Opening a Door Into Hidden Treasures

Around about 2003 I discovered mindfulness meditation and have been practicing it ever since. At that time my motivation for practicing it was to reduce my stress levels. In “Full Catastrophe Living” John Kabat-Zinn describes how he adapted the originally Buddhist practice of mindfulness for a modern audience. He knew from personal experience that you didn’t need to be a Buddhist to benefit from practicing mindfulness. So he respectfully pared away any Buddhist trappings and added modern insights into psychology to create what is now a widely taught course known as Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction or MBSR for short.

Since then, others have come up with new secular adaptations of mindfulness to help people deal with anxiety and depression, cancer, drug addiction, childbirth, parenting, the world of work as well living with chronic pain. Lots of research has been piling up now for over thirty years testifying to the benefits of mindfulness in alleviating suffering of various kinds and also enhancing people’s experience of daily living.

Many people who learn mindfulness to help them with stress often find that it can also take them on a path of spiritual enquiry. There are many books both ancient and modern, influenced by Buddhism, which respond to this hunger for the spiritual. I have read quite a few of them and found that they have much to offer whether one calls oneself a Buddhist, a Christian, a Jew or someone of no faith at all.

For myself, the more I explored the riches of Buddhist teaching, the more I became curious about the root spiritual tradition that I grew up in: that of Christianity with its particular flavour of Catholicism. Surely I wondered, there must be something more beyond the communal celebration of the mass and the sacraments and church dogma to Catholic Christianity? In fact, I was curious to know why so many people have turned away from the spiritual traditions of their ancestors to embrace other faiths rooted in widely difference cultural traditions.

I recognised that for many, their newfound faith in Buddhism or Hinduism or whatever has usually led to a more balanced, fulfilled life. Could it be possible that buried within the Catholic Christian tradition, beyond the rituals and rules, there might be a hidden Wisdom tradition with its own set of meditative practices that could feed the soul? So for some time now I have been exploring this possibility. What I have discovered so far has led me to some exciting discoveries, which I hope to share in future newsletters.