One of the first things of course we have to learn as we begin the journey of meditation and as we persevere in it is that this is a discipline more than a technique. The great gift really that John Main has given to the world and to the church is the remembering of the method present within our own Christian tradition. He found it of course in the teachings of the Desert Fathers, in John Cassian, and then was able to recognise this was a continuous tradition in the Western Church. So this question, how long does it take, is a question that arises from a more secular or technological approach to contemplative practice rather than the approach that the Christian contemplative tradition teaches and encourages, which is to think of meditation not as a technique that’s going to take six weeks but as a discipline, as a path or a way that really has no limit to it. So that’s the starting point for our essential teaching.
( Breakthrough by Laurence Freeman OSB )
