“I have kept my little rule and maintained my little fasts and said my little prayers faithfully,” the disciple said to the holy one.
“Now what can I do to be enlightened?” And the holy one stood up and stretched her arms to heaven. “Why not,” she said, spreading her fingers wide, “why not be completely turned into fire?”
Joan Chittister, In a High Spiritual Season
Seeking spiritual renewal has many degrees. You may be lost in a dark night of the soul, a lonely, dead, gray place. You may have temporarily fallen away from an adored spiritual path because of illness, pressing commitments, or boredom. You may be considering questions of the spirit for the first time. You may be experiencing a crisis of faith. Whatever your reason, the loving-kindness of taking yourself on retreat invites your yearning for grace to be fulfilled.
How have you come to feel lost in this area of your life? Perhaps the overwhelming misogyny of the major religions has soured you in your quest. Perhaps a painful experience associated with your spirituality has blocked you from reaching out. Peg Thompson in Finding Your Own Spiritual Path lists common obstacles to spiritual renewal: fear of being wounded or abandoned by the Divine; fear of intimacy with the Divine, fear of being truly known; defiance against a harsh religious past; bitterness and despair over prayers that were not answered in the past or over asking for help in the past and being admonished to pray instead of being helped; shame because having a spiritual life seems weak, nonintellectual, uncool; confusion because we don’t know how to pray, meditate, or actively seek the Divine; perplexity because organized religion doesn’t speak to you and your attempts to find an alternative path have been tepid or disappointing.
Whatever your reasons, taking the time that a retreat requires may bring the reconnection to spirit that you seek. The act of retreating sends a signal to yourself that you are worthy of a spiritual life. If you beat yourself up and push yourself unmercifully, then you practice self-hatred, and you effectively block a relationship with the Divine. The practice of honoring the self that happens on retreat may spontaneously reawaken your connection to the sacred.
And a more direct inquiry into your spiritual life may need to be undertaken. What is missing for you? Where did you get lost? What are you yearning for? What obstacles are you erecting? How have you been wounded? What do you believe?
Prepare
Your journal and a pen.
Drawing materials or clay.
Meditative music.
Imagining the Divine
In The History of God Karen Armstrong writes,
I wish I would have learned this thirty years ago, when I was starting out in the religious life. It would have saved me a great deal of anxiety to hear—from eminent monotheists in all three faiths—that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of God for myself…. They would have warned me not to expect to experience God as an objective fact that could be discovered by the ordinary process of rational thought. They would have told me that in an important sense God was a product of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I found so inspiring.
When I read the words “create a sense of God for myself,” I felt I was on fire. How could I do that for myself? In the past, when friends or family spoke about their relationship with the Divine, I was always fascinated but puzzled. I didn’t know whom I was going to have that relationship with. And I didn’t know how to pray or whom to pray to. I needed a place to start. I needed images and names for the Divine, names that I could relate to. Perhaps the same is true for you. Perhaps this practice will help you build a bridge toward what is ultimately unnameable, yet not unknowable.
Copy the words below that resonate, intrigue, and puzzle you into your journal. If you see words that you feel you should copy but you don’t feel comfortable or drawn to them, don’t.
God
Goddess
Blessed Virgin
Atman
Adonai
Holy Spirit
Buddha
Jesus Christ
Creator
Deepest Self
Authentic Self
Divine
Eve
El
Eternal Light
Lord
Queen of Heaven
Gaia
Great Mother
Great Spirit
Higher Power
Holy Ghost
Jehovah
Kali
Illumination
Mary
Messiah
Muhammad
Mother
Father
Redeemer
Shekinah
Sophia
Spirit
Vishnu
Wisdom
Yahweh
Compassionate One
Loving Guide
Breath of Life
Spirit of Life
Universe
Universal Mind
Spirit of the Universe
Spirit of Nature
All-Powerful, Guiding, Creative Intelligence
Great Reality Down Deep Within Us
The Mighty Purpose and Rhythm That Underlies All
Mother of All Living
Father of All Living
Divine Feminine
Divine Matrix
Healer
A God Who Looks Like Me
The Still Presence
Presence of Infinite Love
The Source
White Buffalo Calf Woman
Krishna
Inanna
Ishtar
Astarte
Womb Mother
Cerridwen
Lilith
See Good Ways to Listen and Contemplations.
