Conduct of a
Meeting for Meditation
What will
happen when you come to your first meeting for contemplative meditation?
You will have arrived five or ten minutes early, and you will see
the sentence displayed. Come in quietly,
remembering the section making space for
stillness . Choose a chair and sit comfortably, with a straight
back and with feet firmly on the floor. You will aim to be expectant
and alert, but relaxed. You may find it helpful to take some deep
breaths. Then check that you are relaxed in every part, starting with
feet and toes, and ending with tongue and jaw. Keep your head upright
on your shoulders, held up, as it were by a cord to the skies. Rest
your hands on your lap. Begin to familiarise yourself with the sentence
which you may find that you need to write down on a slip of paper.
Close your eyes.
Remember that you are helped by the people around you, united and
strengthened in a common purpose.
Often, before the meditation begins, the reader will ask for the names
of three or four people who are 'laid upon our hearts', as the Quakers
say. These names will be dropped into the final silence, as described
in helping others.
The reader then reads the first section of the meditation paper,
and there follows a silence, while you repeat the sentence
slowly and prayerfully. After the second reading there is another
silence. Then comes the third reading, and a silence again, into which
the reader will drop the names of those given before the meeting.
Meetings are not long, not more than forty five minutes.
In each silence, we repeat the sentence
until we no longer need it. Sometimes we think that nothing has happened
to us, but it is a consolation to know that we cannot measure the
effect, yet maybe we shall find some difficulty will be nearer resolution.
Even years later, we may notice that we deal with an incident with
more love and wisdom than once we would have done.
The method is simple, but not easy, and needs daily practice. When
we use the sentences in our meditation
at home, we repeat the sentence for
as long as seems helpful. Five minutes will be enough to begin.
When you join the Fellowship, you will receive monthly notes, (you
will notice that we have quoted from these notes) as well as a sentence
for each week. For more information on these, see
Contact Us - How to Join.
Repeat your sentence again and again,
whenever opportunity for stillness occurs.