My guest today is Father Laurence Freeman OSB, a Benedictine monk of the Congregation of Monte Olivetto Maggiore in Italy.  Fr Laurence was educated by the Benedictines and studied English Literature at Oxford University. He is the Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) an inclusive contemplative  community based in Bonnevaux. 
Fr Laurence is a prolific author. His books include: Light within, the Selfless Self, Your Daily Practice, Jesus: the Teacher Within, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, Web of Silence and Good Work: Meditation for Personal and Organizational Transformation. He has collaborated with the Dalai Lama on many dialogues and on the ground breaking book The Good Heart. In addition to his work for the contemplative renewal of Christianity he leads dialogues and peace initiatives, seeing meditation as opening the common ground of all humanity.
To Fr Laurence meditation is central because it is foundational, because it is a daily practice for him. He recommends that people meditate twice a day, morning and evening, which has a transformative effect upon our sense of time and, and our way of living. At his center they meditate four times a day. Many people, when they I first began, feel that they don't have time to meditate. But  the time that you give to the meditation comes back. And one has to be patient.
And the interesting discovery is that when we enter solitude, for example, in the time of meditation, and we leave images and conversations with ourselves behind then we find ourselves more and more deeply in this solitude. And the curious and wonderful discovery is  that accepting your uniqueness is also the means to much deeper and richer sense of relationship to others. Solitude is the cure for loneliness. Loneliness is a failed solitude. It's the failure or the inability to really be oneself and accept oneself in one's uniqueness.
God does not allow evil to happen. But God is in the suffering of those who are subjected to that evil. God is omnipresent. God is around a being and God is presence. There is this very challenging and almost terrible saying of Jesus. He says, God is like the sun that shines on good and bad or on the ungrateful and the wicked.
God is being and God is your being. In the silence, in the stillness of meditation, you are being with God, God is being with you, but not in a way that you can psychologize. 
My guest next week will be Dr Jessica Eccles MB, ChB, Dip(French), MA, MSc, MRCPsych, PhD, PGCert HE, Clinical Senior Lecturer and MQ Arthritis Research UK Fellow. We shall talk about philosophy of mind and brain-body interactions and the relationship between joint hypermobility, autonomic dysfunction and psychiatric symptoms

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