A movement towards ‘mindfulness’ has been quietly growing over the past few decades. Its adherents say things like contemplation, stillness and focusing on the present moment are lost arts. But they’re making a comeback. A 3-day conference on “Contemplative Practices” begins this Wednesday in Roanoke with a concert, speakers, workshops and the public is invited.
“There's a lot of focus on people stepping into making change in the world today and there's a lot of risk of, of burnout and having a lot of difficult emotions arise if we're really trying to make an impact in the world.” That’s Juliet Trail, former education director of the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia. She now has her own practice.
“One of the most basic contemplative practices is just to introduce some period of 30 seconds to a minute, maybe at a minimum, of stillness or quiet," Trail says. "And this is something that some people call mindfulness or they might say, let's just take a minute to sit and kind of gather and arrive, finish arriving in the space, and just that simple act, as a practice that's done.”
It may not seem like much, but that’s the beauty of it.
“I'm going to take a breath,” says Mitchell Ratner, a keynote speaker at this year’s Conference. “I grew up believing that my mind was my mind and whatever obsessions or difficulty making decisions or things that arose in it, that's what I got. And what I quickly learned is that that wasn't true. That if we do certain things like encouraging ourselves to come back to our breath, that we can train our mind in a different way and we have a different relationship to it. And, once the mind starts quieting, then we can listen to our heart more and, get new ideas and new perspectives."
Ratner is a Darma teacher in Maryland. That mean he leads a community in deepening their mindfulness practice. “Your mindfulness appears when you're talking to a friend, when you're looking at people on the bus and just wishing them well. Or when your heart opens, when you see somebody in your life with a, a difficulty and so on. It has to do with how you eat and how take care of your body, the exercise you get, your understanding of the implications of what you do as a consumer, as an investor, as a citizen."
Victoria Taylor practices the ancient art of acupuncture. “There’s power in the empty space is how I like to put it. As my teachers would say, “You need to take a break from the action and go into the stillness.”
Taylor will conduct an acupuncture workshop at the conference. She points out, these contemplative practices conferences have been taking place around the Virginia for several years. They began in Blacksburg when an engineering professor at Virginia Tech, named Doug Lindner decided it was important to bring these ideas to bear on hard sciences as well.
Taylor says “He looked for the answer through mathematics and science. And then when he didn't find it there, he went to the great unknown, to the Eastern arts, which studied the other side of it.”
Lindner died unexpectedly last month. At his funeral, Taylor quoted a poem called, “The Emperor’s Pearl.”
“Well, it's a story about an emperor who had to find the meaning of the universe:
And he looked through science and he found nothing.
And he looked through logic and he found nothing.
And then he looked at nothing. And he found it.”
The Contemplative Practices Workshop opens March 5th at the Hotel Roanoke with a concert by Carrie Newcomer, whose music illustrates the ideas behind the movement, like ‘be here now in the present moment.’
Here is a link to the conference schedule and sign up information.
***Editor's Note: A previous version of this story incorrectly listed Juliet Trail as the former director of the Contemplative Education Center at UVA. Her position was education director.
