focus | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

The Life-Changing Practice of Meditation

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

One Work Goal for 2105: Focus

By Anita Mathias

I enjoy the One Word project. Instead of a resolution, one asks God for a prophetic word as a guide for the year.

My word for 2014 was alignment. I have chosen Joy as the word to return to this year. When I find myself stressed, distressed, angry, worried or simply sad, I am learning to stop what I am doing, and pray until peace and clarity returns, accepting the things I cannot change, changing the things I can…

One word, alas, can be constraining for a woman whose work is words…

* * *

My biggest trauma of 2014 was colon cancer. It was not metastatic, thankfully, but because lymph nodes were involved, I was given an estimate of my chances of being alive in 5 years!!

Anyway, fortunately, the median is not the message as Stephen Jay Gould wrote in this popular essay. He was given 8 months to live aged 40, and lived for 20 years, dying at 60 of an unrelated cancer. He writes

Attitude clearly matters in fighting cancer. We don’t know why (from my old-style materialistic perspective, I suspect that mental states feed back upon the immune system). But match people with the same cancer for age, class, health, socioeconomic status, and, in general, those with positive attitudes, with a strong will and purpose for living, with commitment to struggle, with an active response to aiding their own treatment and not just a passive acceptance of anything doctors say, tend to live longer. A few months later I asked Sir Peter Medawar, my personal scientific guru and a Nobelist in immunology, what the best prescription for success against cancer might be. “A sanguine personality,” he replied.

And God, the great mathematician, is known to upset human stats. (Consider Janet Walton given 104 billion to 1 odds of bearing healthy sextuplets. Which was exactly what she did.)

However, estimates of your chances of being alive—even decent odds, as in my case–focuses the mind. “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Dr. Johnson wrote.

In the first shock and sadness after the diagnosis, I wandered through the house, looking at the books I had not yet read, but really wanted to; the documentaries I had not watched, but really wanted to; the books I had not written, but really wanted to; thinking of the places to which I had never travelled, but rather wanted to. I did not want to die. I was in love with life.

I was sad.

Then, who knows how, I snapped out of sadness.

* * *

I had prayed with faith for healing. Why should I proceed as if God was definitely ignore my prayers? That’s crazy behaviour for a believer. God is my Father; why should I hurt his feelings by doubting his goodness.

Fifty springs are little room to look at things in bloom, the poet A. C. Housman wrote. So since, in the Upper Room discourse at the Last Supper, Jesus repeatedly urges us to ask for anything we wish, I asked, playfully, for 50 additional years of life, which would get me to the age at which my great-grandmother Julianna died. (I come from a line of long-lived woman on both sides of the family, thriving into their nineties, often living past a hundred, women who lived on ancestral diets–not the Western diet I have indulged in for the last 30 years.)

And so, while I am steadily changing my diet in the direction of optimum nutrition, and steadily increasing my exercise, I decided to plunge back into work I really wanted to do. Work one loves–a great and mysterious extender of life.

* * *

I started work on a memoir in 1991—an account of a Catholic childhood in Jamshedpur, a Zoroashtrian company town; rebellious years in a boarding school in Nainital, in the foothills of the Himalayas, run by German and Irish nuns; and then working with Mother Teresa at Calcutta.

However, I shelved it numerous times: to write essays; to teach Creative Writing at The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg; for four years to establish a business; and then for another five years, I barely worked on it while I blogged.

Chapters have met with success. They have won a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; a Minnesota State Arts Board fellowship; a Jerome Fellowship: have won “Writer of Unusual Promise” awards to writing conferences, have been published in Best Spiritual Writing, Commonweal, London Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Notre Dame Magazine. I am certain that it will be a good book–though a long one in the first draft (which will definitely need a good editor).

I realized that if I died without finishing it, and publishing it (I am thinking of indie publishing the first longer version) I would feel enormous, almost unbearable sadness and regret, because it took me time and sacrifice to get a good first draft.

But if I died without developing my blog to dizzy heights, so be it. C’est la vie. Blogging has been enormously rewarding in psychological, spiritual, creative, personal growth, social and career ways…a trip to Cambodia, for instance… Who would have guessed? It has brought me nearly 10,000 readers a month, some of whom have become real life friends. The confidence and support a large and steady readership brings cannot be underestimated.

* * *

So I will work on the memoir first, writing 500 words a day. A long memoir averages 120,000 words, which means I could be done with it in less than 8 months; much has already been written, and I already have a first draft. Sounds good, huh?

