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Take Twenty Minutes of Soul Time

If she got really quiet and listened, new parts of her wanted to speak.

—Susan Ariel

I am a firm believer in guides—people who can take us by the hand and lead us one step further down the path, one pass deeper into our story, one beat closer to our truth. These are the people who can help coax our inner brazen out of hiding. Guides can fall into a number of categories: therapists, pastors, coaches, children, teachers, mentors, and more. One of my guides is a spiritual director named Beth. I see her once a month and I never see her that I don’t end up in tears, one way or another. She’s some kind of angel with dreads, and—as a spiritual director does—she listens and looks for God in my story and points me back to his tide of love and healing in my life, all the while keeping a wary eye on my soul for even the faintest whiff of the Soul Bullies. What a gift.

Beth-with-Dreads encouraged me to start a new practice that has now become what you might call “unforced rhythms of grace” in my life.1 She told me to start spending twenty minutes with my soul as often as I could.

I hate to admit it, but I have distrusted this kind of thing most of my life. I’ve distrusted that I could sustain such a discipline or that it would even make any kind of difference. I wondered if these practices were about earning something, which left them hollow. So, I sabotaged myself a hundred thousand different ways, believing I could get what I wanted and needed if I just tried a little harder: analyzed a little more, thought about it all longer.

But when we don’t take the time to listen, we dis-integrate. We are walking heads. We’re trying to think our way around the tangle instead of listening our way through.

 It’s hard work to discern the soul stirrings, to quiet down and just listen without evaluating the veracity or usefulness or practicality of what’s emerging from the depths. In the short run, living from the neck up is so much easier. Until it isn’t . . .

The tangle inside us needs unraveling. And after we’ve convinced ourselves that running as fast as we can will undo the knot, we somehow realize it’s only making the knot tighter.

I can fall back on being a “try-er” by nature. Someone who muscles through. Once I’ve tried and tried and tried, then I find I’m so tired. Funny how tried and tired are practically the same word if you look at them side by side.

By “try” here, I mean the frantic strive, hustle, press. I’m not saying some endeavors in life aren’t difficult, challenging, requiring work. But work is different from that endless try. Work has a destination. Try is a treadmill.

When all our effort runs out, when all our chasing is exhausted, when all our solving proves futile, when all our analysis is in vain . . . then, and only then, do we happen upon a space where we are totally quiet before God. I wonder if this is where he wanted us all along. Perhaps all God wants is to get us still enough so he can pat our arm gently and say, “Shh, it’s OK. Shh. I’m here.” This is grace, and it trumps our try every single day of the week.

Few things have taught me about grace—and it’s unforced-ness—like the practice of twenty minutes of soul time. Making space to get really quiet and listen is holy work. And it’s kind of crazy what emerges if we’ll stop striving and just surrender. We receive God afresh. We happen upon the God-in-us intersection and we are gifted with a sustaining encounter. I believe encounters reveal what our efforts never could.

———

I take my legal pad out to the courtyard at the front of our house, and I turn on the fountain and position a folding chair by a pretty aqua pot with—you guessed it—bougainvillea. I smell the jasmine overgrowing the gate down below the courtyard, feel the wind, and hear the music created by the movement in the palm fronds. I turn my face toward the sun, the warmth and light.

Just this—walking outside and breathing in the world, if we will make time to do it—is intoxicating. I had spent a good portion of the last two years indoors, which was due to a number of factors, including work, mental health, and my energy level. It was now time to receive the aliveness of the world and be energized by its essence.

I take a couple of deep breaths as a means of finding my way back to my body. I can so easily be floating outside my own existence, and this practice is an opportunity to find my way back to myself. So I breathe and try to settle down into my seat, and I listen to whatever is stirring up in my soul. What am I afraid of? What anxieties am I carrying? What am I worried about? Where does my body hurt? What longings are lurking? What angst is making me crazy? What tension am I experiencing? Any feelings that have energy behind them get recorded. Again, I’m not trying to make sense of anything. I’m simply showing up, keeping my pen moving, trying to take notes for my soul.

After about ten to fifteen minutes of soul-recording, I write, God, what do you want to say to me about all this?

This step is so important because it formally invites God into my tangles. Of course he’s already there, already waiting for me, but I need to be reminded of that fact, reminded that he wants to offer wisdom, comfort, love, truth. So I ask him what he wants to tell me, and then I listen and write, listen and write. I do all this until my phone timer chimes.

Here’s the linchpin: I ask God to help me let go and embrace the flow of what surfaces, instead of judging, analyzing, evaluating the contents of my soul and his responses. For those twenty minutes, I’m not allowed to be a soul skeptic. I’m not allowed to reach for holds. I am to submit to the tide.

