Christine Valters Paintner's Blog, page 106

Embracing the Wisdom of the Body ~ A love note from your online abbess

Dearest monks and artists,

I am so delighted that my newest book is now available – The Wisdom of the Body: A Contemplative Journey to Wholeness for Women – is a labor of much love and the work of years of learning to love my body as wise guide and companion, even in the midst of chronic illness and pain. Here is a brief excerpt from the introduction:

We carry a terrible wound: alienation from our embodied life.

Your flesh shall become a great poem.

—Walt Whitman

Welcome to this journey. I want to keep saying that again and again. Welcome and more welcome. Know yourself – all of yourself – all your doubts and resistance, your body and soul, your joy and your grief are all welcome. My deepest hope for this time is that after journeying through all ten chapters, that you might discover yourself welcoming in even more of your beautiful being, and that places of resistance might begin to soften.

Two of the things I like to teach over and over are this kind of radical hospitality (which takes a lifetime of practice) and gentleness with yourself (probably because I need both of these so much myself).

Our bodies have this unfortunate tendency to carry with them a lifetime of criticism, analysis, scrupulous dissection, anger, betrayal, and more. It requires that we begin to remember ourselves, created out of such love. When one of my teaching partners, Betsey Beckman, offers up her Story Dance of the creation story from Genesis, she embodies God as creator, and with each act of creation she says “that’s good” with unbridled enthusiasm. Not in a distanced and unaffected way, but in a delighted and deeply celebratory way. Can we remember this? Can we imagine the divine uttering those words over every nook of our own creation?

The root of the word re-member means to make whole again, to bring the parts back together. We have been waging a war on ourselves for too long, tearing ourselves apart. As Walt Whitman writes, this alienation from our embodied life is a great wound we are each carrying.

What might it mean for you to allow your flesh to become a great poem?

You can find Part Two of A Different Kind of Fast for Lent on Embracing Vulnerability here>>

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE

Photo © Book Cover

A Different Kind of Fast: Part Two – Embrace Vulnerability

Dearest monks and artists,

In 2003 my mother became seriously ill quite suddenly and died a few days later in the ICU. I was only 33 at the time, she was my second parent to die and I had no siblings. I was left with a profound aloneness, even with my beloved husband’s faithful companionship. I coped at first in the way that had always served me well. By being strong and holding everything together, keeping busy when I could so that I could distract myself from the tremendous grief.

Western culture rewards us greatly for being able to pull ourselves together and carry on with life. Speed, productivity, and a denial of difficult emotions are the hallmark of our times. In our rush to get things done we armor ourselves even more.

The problem was that I became ill. It was a number of vague things like fatigue, headaches, depression, skin rashes. During this time I discovered a practice called yin yoga in which seated or lying postures are held for 3-5 minutes with the aim of softening the connective tissues. I grew to love this time of sitting with my body and paying attention to the places of holding, of physical armoring, of tightness and tension. Breathing into these places with loving attention brought a great softening to my body. And in the midst of that softening other things began to loosen their grip – the self-critical thoughts which plagued me, my heart opened to the river of mourning and demanded my attention. Tears arose without bidding and I learned to welcome them in.

I also had a wonderful spiritual director to help guide me through this territory of savage grief. I took long contemplative walks and let the turning of the seasons become a scripture text for me which spoke of the necessity of autumn’s release and winter’s rest alongside of spring’s blossoming and summer’s fruitfulness.

In the early Christian desert tradition, tears were considered a gift. Softening was the fruit of committed prayer and practice. Tears were shed over our grief at loss but also at the places in our lives which had become hardened, the ways we had turned away from God.

Penthos are tears of compunction, a puncturing of the hard shell of the heart, which pierces to our core, reminding us of who we most deeply are. This “gift of tears,” as they are sometimes referred to, reveals to us the misguided perfectionism, games, and manipulations we struggle to achieve, as well as the stories we tell ourselves. These tears free us from lying and any form of pretense that takes over when we feel anxious.

Orthodox theologian and author John Chryssavgis writes: “Tears and weeping indicate a significant frontier in the way of the desert. They bespeak a promise. In fact, they are the only way into the heart.”This frontier is the boundary between our old way of seeing and believing and the wide new expansiveness into which contemplative prayer calls us. Compunction awakens us to all the ways we have been false to our own deepest self and to the profound longing that is kindled when we pay attention to the heart.

A story about Abba Arsenics says that he “had a hollow in his chest channeled out by the tears which fell from his eyes all his life while he sat at his manual work.

The “gift of tears” written about by the desert elders also is celebrated several centuries later by Spanish mystic St. Ignatius of Loyola. They are not about finding meaning in our pain and suffering. They do not give answers but instead call us to a deep attentiveness to the longings of our heart. They continue to flow until we drop our masks and self-deception and return to the source of our lives and longing. They are a sign that we have crossed a threshold into a profound sense of humility.

