In May 2011, a new platform was released that changed our world. The product was Zoom video conferencing. Three months after Zoom was released, three experienced meditators and I tried what seemed at the time to be a radical experiment. We got together virtually to meditate on Zoom. We did this as a live demonstration before a highly sceptical convention of the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM). Very few of the attendees knew what video conferencing was, and the idea of meditating virtually rather than in physical groups was inconceivable to most of the attendees.
The demonstration was a disaster. The bandwidth of the meeting hall was insufficient to support four computers videoconferencing at the same time. One or more of us would fade out and have to reconnect every 30 seconds. The sound was garbled, the video blurred. But even with all of these technical glitches, one thing was obvious. Something magical was happening.
Photo by Mikhail Nilov
At the conclusion of the demonstration, WCCM approved the creation of virtual meditation groups. By July of 2012, we had 76 people registered to meditate together virtually, a number that far exceeded my hopes and expectations. One of those people was Robert Lalor, who would turn out to be critical to the future of virtual meditation.
Robert poured his heart into letting people know what we were doing. Those efforts paid off. Within another two years, the number of meditators meeting in the WCCM virtual chapels had grown to 346, a growth rate of 500%, more than any physical WCCM meditation group.
By 2017, Robert and I were deep into discussions about the future of online meditation. We felt that what we had built was too important to be limited to just one organization. We felt that it should be open to all faith communities. We believed that each faith community (including WCCM) would be enriched by the presence of others.
Consequently in February, 2018, Robert and I took the technology we had perfected for WCCM and launched Meditation Chapel as an independent community with meditationchapel.org as its website and with this vision statement:
Meditation Chapel nurtures unity and peace through the sharing of divine stillness and sacred listening. We support groups of all faith traditions in offering and sharing the contemplative experience through the sacramental use of technology.
Shortly after our launch, I met with Pamela Begeman from Contemplative Outreach, a community founded by Fr. Thomas Keating. I told her about our vision, and she responded with enthusiasm. Contemplative Outreach is the most respected advocate for meditation in the Christian world. Within months, we had a number of groups from the Thomas Keating/Centering Prayer tradition and soon had to double our chapel capacity from one virtual chapel to two.
We were blessed when, shortly before his death in October of 2018, Fr. Keating participated in one of our virtual chapels and offered us “blessing upon blessing.” As we have grown, it has been a tremendous source of encouragement knowing that Fr. Keating had seen the future we offered and blessed it.
By the end of 2019, Meditation Chapel was hosting more than 40 groups and 800 meditators. We thought our growth was finally leveling off and we could settle into a routine. We were wrong. There was one thing we didn’t take into account: COVID-19.
In March of 2020, the U.S. government declared COVID-19 a national emergency. Physical meditation groups around the world stopped meeting. Many of these groups found us, and decided to go virtual. This wave of new signups severely tested our capacity, but we were determined to meet their needs. We didn’t turn away a single group or a single meditator although it meant many long nights managing our virtual chapels. By the end of 2020, we had grown from 40 groups to over 150 and from 800 registered meditators to over 5,000. We now had four virtual chapels running 24 hours a day supporting meditators from more than 30 countries.
In the last few months, things have eased. Vaccinations are slowly becoming available and restrictions are being reduced. However, we have not experienced a significant drop in participation, nor have we lost any groups. We continue receiving new requests to join groups every day and expect to add two more virtual chapels within the next month.
In looking back over the last several years, we have learned a lot about what makes virtual meditation successful. One important lesson is that virtual group meditation is not a replacement for physical group meditation; it is a fundamentally different approach with its own unique challenges and benefits. Here are some of what I now regard as the most important benefits of virtual meditation groups.
The most obvious benefit is convenience. No need to drive an hour in heavy traffic to get to your group; just go to your computer and jump in. This enables a non-obvious benefit. When I attended physical groups, I met with my group at most once a week. With virtual groups, it is so easy to attend that many of us meet every day. That means that seven days a week, we share from the deepest wells of our hearts with people who know and love us. This creates an intimacy of community that is hard to replicate in a physical group meeting once a week. The people I am closest to in the world are people whom I have never physically met.
Another benefit is geography. With physical groups, we are meeting with people in our immediate area. There is very little contact with people in other countries or cultures. With virtual groups, we are almost always meeting with people from around the world. We laugh when somebody says, “Good Morning!” and then remembers that, for many in the group, it is afternoon, or nighttime, or even the next day. It is easy to visualize that we are spinning a web of peace gently surrounding the earth.
The third benefit is somewhat specific to Meditation Chapel. We are by intention interspiritual, and we welcome meditation groups from all faith traditions and even those without a faith tradition. We encourage meditators to participate in groups outside their faith tradition. This means that we are meditating with people with many understandings of the Divine, and some who do not use the language of divinity. But one soon discovers that when sharing the stillness, it doesn’t matter what language one uses to describe that stillness. Buddhist stillness is Christian stillness is Humanist stillness. In that stillness, we meet, we honor each other, and we share the experience of a loving presence that is beyond words.
Meditation Chapel is a 501(c)(3) corporation. It has no paid staff, owns no property, accepts no advertising, and today supports a community of more than 6,000 registered meditators on a budget of less than $10,000 (USD) per year. There is no cost to either meditators or meditation groups to meet on the meditationchapel.org platform.
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