Making the world a better place, one breath at a time
By Shirley Moulton - Founder, The ACADEMi of Life, NYC
Meditation is enjoying a renewed surge of popularity, penetrating the public consciousness as never before…it’s mainstream.
So what is meditation? “Meditation is a discipline that prepares one to engage in the world with greater accuracy, flexibility, and authenticity. It is not a quick fix but a discipline that, when cultivated, can provide ongoing and powerful support for the practice of a fulfilling life.”
Meditative practices are being taken up in corporate America (Google, Apple, AOL, Saatchi & Saatchi, Raytheon, Deutche Bank, Hughes Aircraft, Target, Cargill, Aetna, Genentech, General Mills) and is being declared as a 21st century management tool. McKinsey Managing Partner Michael Rennie, an avid meditator, who has studied the beneficial effects of meditation in corporations, heads the McKinsey’s Performance Leadership Program which uses meditation practices to release the desire for authenticity, dignity and real human connection within a critical mass of individuals in a given organization. Corporations are realizing that after arranging meditation classes for their staff, they have reduced stress levels, are less irritable, more focused, more productive, happier overall and have sharpened intuition.
Meditation is also being taught at YMCAs, hospitals (a foundation run by Donna Karan, donated $850,000 to NYC’s Beth Israel Medical Center to test whether meditation and yoga can enhance the traditional medical treatments for cancer), the military, in medicine to make doctors better, at Harvard Law School to help law students become better negotiators and in public schools to reduce the stress levels of students (the goal of the David Lynch Foundation, is to bring meditation to one million schoolchildren in the classroom).
When we meditate we create stillness. Stillness is where inspiration, creativity and solutions to problems are found. The more we practice meditation we are able to move beyond our active minds and emotions and discover great depths of lasting peace, contentment and serenity…the joy of being. From this place of joy we are able to create “fields of grace” allowing our interactions with others to be more loving, compassionate, authentic and fulfilling. With time, we become better people and the world becomes a better place.
So, to bring lasting peace and love to our world, we declare 11/11/11 World Meditation Day and at 11:11 am/pm on that day for 11 minutes, our goal is to have 1.1 million people meditating to either the Joy Of Being meditation http://bit.ly/lKjcm or any other meditation of your choosing. Eleven minutes of pure bliss. Let’s begin the practice today on 11/11/09 and start to build our meditation community and we will do it again on 11/11/10 until we get to our big day: 11/11/11.
Join our meditation community and movement on Facebook at http://bit.ly/67xaqB
