Tag: spiritual direction

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Upcoming Offerings with The Stillness Collective

It’s the new year and my partners and I at the Stillness Collective are celebrating with new online and in-person offerings! (We just had the honor of leading a guided Examen with Wellspring Church in Long Island City, as part of their Experience Rhythms Retreat for the new year.) Keep reading to see what interests you!

Discernment as a Way of Life: A Practical and Spiritual Approach to Decision Making

When life asks you to choose one road over another, do you find yourself plagued with doubt, fear, and immobility? At the Stillness Collective, we believe developing discernment is vital to a strong, healthy Christian experience. We have created a course that will guide each participant in practical and spiritual approaches to decision making in partnership with God.

Our next 4-week course meets on Monday nights and includes one individual spiritual direction session. When we offered this course last spring, we received extremely positive feedback as well as suggestions for improvement. We’ve taken this feedback and revamped the course to make it shorter and more accessible while keeping all the wisdom and practical helps that made it so invaluable to our first recipients. This class is fully online, so you can take it from anywhere!

Dates: February 13, 20. 27, March 6
Time: 7-9 pm
Location: Online (Zoom)

Would you like to learn more about our discernment course? Join us for an interest meeting on February 2nd at 12 noon.  Click here to register.  

The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises: A Ten-Week Journey

The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola, are a time-tested pathway to deep spiritual formation, growing you in the love of God, understanding of your calling, and discernment of God’s presence and invitations in your life. I will be leading a 10-week Ignatian Exercises small group starting on March 9th, via Zoom. The group will meet weekly for a half hour to an hour, depending on group size.

Are you interested in learning more about the Spiritual Exercises? We have an info session on February 6th at 7pm. Click here to register. 

Or, if you would like to contact me directly about the Exercises, either in the 10-week or 9-month form please email me at cmyers.spiritualdirection@gmail.com.

Lenten Retreat: Remain in my Love

As you journey through Lent this year, what does it mean to you to believe in and remain in God’s love, to fully surrender to his unconditional love and embrace? 

As you follow God’s invitation to receive his transformational love, what hidden parts of you might he heal and release to the light? 

Join The Stillness Collective for a Lenten retreat featuring guided reflections on Scripture, live music, and time for meditating on the freely given grace of God’s love. 

When:  March 4th, 9:30am – 1pm 
Where: Coram Deo, Midtown Manhattan
Register: by February 19th with code EARLYBIRD for 10% off

As always, I would be honored to journey with you as your spiritual director. For a free exploratory conversation, please get in touch at cmyers.spiritualdirection@gmail.com.

In faith, hope, and love –

Carrie

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Meditations for Thanksgiving

Exciting news! My partners and I at Soul Space are releasing not one, but FIVE guided Thanksgiving meditations for the month of November. One, like always, will be free. If you’re an email subscriber already, you’ll have already received it in your inbox. If you’re not a subscriber yet, you can become one at no cost simply by signing up on our website. The other four will be released a week at a time to those who sign up for our Patreon community.

This month, all of our releases are themed for Thanksgiving. Our free release, which you’ll receive as a link in your inbox as soon as you subscribe, is on Colossians 3:12-17. This recording will be yours to listen to whenever you choose on our website, or to download into your personal device.

If you get our emails already or head to our website, you’ll notice some changes. First, we’ve renamed and rebranded ourselves as The Stillness Collective. Our mission continues to be to help people create space for restoration, rest, and stillness in their busy lives. Our meditations are one part of that mission. Spiritual direction is another part. The last, new piece – coming soon! – will be retreats.

You can still find a free sample meditation – Romans 8:32-39 – on our website under the heading “Guided Meditations,” but our new monthly release will now be available only to those who are on our mailing list, rather than posted online. Again, our mailing list can be joined at no cost and you’ll receive a link to a new meditation every month, which you can listen to online or download.

The other four meditations are based on ancient Christian forms of contemplative prayer – that means they are tried and true and experienced by Christians all over the world and for many centuries. Every month, as a Patreon supporter of The Stillness Collective, you’ll receive one guided Ignatian prayer, one Lectio Divina, one Examen, and one breath prayer. These will also be available online and to download. (To read more about these four forms of prayer, visit this link. )

We would love for you to join our community of supporters by signing up for Patreon. We know there are lots of options for meditation and prayer out there, but we believe that our guided prayers have a few features that make them special. First, they are planned and written by three experienced Christian spiritual directors who are immersed in contemplative practices and also trained in helping people connect with God and get in touch with their deep longings and desires. Second, you have the option to pair the meditations with monthly spiritual direction (and soon, retreats!), which will support you as you seek to encounter God in your everyday experience. Third, our meditations are set to beautiful ambient music composed specifically to help people enter into contemplation. And finally, you will be able to download our meditations and keep them forever, even if you choose to end your subscription.

