• being human,  breath,  embodied liturgies,  embodiment,  prayer,  writing

    Prayer Is …

    I’ve been thinking a lot about prayer lately, how I used to view it and how I view it now. And this further pondering is no wonder; we are studying ‘signs of growth’ on the spiritual path in my Spiritual Direction training … ‘birth-quakes,’ reconciling and renewing growth spurts along the spiritual journey (Rosalie Norman-McNaney). Life is God’s ‘earth school.’ There is much to learn if we pay attention. To me, prayer used to be all about thanking and asking. In fact, when I looked up ‘types of prayer,’ the first thing that came up were ‘Five Forms of Prayer:’ blessing and adoration, petition, intercession, thanksgiving and praise. These are all wonderful. Ways of speaking to God. But I’ve learned many other types of prayer over the last several years. Prayer that feels more like meditation than prayer, prayer that takes us deeply into…

  • being human,  breath,  embodiment,  learning,  spiritual direction

    My Spiritual Companion, James Finley

    Throughout my time training as a Spiritual Director, I was asked to choose a spiritual companion for the journey. Actually, we were asked to let our companion choose us, and I was lucky enough to be chosen by my beloved teacher, James Finley. Below is the reflection I wrote for this assignment: See that guy to the right? He’s very important to me. He and his words have been a lifeline in some of my hardest days. He is the reason I consider myself a Contemplative Christian (though I fall short so often). Look at that smile. It’s infectious. It reminds me of the Buddha … sincere, unpretentious, serene. And while he’s a serious guy, he smiles and laughs a lot, especially at himself. I love his sense of humor. And his humility. When we were first asked to ‘walk’ with a spiritual teacher…

  • being human,  embodiment,  learning,  spiritual direction

    The Divine Feminine

    As I near the end of my Spiritual Direction training, the last module pertained to the Divine Feminine. Below is the Reflective Expression I wrote: Studying the Divine Feminine certainly gave me a lot to ponder, and its not the first time I’ve explored the topic. As I’m prone to do, I brought the concepts into myself, examined my tendencies, and its clear I live far more often in the masculine than the feminine … I, like so many of us in Western culture, am dictated by clocks and tasks, and I’ve always been a go-getter professionally. But what I realized in my illness is that I was more of a human doing than a human being; I treated my life as a project instead of a life. I no longer want to live from that space. Slowly, I’m teaching myself how to live…

  • being human,  breath,  embodiment,  learning

    The Spring Within You

    I’d like to meditatively reflect on something I read from the Center for Action’s Daily Meditations earlier this morning: “Jesus’ most wonderful metaphor for [the] inner experience of grace is “a spring within you.” This spring is not outside us, it’s within us, and it’s bubbling up unto eternal life. Spiritual knowing and spiritual cognition are always really re-cognition. It’s the realization that what we already know is true at some deep level. We’ve had an intuition or a suspicion that we might just be a beloved child of God, but we often think that it’s too good to imagine. Heaven is already given, and the gift is already handed over. To the woman at the well, Jesus says very directly, “If you but knew the gift of God … you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (John 4:10). Jesus is…