Choose one or more of your selected words. Using spontaneous painting, clay, or collage, create an image inspired by your chosen words. Let your intuitive heart guide you. What does this mean? It means that the process of making the image—of how it feels, of what thoughts and feelings occur to you—is what is valuable, not the finished image. This is not art making, this is ceremonial discovery. You might like to keep a journal or tape recorder close by to record impressions while shaping your image.
See Courage for how to dialogue.
When you are through, sit in silence with your image for a few moments. Dialogue with it. Let your image speak through you. Recall Karen Armstrong’s words, “God [is] a product of the creative imagination.” Contemplating this evokes a feeling of prayer, but instead of a prayer of petition, this is prayer of connection. “We can think of prayer as any practice that fosters or expresses our relationship with the sacred as we understand it…. When we pray, we actively seek a relationship to the divine,” is the way Peg Thompson defines it (italics mine). If we think of prayer as entering into a dynamic, intimate relationship with the awesome energy of the universe, we stop seeing ourselves as unworthy or inert and begin to imagine communicating with, co-creating with, the Divine. Which is not to suggest this is a neat process, a “create-your-own-God” package. A relationship with the Divine is above all a relationship with mysterium tremendum, with an overwhelming mystery. We may create an image or a sense, but never a definition. There is intimacy but never comprehension. The Divine is not “an objective fact that could be discovered by the ordinary process of rational thought.” Cultivating this relationship requires and creates faith—faith in your own worthiness to be in such an intimate relationship, faith that the process of co-creating your life with Spirit is truly occurring, and faith that although you can neither see it nor taste it, the mystery is loving you back.
Gratitude, worship, devotion, being held, and being known can all be experienced as prayer. Somewhere between what Jesuit retreat leader Anthony de Mello described as lovingly gazing at the blank that is God and the form of prayer I learned in a Baptist Sunday school I attended briefly as a child lies a shimmering range of ways to be in relationship with the sacred. I kept thinking of all the ways I am in relationship with people, places, and animals in my life and how these relationships are sometimes a form of prayer. Prayer became alive to me as a way to care for my daughter, my garden, my body. I could communicate with my renewed image of the Divine through these acts as well as through dancing, writing, and talking. And I was worthy of accepting communication back.
Now that you have an image of the one you seek a relationship with, what do you want to say? Try avoiding words, and use your body to establish connection. Using gestures or dance, express with your body your doubts, your desires, your gratitude for this new or renewed relationship. Or you may love words, as poet Kathleen Norris does, and through the psalms, other poetry, or your own writing you can declare your feelings toward the Divine. You may want to repeat one of the sacred names you chose over and over while breathing deeply. You may sit in silence, using your image as an icon to softly focus on. Experiment with establishing a living relationship that fits you, a style and rhythm that fan your desire. Don’t force yourself. Avoid beating yourself up if nothing comes alive for you during this exercise. Just leave it be for a while. Similarly, don’t avoid a path that appeals to you because it feels too new or too different from what you believe. Trust that what you are drawn to today is right for you and that the response of your heart will tell you if you are worshiping in a way that is true.
Define and Undefine Your Spiritual Life
Sometimes you lose your connection to the Divine because you don’t know what you need from this connection or what role a spiritual path plays in your life. Why practice a spiritual discipline? Why be a spiritually oriented person? Why nurture your spirit? What does spiritual mean?
See Introduction for one definition.
Sometimes you lose your connection to the Divine because you are trying to control it, because you insist on defining what your relationship with the Divine will be. Perhaps it is only a relationship about self-improvement, thinking optimistic thoughts, or creating your own reality. Or perhaps it is primarily a punitive relationship, one of judgment and moral direction.
Read the list in Contemplations: Ways to Work with Questions and Other Material for ideas on how to work with this question. Center yourself before encountering the questions below. Ask for help, even if you don’t know whom you are asking.