I will shoot for 500 words rather than 1000, for that will leave time for walking, gardening, housework, prayer, family life, friendships as well as gas in the tank for another day’s writing.

500 words… I might be able to write that in an hour if I focus. Perhaps two hours if I shoot for beautiful words. In a widely shared piece, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet attributed their success to that fact that they knew how to focus.

And that is my work goal for 2015: Focus

I am using an app called Freedom to turn off the internet when I write. I really enjoy the quiet and concentration of being in the zone, and get so much done when the internet is off.

So I will write my 500 words, and then blog–a blog or two or three a week as the Lord gives me strength and energy.

I had a mentor, whose book I edited. He said he would write as the Lord provided time. I thought privately, “One can’t write like that!” But both his books are still read in a world in which bloggers publish books to a three week buzz, books which are often dead in six months, and forgotten in a year.

Apparently relying on the Lord for words and time is a very good work strategy indeed!

A Pruned Minimalistic Life is More Fruitful

By Anita Mathias

When we were in Tuscany in September, I saw grape vines pruned back drastically to about three feet, and above them, masses of plump abundant grapes, black, green, purple.

Grape vines grow as tall as you let them. We have some growing in our conservatory and the side of our barn, which are 10-15 feet.

These, however, were cut back savagely, sending all the energy upwards, and look at the fruit!

* * *

I wish I had taken in this visual lesson earlier. How much more productive I would have been.

But I have learnt it now.

Cut back the inessentials, so that you can be fruitful in the essentials, the one thing you have been put on earth to do.

Jesus at the end of his life said, “I have done the work you have given me to do.” (John 17:4)

So cut back even the good things; the volunteerism; your social media friendships, so that the work he has given you to do, the fruit you want to produce, gleams more beautifully.

Ask yourself: Is this activity the work God has given me to do? If not, even if it is a good thing–taking a turn at leading the Bible study or serving on church teams and rotas–leave it for someone else, for whom it is perhaps the work God has given her to do.

* * *

Those vines struck me like a dart to the heart. Since then, I’ve been pruning—my possessions (getting rid of at least one thing a day) and my commitments. I have even been pruning relationships with negative friends, who drag me down and depress me, relationships I had not let go because of sentimentality and familiarity.

The fruitful vine is pruned so that it will be even more fruitful. One of those counter-intuitive truths which run like grace-notes through the Gospels.

Quit Worrying about your Savings Plan: Jesus

By Anita Mathias

Image credit

Jesus was a spectacularly loving person, caring and reaching out right through his crucifixion— so when he speaks about money, we’d be wise to listen up.

We’d be wise to listen because his desire, the reason he said he came, was for the fullest human flourishing, that we may have LIFE in abundance.

We’d be wise to listen because he only speaks in kindness.

* * *

I am re-reading the Sermon on the Mount. There has been a Christian conspiracy down the ages to quietly ignore parts of it.

But I bet Jesus meant it when he said “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, but rather store up for yourself treasures in heaven.” He’s consistent in this advice: Do not labour for food which perishes, but for food which endures to eternal life.

* * *

The standard financial advice is to keep 6 months salary in cash at all times, (and to have 10 times your final salary in cash or stocks by the time you retire).

In other words, save enough to ensure that you can live without needing to trust God, without needing to lean on his ingenious ideas, and without needing to see his miracles and deliverances.

There is no kindness nor God-wisdom in this advice, but a lot of self-imposed deprivation, of harsh treatment of the present.

Six months salary in cash at all times; ten times final salary squirrelled away–think of how much fun and adventure and experience and opportunities for kindness and generosity and hospitality we miss out on with this sterile focus on saving enough money so that we will never have to rely on God’s kindness or generosity. So that we can, completely erroneously, perceive ourselves to be invulnerable.

* * *

There is a popular cliché about work-life balance: Nobody on his deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time at the office’. What is more likely is that nobody ever said on his deathbed, “I wish I had more money.”

But we may well wish we’d travelled more, seen more theatre, more film, read more books, taken more friends out to dinner, been more generous to our children, instead of working so darn hard, saving so much.

Stop worrying about saving for the future. And do not waste today worrying about the future.

This radical statement is, in fact, a sacred command. Do not worry about tomorrow Jesus says, setting us free, great liberator that he is.

* * *

The effects of 2008 world-wide credit crunch, and the subsequent contraction of economies are lingering. It’s probably a safe bet that many of my readers will not be on track to have ten times their final salary by the time they retire.

And neither am I!!

But, truthfully, I am not worried.

