food everywhere, at every social occasion, Jesus’s counsel about not worrying about what we will eat takes on an additional relevance. Eat what is set about you, he advised his disciples, as they went out to preach the Gospel. In this age of diet culture and weight obsession, Jesus still shows us how to live lightly, offering strategies like fasting (which he promises brings us a reward from God). 
What would Jesus’s way of getting fitter and healthier be? Fasting? Intuitive spirit-guided eating? Obeying the great commandment to love God by praying as we walk? Listening to Scripture or excellent Christian literature as we walk, thanks to nifty headphones. And what about the second commandment, like the first—to love our neighbour as ourselves? Could we get fitter running an essentialist household? Keeping up with the garden? Walking with friends? Exercising to be fit enough to do what God has called us to do?
This meditation explores these concerns. #dietculture #jesus #sermononthemount #meditation #excercise #thegreatcommandment #dontworry 
https://anitamathias.com/2023/05/03/do-not-worry-about-what-to-eat-jesus/
Kefalonia—it was a magical island. Goats and she Kefalonia—it was a magical island. Goats and sheep with their musical bells; a general ambience of relaxation; perfect, pristine, beaches; deserted mountains to hike; miles of aimless wandering in landscapes of spring flowers. I loved it!
And, while I work on a new meditation, perhaps have a listen to this one… which I am meditating on because I need to learn it better… Jesus’s tips on how to be blessed by God, and become happy!! https://anitamathias.com/2023/04/25/happy-are-the-merciful-for-they-shall-be-shown-mercy/ #kefalonia #family #meditation #goats
So… just back from eight wonderful days in Kefal So… just back from eight wonderful days in Kefalonia. All four of us were free at the same time, so why not? Sun, goats, coves, bays, caves, baklava, olive bread, magic, deep relaxation.
I hadn’t realised that I needed a break, but having got there, I sighed deeply… and relaxed. A beautiful island.
And now… we’re back, rested. It’s always good to sink into the words of Jesus, and I just have. Here’s a meditation on Jesus’s famous Beatitudes, his statements on who is really happy or blessed, which turns our value judgements on their heads. I’d love it if you listened or read it. Thanks, friends.
https://anitamathias.com/2023/04/25/happy-are-the-merciful-for-they-shall-be-shown-mercy/
#kefalonia #beatitudes #meditation #family #sun #fun
https://anitamathias.com/2023/04/25/happy-are-the- https://anitamathias.com/2023/04/25/happy-are-the-merciful-for-they-shall-be-shown-mercy/
Meditating on a “beatitude.”… Happy, makarios, or blessed are the merciful, Jesus says, articulating the laws of sowing and reaping which underlie the universe, and human life.
Those who dish out mercy, and go through life gently and kindly, have a happier, less stressful experience of life, though they are not immune from the perils of our broken planet, human greed polluting our environment and our very cells, deceiving and swindling us. The merciless and unkind, however, sooner or later, find the darkness and trouble they dish out, haunting them in turn.
Sowing and reaping, is, of course, a terrifying message for us who have not always been kind and merciful!
But the Gospel!... the tender Fatherhood of God, the fact that the Lord Christ offered to bear the sentence, the punishment for the sins of the world-proportionate because of his sinlessness.  And in that divine exchange, streams of mercy now flow to us, slowly changing the deep structure of our hearts, minds, and characters.
And so, we can go through life gently and mercifully, relying on Jesus and his Holy Spirit to begin and complete the work of transformation in us, as we increasingly become gentle, radiant children of God.
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