In the New Testament we find Jesus weeping over the death of his friend Lazarus, and over the city of Jerusalem. Certainly his final hours were a profound witness to the call of radical vulnerability as a portal to divine grace.

God is felt in the places of pain and sorrow, in the places of paradox and contradiction. Our tears reveal our deepest joys when we acknowledge that we cannot possess anything, neither the spring blossoming nor our partner in life. We learn to love without holding on. The times my marriage has bloomed even further have often been the times of shared vulnerability, when we allow ourselves to reveal our soft underbellies to one another.

My fast this Lent is taking different forms. I am being reminded again of the seductiveness of strength, of pretending that everything feels fine when I am struggling inside. I remember that the places of the greatest disruptions in my life have also been the occasions of the most profound gifts.

My Lenten discipline is to allow a great softening this season, and in the fertile earth of my heart, to see what begins to sprout there that never had a chance in the hardened soil.

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE

Photo © Christine Valters Paintner

Monk in the World Guest Post: Jamie Marich

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission for the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Jamie Marich's reflection Dancing Mindfully with the Elements.

The invitation to pray and meditate with the elements is fully awakened in my life. I credit much of this awakening to Christine and learning from her sacred work with Abbey of the Arts. Diving in to the various exercises in Christine’s books and retreats has heightened my attunement to the elements in the various places that I travel. My own mindful journey and contemplative practices in mindfulness traditions assists in this deepening of attunement. For me, attunement is the glorious practice of noticing what resonates when you consciously decide to live in the present moment. A beautiful synchronicity can arise between you and the moment, you and your surroundings, you and your sacred purpose. Like the sweet sounds gleaming from an instrument when all of the parts and mechanisms are in their proper place, attunement helps me to dance with the lessons that earth, fire, wind, and water wish to teach.

I recently had the privileged of taking a journey to the country of Iceland with my husband David. Iceland was one of those “bucket list” destinations; a place I always wanted to see yet traveling there never seemed practical. This summer, a dear friend of mine passed away tragically, unexpectedly, and much too young. Working through my own grief connected to his death has inspired me to live my life more fearlessly—to take the leap of faith and experience more of those “bucket list” wishes. Iceland is a place that demanded my attention, my attunement to all four elements. Although sometimes my attention was drawn to one element specifically, I generally experienced their grace and glory in their fusion. For instance, heat rose up from the earth causing a hot spring to bubble, and the wind carried the steam from this natural phenomenon to my face and body. I was able to breathe in the warmth and savor the wonder of that natural fusion.

I noticed that spending a week in this place of elemental fusion with conscious intention to deepen my spiritual practice elicited a wellspring of creative expressions from my heart and soul. I am happy to share with you in this blog a poem that I wrote while on this journey and a video of a dance practice that I created while in Iceland. For me, the greater challenge is to continue to move in the beauty of this elemental fusion that so impressed me in Iceland within my daily life here in Youngstown, Ohio. It seems that traveling to beautiful places can inspire me, yet the real challenge is to access the power of these places in my regular life without judging my regular life as boring or ugly. In the video you will see, it pleases me that I was able to film the first part of it in Iceland where the dance came to me, and the second part (the dance along) right in my back yard in Warren, OH. There is a lesson in this transition for me—how can I meditate and pray with the elements every place I go, in every day that I live? How can dancing mindfully with the elements help you to connect to your true purpose today?

ELEMENTS

When my yoga meets the water,

Encountering the clean

Scent of eucalyptus

My entire being floats

In the balm of nature's renewing force.

When my meditation touches the earth,

Sensing the sureness of

Rock beneath my pilgrim feet,

My mind takes comfort

In the security of Mother Earth's assurance.

When my dance moves with the wind,

Gliding with Divine Mother's

Holy breath on my body,

My soul is both exhilarated and terrified

In the uncertainty of how this force will beckon.

When my song greets the fire,

Rejoicing with the pure beauty

Manifest before me,

My heart is warmed by the creative force

Of my human ancestors immortalized in flame.

Jamie Marich, Ph.D., LPCC-S, LICDC-CS, REAT, RMT travels internationally speaking on topics related to EMDR therapy, trauma, addiction, expressive arts and mindfulness while maintaining a private practice in her home base of Warren, OH. She is the developer of the Dancing Mindfulness practice (www.dancingmindfulness.com). Jamie is the author of four books, including the popular EMDR Made Simple. She is currently working on her latest book (in collaboration with Dr. Stephen Dansiger) EMDR Therapy and Mindfulness for Trauma Focused Care (due out with Springer Publishing in 2017).

A Different Kind of Fast – Ash Wednesday Blessings & Lenten Resources

Dearest monks and artists,

I wanted to share with you some reflections as we begin the holy season of Lent as well as some resources to support your journey. We are offering our own online retreat on the practice of lectio divina which starts today, but I will also be sharing this series from our archives below each week on a different kind of fasting.