(If I received a cheque in the mail for ten years salary, I would bank most of it. But, in its absence, I would not deprive myself of travel or generosity or what is necessary for the flourishing of my work, or my family’s flourishing because I do not have 3-6 months salary in the bank and my retirement is not properly funded. I would not, however, go into debt, or put more on my credit card than I can pay in full this month for anything, except food.)

* * *

And that is why the Gospel is good news to the poor. Guys, do not worry, Jesus says, soaring into sublimity. The God who cares for the sparrows and lilies will care for you. Seek God today, and let Him worry about tomorrow.

It is splendid advice, and, with God’s help, I intend to follow it.

* * *

I once read some research that tracked people’s thoughts through the day. The top things women thought about were 1) their hair!! 2) money. How much they have, how to save, what to buy, how to get bargains, how much money others have, how they got it. Women thought more about money and their hair than sex, the study observed. Men, on the other hand…

However, why not gradually shift our focus in the direction Jesus suggests–to focus on alternative eternal treasures—and fill our bodies with light? In Matthew 13, in a slew of metaphors, living in God’s kingdom is consistently referred to as treasure: the treasure in a field, the pearl of great price worth selling everything to buy.

Why not slowly develop the habit of eating Scripture, this treasure hidden from the busy? Develop the habit of Scripture meditation, an acquired taste in our fast-fast world of distraction. Start small, start with a short time, and increase it as the appetite grows for time with Jesus in quiet eternal realms which stretch and expand.

* * *

Scripture meditation yields great rewards. Paul Meier M.D. found in his study of the psychological and mental health and spiritual lives of evangelical seminary students that students who practiced almost daily Scripture meditation for three years or longer were significantly healthier and happier than students who did not meditate on Scripture daily.

Or as Jesus might have said, their whole body was full of light.

* * *

For what we focus on determines the course of our lives. If our eye is good (“good eye” opthalmos haplos in Greek, refers to generosity) our whole body is full of light. If on, the other hand, our eye is bad, (evil eye, Greek ophthalos poneros, refers to stinginess or greediness) our whole body is full of darkness.

When I think of the most generous people I know, there is a lightness and loveliness to them. And when I think of the most stingy, money-focused people I know—who cannot part with money, cannot force themselves to be generous, who will manipulate others into helping them, but rarely help others—there is a kind of darkness in their lives. The English word miser comes from the Latin miser, “unhappy, wretched, pitiable, in distress.” The focus on money clouds their hearts and lives in darkness.

Whoa, Jesus, so many things you say are literally true!!

We Must Prune Even the Good for Increased Fruitfulness

By Anita Mathias

Every branch that does bear fruit, the gardener prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. John 15:2. Seems unfair, doesn’t it?

In a contemporary interpretation of the Joseph story in Sun, Stand Still, Stephen Furtick refers to the pit of into which Joseph was tossed on his journey from being a shepherd boy in Israel to being Viceroy of Egypt as being a necessary removal of the unnecessary from the hard disk of Joseph’s life to make room for an upgrade.

Yes. That is what pruning is. If the good—branches, twigs, leaves– interferes with the best, out it goes.

For the good is always the enemy of the best.

* * *

I have struggled with this all my life, being the sort of woman who is interested in everything, and wants to do everything, remaining in denial that the many was the enemy of focus.
However, more and more I am realizing my life and my time are not my own. That my call to write is synonymous with my call to follow Christ. For He calls me to write. So I must cut what stands in the way of writing.

At New Wine 2008, the wonderful Heidi Baker launched into a hypnotic, half-sung, half-chanted riff at the end of her talk, where she prayed gifts on her audience. “Has God called you to write? she asked. “Then say, I will do whatever it takes for me to become a writer.”

Can I say it even now? It makes me feel afraid, and stressed.

* * *

I had entered Mother Teresa’s convent and wanted to become a nun when I was 17. I realized it was a mistake after a year, but thought I would look foolish if I left, so dragged on, growing increasingly ill, physically.

While there, I read a book called “Our Father.” A man boards a train going in the wrong direction. He realizes it, but having told everyone that he was disembarking at the last stop, he felt embarrassed to admit that he had boarded the wrong train, and jump off. So he continues travelling in the wrong direction–getting more and more annoyed with the friends who invited him to dinner, exposing him to this hassle.

I left.

If you realise that you are going in the wrong direction, have agreed to something you shouldn’t have, are doing something that is not your call, jump off as fast as you can.

In this phase of pruning, I am jumping off more and more trains I should never have boarded, my French language lessons, gym memberships, prayer ministry, many relationships and friendships, some social events, so that I can more fully focus on the one thing God has called me to do: to write!