Be willing to sit with the discomfort of not knowing what you yearn for. Be willing to be greedy and childish in your desires. Be willing to acknowledge ideas that are foreign or threatening to your idea of who you are and what you believe. Practice trust.
Same approach—center yourself, ask for help, and then contemplate the question however you choose, taking all the time you need. Listen to the mere whisperings of your imagination. Honor them.
Same procedure. Take a break if you need one. Finally, take the sentence stem below and complete it fifty times.
What emerges from doing this practice? What did you learn? Are you surprised? Reassured? Threatened? Challenged?
Randi discovered in answer to the first question that the central limit she put on her relationship was “fear of getting close to Spirit.” Jackie found she needed to “surrender to the mystery of life and stop controlling everything.” Mona defined being spiritual as “living the golden rule, even toward someone who cuts in front of me in line at the store or plays rap music on the subway.” Another woman found that writing down what she believed took her entire retreat, because “it is so easy to mouth spiritual ideas and so hard to make them a true part of your life. I didn’t want to write down anything I wasn’t willing to live. After I made my list, I asked myself, ‘How am I living these beliefs?’ That led me to make a list of ways I would like to.”
Can you do the same? Reading over what you wrote in each section, are there one or two actions that, if you did them on this retreat, could reinvigorate your spiritual life? What emerges may be simple and basic, like being kind to yourself and others, or puzzling and hard to know how to do, as with Jackie and her idea of surrendering to mystery. “I had no idea how to do this—there wasn’t a clear first step. So I tried asking my Higher Power what I should do and kept trying to just be still and wait, over and over, throughout my retreat.” What do you need to do?
Become an Empty Vessel
One morning when I was trying to pray, requesting help with this chapter, a voice asked, “How can I fill you up when you are so full already?” The image of an empty bowl came to mind. I was shocked into stillness. In that moment I stepped back and saw my spiritual practices as mainly telling and thanking, not listening and being. A feeling of being hollow arose—as if there were an empty space starting at my throat and expanding into my torso. An empty hourglass vessel. I named myself “Hollow Listening Woman.”
See Good Ways to Listen: Being.
I decided this was an excellent practice for me to continue—to spend a few moments each morning sitting silently, focusing my mind on the feeling of being hollow: empty, open, clear. I think of this as prayer, but instead of asking or complaining or even giving thanks, I keep my heart and mind focused on being empty.
When I can stick with it, when I can resist the need to beg or cajole, when I can calm my frantic thoughts with this spacious image of my body as an empty vessel, sometimes I am graced by a feeling of something pouring into me. Sometimes this is an idea or image, but mostly it is a feeling of depth and peacefulness, as if I’m sinking into something infinitely vast. Yet if I hope for something to come, nothing does. If I feel like I am waiting, it doesn’t feel right. I have to focus on being empty and that alone.
Spiritual renewal may come through emptiness, by becoming a vessel that the Divine can pour herself into. Let an image of emptiness occur to you. Meditate on it. Become a hollow listening woman.
Discipline
Discipline has a bad reputation. Images of nuns with rulers and fasting until you faint come to mind. Yet loving discipline is a cornerstone of meaning and renewal. You don’t beat yourself into prayer, meditation, or helping others; you acknowledge your resistance, give it a hug, and keep going.
Pick any spiritual practice that you know, think you know, or have always wanted to experience. Praying the rosary, meditating on the Buddhist loving-kindness prayer, reading from the Koran, meditating on your inhale: the choices are endless. Keep it simple—let it be something you can do on retreat, without preparation or fuss. Choose a practice that revolves around silence and that can be done in ten to thirty minutes. Do this practice regularly on your retreat. No thinking, no wavering, no changing your mind. If you are on a very short retreat, then do a shorter practice (say five minutes) every half hour or hour of your retreat. Don’t skip this because you assume you don’t know how to do a practice correctly.
See Resources for books about varied spiritual practices.
