Meditation #7: Prayer for Peace

2013

When I think about what will bring us peace in this world I envision communities that come together to fully support families in raising physically and mentally healthy children. I believe that everyone has a role that they can play to contribute to the healthy development of children in their family and community. This series is intended to help participants think through the innumerable ways they may be able to provide support and nurturance throughout the growth cycles of children and their families—actively contributing to the construction of a healthy and peaceful world. You may notice two prominent visual themes in these montages—plants to represent life and hands to represent different types of support. The diverse plants are used in place of images of specific children or families. Plants have similar life cycles to many other living organisms; I wanted participants to view the core concepts broadly, not tied solely to preconceived notions of a specific gender, race, class, or sexual orientation that may be triggered by human images. The hands that appear in these montages belong to local community members who in some way contribute to the wellbeing of children and families—brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, parents, godparents, grandparents, teachers, and those who work in public and/or mental health fields. I encourage you to view your hands as readily fitting in with these hands as you contribute to the healthy growth and development of children and families. My hope for this work is that the visual imagery will grab you, the written information will trigger you to think more deeply about the concepts addressed, and that you will feel motivated to join in the creative process by contributing your own ideas to the foundational images. I strongly believe that you, personally, can help bring our communities peace by contributing to the important work of bringing up holistically healthy children of the present and future. Each image has a question underneath it that is designed to spark your thinking about the roles you may choose to take as supporters of healthy children and their families.

2010

Wherever he goes, Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard is asked to explain what meditation is, how it is done and what it can achieve. In this authoritative and inspiring book, he sets out to answer these questions. Matthieu Ricard shows that practising meditation can change our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. He talks us through its theory, spirituality and practical aspects of deep contemplation and illustrates each stage of his teaching with examples. Through his experience as a monk, his close reading of sacred texts and his deep knowledge of the Buddhist masters, Matthieu Ricard reveals the significant benefits that meditation - based on selfless love and compassion - can bring to each of us.

The term meditation encompasses a broad range of different practices, including reciting religious scriptures, chanting sacred mantras, progressive muscle relaxation, exercising deep breathing, sitting in silence, dancing, or even screaming. Spirituality through meditation is now becoming widespread in the mainstream business world.

When How to Meditate was first published more than twenty years ago, meditation was not widely known or practiced in the West, and there were few books about it. Things are different now. Millions of Western people practice meditation regularly; doctors prescribe it to their patients as a way to deal with pain, heart disease, cancer, depression, and other problems; scientists are studying its effects on the brain and the immune system. There are dozens of books, tapes, CDs, and websites about meditation, and meditation classes are available in most cities. Whatever I know about Buddhism and meditation I have learned from my kind and compassionate teachers, especially Lama Thubten Yeshe, Zopa Rinpoche, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey, Geshe Jampa Tegchog, and Ribur Rinpoche. I thank these precious teachers from my heart for sharing with us their knowledge and insight and pray sincerely that their work may continue for a long time to come. Many people have worked to make this book possible. I extend thanks to Wendy Finster for her Handbook of Mahayana Practices, from which this book developed; to Thubten Wongmo, Jon Landaw, and T. Yeshe for their initial editing and translating work; to Nick

This paper discusses the potential of meditation used in conflict transformation training based on the the needs asserted within conflict transformation studies, the purported benefits of various types of meditation training, and scientific studies of stress and mindfulness. However, the paper claims there is still much work to be done by Buddhists in categorizing the many forms of meditation to fit such practical social applications and although scientific studies are promising, they still lack in the specificity necessary to make more than basic presumptions.

Self & Society, 1989

One day a man of the people said to Zen Master Ikkyu: 'Master, will you please write for me some maxims of the highest wisdom?' Ikkyu immediately took his brush and wrote the word 'Attention'. 'Is that all?' asked the man. 'Will you not add something more?' Iltkyu then wrote twice running: 'Attention. Attention.' 'Well' remarked the man rather irritably, 'I really don't see much depth or sublety in what you have Just written'. Then Iltltyu wrote the same word three times running. 'Attention. Attention. Attention.' Half-angered the man demanded: 'What does that word 'attention' mean anyway?' And Ikkyu answered gently: 'At tent ion. means attention.' Meditation is the way out of the apparent impasse created be the fact that many of the bur led beliefs and condition ings which cause us to be uneasy and insecure are dissolved in our experience.

