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Today’s mania for speed strikes right at the root of our capacity for an even mind. How often do we find ourselves locked into behavior and situations that force us to hurry, hurry, hurry! By now, most of us are aware that compulsive speed--"hurry sickness"--can be the direct threat to our physical health. But hurry has another alarming repercussion: it cripples patience.

When we lack patience, even a few moments’ delay, a trivial disappointment, an unexpected obstacle, makes us explode in anger. We are not hostile people; we are just in such a hurry that keeping the mind calm is impossible. Without peace of mind, how can we enjoy anything, from a movie to good health?

When we go slower, we are more patient, and when we are more patient, we are capable of enjoying life more. All these benefits can come from just learning to slow down.

Sermon: Slowing Down

We all know our lives today are speeding up. We pay for our gas at the pump, we pay our bridge tolls via Fasttrak, we instantly get cash out of an ATM, and we are annoyed when we have to wait in line do deal with any of these things. A recent study showed that office workers are interrupted at their tasks on average once every three minutes. Is it any wonder we take work home to get anything done?

I think about differences between now and when I began my career as an engineer. Then I traveled with a pad of paper and a calculator, now my bag contains a mobile phone, a laptop, a wireless card, a PDA, an IPod and chargers for all of this stuff. These tools I carry are supposed to improve my productivity, but between the computer viruses, connection problems, and dropped calls to tech support, I’m not so sure. Back then my workday ended cleanly at 5:30, but for many of us, now it just dribbles on into the evening.

I have been told that we encounter more printed material in a good Sunday paper than a literate person in the late Middle Ages would see in a lifetime. The quantity of human knowledge is estimated to be growing exponentially, doubling every 18 months. We struggle to keep up with new knowledge that is essential for our careers, caring for our families and making financial decisions.

But even with all of the complexities of modern life, most of us embrace the pace. We may talk of somehow getting out of this rat race, but we don’t. At one level, we do appreciate the benefits, which for some of us these are good incomes and prestige, for others it is the variety of experiences and human connections that such a pace brings us.

Being busy can also be a good distraction. I know that when I’m busy, I am often able to put aside thoughts that inevitably come up. The fears and worries that we all have: Is there enough money to get by this month? What are we going to do about the latest episode with my aging parents? Could this spot on my skin be some kind of pre-cancer? Or I ponder regrets: What of that unkind comment I made to a friend years ago that strained our relationship. What if I had chosen to continue with debate in high school?

These thoughts get in the way of what I am doing, and I don’t pay attention. I make mistakes at detailed tasks. I am not fully present with others, and they sense that, and become distant. I respond by trying to become more organized and focused, but this is ultimately ineffective. Phillip Simmons, took this further in his book Learning to Fall: "I think if we are honest with ourselves, we can agree that our busyness -- whether of body or mind -- is often a distraction, a way of avoiding others, avoiding intimacy, avoiding ourselves. We keep busy to push back our fears, our loneliness, our self-doubt, our questions about purposes and ends. We want to know we matter; we want to know our lives are worthwhile. And when we’re not sure, we work that much harder, we worry that much more."

Phillip, a Unitarian Universalist writer, wrote these words toward the end of his life as he came to terms with dying from ALS.

It is often that the only times we confront these things is when something terrible happens. Maybe we’re laying in a hospital bed after a trip to the emergency room, or we’re pondering "what now", after we’ve been ‘walked’ out of the building at work carrying our workplace belongings in a cardboard box. At these moments we find our life slowed down in a very abrupt way, in essence, we are brought to a dead stop. The questions we’ve avoided are now at the fore, and we must confront them in the midst of the pain and confusion and isolation.

I’d like to suggest that what we would do much better to engage these questions at our own time and pace, and to do this we need to do is to slow down intentionally and gently. We need to find the stillness, to listen to the still, small voice that whispers from the gaps between all the doing and going that is our lives. We need to begin a gentle conversation with this voice, and to do that; we need brief bits of silence in our lives. We need to slow our pace so that these gaps may appear.

For many of us, a spiritual practice helps us do this. My own spiritual practice is based on the Eight Point Program developed by Eknath Easwaran. Easwaran founded the Blue Mountain Meditation Center which is located nearby here in Tomales.

Eknath Easwaran was a Fulbright scholar who came from India to U. Cal Berkeley where he taught literature. He had originally planned to study Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the great Unitarian Transcendentalist minds of the 19th century. I relish the interconnections here: Emerson and the Transcendentalists studied Hindu and other Eastern philosophy in the 19th century, and Easwaran comes from India to study Emerson in the 20th century! After a stint at Berkeley, Easwaran discovered his true passion was teaching and writing about meditation and related spiritual disciplines that he organized into his Eight Point program.

I want to touch on two of the key parts of Easwaran’s Eight Point program: the mediation practice and the use of the mantram, or mantra. I will talk a bit about meditation today and I want to introduce you to the use of the mantram. The mantram practice is particularly easy to learn and apply. You might want to talk with Shari Woodbury, of this congregation, who works at the Blue Mountain Meditation Center and can provide resources on this meditation practice if you are interested.

The form of meditation we practice is called passage meditation. We start by memorizing passages we’ve chosen from among the world’s great spiritual or wisdom traditions. We meditate by reciting in our minds, silently and slowly, these passages, focusing our minds just on the words. Most people who use this practice meditate for thirty minutes every morning.

In creating this form of meditation, Easwaran melded his Eastern experience with Western sensibilities to create a very practical, Western-oriented meditation practice. So for example, we meditate in a chair rather than on a cushion, because that’s how we in the West sit, and the intellectual engagement of using passages seems to fit our Calvinist expectations that even in meditation we ought to be doing something, not just sitting there thinking about nothing!