I hope you’ll take a look at our offerings! Listen to our free meditation on Romans, sign up for our one free monthly meditation, and visit our Patreon page. Through December, we’re offering a discount on our four-meditation monthly package, so now is a great time to join our community. Thanks so much for being a part of our journey!

Follow me on Instagram @ravishedbylight

The Stillness Collective Logo created by Tony Colon, Starlight Studio NYC

The Stillness Collective Website Design by Joy Lee, Fonder Studio

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New Contemplative Reflections on Psalm 16 and Philippians 4:6-9

My partners and I at Soul Space released a new reflection yesterday! Featuring Psalm 16, it invites us to make God the center of our hope and trust, to follow him in his way of life and joy, and to see the abundant ways he is already present in our lives. 

Last month, we also released a reflection on Philippians 4:6-8, a contemplation to help us cope with anxieties and fear by following the Apostle Paul’s RX for peace: gratitude, prayer, and focusing our thoughts on all that is good and comes from God. 

In the meantime, we are also planning more reflections for the fall! Starting in November, we are hoping to release a series of 5 meditations per month. One will continue to be free, and the other four will be behind a paywall of some sort – we’re still working out the details. Our first series will be in November, on Gratitude (of course!), and in December, an Advent series entitled, “Opening Ourselves Up . . . to God’s Holy Disturbance.” Each month will include four different types of prayer based on the month’s theme: an Ignatian imaginative prayer, a Daily Examen, a breath prayer, and a Lectio Divina. 

We’ve gotten some really great feedback on what we’ve done so far, so thank you to all who have listened, responded, and shared with your friends and family! All of us have had our lives and relationships with God changed by contemplative practices (and by spiritual direction) and are passionate about bringing them to as many people as possible. – Carrie

Find me on Instagram @ravishedbylight

Find SoulSpace on Instagram @soulspacecenter

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A Meditation for Advent

The people who walk in darkness will see a great light.
For those who live in a land of deep darkness, a light will shine. 
Isaiah 9:2     

This year, these words from Isaiah seem more resonant than ever. 2020 has been – and continues to be – in some ways darker than imaginable. With the first vaccines being administered, a glimmer of light is beginning to make its way through, but we almost certainly still have long months of fear, loss, and isolation to go.

At Christmas, we celebrate the arrival of Jesus, the Light of the World, the one who brings us hope and salvation, but we also acknowledge the loss and the brokenness he came to redeem. What has your experience of the darkness been this year? Where has God been present to you in suffering and mourning, and who has he been to you?

I invite you to listen to this meditation from the spiritual directors at Soul Space on Isaiah 9:2-7.  Let Scripture, music, and the Holy Spirit move you to reflect on the character of God and what it means to hope in God in the midst of a season of darkness and waiting.  

May you have a blessed Advent season and may the light of Christ fill your heart and sustain you with life, peace, and love.

Visit the Soul Space website here: soulspace.center.

Find me on Instagram @ravishedbylight and on @soulspacecenter

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Listening to the Voice of the Beloved: Praying the “Beloved Prayer”

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*In Henri Nouwen’s book, Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith, he reflects on Jesus’ baptism in Matthew 3:17, when the Spirit descends on him in the form of a dove,

And a voice from heaven said, “And a voice from heaven said, “This is my  dearly loved Son, who brings me great joy.”

 

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Nouwen writes that Jesus’ core identity came from this moment of knowing he had his father’s total, lavish acceptance and approval.  He goes on to say that the same is true for each of us. We are all God’s beloved children and our core identity – our center – comes from knowing we are God’s beloved and that he is well-pleased with us.

Building on this definition of each of as God’s beloved, Nouwen explains that

I have come to define prayer as listening . . . to the one who calls you the Beloved. 

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Is that you, God? (Also, the face I make when my teenagers are in charge of Spotify.)

In our noisy, pixelated, distracting world, it’s not easy to listen for the voice of the Beloved. It can be hard to distinguish God’s voice from all the others clamoring for our attention. And once we do listen, it can be just as hard – if not harder – to accept the truth of God’s love for us. That’s why regular, intentional prayer is crucial.

The discipline of prayer is to constantly go back to the truth of who we are [God’s beloved children] and claim it for ourselves . . . We must go back to our first love, back regularly to that of core identity.

