Learning Calm: Christians and mindfulness.

I was very recently asked by a Christian student at my university with regard to a set of meditation sessions I had just advertised under the title 'Learn Calm and Carry On'.  "May I ask based on what philosophy behind will the meditation be conducted?". This is the answer I quickly formulated, but it seemed to me that in brief it helped me to articulate why I do it. You may discern that I have answered more than the simple question as asked: coming from a Christian tradition which has sometimes been more wary of things like this, I judged that placing the answer within a broader context was needed.

The philosophy behind it, from my point of view, is slightly sophisticated. In overview; it is rooted in scientific research on exercises involving focus on breath and awareness of one's own consciousness. As the person who leads this particular package of exercises, and as a Christian I understand what I'm doing as in Christian terms. I think that self-awareness is an important discipline for Christians to develop in order for us to become aware of how we do and don't follow God's will (even into the recesses of our personal formation) and to help us to become more conscious of God's presence in our everyday life.

These exercises can help us to cultivate those awarenesses.

However, these sessions are open to people who don't necessarily share a Christian commitment because I think, based on the scientific evidence, that the exercises can help people develop better mental and emotional health and because I believe that Christian faith calls us to 'do good to all', offering something like this is part of a broader Christian outreach. I occasionally talk with people about how they link up with Christian faith. Within the sessions themselves, I just use exercises that can be accessed by a wide variety of people with no particular content that requires a specific faith commitment.

As a Christian I see mind-body wholism as a part of the heritage of our faith reaching back into Hebrew anthropology and exemplified in the philosophical commitments that the churches of the first four centuries recognised as consistent with Christian commitment. That mind-body wholism leads me to expect that by engaging in certain kinds of psycho-somatic exercises, people would gain some health benefits. It is no surprise, either, therefore, to discover that by engaging in exercises of this kind, Christians can also find things that can help to mature their own discipleship of Christ.

On a more personal note, my own engagement in these exercises came through recognising that the effects and some of the component parts were actually part of practice and experience of many Christians, myself included. It was just that taking them out of the familiar context of a specific spiritual tradition made them seem somewhat unfamiliar at first.

Now, of course, there are others who might lead a range of exercises such as I do who don't share a Christian faith. And, of course, they would have to work out for themselves how they square the scientific results with their own philosophies. In what I've written above, I hope I've given you an indication of how it seems to me that these exercises can fit within a Christian understanding of the world. 

Further comments

My response ended at the last paragraph, but a few further comments might be called for.  There is in this response an implicit view of the relationship between the philosophical entails of Christian commitments and the 'public square': I'm not an exclusivist in this respect: I think that because world-views are seeking to explain the world which is a common heritage, there are enormous overlaps of explanations. In fact, missionally, I see these as the reason we can, as Christians, engage in conversations about how we collectively 'do' society and expect that sometimes our views can gain some degree of collective acceptance -because there is common ground in the human experiences of ourselves, our bodies, minds and the world. But maybe that's another post ...