A practice for noticing & resetting

This week's big idea is ultimately about living with intention, and how stepping out of our routines can give us new insight into how.

Today I want to go from macro to micro. Before I share a practice that I think can be helpful for individuals and even communities, let me say one final word about why I think it's worth the effort.

For me, the most compelling invitation again and again in the spiritual life is to experience, and then more deeply claim, the freedom of the gospel.

Jesus came that we might have life and have it abundantly. If we believe that, we should believe that Christ by the Spirit seeks to set us free from whatever's blocking us from joyful, purposeful living.

I don't always love the discipline that any robust spirituality requires. And as I've gotten older, I've gotten ever more deeply in touch with the embarrassing reality that wanting to please or serve God is almost never the main reason why I do just about anything.

Sure, on really good days, experiencing God's love and then returning and sharing it is a lovely blueprint for life in the Spirit. It might even seem just this side of possible on the very best days.

The rest of the time, I settle for the selfish motivation of wanting a little freedom from the prisons I'm always building for myself. ("Unbind him and let him go!", Jesus says just one chapter in John later after the Abundant Life epiphany.)

If I didn't believe Jesus really wants that for me and for you—and is always within us diligently snipping at those chains—I think my faith would be in deep trouble.

But he does. And he is. And it's honestly enough, I think.

Anyway, sorry, apparently I can't bring myself to write a spiritual advice post without first telling you where I'm coming from. Perhaps that's for the best.

If you've made it this far, then here is the practice and some further thoughts for trying to protect our precious attention a little bit, and invite others to do the same.

The practice is ...

It's that maddeningly, humiliatingly simple.

During a particularly difficult and busy time in my professional life, my spiritual director issued the challenge: Throughout your day, whenever you realize you need it, just take one genuinely restorative breath.

One slow, deep breath. I think he may have even said "true breath." I don't know exactly what that means, but the phrase seems to guide me regardless.

To get off the hamster wheel and into a more centered space, just take a breath. "Just."

I'm saying it over and over again because it still kind of incenses me that it even sometimes works. I wanted a prescription for spiritual bootcamp. "Doctor, give me the Whole 30 of prayer, whatever that is! It's the only chance I've got!"

And he gives me "Ready, set, breathe." WFT?!

It's that simple, and thus also interchangeable with any number of similarly simple practices. A touchstone or rosary in your pocket. A personally meaningful mantra. The first few notes of an important song or playlist.

We already have what we need a lot of the time. It just kinda sucks to admit we rarely want to use it, or we let ourselves get too busy or too distracted to remember we do want to use it.

Plus practices are a process, so of course it's not necessarily going to "work" the first time or all the time. The practice becomes the way of accessing something like the sum total of the journey-so-far.

But that's the practice. One deep breath.

Now some notes, in decreasing order of importance:

(1) Of course, what I am monumentally not saying is our emotional, spiritual, or attentional problems can all be solved with this or any "one weird trick." Of course. There are occasions for therapy, for direction, for coaching, for meds, for you name it. We can't breathe or pray or [any other practice] our problems away, especially traps set and baited by entire industrial complexes. We need community, accountability, material necessities, the grace of the Divine, etc. to make it in this life and it's still sometimes not enough. Stipulated.

(2) As you probably already know, it's the choice to take the breath that does the most critical work here, at least in my view. The breath itself helps the body catch up with this miraculous little choice that our mind has, with God's help, come to in this moment.

(3) I've learned something important about trying to share this practice with the five year old who, God help her, is my most significant spiritual charge. Telling my daughter to take a deep breath is seldom a winning strategy. But she will almost always permit me to draw a little closer to her as I gently but clearly take deep breaths of my own. Often, she'll follow suit after a few cycles. (And it's shockingly effective if I'm already holding her, which I realize doesn't help if the people you're accompanying aren't related to you. But it's a sight to behold and a testament to the power of embodiment.)

(4) If you routinely lead liturgy, I recommend finding one or two moments during the service where you have the space for one deep breath. You might be surprised by the value of this practice as modeling for others. I wordlessly and only semi-consciously picked it up from a priest who meant a lot to me during a formative time.

(For what it's worth, my moments are when I return to my seat after preaching and after the post-communion "dishes" but before the post-communion prayer.)

I think a practice like this can work for teachers and facilitators too. For example, before calling the group back from breakouts is a fantastic time for one deep breath. Ditto for tense moments when you want to signal the importance of a reset for the group. To borrow a line from Aaron Sorkin, "No [leader] you admire is afraid of silence."

The tricky thing about one deep breath is that telling another individual to take one deep breath is often really counterproductive. (Hence all the rhetorical runaround in this post.)

My plea to my spiritual director was the opening he needed. If you want to share this practice with another individual, watch for such an opening or go with the show-not-tell strategy.

But it's a great practice to invite a group into and to ritualize into shared social rhythms. It is genuinely lovely to breathe intentionally with others in a gathered setting. It feels more natural the more you do it.

I'd love to hear about ways you've made this and other deceptively simple spiritual practices work. Hope to see you in the comments!