According to Nouwen, our acceptance of our belovedness is the journey of our lives – “the origin and fulfillment of life in the Spirit.” Through prayer, we come to understand that God loves us, as we are, in both our “limitations and glory.” God’s voice calling us his beloved silences our self-condemnation and our self-rejection; listening to this voice coming from God – as well as through other people who show us love and acceptance – is what enables us to feel at home in the world.

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Living out the truth of our belovedness is another way of saying that Christ is being incarnated in us.  As a way to let this truth sink in, Nouwen recommends “The Beloved Prayer,” a three-part, thirty-minute prayer that can be done individually or as part of guided meditation in a group. “The Beloved Prayer” begins with quietly praying the phrase, ‘”Jesus, you are the Beloved,” then moving onto “Jesus, I am the Beloved,” and then concluding with “Jesus, we are all the Beloved.”

For those of us who don’t have thirty minutes in their day or who are building up to longer contemplative prayer sessions, praying one phrase at a time is an option. Follow these steps.

Praying “The Beloved Prayer”

  1. Find a quiet, still place. You may choose to set a timer if you have a limited amount of time for this practice. Begin to breathe slowly and deeply, relaxing your body and clearing your mind.
  2. Become aware of God’s presence with you. Ask the Holy Spirit to guide your prayer time.
  3. Choose the phrase that seems to most resonate with you at this moment: Jesus, you are the Beloved; Jesus, I am the Beloved; or Jesus, we are all the Beloved. The last phrase will lead you to meditate on a group of people – perhaps family or friends – the Body of Christ, or on all of God’s creation.
  4. Begin saying it to yourself, quietly aloud, or only in your head. You may choose to close your eyes. Try to gently merge the rhythm of the phrase with the rhythm of your breathing. Say it slowly, without hurry, until every other thought seems to fall away. As distractions inevitably show up, don’t worry about them. Simply acknowledge them and refocus the words of the prayer.
  5. If you have not set a timer, you may find your prayer time comes to its natural conclusion. You may feel rested and replete, or you may simply find a bodily demand can no longer be ignored. Come slowly back to your normal awareness and sit for a moment in silence. If you feel led to do so, end with a brief prayer of thanksgiving and a request for continued awareness of God’s presence throughout your day.

You may find that one phrase claims your attention for days or weeks, or you may feel drawn to a different phrase each day. Either way, trust the Holy Spirit to affirm your belovedness and bring you back to that place of core identity.

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* Part of my Spiritual Practice of the Month series of posts.**

** Yes, I know. It is practically April! I’m a “9” with a strong “1” wing on the Enneagram and the legalistic part of my soul is simultaneously embarrassed and proud that I’ve snuck in this post just under the wire.

Find me on Instagram at #ravishedbylight

Photo credits

Jesus’ baptism: https://www.ravenfoundation.org/whats-jesus-john-baptist/, original source unknown

Baby: http://www.discoverenglish.com.au/blog/exams/english-listening-resources-online

Dove image by Gerd Altmann, pixabay

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Take Your Meds For Jesus: How to Turn Any Daily Routine into a Prescription for Contentment (Spiritual Practice of the Month)

 

Surrender (Instagram.Blog)

This post is part of my ongoing series on monthly spiritual practices. I’ve adapted this practice from friend, fellow spiritual director, and glowing newlywed Kimberly Malone. Her original suggestion was to turn taking your daily medication into an opportunity to relinquish control to God.

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I’ve always aspired to be a shower and go kind of gal: Throw on some leggings and a comfy shirt, run a comb through my hair, slap on some sunscreen, and run out the door looking as glowy and pure as a Dove commercial. (Except clothed. Clothing is good.)

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The ideal. (*Not what I look like in the a.m. Or really ever.)

Unfortunately, God had other plans for me: a DEFCON-threat level assortment of allergies and skin issues including year-round eczema that ranges from mildly irritating to infuriatingly itchy. As a result, I have a twice-daily routine that includes oral medications, nasal spray, and smearing various over-the-counter and prescription creams on myself. By the end of all this, I’m about as greasy as an arctic seal dipped in Crisco, but my skin will still be dried out within a few hours.

Then, I have to add in the time it takes me to deal with contact lenses, the allergy eye drops, and the retainers I’ve worn since high school. At bedtime, I kick my routine up a notch by adding in the nightly warm compress that keeps my tear ducts from backing up and swelling my left eyelid up to the size of Jupiter. I didn’t know you could have both oily tears and dry eyes, but, hey, I’m a complicated woman.

