Meditation and Christian fundamental[ist] misconceptions

Typically I have found certain types of Christian rather wary when I mention that i lead basic meditation sessions at our university.  When you look into it, you discover the common difficulty is that a number of Christian conservative and fundamentalist sources run a common critque. Meditation, the claim, is about learning to empty the mind -and that's dangerous because it then allows demonic infestation to occur. The only real Biblical basis for this claim is the gospel story about a demonised person being delivered but, because they don't follow Jesus, are then 'swept and clean' for seven more demons to infest them. From this it is deduced that an empty mind is a standing invitation to evil spirits.

However, there is a fundamental misunderstanding going on here. While it is true that i have talked to some new-age meditators who do seem to be aiming to empty their minds, in actual fact, mindfulness style meditation is not this. As the article Meditation for anxiety, depression? says:

"A lot of people have this idea that meditation means sitting down and doing nothing. But that's not true. Meditation is an active training of the mind to increase awareness, and different meditation programs approach this in different ways."

Far from emptying the mind, it is an attempt to fill the awareness and to decrease mind-wandering. I would actually say that emptying the mind is impossible; there's always something going on. In fact what mindfulness meditation is trying to do is something that can be quite useful for Christians.

Mindfulness meditation ... emphasizes acceptance of feelings and thoughts without judgment and relaxation of body and mind.

The attitude of 'not judging' -which is really about not prejudging or pre-empting in order to see what is really there and going on, is a vital skill set in self-knowledge which can help us to confess sin accurately and to become aware of our own motivations and habits of thought thus allowing us to put on the armour of light and to put away childish things. The research indicates that mindfulness meditators tend to be more empathic and this for Christians would relate to allowing our self-understanding to inform us about the way others 'tick' thus enabling us to fulfill better the  'do not judge lest you are yourselves judged' teaching of Jesus as well as helping us to the insights which would allow us to love our neighbours as ourselves.

Also, mindfulness practice seems to enable people to concentrate better -which is helpful in scriptural meditation or in simply contemplating or being aware of God.

The interesting thing, and one might think this could be an implication (I think rightly), is that by having regular disciplines of scriptural meditation -Lectio Divina and the classic Evangelical Quiet Time (which are very similar practices)-  or of self-examination for the confession of sin to name but two, the kind of mind-training being uncovered by research into mindfulness takes place. These 'deliver' (leaving aside the spiritual benefits) increasing ability to concentrate and focus attention and also greater self-awareness and other-understanding. So it's also easy to see have mindfulness practices can be congruent with Christian formation.