Teachers College Record, 2006

which focuses on contemplative practices from various wisdom traditions in order to increase awareness of what they share and to encourage educators to view these practices as sources of peace and tolerance. The article also presents various ways in which the students participated in the course and ends with an essay on ''right teaching,'' written as a final project by Akbar Ali Herndon and Zuki Karpinska. If we are to make peace in the world, we must first make peace in ourselves. -The Dalai Lama When one gives whatever one can without restraint, the barriers of individuality break down. It no longer becomes possible to tell whether it is the student offering himself to the teacher, or the teacher offering herself to the student. -Lao Tzu In concluding this special issue, I (Clifford Hill) would like to begin by describing a course on contemplative practices and education that was offered at Teachers College, Columbia University, under the sponsorship of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. The article will end with a collaborative essay prepared by Akbar Ali Herndon and Zuki Karpinska as a final project for this course. In putting together the course for a professional school of education, I had two particular concerns. First, I wanted to adopt an approach that would be sensitive to the separation of church and state, and second, I wanted to bring broad perspectives to bear on contemplative practices. Given these concerns, the temptation was to minimize the historical association between contemplative practices and religion and to document the

Infactis Pax, 1 (2), 2007

Connecting inner dimensions of peace education to outer dimensions of peace education is critical for transformative peace efforts aimed at curbing a cultural of violence and moving toward a culture of peace. The cultivation of inner peace can contribute to knowledge paradigms that are supportive of peace and can provide a foundation for social action toward supporting peaceful attitudes, dispositions, values, action-orientations, behaviors and social structures. Contemplative practices/meditations  In Factis Pax 1 (2) (2007): 120-157 http://www.infactispax.org/journal/ 121 are essential to education for peace because inner and outer worlds are not mutually exclusive, rather they mirror and reinforce one another. Therefore, inner violence correlates with outer violence; inner peace correlates with outer peace. Aligning both nonviolent means with nonviolent ends is essential for building sustainable, renewable peace. The connection between being peace and doing peace needs to be more deeply fostered and explored in the field of peace education.

Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds, 2023

Rethinking Meditation provides a new theoretical and historical approach to Buddhist and Buddhist-derived meditative practices. It shows how, rather than coming down to us unchanged from the time of the Buddha, the standard articulation of mindfulness as bare, nonjudgmental attention to the present moment is a distillation of particular strands of classical Buddhist thought that have combined with western ideas to create a unique practice tailored to modern forms of thought and ways of life. Part genealogical study and part philosophical argument, it inquires into some of the widespread assumptions about how meditation works and what it does, presenting a view of meditative practices as technologies of the self embedded in cultural forms of life. It shows that the relationship between meditative practices and cultural context is much more crucial than is suggested in typical contemporary articulations, which often emphasize transcendence of cultural conditioning and achieving “objective” internal access to the contents of consciousness. Meditation, McMahan argues, is always situated in social contexts and draws from repertoires of cultural categories, concepts, and values, sometimes accommodating them and sometimes resisting them. Rethinking Meditation also considers the scientific study of meditation and meditation in relation to modern articulations of secularism, freedom, authenticity, appreciation, and interdependence. It also examines the potential for meditation to enhance autonomy and addresses recent attempts to bring meditative practices to bear on social, political, and environmental issues.

BUDDHIST APPROACH TO HARMONIOUS FAMILIES, HEALTHCARE, AND SUSTAINABLE SOCIETIES, 2019

Mental health is the third most burdensome topic in Australia that takes the highest proportion of non-fatal burden among nearly 200 diseases (Fig. 1). It is noteworthy to address the mental disease group that covers a wide range of conditions “including bipolar affective disorder, anxiety, substance use, behavioural and developmental disorders, schizophrenia and intellectual disability” (AIHW 2016, p. 149). In response to this health burden, there has been a huge interest in meditation-based techniques over recent decades (Shonin et al. 2014; 2014a; 2014b). WHAT IS MEDITATION? Meditation, as known as bhāvāna in the Pali or Sanskrit term , is recorded existent before written history throughout religious practices of dhyāna in ancient Eastern religions, originated in various forms from Hinduism, Jainism, Indian Buddhism to Daoism and Chinese Buddhism (Everly & Lating 2013, pp. 201-4). The Institute of Noetic Science (IONS n.d) identifies meditation “as one of the key practices for cultivating positive transformations in consciousness” based on their research and publications. In the meantime, Meditation Association of Australia (n.d) refers the significant aspect of Eastern philosophies that lead to the end of all sufferings . Strong (2015, p. 150) could not agree more by saying “right mindfulness and right concentration are two limbs of the eightfold path that are traditionally considered to be part of the training in meditation”. To comprehend the utmost goal in Buddhist philosophy – Nirvana, he succinctly discerns the development of mindfulness (sati) and insight (vipassanā-bhāvanā) from calm-abiding practice (samatha-bhāvanā) in order to have a notion of “the wisdom that comes with knowing reality” (p. 153). By means of mindfulness practice applied in psychotherapy as a healing modality as well as in clinical studies (Germer et al. 2005; Kabat-Zinn 1990; Didonna ed. 2008), insight meditation has become popular in the West since 1960s when early attentiveness in Eastern ideology spread (IONS n.d). Still, meditation approach also encompasses loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity, and other spiritual elements. In this respect, the paper will substantially review the scholarly literature on the potent modality of meditation in present-day clinical studies. Thereafter a succinct look at Buddhist values associated with meditation in untraditional, but conventional practices being surveyed within the current theme of Western approach. Last but not least, the author’s spiritual guide to perform this modality in everyday life will be concisely presented for future reference.