Collective healing

Image by Anna Tigra

A friend of mine is meditating each day at 7.30am for healing in Italy. She is inviting others to join her. She sits, with her eyes closed, gently breathing, her focus and attention on healing people in the country her family are from. Connecting with them from across the ocean. Transcending physical distance to be with them. It brings her some comfort. And like a pebble in a pond, the energy of her meditation ripples away from her and into the world. Imagine the power of what she is sending out, joining forces with the healing energy of many others, all at the same time.

I have witnessed something extra special happen when people meditate together. I have felt an energy during and after the meditation, like no other. And I have experience, alongside others, time simply disappear. Meditating in a group, and then sharing our meditation journey, has shown me that people’s meditation stories can, even when vastly different, entwine. They can be connected by a vision or a sensation. They can weave together through shifts in energy and emotion. I have watched people meditating together fall into the same breathing pattern. Their chests rising and falling in unison. I have seen them smile at the same time.

Meditation can manifest a state of mind and an energy. It can change not only how we perceive the world, but what happens around us. What happens around us close by, for us as individuals; and more broadly in a larger scale way, for us as a society.

When the bushfires were at their peak in Australia, the call went out for people to pray together on the 3 January. And people responded, people prayed and meditated together. I am a big believer in the power of the collective. I just know in my heart it works. I don’t need to know how. But I understand, other people around me need to know the science behind it.

I am, therefore, really grateful to Georgie Ellis from Bluechip Minds for sharing back in January a research paper on this from EurekAlert, the online science news service. EurekAlert curate ‘health, medicine, science and technology news from leading research institutions and universities’ and in 2016 published an article about group meditation being associated with a significant reduction in crime. It was a longitudinal study spanning many decades and when the number of participants of the meditation group exceeded the ‘threshold predicted to reduce negative trends there was a significant shift in the U.S. national homicide rate and urban violent crime’.

According to the lead author of the study:

“…research is increasingly suggesting that there’s a field effect of consciousness. If you get a large enough group together practicing this [advanced transcendental meditation] technique to experience the field quality of consciousness, these extended ‘field-like’ effects are expressed in society.” Micheal Dillbeck

According to the paper the ‘hypothesis of a field effect of consciousness implies that there is an underlying connection between individuals in much the same way that physics has uncovered greater unity beneath the diversity of matter and energy fields. The more powerfully that underlying field is enlivened, the greater the unifying influence of peace and harmony on the surface levels of life’.

It is the butterfly effect of chaos theory: where a ‘small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state’.

I was thrilled when, as I was writing this and looking for some research to share on the power of collective meditation, that I stumbled on the wonderful news that Deepak Chopra is going to live stream a collective meditation this Sunday March 29 at 12pm EST. Which is 3am in Melbourne on Monday 30 March, and 2am in Brisbane that day. You can sign up for free for this live global meditation event, a great initiative of Chopra and The Well for the world to come together and ‘breathe as one’. Meditating together, across the globe will tap into the underlying connection between individuals and boost it for greater impact, particularly when we share the same intention.

But if that time is a little early for you, I invite you to join me and my friend Agatha. Join us at 7.30am AEST every morning for how ever long you have, no matter where you are, no matter what the time equivalent. I invite you to meditate with us, together, for healing in the world. To send our energy to those around us in our community, to those outside our community and beyond. Meditate for everyone in our country, and for everyone in their countries.

Let your meditation be the moving wings of a butterfly.