This week we enter the long desert of the Lenten season. If you participate in a liturgical service, most likely you will be marked with the sign of ashes and the words “from dust you came and to dust you shall return” will echo through the sanctuary space again and again.

St. Benedict writes in his Rule to “keep death daily before your eyes” and Amma Sarah, one of the desert mothers said, “I put my foot out to ascend the ladder, and I place death before my eyes before going up it.”

The word for desert in Greek is eremos and literally means “abandonment” and is the term from which we derive the word “hermit.”  The desert was a place of coming face to face with loneliness and death.  Your very existence is threatened in the desert. You can only face up to yourself and to your temptations in life which distract you from a wide-hearted focus on the presence of the sacred in the world.

Death of any kind is rarely a welcome experience.  Even when we witness the mysteries of nature year after year reveal the glories of springtime which emerge from winter’s fallow landscape.  We resist death, we try to numb ourselves from life’s inevitable stripping away of our “secure” frameworks.  We spend so much energy and money on staying young. But when we turn to face death wide-eyed and fully present, when we feel the fullness of the grief it brings, we also slowly begin to discover the new life awaiting us.

In the desert tradition, death is a friend and companion along the journey.  St Francis of Assisi referred to death as “sister” in his famous poem Canticle of Creation.  Rather than a presence only at the end of our lives, death can become a companion along each step, heightening our awareness of life’s beauty and calling us toward living more fully. Living with Sister Death calls us to greater freedom and responsibility.

Alan Jones describes the desert relationship to death in this way:  “Facing death gives our loving force, clarity, and focus. . . even our despair is to be given up and seen as the ego-grasping device that it really is.  Despair about ourselves and our world is, perhaps, the ego’s last and, therefore, greatest attachment.”

I have been sitting with Jones’ words and the invitation to fast during Lent, one of the central practices we are called to take on. The first reading for Ash Wednesday is from the prophet Joel summons us to “return to God with your whole heart, with fasting, and weeping, and mourning.”

The kind of fast drawing me this season isn’t leaving behind of treats like chocolate or other pleasures. This season I am being invited to fast from things like “ego-grasping” and noticing when I so desperately want to be in control, and then yielding myself to a greater wisdom than my own.

I am called to fast from being strong and always trying to hold it all together, and instead embrace the profound grace that comes through my vulnerability and tenderness, to allow a great softening this season.

I am called to fast from anxiety and the endless torrent of thoughts which rise up in my mind to paralyze me with fear of the future, and enter into the radical trust in the abundance at the heart of things, rather than scarcity.

I am called to fast from speed and rushing through my life, causing me to miss the grace shimmering right here in this holy pause.

I am called to fast from multitasking and the destructive energy of inattentiveness to any one thing, so that I get many things done, but none of them well, and none of them nourishing to me. Instead my practice will become a beholding of each thing, each person, each moment.

I am called to fast from endless list-making and too many deadlines, and enter into the quiet and listen for what is ripening and unfolding, what is ready to be born.

I am called to fast from certainty and trust in the great mystery of things.

And then perhaps, I will arrive at Easter and realize those things from which I have fasted I no longer need to take back on again. I will experience a different kind of rising.

*This is the first of a seven-part series on other ways of fasting for the season of Lent.

Here are some books for your to consider as well (the first two are available on Kindle). John and I are planning to read through Brueggeman's book of daily reflections. With the current political climate we are hungering for a prophetic voice like his. I also love Paula Huston's work as well as the book of poems for the season.

A Way Other Than Our Own: Devotions for Lent by Walter Brueggeman

Simplifying the Soul: Lenten Practices to Renew Your Spirit by Paula Huston

The Heart's Time: A Poem a Day for Lent and Easter by Janet Morley

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE

**Please note the Amazon links above are affiliate links which means the Abbey receives a small percentage of your purchase price at no additional cost to you. These funds support our scholarships.

A Lenten Lectio Divina Online Retreat (starts today!)

Lectio divina is a practice of being present to each moment in a heart-centered way. We are often taught in churches to think through our prayers – reciting words and formulas which are valuable elements of our shared traditions, but only one window into God’s presence. In lectio we invite God to speak to us in an unmediated way. Our memories, images, and feelings become an important context for experiencing God’s voice active in us and we discover it when we pray in a heart-centered way. Those words moving through us break open God’s invitation to us in this moment of our lives and calls us to respond in some way.

Are you longing for a transformative journey to deeper intimacy with God through an ancient practice? Would you like to cultivate a more contemplative way of being with scripture and the world? Would you like to have a guide for the season of Lent supporting you through regular reflections and guided meditation practices?