This summer I took my kids up to Tahoe to visit my in-laws. One morning we ventured out to the Yuba River with our clunky water shoes and coolers and giant tubes. The Clampetts go to Tahoe. The water was so clear you could see down to the river floor, and despite the drought here in California, the water ran just fast enough that we could catch a ride. We took turns escorting the littlest cousins, Ollie and Elle, down the river while the big kids drank grape soda on the shore. After a couple of attempts, we were all learning how to best maneuver our tubes between rocks, other tubers, the minor-league rapids. My son Luke said it best after his first run: “Well, there’s one thing I’ve learned already: Don’t fight the river.”

Yes. This is the image we are to take with us into our twenty minutes of soul time. We are to trust the flow.

———

Here’s how I started: feeling slightly desperate for a new way, ready to stop hiding and trying, and ready for more love and trusting. I believed that the only way out is always through. I ordered a thing or two on Amazon to help seal the deal. I found a pen that spoke to me and a place that nurtured me. I lit a candle some days, a fire in the fireplace others. I made an almond milk latte. I set a timer for twenty minutes. And I listened. Wrote. Listened. Wrote.

And then I did it again. And a few days later, I did it again. An unforced rhythm of grace.

That’s it.

Sitting down and listening is not necessarily revolutionary in theory. But it is revolutionary in practice. As an extrovert with a busy brain, I find it almost embarrassingly obvious that I would need to sit down and be still. So obvious, in fact, that I don’t do it. And then my brain gets busier and my body gets buzzier, and the next thing you know I’ve dis-integrated, and I’m a head walking around with lots of ideas and lots of plans and lots of solutions . . . and no soul.

No one—including my kids, my husband, my friends, or God—benefits from this version of me. Sure, they will love me even when I’m in this state, but I am not the me I was created to be. And therefore, I suffer in this equation too, because I am completely disconnected from the Source. As we listen to ourselves, we create space for God. And as we encounter God, we find ourselves.

I think every one of us is longing for an encounter with God. For something true that intersects with our real lives and our real needs. We long to not just study about him, but to meet with him. And, even more, to meet with him in a way that has bearing on what is actually going on in our own lives. To hear him speaking over us. To feel him reaching toward us.

Your soul, your Created Center, is where all of you and all of God dwells. You don’t analyze, think, or study your way there. You push the urgent back and you sit and you listen. You come to a point where you realize the rest of your life isn’t going to work if this twenty minutes doesn’t happen regularly. It’s a recalibration. It’s a reintegration. In those twenty minutes, allow yourself to be met with grace. Again, this isn’t about you working your way to God. This is about you sitting down long enough for God to get to you.

Desires will surface. Memories will walk right toward you. You might see yourself as a child. You might remember a dream you hadn’t thought about in years. You might think of something you love. Your soul time may not produce immediate answers—then again, it might. It’s not a time to analyze or fix. It’s a time of flow, like Lukey on the Yuba.

This is how we learn to live from love instead of living for looks. We slow down long enough to listen and receive the love that is ours for the taking. We let it seep into the deepest parts of our being. In the past, we were moving so fast, talking such a streak, that the goodness would just run off. Now we allow our soul to be soaked—down to the root—and then we get up from the chair and we go about our day from that soul-soaked place.

Practicing twenty minutes of soul time is about allowing God to chip away at the plaster we’ve packed around our fleshy, vulnerable soul. It’s about returning to what he’s already given us. Returning instead of relentlessly forging ahead.

So the challenge for all of us will be creating enough space to practice what we know, and then simply believing God at his Word: that as we come to him, we trade our try for his rest.2 We trade our tangle for his peace.

Take a deep breath and get quiet. Then quieter still. What is God speaking into that true place inside you?

(Remember, don’t fight the river.)

Reflection & Expression

Make an appointment with yourself for twenty minutes of soul time. Create space for your soul to speak up, and then ask your soul what it might want to say to you. Once you have written for a bit of time, ask God what he wants to say to you about anything you’ve written. Remember to keep your pen moving.

Ruthlessly confront anything that threatens this appointment:

Shoulds

Pleasing

Comparison

Perfection

What others think

Productivity

Efficiency

Failure

Doubt

Putting everyone else’s needs before your own

For Your Brazen Board

Add a few words—or images representing these words—from your writing, key words that resonate deeply with you. You could also add the words “soul time” and/or images that remind you of a safe place for your soul to speak up.

You could find an image of a river as a reminder to honor the flow in your twenty minutes of soul time instead of evaluating (read “judging”) what’s emerging.

Or you could find an image that represents grace to you, God coming near to you because he loves you, not because you’ve earned his presence.