But what if you don’t have any idea what spiritual discipline to practice? What if nothing comes to mind? Then either choose a practice from one of the books listed in Resources, or sit in silence for twenty minutes and watch your breath. No mantra, no special instructions. Yes, volumes have been written and thousands of opinions are held on how to sit in silence. You don’t have to do any of them. Just sit. Decide before your first session where you will sit and how. Spend a few moments becoming comfortable, making sure your lower back is supported. Sit up if you are physically able, because if you lie down you may fall asleep. Return at regular intervals to the same place, the same position, and sit in silence. Use a timer; do not watch your watch. Allow yourself no variations. Observe what you obsess about. Observe the silence that falls over you. No conclusions need to be drawn. Nothing needs to happen except to sit in silence.
If you tried sitting in the past and hated it, then walk in silence in nature. If nature is not available, you might need to wear headphones with very simple instrumental music to block out distractions. The same precepts: Do nothing but walk. Do not talk to anyone. Observe your reactions, resistance, repetitive thoughts. No conclusions, no striving, just walking in silence.
After doing any form of sustained discipline, you will feel yourself opening. You may not have learned anything intellectually. You may not see angels or have tea with Gandhi. You may not shave your head and take up a begging bowl. But you will feel: a deepening, a quickening, an enlivening, a relief. When you do, express gratitude to the sacred as you know it.
(If you read this before your retreat and a discipline comes to mind that involves a special setting or other people, say attending the hours of the liturgical day within a religious community, then by all means pursue your idea.)
Addressed to the Heart
One of the ways we dull our spiritual senses is by forgeting to observe the riches that are being offered to us each moment. We forget to marvel at the fingernail on the tip of each finger, the sunlight pouring through white muslin curtains, that eating peaches and cream creates energy to fuel the brain that is reading these thoughts. Mystics seem to be the only ones who are able to walk around in awe of the indescribable wonder of life. “Look around you, enjoy every flowering bush, every tall tree, and know that the spirit of God has made them lovely for you,” St. Clare of Assisi declared.
It is time to be a mystic.
Spend part of a retreat, or all of a mini-retreat, being alert to what is being offered to you. Imagine that life is one giant gift, wrapped in reverence, being offered to you by your Divinity. Sit down. It need not be anyplace special. Take a few deep breaths, and then simply receive what is being offered. These are good questions to start with:
See Good Ways to Listen: Divine Landscape: Nature as Mirror.
Use all your senses to answer these questions. Look around. What is being offered for your eyes to feast upon? Listen. What is being offered for your ears to resound with? What is being offered for your taste buds to savor? What is being offered for your nose to inhale into you? What is being offered for you to embrace? What is being whispered into your heart?
You may spend five minutes or an hour on this practice. It is mysterious and can be profoundly moving. You can do it while walking, in your office, on the bus, at home, anywhere. On a long retreat, use this practice to punctuate your retreat. Set an alarm to gently remind you every three or four hours, sit down wherever you are, and open to what is being offered.
Unfold into gratitude without answers.
See Grieving: Emotional Container for creating a safe place.
Melting
Using spontaneous writing or painting, make a list or draw images of everything you dislike about yourself, everything you cannot forgive yourself for, everything that you may torture yourself about. You are taking an inventory of your brittle, hard, ancient hurts and defects. Be fierce.
When your list feels complete, put it next to an image of the Divine. This may be an image you have made or an image you found or already love. It may be a tree or a rock. It may be a shrine of images.
Center yourself in whatever way you choose. Close your eyes. Imagine your image of the Divine as you know it coming toward you. Whatever comes to you is fine. Spend a few moments feeling this presence. See your Divinity enveloping you in a hug. Open yourself to how this feels, this love and acceptance. Be aware of feeling inadequate, unworthy, or unclean. Imagine your Sacred Being bathing you in holy water. Take time to imagine where you are, what the water feels like, smells like, even tastes like. Linger. Trust whatever details occur to you.