Click here for more details and registration>>

Rainer Maria Rilke and the Archetype of the Artist ~ A love note from your online abbess

Dearest monks and artists,

If you haven’t yet made a commitment for the season of Lent, I invite you to join our online retreat experience on the practice of lectio divina. The retreat begins Wednesday and includes live webinars and a community forum. More details at this link>>

Our next session in our Illuminating the Way series is tomorrow and will be on the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the archetype of the artist. Registration details below.

Rilke is, perhaps, an unlikely candidate at first glance to join our circle of monks and mystics. He was undeniably opposed to the institutional church, rejected dogma and what he considered to be second-hand experience of God. On his first visit to a Russian monastery in his twenties, however, he fell in love with the spirituality there, the atmosphere, the reverence, which led him to write one of his first books of poetry, The Book of Hours, inspired by monastic tradition.

His poems in that book reflect the longings of an imagined monk. But even beyond that initial book, Rilke’s poems continued to be suffused with a desire to grow in intimacy with the sacred dimension of the world. He also took his life as poet and artist very seriously, and especially through some of his 11,000 letters, as well as several books of poems, we have a window into great wisdom for the creative life. He believed in art as a “cosmic, creative, transforming force” and invited us to consider it no less than this.

In Letters to a Young Poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes:

"There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple 'I must,' then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.” 

Rilke is addressing this to a writer, defining what is needed for full commitment to the creative life. You could substitute the word "write" with create, paint, dance, garden, cook, love well, or any other creative endeavor and then read the words again and see what they stir. Strong words, with perhaps a hint of the Warrior at play setting those boundaries. You might pause here for a moment and reflect with Rilke. Must you create? Do you experience a compelling need to express your deep desires? If so, how do you build your life in such a way as to support this?

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE

Dancing monk icon © Marcy Hall (prints available in her Etsy shop)

Monk in the World Guest Post: Joan DiStefano

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission for the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Joan DiStefano's reflection on lessons learned at Abbey of Gethsemani.

June 6, 2006 the Abbey of Gethsemani, Trappist, Kentucky.

Thomas Merton’s grave. I remember that first early afternoon when I was told by a monk to walk near the first tree and find him between two fox’s.

Huh?

The tree was easy, it was up a tiny incline of grass, but the two fox’s turned out to be the Abbott Fox buried to the  left, Merton in the middle, and a monk Fox on the right. I gazed down at the marker cross with someone’s peace symbol hanging on a chain, and decided to add my Tau. I wanted to return someday and would hope to see it again.  Little did I know that day, just how soon I would be back!

Visiting Merton’s grave only happened because his Abbey is located an hour from where I had attended a stained glass conference in Louisville.  Fifty years ago it was his book, No Man Is an Island, which I purchased while on a lunch break working at Macy’s, my first job post high school. Though  I couldn’t comprehend most of it, it secretly hid within me for decades.

So,now, to be starting a five day silent retreat here at his monastery, was the beginning of awakened spiritual hunger.

I was eager to try the monk’s day which began with Vigil at 3:15am, and ended at 7:30pm Compline, with the Abbot’s blessing and the chant: Have a restful night and a peaceful death.

My second day there, I was shocked to find during my walk along the retreatant's garden path, something sparkling that caught my attention. It was shards, fragments and remnants of stained glass windows leaning against the window panes of an old building beyond the exterior stone walls. I asked a monk about it. By Vespers, another monk found me and took me to the  Abbot, who requested me to come to the Abbey as much as possible and do what I could to reassemble the original stained glass from Germany that was part of the church until the early 60’s.

My conversion into “real life” versus “false sense of what life is” began that day.

By November, I was back. I relished the silence, the work, the prayers, the time of personal reflection. This was a radical departure from how the bulk of my adult life had been spent. Riding Harleys around the US, working in topless night clubs, making art, teaching in a prison, raising my son, and being part of violent, volatile relationships. The Abbey was an atmosphere alien to me, because here was a haven of peace..

Early Christmas week,  I needed some supplies, so br. Simeon, took me to the large chain store located twelve miles away. Upon entering the hectic, noisy store, several televisions each playing violent movies, including violent cartoons, were situated at the entrance. Passing by and walking toward the Happy Holidays department, were Christmas ornaments, decorations, wrapping paper, and ribbons thrown all over the floor with people both stepping over and on the merchandise. I asked a clerk where a Nativity scene might be. She didn’t know what I was talking about. “What is that?” she asked me. Then answered that there might be some crosses I could buy.

I turned to br. Simeon, and said, "this here is supposed to be real life?  And the monastery is not? This place looks like Hell to me!  This is the manmade life filled with garbage, misplaced aspirations, anxiety, shallow distractions, willfulness and violence."

His reply when we returned to the car was this: "You on the outside are the saints. You have the sick child, the unemployed husband, the leaking roof on your house, the eviction notice, the broken down car, and yet you keep your faith, you rise above the trials and persevere. You come here for spiritual rest instead of taking a nice vacation. We monks don’t have your challenges but we have our inner battles day to day. Calm is easy on the surface."

