![]() ![]() There’s nothing inherently wrong or right with that, but Christian meditation and prayer is distinctively different. When I was meditating using the mindfulness apps, I felt like I was trying to exercise my mind into building the ability to be more present and to better myself. The first difference comes down to why we’re doing it in the first place. So what exactly is different about Christian meditation? Well, at the core, there are 3 big differences: The short answer is, if you’re interested in learning more, I recommend you download and try it out! If you’re interested in finding out more about Christian meditation, though, just keep reading. or dive into traditional Catholic prayers and content (e.g., Our Father, Stations of the Cross, Saints) to re-discover and meditate on their beauty and depth. The app leads you through easy-to-follow guided sessions on each of these methods, lets you pick across themes of humility, calm, gratitude, joy etc. This is why we built the Hallow app (available on iPhone, Android): to try and help us discover and grow in this form of prayer and recollection (we also hit on many other beautiful methods of Catholic contemplative prayer and meditation including the Examen, Lectio Divina on the daily Gospel, and the Rosary). ![]() ![]() It lets us find our center, while ensuring that the center that we find always ends up being God. It’s a method of meditation that incorporates the calming recollection that we’re all seeking with the beauty of the Christian faith. So where do we go from here? What are we supposed to do with all of these caveats and warnings? Should we use these mindfulness apps to meditate or not? The great news is that there’s another option: Christian meditation. However, he continues, do not remain in yourself, but go beyond yourself because you are not God: He is deeper and greater than you….”To remain in oneself”: this is the real danger.“ Augustine is an excellent teacher: if you want to find God, he says, abandon the exterior world and re-enter into yourself. Augustine to help bring home this point: “On this topic St. Where is the focus? Many of the meditation practices common today are associated with an internal focus (e.g., on the breath, body or mind) whereas the aim of Christian prayer is always to “flee from impersonal techniques or from concentrating on oneself.” The future Pope Benedict cites St.Another is the lack of focus on humility and the potential for an increase of self-centeredness. One is misinterpreting feelings of calm and relaxation as spiritual consolations and thus ignoring the interconnection with our moral condition. What are the consequences? Spending too much time focused on our bodily sensations and experiences (e.g., breathing exercises, body scans) can potentially lead to a number of dicey consequences.What is the core? The center and core of all Christian prayer and meditation must always be God and striving to engage in a real living dialogue with Him.He also encourages us not to reject these ways ‘out of hand simply because they are not Christian,’ but that the Church recognizes what it is true and holy in the other world religions because they ‘reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens all men.’Īll that being said, he raises some serious concerns about these methods of meditation as they relate to the conception of Christian prayer: “Without doubt, a Christian needs certain periods of retreat into solitude to be recollected and, in God’s presence, rediscover his path.” “The spiritual restlessness arising from a life subjected to the driving pace of a technologically advanced society … brings a certain number of Christians to seek in these methods of prayer a path to interior peace and psychic balance.” He starts by acknowledging the deep spiritual need that underlies these questions: He wrote a letter 30 years ago addressing exactly these same questions*. To find the answer, it turns out, we have to look no further than Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict. The good news, I found, is these are not new questions, and this is not a new problem. It helped me to focus and to learn to sit in silence without my mind constantly racing through my to-do list, but I always kept questioning how it fit in with my faith. With the rise of Headspace, Calm, and all of the other mindfulness meditation apps, those of us coming from a Christian background can have a lot of very good questions: are these methods okay to use? Are they bad or evil? Are they Buddhist? Are they in line with Church teaching? I, myself, was an avid Headspace user for 3 years and at the time, I loved it.
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