Page 25 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 1 Fall 2013

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Meanwhile, at St. Paul’s, Morey formed a meditation club;
during her Sixth Form year, sometimes joined by others,
she would meditate a half hour every day before Chapel.
Continuing her practice after SPS, she deferred Dart-
mouth for a year to practice intensive meditation in a
monastery in Burma. “This was one of the toughest
experiences of my life,” she says, “but I have no regrets
– particularly as I’ve learned more over the years about
the benefits of mindfulness and its significant impacts
on the brain – which at 18 was still rapidly developing.”
“Becoming a nun was what I was thinking about through
college,” she wrote in an article for the journal Shambala
Sun. “My attraction to ordination, though, was that it was
a kind of running away. Sometimes it’s hard to be in the
world. I start to want stuff, like fancy houses, and I get
frustrated when I’m not being mindful. Now I’m comfort-
able with the lay life.”
The current popularity of mindfulness meditation – the
two words, often seen together, are virtually interchange-
able – was inaugurated by most accounts in the late 1970s
by biologist Kabat-Zinn. The practice has since reached
into households and workplaces across the Western world.
The source, however, is decidedly Eastern, predominantly
Buddhist, but appearing regularly in the American zeitgeist
– from Thoreau’s “stop to smell the roses” to Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation with the Beatles
to the “be here now” mantra of Ram Dass and beyond.
Mindfulness as taught in today’s workshops and sem-
inars – from an eight-week course taught by Kabat-Zinn’s
disciples to shorter introductions presented in office
canteens – rarely appeals to the non-secular origins of
the exercise. Instead, to avoid alienating those wary of
religious indoctrination, mindfulness is more often offered
as a technique for stress reduction, pain relief, mem-
ory enhancement, and other forms of self-improve-
ment, including professional success.
m of Your Hand