Ten  years from that Christmas have passed. Changes arrived  with the new Abbot, and changes had rooted within me.  Though I start my day later than 3am, what the Abbey rhythm changed within me is my lifestyle, praying, thinking and compassion . . . from turbulence to contemplation.

My studio is situated on the edge of the Bay overlooking San Francisco. Influenced by the welcoming generosity of the monks, led to my creating a peaceful spot with a table and chairs, plants and books for folks who walk by and need to sit and rest.

In one of my large picture windows, I have installed a stained glass window from the Abbey, of Mary, baby Jesus, and St. Bernard.  Each day folks knock on my door to look at it, and then want to talk about where God is or has not been in their life.

I hand whoever would like one, Thomas Merton’s prayer for knowing God’s Will.

My studio workday is spent in silence, with breaks for spiritual reading. The music in the background is usually Gregorian chants.

I thank dear Thomas Merton who unknowingly beckoned me to a new way of being.  Each day is a new beginning, a daily conversion.

It is possible to be “a monk in the world."

Joan DiStefano from Oakland CA, had the childhood desire to be an actress. Her high school drama teacher told her to go and get real adventures and then later in life become a character actress. With that advice, she proceeded to have experiences both good and not so good! One day, while stranded on the side of the freeway with a broken down motorcycle, she prayed to God asking his will for her life. That surrender took her to where she is now. Not an actress, but a liturgical artist for varied faith traditions, and a professed Secular Franciscan.

The Sacred Art of Reading the World – Lectio Divina as a Life Practice ~ A love note from your online abbess

Dearest monks and artists,

Lent will be upon us very soon and we are very excited to be offering an online retreat on lectio divina, the sacred art of reading the world which includes seven live sessions with me. While we first take up lectio to listen for the holy speaking through the scriptures, slowly we see the whole world as a sacred text.

When I first was introduced to the practice of lectio divina many years ago I felt an opening inside of me, as if I was being met right where I was. I discovered in this ancient way of praying a mirror of my own inner movements and longing for contemplative depth. I felt supported in a way of savoring life and listening deeply for the voice of Spirit moving through sacred texts and the world.

Lectio divina has four movements or stages to it which invite us into a place of savoring life and our experience and to discover God’s invitation to us in the midst of our experience. These four movements overflow into the whole of our lives.

Shimmering

The first movement is to read the sacred text and listen for a word that shimmers or catches my attention. I do this as I sit to pray each morning with my scripture reading, but also as I move through the day I find that there are moments that shimmer forth: a friend offers me an unexpected insight, I gaze upon my sweetly sleeping dog, I go for a long walk and find the gathering of crows cawing stirs something in my heart, my husband reaches for my hand and in that moment I feel so deeply loved. We all have these shimmering moments calling to us each day if we pay attention. Through lectio I cultivate the capacity to notice these and honor them as important, as sacred.

Savoring

The second movement is reflection which involves taking what shimmers into my heart and allowing it to unfold in my imagination. I savor the images, feelings, and memories which arise. Our lives are so rushed, that savoring can become a counter-cultural practice. In my morning prayer I make space to just notice what experience is rising up in me, and in my daily life I become attentive to those experiences which stir strong feelings or trigger an unexpected memory. Perhaps I am driving in my car and a song comes on the radio which carries me back in time to a moment from my past and I am filled with emotion. Lectio cultivates my ability to make space to allow the fullness of my experience. Rather than holding back my tears and judging them, I let them flow and in the process discover a moment of healing and grace.

Summoning

The third movement is about responding to our prayer and listening for God’s invitation in this moment. In my morning practice I sit and wait as the word that shimmers and the images, feelings, and memories which have unfolded in my prayer begin to yield a sense of God’s longing for my life. In my daily life I notice when my heart is touched by an encounter and I sense that God is summoning me into something new through this very moment. I can’t know what that new thing is just yet, it is often more of an intuition. Sometimes it happens after I teach a class and I have expressed something in a new way and I surprise myself by my own words or a student asks a probing question which breaks open the subject in ways I hadn’t considered. These are moments of divine invitation and lectio helps me to respond.

Stilling

The fourth movement is about going more deeply into a space of rest and stillness. In my morning prayer I simply sit in silence for several minutes, basking in the experience of being rather than doing and feeling full of gratitude for this gift. As I move through my day I am touched by the moments of stillness I find in the midst of life’s busyness. I go for a walk and come upon a radiant dahlia blooming and I am stopped in my tracks, breathing in for just a moment the beauty of dahlias. I am sitting with someone who is sharing her deepest struggles and both of our eyes become wet with tears and we simply pause for a few moments to rest into the silence which holds us both. I pause for Sabbath moments.