Some insightful work has been done to try to understand what goes on in our brains when we meditate. Researchers at the University of Madison used functional MRI to get images of the brains of meditators, and found that the left prefrontal lobes of Buddhist meditators are more active than those who don’t practice . Now the left prefrontal lobe is associated with positive emotions, such as hope and love for one another. What’s fascinating to me is that this heightened activity in the left prefrontal lobe went on all the time, not just when these people were meditating.

The other key element of my practice is the use of the mantram. The idea of repeating a mantram, a holy name or phrase, is an ancient idea, developed independently in many religious traditions. St. Francis of Assisi for example, repeated "My God and My All". Mahatma Ghandi repeated "Rama, Rama."

Having used a mantram for many years, I can attest to its power as a means to calm my mind. I find it particularly helpful when I am waiting in lines in a stressful situation, like at the airport, or the Kaiser clinic.

The idea is a simple one. You choose a mantram, and repeat it silently whenever you have a situation where your mind is otherwise not intensely engaged and would otherwise tend to drift onto worrisome thoughts. Good times might be bedtime, washing the dishes, vacuuming, or walking. The repetition of the same mantram, over time, creates a deep connection to calmness and tranquility.

How do you pick a mantram? We suggest you choose one that is comes from a great spiritual tradition that you know well or are in sympathy with. Here are a few examples. In Buddhism, Om mani padme hum, refers to the jewel in the lotus of the heart. In Hindu, Om namah Shiva, reveres one of the forms of deity. In the Jewish tradition, Barukh attah Adonai is a blessing of the Lord. In Islam, Allahu Akbar "God is Great". In a sense, these holy words provide a connection not only to the divine, however you see the divine, but they also connect you to a huge community of people within those religious traditions who also may be using that mantram along side you.

You may want to experiment with several mantrams, and try them out for fit, say, over a few weeks. When you find one that works well, and you grow comfortable with it, you should stay with it -- do not change it. Over time, your mind will form a deep association of the words of your mantram with calmness and focus. Before talks like this, I find that just a few repetitions of my mantram very quickly takes me to a place of calm and presence. I invite you to try it. Let’s take just a half a minute or so to silently repeat one of the mantrams I mentioned. Om mani padme hum, that was chanted by the choir earlier, might be a good choice, or you may have another one. [30 seconds of silence] Thank you.

Scientific research has suggested that use of a mantram can lead to positive psychological changes. A recent study of a practice similar to this one showed decrease in blood pressure, heart and breathing rate for participants. Another study shows that using the mantram and related practices enhanced the caregiving ability of healthcare professionals.

I believe that spiritual practices like meditation or the mantram can make a difference not just for health care professionals, but for anyone who is trying to serve others through volunteer efforts, social justice work, or social activism. Let me give you an example.

My partner Liz and I are soon traveling to Guatemala to participate in a UU Service Committee study group. My growing awareness of US colonialism in that country, including the US participation in overthrow of a democratically elected government and establishment of a dictatorship fifty years ago, and later acts of oppression and genocide, brings me great sadness. I know that our task in the study group, to listen and be witnesses, is difficult. That is just the start; I don’t know what we will be able to offer or how we’ll be able to serve.

As Unitarian Universalists we want to make a difference in the world. It would be so easy pretend that this and other injustices and suffering doesn’t exist in our world. I am reminded of an ancient Ch’an poem that contains this line:

Turning away and touching are both wrong, for it is like a terrible fire.

Eknath Easwaran compared meditation and work in the world to breathing. Meditation, or any spiritual practice, is the in-drawing of breath; service is the exhalation of breath. To devote ones’ effort to spiritual practice only is holding the breath in, to devote ones effort to service only is to hold the breath out. Neither can be sustained for long. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk and Nobel laureate, teaches a meditation practice based on mindful breathing. In the style of his practice, I offer this:

Breathing in, we arise early for silent meditation.
Breathing out, we work to feed the homeless.
Breathing in, we repeat a spiritual passage slowly in our minds.
Breathing out, we offer calming words to bring civility back into a political debate.
Breathing in, we recite an ancient prayer as we wait for an appointment
Breathing out, we march for immigration rights with others in our community.
Breathing in, we silently repeat a mantrum as we go about the details of the day.
Breathing out, we listen, just listen, to a friend confronting a cancer diagnosis.
Breathing in, we empty ours minds as we walk silently on the forest trail.
Breathing out, we bring the food and make the coffee, knowing that our work supports the work of others so that together we bend the course of the universe toward justice.

By slowing down, by making room, by being ready to receive, we create openings for those brief and unhurried messages from the divine. Little packets that we can open carefully and over time assemble into the personal sacred text that is the story of our lives.

From this intricate and beautiful story, we can read out what is truly important in our lives. In the silence, we find the subtle turns of plot, the minute details of narrative, and over time, we perceive the broad themes that are our lives’ purposes. We are then able to give that which is important our full attention, without hurry or half-measures, and to let go of other, less important, things.

1. New Scientist. "How interruptions can destroy your day," 28 June 2006,
2. Peter Russell, Waking Up in Time, 1998, p. 19.
3. Phillip Simmons, Learning to Fall, 2000, p. 121.
4. "The Colour of Happiness", New Scientist Magazine vol 178 issue 2396 - 24 May 2003, p. 44.
5. Easwaran, Strength in the Storm, 2005, p. 20.
6. John Marshall, An assessment of the impact of the relaxation response on physiologic measurements and spiritual dimensions, 2006.
7. Ann Richards, Doug Oman, John Hedberg, Carl E. Thoresen, Jeanne Bowden, A Qualitative Examination of a Spiritually-Based Intervention and Self-Management in the Workplace, 2006.
8. Tungshan, Song of the Precious Mirror Samadhi, Taigen Leighton, trans.