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Meditative Spaces
On her last sabbatical, Fran Grace went into the woods. In a remote cabin in a southeastern Oregon forest, with no electricity, Internet or phone, the University of Redlands religious studies chair sat down and began to meditate. When she returned to the California campus in fall 2004, she changed her class offerings — shifting from courses like “Religion and Hate” to contemplative-based classes in meditation, healing and compassion.
“It brought forth a commitment in me to see how do we integrate these kinds of contemplative moments in a learning environment for students, where they can drop down to a deeper level, a calmer level,” says Grace. “It seems so obvious to me that a calmer mind is a more focused mind and a more focused mind is a better learning mind. But we don’t really ever talk about that.”
Grace, who offers two-credit meditation courses at Redlands, spearheaded an effort this summer to transform a standard classroom into a meditation classroom – a yellow-painted space with zafus and zabutons (cushions and mats) instead of desks and chairs. “I walk in the room and I sort of feel uplifted,” says Brianna Wetteland, a sophomore who is taking Grace’s meditation class this fall. “There really aren’t words for it,” she says of meditation. “It’s just the experience of it, just the way I feel toward people. I have this newfound appreciation for everyone and everything in my life.”
The University of Redlands’ meditation classroom is somewhat unique in that it was specifically designed to be an academic space – it’s housed not within the chaplain’s or student affairs office, but instead in the department of religious studies. Yet, grounded by research showing the physiological, mental and cognitive benefits of meditation, colleges all across the country are adding spaces specifically designed for meditation, each with a unique institutional signature.
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Colleges of all types are creating meditative spaces. The University of Idaho’s University Commons, constructed in 2000, has a meditation room that faces north with a view of wheat fields against mountains, a university spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail. Others wrote in to describe an outdoor labyrinth at Richland College in Dallas, where a memorial brick walkway honoring deceased staff members runs alongside the gravel path — about a half-mile in length into the center and back — and also a 30-foot-wide circle labyrinth that students at Green Mountain College, in Vermont, built of slate in the spring of 2006.
Students at Warren Wilson College, in North Carolina, built a stone meditation hut around the turn of this century. Although it is kind of cave-like – dark and cold — so a study room turned meditation and tea room transformed this fall adjoins the suites where members of a Buddhist-themed student organization live, says Hun Lye, a professor of religious studies at Warren Wilson. Also in North Carolina, Rev. Tim Auman, the chaplain for Wake Forest University, describes plans to finish renovations on a small inter-faith meditation room – “neutral space” — in the university center by February 1. It will be the second meditation room on campus: The first is clearly Christian in nature, reflecting Wake Forest’s Baptist heritage.
“Even though the meditation room we’re building is small, it has very symbolic value for us as a university, in that we say to our community we recognize that there is a large amount of religious diversity on our campus,” Auman says. “And we have that whole other group of college students who consider themselves spiritual but not religious. They have their own particular needs in terms of places where they want to reflect.”
Indeed, it seems the majority of college students consider themselves to be spiritual in some way. A 2005 study by University of California at Los Angeles researchers found that 80 percent of freshmen have an interest in spirituality – but while they expect guidance from their colleges on spiritual matters, those expectations often aren’t met. In an earlier pilot study of college juniors, the researchers found that nearly two-thirds said their professors don’t encourage discussion of spiritual or religious matters.
Read the rest of the article here:
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/03/meditation
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