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January 7 - January 29, 2023
Our era of fragmentation has paved the way for an era of anxiety.
Read sacred texts
Create sabbaths
Find opportunities for what one might call prayer—mindful quiet forms of reflecting on love, gratitude, and contrition.
Eat with others.
Seek out ...
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Religious traditions that were supposed to serve us have often failed. Worse, many have actively excluded us. So we need to find a new way forward.
Communities that we studied offered people opportunities for personal and social transformation, offered a chance to be creative and clarify their purpose, and provided structures of accountability and community connection.
Disconnection sours the sweet things in life and makes any hardship nearly unbearable.
While our culture often lifts up the importance of self-care, we’re desperately in need of community care.
Without clarity on what to do when we meet these milestones, we let them pass by, unable to live through them wholeheartedly.
Research data also suggests that each new generation is less religious than the last.
Attendance at congregations is down, but our hunger for community and meaning remains. Formal affiliation is declining, but millions are downloading meditation apps and attending weekend retreats.
Moreover, they find spiritual lessons and joys in completely “nonreligious” places like yoga classes, Cleo Wade and Rupi Kaur poetry, and accompaniment groups
We see religious institutions as being driven by hypocrisy and greed, judgmentalism and sexual abuse, anti-scientific ignorance and homophobia.
Deep connection isn’t just about relationships with other people. It’s about feeling the fullness of being alive. It’s about being enveloped in multiple layers of belonging within, between, and around us. This book is an invitation to deepen your rituals of connection across four levels: Connecting with yourself Connecting with the people around you Connecting with the natural world Connecting with the transcendent.*
lives. The interlocking systems of oppression depend on our feeling alone and ashamed.
three things in any practice or ritual: intention, attention, and repetition.
I’ve come to believe that just about anything can become a spiritual practice—gardening, painting, singing, snuggling, sitting.
We just need to be clear about our intention (what are we inviting into this moment?), bring it our attention (coming back to being present in this moment), and make space for repetition (coming back to this practice time and again). In this way, rituals make the invisible connections that make life meaningful, visible.
The shimmering flashes of life’s fullness get lost behind the stack of unanswered email and the relentless drudgery of the everyday.
when we can’t fully describe what we’re feeling, we tend to discount the feeling itself as illegitimate or unworthy of our—or other’s—attention.
any place and any time can be sacred.
reframe your established habits through a lens of multilayered, deeper connection.
Give intention to the evening cup of tea. Find community to discuss books that move and inspire you. Recite a little poem in the shower every morning.
nothing that can get between you and life’s deepest connection. Nothing, no matter how powerful, can ever take that away. Not depression or anxiety, not assault or addiction, not grief or jealousy, not poverty or wealth. Each of us is entirely worthy and beloved. Even you. Especially you.
how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.
Who are we without the role that has given us meaning?
“The classic soul is more ourselves than we are, a loving and well-loved companion, loyal to us uniquely, entrusted to us, to whom we entrust ourselves.
a text is sacred when a community says that the text is sacred.
we are fundamentally okay, that our experience is valid even when we can’t make total sense of it.
that if she read a sacred text her goal was not to finish reading it, but instead to read only as much as would stir her mind to prayer.
What’s literally happening in the narrative? Where are we in the story? What allegorical images, stories, songs, or metaphors show up for you? What experiences have you had in your own life that come to mind? What action are you being called to take?
Guigo would tell us that the first stage is as if we’re putting a bite of food into our mouths, and that in this second stage we have been chewing it, breaking it down into many smaller pieces.
at this stage we’re delighting in a bundle of ideas—next we need it to resonate more deeply, to seek the spiritual meaning.
Having a consistent havruta study partner means not only that you are always challenged with new and exciting questions, but also that you build a bank of references together and that the truth to each wondering lies somewhere between you, always living in the back-and-forth of your questions and suggested answers.
There will be days when your practice feels empty. Pointless, even. Vanessa explains that in these moments we have to trust our former selves, who in times of clarity and conviction decided that this practice was the right thing to do.
stories can be a mirror in which we reflect on our lives.
This story has always carried special meaning for me because it reminds me that each one of our hearts hardens if we don’t keep prying it open to the hurting world.
It can be easier to check our bank balance than our conscience.
nothing is harder to do these days than doing nothing.
I made Friday nights a sacred time of digitally disconnecting from the outside world to make space for connecting with myself.
Sabbath isn’t a time to catch up on tasks. Nor is it simply a time of rest to prepare for a busy week. It is a time to revel in the beauty and delight of simply being. The sabbath “is not for the purpose of recovering one’s lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor,” Heschel writes. “The sabbath is a day for the sake of life. . . . The sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of sabbath.”
It is a time to revel in the beauty and delight of simply being.
the Age of the Screen, there is little room for amateur creativity.
our creativity is not meant for performance—but for enjoyment,
Hobbies don’t have to become hustles! Making room for play is about learning what things awaken joy for you, and making time for those special things.
“Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms,” writes theologian Walter Brueggemann.
By keeping a sabbath, we can remember that all is well and that we are part of the invisible kinship of all things. That
Sabbath helps us connect with ourselves by reminding us that we are profoundly good enough—just as we are.
