Apatheia

What we discover about meditation by practising it is what we discover about life. It gives us a way of seeing and interacting with life. When I began to meditate seriously, it took me a few years after I was introduced to meditation. In fact I had to go and join the monastery in order to learn. But after I had been meditating for some time, I was very committed to it. And I was also very impatient, and I asked Fr John once, ‘How can I speed this up? I’m not really getting there yet.’ I’d had of course, like we all do, some moments or some experiences which are encouraging appearances of, if you like, temporary enlightenment, but they would pass. They might last a certain period of time, and you feel you’re floating on air, and you feel you love the world and the world loves you, and you feel very well. It’s a deep experience of apatheia, what the Desert Fathers called apatheia. 

Enlightenment by Laurence Freeman OSB