Lectio and Life

After more than twenty years of practicing lectio divina, I see the world differently. Each moment and thing has the potential to become a vehicle for revelation. Lectio divina has changed my life. Instead of being something I practice for twenty minutes each morning it has become a way I experience and move through the world. Instead of feeling bound to a particular structure and sequence of steps, I discover that each movement of lectio has its own gift and rhythm and I open my heart to when it will be revealed in my day. The practice of a spiritual discipline is about more than the minutes we spend doing it, but how it overflows into the whole of life.

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE

Photo © Christine Valters Paintner

Monk in the World Guest Post: Jean Wise

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission for the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Jean Wise's reflection entitled Living With the Tension of Routines and Adventures.

Paradox. Deep within me live two longings that I used to believe contradicted each other. I assumed you thrived more within the blessings of routines or within the advantages of adventures. One or another, not both, worked better for me, so I thought.

“You can’t enjoy both,” lying voices whispered to my heart. 

I am learning now to hold the predictable and the impulsive times equally, knowing they both nourish my spirit. I enjoy and am grateful for routine and adventure. Both enrich my journey and bring gifts to my heart. And I acknowledge often while I am in the midst of one, I crave the other.

Routines offer me a sense of control, freedom and a way to manage my time. To be honest, sometimes I just don’t want to make more decisions and should think through everything. I let the pattern of the day guide me. This type of freedom relaxes and releases built-up anxiety.

Routines help me intentionally create time with God in a regular uninterrupted fashion. I know when I hem my days – the beginning and the ending – in prayer and time with him – I feels his presence more throughout the day.

Routines bring a framework into my life. I love the sense of accomplishment by checking off items from my daily to-do list and tackling bigger projects, like writing books, that God has placed in my heart. A regular schedule provides time, space, and support to getting things done. A predictable system keeps me on track.

Routines help me stay with positive self-care habits.  I keep up my fitness challenges and eat less unhealthy snacks when at home and in the flow of the customary cycles. The practices of healthy habits thrive with routines.

I know what to expect when living in routines. The comfort of knowing the order of my work day, the sequence of our regular worship service, and the familiarity of rhythms of each day. I am content and joyful in the cyclical beat of life.

But then I get restless with too much routine.  Boredom leads to laziness and discontent and become too constrictive in its predictability of the same old grind. I hunger for adventure.

When traveling, learning something new, and stepping out of my comfort zone, my normal daily point of view widens. I pay attention to the details in life and in nature. I am awake. I am alive.

Adventure produces creativity within me. Routine helps me get things done and out of the way, allowing for time and space for new ideas to emerge. Creativity blossoms in the wild and innovative garden of the open territory of the unknown, strange, and new. I discover, explore, and flourish in the sweeping ranges of spontaneity and novel undertakings.

Stepping out of routine I find refreshing renewal. I leave the old patterns behind and let go of the known framework is like sipping on cool, restoring water. I dive in and shower in enlivening waterfalls of inspiration.

I observe more when on an adventure. My senses heighten. My mouth swirls with new tastes.  I sleep in different beds and stretch myself in different time zones. My mind bursts with history lessons and exploring places I’ve never been before. I am grounded with others from the past and dreamers of the future. I am part of a whole – the network of humans across centuries.

My spirit flourishes with both routine and adventure. I no longer struggle with the idea that I should choose one or another, I willingly accept the gifts they both bring into my life. I appreciate and live mindfully no matter if surrounded by the predictable or the spontaneous.

I love coming home from a vacation and snuggle back into the warmth of routines. My spirit takes a risk to leave my safe harbor to learn, stretch, grow and live and returns home, rested and ready to work.

Routines keep me on automatic mode to stay healthy, attune to the important details of life. Adventures nourish my imagination and stirs my spirit that at times settles into sleepy hibernation. I soar with adventure; I sink deep roots in routine.

Routines keep me on a path that may evolve to a rut if I am not careful.  Adventures wake up my soul and stretches me when I venture off the path occasionally.

Living with the contradiction of both routine and adventure, I feel whole. My soul quickens with excitement, not anxiety, in the energy of oscillating between both modes. And I am thankful for the gifts both bring.

Jean Wise is writer, speaker, and retreat leader. She is spiritual director, RN, and a Deacon, living in northwest Ohio. Her passion is to help others deepen their walk with God. She writes twice a week on her blog at: www.healthyspirituality.org and is the author of several books including Spiritual Retreats, a Guide to Slowing Down to be with God.

