COMMUNION

I continue to be grateful for the inspiration that led me to open our house to neighbors--now friends!--who join us more or less every other Wednesday for a guided meditation. Yesterday evening was another wonderful occasion--quite special because four of our visitors and two of us, Ellie and I, were family. (I avoid using names other than those of my own family for privacy reasons). That bond could be felt, I think by all of us, even in the silence of a meditation sit.

It was not for the first time that someone remarked, in our conversation following the sit, on the difference between sitting alone and sitting in a group. The power and the concentration seem somehow multiplied by the number of people in the sitting circle. It is, I think, a spirit of communion, a word that not coincidentally reminds me of the name of the service that was at the heart of my father's Christian practice. While not partaking, obviously, of the "bread and wine," we sit together, breathe together, enter together into that special--call it spiritual--space that meditation opens up. Even as we breathe our way into the privacy of our own mind space, we share that space with others and benefit from the space they share with us.

Also in conversation... one of us introduced a word I was reaching for as I led the session yesterday. Having reminded myself in my own meditations in the previous days of the importance of taking pleasure in the breath, of relishing it, delighting in it, I introduced that notion a couple of times in the course of my customary guidance. The word our fellow-meditator used in relating some of her own experience was "savor." What a wonderful word that is! Whether taste or fragrance, singular moment or satisfaction in one's own achievement, to savor it is to bring oneself immediately and wholly into the present. Which is what, of course, we're all striving to do in our meditation.

I realize, always, after a sit, how very much I have to be grateful for!