Mindfulness & Meditation

Both the secular and the religious tout mindfulness and meditation. It’s no wonder, because they promise a great deal of health to the one who practices them. Does mindfulness and mediation, however, look the same across the secular and religious worldviews? To answer this question, Kaleb Beyer and Isaac Funk speak to both the therapeutic and Christian uses of these practices.  

Show Notes: 

• Mindfulness – attentive to the present moment. 

• Meditation – focused attention. 

• Therapeutically these practices help a person have cognitive flexibility. The freedom to allow more into their experience than the one painful script that is running. In this way, mindfulness and meditation help a person uncouple themselves from mental distress in such a way that allows for a felt reality that is informed by accuracy and truth.  

• Spiritually, in a Christian sense, this uncoupling allows for a recoupling with God. The goal is not a disembodied state nor an abandonment of self. It is not an emptying but a filling. Not defined by absence but by presence. It allows for a life to be lived with God in the body and in the mind.