Becoming Body-Words of Love ~ A love note from your online abbess

Listen, whatever it is you try

to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you

like the dreams of your body,

its spirit

longing to fly while the dead-weight bones

toss their dark mane and hurry

back into the fields of glittering fire

where everything,

even the great whale,

throbs with song. —Mary Oliver, from "Humpbacks"

Dearest monks and artists,

Several years ago, before moving to Ireland, I completed a training to teach yoga. I began the program because I had practiced yoga for many years and longed to dive more deeply into it. I expected to fall in love with my own body even more in the process; what I didn't expect was how much I would fall in love with other people's bodies as well. As I walked around the studio and students are in their various poses I see the incredible variety in body types, shapes, sizes, flexibility, and bone structure. My training involves hands-on adjustments, which are less about "fixing" a pose and more about either offering a deeper experience of it or providing a sense of loving presence with a student through a shoulder rub or simply laying my hands on their back.

When students are in savasana, or corpse pose, which is always the final pose in any physical yoga practice, I go around and place my hands gently on their heads one at a time and I offer silent blessings for them and their bodies. I don't know most of their stories so I ask for healing in whatever is keeping them from being fully alive and fully present to their beautiful physical selves.

When I was twenty-one, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a degenerative auto-immune illness. The only other person in my life I knew with this disease was my mother and it had ravaged her body. I was devastated. I felt deeply betrayed by my body. In an auto-immune illness the immune system begins to attack its own tissue. Six years later I had to take a year off from work and go on disability because of the pain and inflammation. That was the year I first walked into a yoga class and was one of the paths I took back to loving my body.

Sexuality isn't just about our sexual relationships with another person, but about our capacity to engage in intimacy with the world through our physicality. Theologian James Nelson writes:

Our human sexuality is a language as we are both called and given permission to become body-words of love. Indeed our sexuality—in its fullest and richest sense—is both the physiological and psychological grounding of our capacity to love.

Body-words of love. That phrase takes my breath away. How do I allow my very body to become the fullest expression of love and tenderness in the world? This body with its aches and its loveliness. This body that has experienced searing pain. This body that will one day become dust, but also sprang from my mother in a burst of desire for life.

In all the attention we give to the perfection of the body in our culture, we undermine our capacity to become body-words of love. We forget that we are called to both the joy and the sorrow woven together. No surgery can excise our mortality. No procedure can remind us of our sheer giftedness, gift given to each other. The effect of our obsessions with our bodies is that we grow in our distrust of our physical selves.

We are not offered ways to be with our bodies in the full range of their glorious beings—the joys, delights, pain, and disappointments. We are not encouraged to trust our bodies in this culture, for they forever need improving. We can buy an endless variety of products and programs geared solely at responding to the message that our bodies are somehow not good enough, not beautiful enough, or not wise enough on their own.

I had a dream once where I went to the doctor and discovered I was pregnant. But the doctor told me that I wasn't nourishing myself enough to sustain the pregnancy. I awoke thinking of Mary Oliver's words above: "nothing will ever dazzle you / like the dreams of your body." I am dazzled by this invitation from my body to be even more nourishing and loving than I already am. I take the invitation very seriously. I began immediately to ponder ways I could offer my body the deepest kind of nourishment in tangible ways.

The dreams of my body are about breathing so deeply that every cell expands and shimmers; they are about resting into a generous multiplicity of sabbath moments each day, of swimming through warm and buoyant water, walking through a thick grove of trees, feeling wind across my skin, experiencing the fire of my passions kindling within. My body is dreaming of space for all of these and for the yet unknown dreams, the ones that pulse deep within me and with time and space will emerge in their own beauty and power. Our bodies long to be in intimacy with the world around us.

Valentine's Day is that highly commercialized holiday of chocolates, flowers, and Hallmark cards. In many ways it has become another way to mark how inadequate we feel about ourselves if we are without a partner, or about our relationships and how to express love if we are partnered.

February 14th does offer us another invitation, however—to consider the call to become "body-words of love."

I understand this invitation as beginning with myself and then allowing that felt love of my own body to radiate out into the world and offer loving presence to others.

How many of us treat our bodies with the lavish attention they deserve? What does it mean to treat our bodies like the temples they really are? What is the damage caused by the endless messages we receive each day about our bodies' inadequacies? What if for one day we could put to rest the damaging stories we tell ourselves about how our bodies don't measure up? What if we could bring our full presence to our bodies' needs instead of endlessly ignoring them?

St. Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), an orthodox monk who later became an Archbishop, upheld the doctrine that the human body played an important part in prayer rooted in the Incarnation; that is, the whole person, united in body and soul, was created in the image of God, and Christ, by taking a human body at the Incarnation, has "made the flesh an inexhaustible source of sanctification."

I am in love with this image: What if our bodies truly were an "inexhaustible source of sanctification" and we treated them as such? To sanctify is to bless or make holy, to set apart for sacred use. To consider our bodies a blessing is another way to become "body-words of love."

This Valentine's write a love letter to your body, offering both gratitude and forgiveness. Instead of using words, offer it in food, in warmth, in touch.

