Page 27 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 1 Fall 2013

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in the Clark House meditation room for “quiet sitting,”
as he calls the practice. Five to ten students and possibly
an adult or two might arrange themselves on the cush-
ions on a given evening.
“If it speaks to them,” Fletcher says, “they come back.”
While he serves as chaplain to the School’s Hindu
and Buddhist communities, Fletcher avoids inserting
a religious context into the mindfulness sessions. As
participants “look at their whole inward journey,” he
says, “they all couch it in the frame of reference from
which they come.”
“I’m not really a mindful guy,” Fletcher adds. “I medi-
tated regularly for many years,” he explains. “I don’t
meditate now; rather, I feel I meditate all the time. I
can’t remember the last time I felt stress. Stress is
self-caused. It starts to come up, I see it right away,
I have a little chuckle, and it goes away.”
While he finds his wife’s insights into the
science of mindfulness intriguing, still he
shrugs and says, “It works, and that’s
what’s important.”
The weekly mindfulness ses-
sions organized by Rick Pacelli,
who teaches physics, astron-
omy, and robotics, reflect
some of his own background
in Christianity, as a practic-
ing Catholic but who also,
as verger in the Episcopal
Chapel of St. Peter and St.
Paul, leads the clergy and
choir in their processionals
and recessionals.
Pacelli worked in the 1980s
at New York City’s Covenant House,
a center for homeless youth, “help-
ing 18-to-20-year-olds put their
lives back together in a spiritual and
communal way.” He coordinated volun-
teers in the city and eventually became inter-
national director of the Covenant House-affiliated
organization Community.
During those years Pacelli prayed and meditated an hour
each day. His practice, he explains, was influenced most
directly by the “centering prayer” approach developed
by the Cistercian monk Thomas Keating at St. Joseph’s
Abbey in Spencer, Mass., and by the writings of Thomas
Merton, a Trappist monk whose own practice of contem-
plative prayer owed much to his friendship with the
Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.
“Merton and Keating called the Catholic community
back to its roots,” Pacelli says, “and were very helpful
to me in my life.”
But while Catholicism informs his meditation, he finds
the practice to be “a thread that ties together every genre
of spirituality.”
In 2008, Pacelli attended a ten-day meditation retreat
in Colorado
and, during
a sabbatical
two years
ago, traveled
to Duluth,
Minn., for
an extended
course in
preparation to
be a meditation
instructor.
In the Clark House
meditation room, he
might begin his weekly
sessions with students by “giving
a little spiel about the physical, mental,
and spiritual benefits” of mindfulness.
“I teach about using breath or a mantra to help in
letting go of thoughts,” he says, urging students as they
choose a mantra “not to pick a word that takes them
away on a mind trip.”
Researchers have compared the brain activity of monks
in deep meditation with that of subjects on LSD and other
psychoactive drugs, sometimes finding close similarities
between such so-called altered states of consciousness.
In her work with young people, though, Jessica Morey
insists she’s attempting to help them toward just the
opposite of an “altered state.”
“I’m trying to get teens to connect to their everyday,
mundane lives,” she says, “to know what they’re eating,
to be aware of the activities we typically ignore and
space out on.”
“Unfortunately, most of us live our lives ‘mindlessly’
on autopilot,” Morey finds, “hardly noticing the food we
eat, our commute to work or what’s happening in the
world around us. Instead we are preoccupied with our
to-do lists, ruminating about a difficult conversation,
planning our next vacation. And, as we get more and
more wired, it seems to be getting easier to be out of the
present and not notice the world right around us. We
seem to be living more often staring into a rectangular
screen than noticing the sights, smells and humans
around us.”
As she works with teenagers in mindfulness practice,
Morey watches them develop qualities of mind that she
found rewarding in her own adolescence: “concentration,
increased ability and willingness towards self-intro-
spection, greater levels of compassion towards themselves
and others, and increased access to the insight and wis-
dom at the depths of their own inner life.”
What most touches her, she says, is hearing the kids’
responses. “Today for the first time I found myself
offering myself loving kindness in a troubling moment,”
a 16-year-old girl told her. “It was such an amazing
experience to realize that I could actually want myself
to be happy!”
7/11
This is a breathing exercise that you
can do whenever you feel anxious or over-
whelmed. Breath normally but count to 7 on
your inhale, then count to 11 on your exhale.
Extending the exhale activates the parasympa-
thetic nervous system and automatically
triggers the body to relax.
Conversely, if there is a time when you need
to be energized you can try an 11/7 –
inhale for a count of 11 and exhale
for 7 – this brings more energy
into the mind and body.
O–P
tice to create a
y, especially when
elmed, angry,
upied, is to STOP:
what you are doing.
w, deep breaths.
s of the whole breath.
osity your thoughts,
dy sensations.
ith whatever
ith a little more
awareness.