As you are bathed, allow your mistakes, your wounds, your shortcomings to fall away. However you feel or visualize this happening is perfect. You may see darkness streaming out of your body. You may imagine symbols for different items on your list and see these symbols being dissolved or transformed by the water. You may hear yourself listing the things you hate about yourself and hear a voice responding with “And that, too, is accepted.” Your vision may expand beyond this bath. Follow your imagination. Open to the love that is available. Stay out of your mind, out of what you believe or don’t believe. Focus on being held, bathed, and accepted.
Soma Source
Feeling in our bodies our relationship to the Divine, beyond words and theory, is often where women find spiritual renewal. We have been taught for thousands of years that our bodies are unclean, that we were not made in the image of the Divine, and that we must split spirituality from matter. Of course, in doing so, the feminine has been exiled, and a barren trap of self-hatred and separation from the Divine has been erected around us.
See Contemplations.
By reuniting our bodies with our spirits, we can move out of the often deadening rational place of trying to have a relationship to the Divine. We can then move into a holy, visceral knowing that we are Divine, that we are part of the whole. A body-based relationship to spiritual renewal can also get us past our fears of being intimate with the Divine by helping us honor our bodies and acknowledge the Divine similarities between our bodies and the earth and between our regenerative powers and the regenerative power of life. In the end, the spiritual life is not one of intellect. It is knowing in the body that we are all one.
Here are several quotes to inspire your imagination to move closer to your Divinity. There are some instructions for movement and ritual, but please take them only as starting places. Move into a nonrational state where directions are meaningless.
Maya Angelou stated in The Feminine Face of God,
One says, “I am Thine” to that force of energy that has created us. It’s only when you can give over the concern about everything else—whether the bills are paid or the phone is ringing—and join that moment, join that other body, that you can have total completeness in sex. So it is the same as the development of true spirituality. You must admit to yourself that you are part of everything, and then there is total enjoyment.
Sit quietly and contemplate Maya’s words, especially give over concern, join, and part of everything. Find a physical position that communicates that you feel physically closed, shut away from what Maya is describing. Stay with that posture for a while. Intensify it if you wish. When you are ready, find a position that communicates the opposite, that you are opening to “I am Thine,” to joining, to giving over concern, to merging with something larger than yourself. Move back and forth between closed and open. You may feel like changing the movements as you go along. You may feel like staying closed longer than open. You may find yourself enlarging or lingering over the transition between being closed and being open. See if you can sense which position you are more familiar with and which you yearn for more. Allow “that force of energy” to speak to you and through you, and allow the words to be embodied in you.
The Mother has one law: “Create; make as I do…transform one substance into another…transmute blood into milk, clay into vessel, feeling into movement, wind into song; egg into child, fiber into cloth, stone into crystal, memory into image, body into worship.”
So proclaims artist and former nun Meinrad Craighead. Take one or two phrases of this passage, and create something using your body. How does this statement inspire you to manifest your spirit into being? Yes, that may sound vague and esoteric. I’m asking you to make a leap into imagination. Forget making sense. Move your body, sink your hands into clay, lift your voice—spirit and matter coming together.
I too can bring my breath down to dwell in a deeper place where my blood-soul restores to my body what society has drained and dredged away….
There is no defense against an open heart and a supple body in dialogue with wildness. Internal strength is an absorption of the external landscape. We are informed by beauty, raw and sensual. Through an erotics of place our sensitivity becomes our sensibility…. Steam rising. Water boiling. Geysers surging. Mud pots gurgling. Herds breathing. Hooves stampeding. Wings flocking by. Sky darkening. Clouds gathering. Rain falling. Rivers raging. Lakes rising. Lightning striking. Trees burning. Thunder clapping. Smoke clearing. Eyes staring. Wolves howling into the Yellowstone.
This passage is from An Unspoken Hunger by Terry Tempest Williams. Find an inspiring place outside or in nature to read it. How can you actively absorb into your body inner strength from the landscape around you? How can you be “a supple body in dialogue with wildness”? Don’t think you have to be in the wilderness—wildness is all around. You can meditate on a bowl of rocks while sitting in the bathtub. Where did these rocks come from? In the eons of their existence, where have they been? The water that surrounds you, where did it originate? Can you feel the clouds gathering, the rain falling? You can do this in a backyard, in a park, on a rooftop gazing at clouds. The untamed is always all around you. Locate it. Be in dialogue with its beauty through your body.
