An item on the daily rundown of the local college read as follows: "Meditation Canceled Due to Snow."

I could picture the normally calm Trappist monks near my home town in Massachusetts being flummoxed by reading that. Meditation has been one thing that is even more doable than the mail carrier's rounds: stayed by neither sleet, nor hail or, in this case, by a measly five inches of pure, driven snow.

I'm quite sure that the notice referred to a group that meditates together, though that's in a classic sense a modern practice designed to attract campus curiosity seekers who wouldn't otherwise approach anything so inactive or "unproductive." So in the order of things it was proper to let the group know that the latest trumped-up weather disaster made it unnecessary to even think about undertaking a risky walk across the quad.

Still, they might have suggested that participants still had the option of quieting their minds by themselves in their rooms or even on a sled on the nearest snow bank.

For the growing number of people who have either discovered meditation for the first time or, like the Trappists, have observed it as a way of life for many years, it has been a marvel. In an action driven, achievement oriented society like our own, where both religious and secular rituals have largely displaced inner journeys as sources of affirmation and confirmation, meditation has come back from its long hibernation in western culture, an improbable "do nothing" answer to a fever of longing. Not terribly pragmatic in an age when home renovation appears within the grasp of television viewers. Meditation only offers the non-self as an answer.

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Maybe the college meditation group encourages personal time alone or is a place for preparing to do so. Groups are endemic to Trappist life, after all, and that doesn't prevent their private soul searching.

In any case, my hope is that the college notice isn't a sign that meditation is going soft. It takes a tough meditator to keep on when all those outside forces are saying it isn't worth the effort anyway, that putting it off won't harm a thing. Those of us who depend on it beg to differ. Let it snow. Let us meditate.

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Toughening Up Meditation

Mindfulness is "the intentional, accepting and non-judgemental focus of one's attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment", which can be trained by meditational practices derived from Buddhist anapanasati.

The term "mindfulness" is derived from the Pali-term sati,[3] "mindfulness", which is an essential element of Buddhist practice, including vipassana, satipahna and anapanasati.

Mindfulness practice is being employed in psychology to alleviate a variety of mental and physical conditions, including obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, and in the prevention of relapse in depression and drug addiction.[4] It has gained worldwide popularity as a distinctive method to handle emotions.

The Buddhist term translated into English as "mindfulness" originates in the Pali term sati and in its Sanskrit counterpart smti. The Abhidhammattha-sangaha, a key abhidharma text from the Theravada tradition, defines sati as follows:

The word sati derives from a root meaning 'to remember,' but as a mental factor it signifies presence of mind, attentiveness to the present, rather than the faculty of memory regarding the past. It has the characteristic of not wobbling, i.e. not floating away from the object. Its function is absence of confusion or non-forgetfulness. It is manifested as guardianship, or as the state of confronting an objective field. Its proximate cause is strong perception (thirasa) or the four foundations of mindfulness.[5]

Sati means not only, "moment to moment awareness of present events," but also, "remembering to be aware of something or to do something at a designated time in the future".[note 1] In fact, "the primary connotation of this Sanskrit term [smrti] (and its corresponding Pali term sati) is recollection".[note 1]

The Pali-language scholar Thomas William Rhys Davids (18431922) first translated sati in 1881 as English mindfulness in samm-sati "Right Mindfulness; the active, watchful mind".[6] Noting that Daniel John Gogerly (1845) initially rendered samm-sati as "Correct meditation",[7] Davids explained,

sati is literally 'memory' but is used with reference to the constantly repeated phrase 'mindful and thoughtful' (sato sampajno); and means that activity of mind and constant presence of mind which is one of the duties most frequently inculcated on the good Buddhist."[8]

John D. Dunne asserts that the translation of sati and smti as mindfulness is confusing. A number of Buddhist scholars have started trying to establish "retention" as the preferred alternative.[9] Bhikkhu Bodhi also points to the meaning of "sati" as "memory".[10][note 2] The terms sati/smriti have also been translated as:

According to Brown, Ryan, and Creswell, definitions of mindfulness are typically selectively interpreted based on who is studying it and how it is applied. Some have viewed mindfulness as a mental state, while others have viewed it as a set of skills and techniques.[11][12] A distinction can also be made between the state of mindfulness and the trait of mindfulness.

Excerpt from:
Mindfulness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia