A viewer asks: “I believe prayer and meditation are quite similar; however, since I’ve been listening to you, this initiative strikes me as something, perhaps, not so good – or liable to be misused: Any teacher with a K-12 classroom can gain free access to a leading app for meditation and sleep. Teachers will get unlimited access to guided meditations and mindfulness exercises, including programs tailored for age groups from pre-Kindergarden through high school. The goal of this initiative is to provide teachers with the tools and resources they need to help kids to develop a lifelong capacity for greater self-awareness, concentration, patience, and resilience.” What are the benefits and risks of this practice?

Unfortunately, the risks far outweigh any benefits. As you know, meditation in and of itself has some value as a way to de-stress by calming the mind for a time and standing down and choosing to not think or focus on the struggles of the day, and allow one to have some peace and calm and quiet, and this can help restore a person by giving them a rest period. That is a far cry from true self‑improvement. It is more like a return to a neutral baseline so people have a state of calm within to engage in the next task. So it is sort of like hitting a reset button, in a sense, of providing a return to a calmer state of mind to begin anew, but that is hardly an achievement and a way to create lifelong benefit through any kind of meaningful strengthening or self-improvement in a tangible, demonstrable way. It is simply a belief that has crept into human awareness because of disinformation promoting this as a New Age approach to betterment, and because it is essentially a secular exercise even when done by a "spiritual person" with a spiritual purpose in mind. It will do no such thing if it does not involve a specific outreach by the mind of the practitioner seeking out a divine figure to commune with, to make a connection of some kind, and perhaps to request guidance, information, support, or healing during the interval taken for the meditation exercise. In the absence of a deliberate, specific spiritual outreach, this leaves a vacuum and the divine realm must simply stand by and watch what unfolds. We have told you before that any outreach beyond the self wanting something to happen will be met with a reply and an answer from the beyond, but that is largely provided by dark entities of all kinds who watch for opportunities of this kind and will use it as a way in, a way to gain an entrance into the person’s consciousness and physical energy field, and then things will worsen from there because once a toehold is established, they will take up residence and then begin to manipulate their host and eventually cause a worsening of things and even a tragic consequence. To have the educational system outfitting naive, innocent young minds with a tool of self‑destruction in this way is quite disheartening and so typical of the strict adherence to secular practice and the shunning of anything spiritual in the school setting. This is a well-meaning perspective that was important in its day, given the past history of state influenced church institutions and the problems they caused the populace, but to use separation of church and state as a way to deny any belief in a higher power, and to ban any mention or possibility of exercising a spiritual lesson or theme in a school setting, is taking things to an extreme of causing a worse outcome than the possibility of being unfair to some faiths by using others as examples or as a focus, whenever the idea of spirituality might be brought up in a classroom for teaching purposes. But those issues can be handled just as carefully as seeing to their exclusion. There are many ecumenical approaches that can be evenhanded to recognize all major faiths as having common central ideas and benefits without shunning the very idea of faith as though it is tainted and will be damaging. This is the wrong message to give the young and is quite sinister in its origins and its consequences. So this meditation approach, in the absence of any spiritual protection, is a gross negligence of the first order and will incur significant karmic penalties for all who promote and facilitate this practice.