Stories
Barbara is a therapist and movement teacher. She also leads women’s retreats.
It is the first morning of my retreat, and I rise with the sun to practice my own version of flow-yoga by the pool. I can move only slowly. Like a lava flow creeping across the land, I am thick and hot, but powerful in my slowness—definite and intentional, guided by gravity. My body says, “Stay low…deep in your pelvis. Get seated there. Be in the exquisite moment and be satisfied with every minute breath and movement. Take your time and surrender. Take all the time you need.”
Yesterday afternoon, as I dozed in and out of consciousness on the lanai, I heard the geckos chirping and through the slits of my eyes saw the glazed and fractured light shimmering on the ocean…in the clouds…through the leaves of the trees. I began to dissemble…to come apart. At some molecular level I spread out, admitting these other living beings into and between the fragments of me. Dissolving into a quivering tapestry of light, sounds, and color…one fabric. My witness self was still there to notice this phenomenon and to have a moment of alarm. Whoops! I’m not supposed to do this. I’ve got to keep it together. Then, in quick succession, a flicker of joy, then humor and recognition. Oh yes! This…!
Later, doing movement by the pool, I partly reclaim this state as I open my eyes and trace the outline of the horizon, a tumble of bright bougainvillea, graceful silk tree, clouds and sea, ploughed fields, fluttering palms, stone wall, water. A voice (my voice) says, “The mother and the father are one.”
I notice that I am silently weeping. My friend R’s simple song comes to my throat.
Give thanks to Mother Gaia.
Give thanks to the Father Sun.
Give thanks to the plants in the garden where
The Mother and the Father are One.
More tears. I am being reminded to integrate the masculine and the feminine. To respect the Male Divinity as well as the Goddess. Six months before, on the same land, I experienced a deep and spontaneous sharing with a friend. It was as if a veil were pulled aside and I suddenly realized how alienated I had been from the Father God. My hellfire and brimstone Christian fundamentalist upbringing had turned me off to the image of God as a punishing and critical father. In my twenties I turned to the Great Mother Goddess for comfort and healing. Now I am being guided to the next step. It is time to turn to the male side of the Divine (of my own psyche as well) to clear away the false images and find my own true relationship between the two sides.
As if to acknowledge my surrender to the task, I plunge into the pool headfirst. I am naked except for my gold ring with a triangular blue topaz, the ring I gave myself as a symbol of the sacred trinity—Father, Mother, and Divine Child or Christ Being.
Kneeling in the grass, with the hot sun on my face, I pray to be shown a way to be in a true partnership of the masculine and feminine. Opening my eyes, I see two bright red dragonflies beginning their mating dance, swooping joyfully in tandem. I speak aloud, “See, just like that! We can be like that and dance and fly together!”
The answer to my prayer hasn’t come as a detailed blueprint or a list of “to-do’s.” But I trust somehow if I can hold this image of the dragonflies in my heart, the process will unfold.
For Long Retreats
See Retreat Plans: A Three-Day Spiritual Renewal Retreat for ideas.
For Mini-Retreats
Defining and Undefining Your Spiritual Life, Discipline, Melting, and Soma Source all make good mini-retreats in themselves. Combine Defining with Melting, Defining with Discipline, or Discipline with Soma Source.
For Retreats in the World
Do an opening ceremony in your own way and space, then attend a religious service that you have always wanted to try, or return to a religious place you are trying to understand. Do not require yourself to interact with others, to be greeted, or to wear a name tag. For now, take what you wish without judgment of yourself or others. Then visit a place in nature or go back to your retreat space, and do Defining and Undefining Your Spiritual Life.
For Retreats with Others
Try doing Defining and Undefining Your Spiritual Life on your own and then coming together in a deep listening circle to share what you found. Or do Soma Source in a circle together.
See Retreating with Others: Deep Listening Circle.