The body loves slowness. Instead of rushing from place to place until you crash into bed exhausted, allow holy pauses to breathe deeply, take a long bath as an act of offering, lavish yourself with oil. Prepare a nourishing meal for just yourself. Eat chocolate, but make sure it is the deepest, darkest, richest kind you can find and eat it with as much attention as you can summon. Make an appointment for a massage and receive some loving touch imagining that you are being anointed for blessing others. The senses are the gateway into the body's wisdom.

My newest book The Wisdom of the Body offers ways to offer this kind of lavish love to our embodied selves.

We also have some wonderful online programs coming up. Join us for our Lenten online retreat on the ancient practice of lectio divina, our Sacred Seasons retreat in community and a yearlong journey through the Celtic Wheel of the Year, or our Dreaming of the Sea small group spiritual direction program working through the mythical story of the Selkie.

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE

Photo © Christine Valters Paintner

Monk in the World Guest Post: Nancy L. Agneberg

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission for the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Nancy L. Agneberg's reflection on entitled Winter Spirituality.

I love winter.

I prefer winter to summer and spring.

When it is fall, I think fall is my favorite season, but then winter comes, and I know, for sure, winter is my favorite season.

Oh, I am willing to join in with the usual February and March conversations about winter being far too long and will spring ever arrive? As I listen to the whining about the cold, the snow, the dark, I politely nod my head in agreement. 

“I know, I know,” I say. “Isn't it awful?”

Once at a retreat the ice breaker activity centered on the question, “What's your favorite season?” The floor was divided into four quadrants labeled winter, spring, summer, fall. One by one each participant stood in her preferred season, giving her reason for choosing that season.

“I love the new growth, the beauty of spring flowers.”

“I love the freedom of summer, being able to be outside all the time. 

“I love the fall colors and wearing a sweater again.”

While I wasn't quite alone in the winter square, there weren't many of us, but we seemed to share the same sensibility.

“I love the feeling of being tucked in.”

“I love the peace and quiet when it snows.”

“Winter feels more spacious to me, more time to be with myself.”

Yes, that is it.

I welcome the coming of winter. Cave Time. Sabbath Time. A time not only to hibernate and rest, but a time to grow and deepen. 

On dark winter mornings when I go upstairs to my garret office, I stand, just for a moment, in the glow of my desk lamp's circle of light. That one light reminds to me to stay quiet, to listen to the inner promptings. In this focused circle of light I meditate and pray. I write. I read. I sit in silence. Here there is shelter for deep conversations and connection. Here I am reminded of my own inner light, even in moments of darkness. 

With a shawl wrapped around my shoulders I delight in doing the next thing, often feeling productive and creative. Or I choose to do nothing. Either way is a choice of contentment. Winter's uncluttered, unlittered nature moves me patiently from day to day without surprise of color or blossom or smell of dirt. Instead I stop, I rest. I stretch slowly, deliberately, quietly, careful not to wake any other bears in my cave.

I love the bones of trees in the winter; the skeletons. The ability to see how a tree is made and how it reaches; its spread and girth and width. The bones, the basics, the dark against the grey sky. The shadows cast, the possibilities, the past, present, and the imagined future.

It I were a painter, winter trees would be my subject. From a distance I would paint a colony of trees, a naked community, like being at a nude beach. Up close I would paint every line and blemish and wrinkle and wart and age spot and acne scar. The signs of a life lived. They've earned their wrinkles, just as I have earned mine.

They have lived through many seasons, many years, known draught and deluge, the coldness of abandonment and neglect and the pressing heat of passion too close for comfort. I love the starkness, the lack of pretense, the startling beauty of trees in winter. The way they seem to say, “Look at me. This is who I am.” 

A winter tree looks either older than its years or younger than time and that is just the way I feel. I am a winter tree.

There is a certain clarity that comes with winter, a clarity I would like to discover in my own winter season of life. One can see forever, or at least it seems that way. And yet, we can't quite see how or when exactly it will end. Winter asks us to let go of the need to know for sure. Winter reminds us to rest in the surprise of the present moment, but at the same time assures us that it will melt into another time. On its own time. Not ours. 

I value the harvest of fall, the energy of spring, the secure lingering of summer, but even more I covet the lairs of winter, the hidden passages, the unlit corridors, the streamlined views, the bareness of the horizon. The action coldly stopped, frozen without conscious time. I've done what I can all those other days and months and now it is time to leave what is undone and to unwind the sweater till once more it is yarn. It is sheep. It is essence.

Ah, this is it. Winter is essence and offers the time to recall, to re-call my own essence.

Nancy L. Agneberg, a writer and spiritual director, finds joy in helping others deepen their relationship to the Divine, the Sacred, the Holy, especially as one ages. Currently, Nancy is writing a spiritual memoir, which explores the spiritual invitations of living in different homes. She posts frequently on her blog, Clearing the Space.