Attention, Virtue, Meaning

Introduction

To concentrate is not a technique. It is a way of listening.

Contemplative practice makes it possible to attend — the regulation of attention that points toward inner freedom. Attending gives rise to listening: first, in the sense of understanding what life is asking of us, that is, discovering meaning; second, in the sense of therapeutic listening. Finally, to respond is to act genuinely and coherently, free of reactivity and haste.

Aim

To present Logomeditation as a proposal for logotherapeutic meditation, and to demonstrate the theoretical coherence of that integration.

Method

Logomeditation was created by Julius Barreto-Lins over a path of more than twenty years, with Paula Barreto-Lins as co-founder. It combines rigorous scientific research, continuous clinical practice, and personal meditative deepening under the mentorship of contemplatives.

Group and individual application

It is offered as a structured twelve-week programme. Because it is centred on learning a practice, the meetings can be held in families, workplaces, and parishes, as readily as in healthcare and psychotherapeutic settings. It suits anyone without cultural objection to Catholic Christian symbolism, whatever their creed.

It is also offered as a complement to individual psychotherapy, presented as work between sessions, according to the client's needs and cultural sensibility.

The three axes

Logomeditation rests on three axes, none of which can be removed.

The path

Commitments

To practise three times a day, five minutes at a time, with regularity and with widened intention — the intention that widens to include the other and the uncomfortable.

Rhythm

Each week the group meets in a circle. It discusses how the exercises met daily life, asks for clarification, and shares what was found. A new meditative exercise is learned, and a reflection is carried into the week.

Journey

Week by week, the dimensions of perception and consciousness are investigated, with simple language and simple meditative exercises. The programme opens with the regulation of attention, growing familiar with meekness in the very act of returning to the proposed focus. Those foci include natural breathing, bodily sensations, and feelings. It moves on to the cultivation of inner freedom, with the foci: emotions, loose thoughts, and ideas. It prompts the listening for meaning through reflective questions. It encourages the ordering toward love through the cultivation of values and commitments.

Discussion

Contemporary mindfulness asks the practitioner to observe their thoughts without judgment. The instruction is clinically useful, but philosophically imprecise. What non-judgment in fact asks for is the moderation of hasty judgments — reactive, and coloured by passion.

Logomeditation offers that moderation its proper names. Meekness — the virtue that moderates anger and returns serenity to the intellect, without suppressing judgment. Humility — the virtue that orders the appetite for one's own excellence.

Learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart. Jesus, explaining that his yoke is light (Mt 11:30).

Cognitive defusion is demonstrably the active quality in MBCT's benefits for depression. We identify, in the Teresian tradition, a correspondence to that quality in the discernment of the faculties of the soul.

Teresa of Ávila instructs her daughters to distinguish, in mental prayer, between the intellect and the will on one side, and the imagination on the other. She teaches that much suffering can be spared once it is understood that the soul may be recollected in God even while the imagination goes on wandering through the castle (Teresa of Ávila, 2018, Fourth Mansions, ch. 1).

Wonder ("Oh!")

The state of sudden openness and admiration that emerges from concentration is a radically logotherapeutic experience — before the beauty of a soul, a sunset, a sleeping child, or the silence of prayer. That wonder can be an integral experience of openness to meaning.

The authors