 

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The Reality: Hot Mess Barbie (Except Asian. And itchy. And not a 5’11” Double D.)

Basically, by the time I get myself to bed in the evening, my husband is already having a cigar with his BFF the Sandman over scotch, a cheese platter, and a roaring fire.

(Does scotch go with cheese? I actually have no idea, since I think scotch is a gustatory experience somewhere between cough syrup and drinking gasoline.)

But back to the spiritual part of this whole mess. Although that’s a misleading statement, because the truth is there is no division between the spiritual part of our lives and all the rest of it. God is in all of it, from the mundane to the awe-inspiring.

That’s why I love my friend Kimberly’s suggestion to turn your medication routine into a time of giving up control to God. And it’s why I am adapting it into this month’s spiritual practice. Medication is not usually something I approach with surrender. It’s something I do grudgingly – because I have to. I dislike the time, the expense, and most of all, the daily reminder that my body is flawed and that I am literally physically uncomfortable in my own skin.

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But what if I approached taking and applying my meds not with tolerance at best, resentment at worst? What if I spent that time giving thanks for the ways that God is present to me each and every day, and especially in my body? What if as I took a pill or slathered on a cream, I offered up control of my body and my life to the Holy Spirit? If I was less focused on the way my body falls short and instead marveled at how I am fearfully and wonderfully made? How God used my hands and my feet over the course of the day? How he might choose to use them tomorrow? What if I used this Thanksgiving season to be thankful for all the ways God is present in my life, even those things I’d rather avoid? How might God turn my grumbling into gratitude? My discontent into contentment?

While I’m going to apply this practice of surrender and gratitude to taking my meds, it can work in any daily routine you have, anything you might normally do by rote: Drinking your morning coffee, getting dressed, brushing teeth, tying shoes, folding laundry. Once you’ve identified the routine you want to invite God into, here is a simple, basic three-step prayer to follow on a daily basis.

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As you practice this discipline of relinquishing control and giving thanks, may God bring you new awareness of his gifts and grace in your life. And may your Thanksgiving season be blessed!

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Come find me on Instagram @ravishedbylight.

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“To Steal, Kill, and Destroy”: Anxiety and Spiritual Direction

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I’m excited to share that I just had a short article published in Connections, the online publication of Spiritual Directors International, which is – quite self-explanatorily – an organized community for spiritual directors, also known as spiritual companions, or people who help other people become more aware of where and how God is present in their lives. (Hint: He’s everywhere – if we just learn to look!) SDI claims “more than 6,500 members in 42 countries around the world.”

In my article, “Facing Performance Anxiety in Spiritual Direction” (p. 7 of the newsletter), I describe a bit of what it’s like to be a new spiritual director and to feel my inner “demons” of insecurity and fear triggered by something that happens in a direction session as well as how my peer supervisors helped me get to the bottom of what was bothering me.

Here are two short snippets from the piece.Screenshot 2018-05-25 at 11.42.41 AM

 

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And here’s the header image the editor chose: Screenshot 2018-05-25 at 11.47.33 AM

That’s me, facing down my fears! Obviously on a day where I’m wearing fake eyelashes.

(You can find the complete article and the full edition of Connections here.)

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Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation (Book Review)

Day 12 of my 30-day writing challenge

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Many Christians undertake Bible reading, prayer, and other spiritual disciplines like fasting out of a desire to “work for Christ” or out of guilt for not doing more. Ultimately, these activities can drain and frustrate, drawing us further away from God, not closer. God invites us to something different: spiritual transformation and a deeper life with him. 

Ruth Haley Barton’s practical, introductory book, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging our Lives for Spiritual Transformation, is for all of us who experience an “invitation” to a deeper life: a longing and searching for connection with God. Barton helps us to recognize and follow this invitation to deepened relationship through the practice of spiritual disciplines. Prompted by the desires of our truest selves, we enter into the mystery of God’s transforming presence. 

Sacred Rhythms leads us through step-by-step guides to a number of spiritual disciplines, with the goal of making these disciplines part of our regular practice. These disciplines include approaches to Scripture reading and prayer, but because they are focused on being with God, rather than doing for God, they lead us towards a new way of life in relationship with God instead of more task-oriented work. As we embrace these disciplines, we will discover openness to the “everyday beauty and fullness that comes from paying attention and finding God in the midst of it all.”

In each subsequent chapter, Barton introduces a new practice or grouping of practices: solitude (especially important in an age of technology), Lectio Divina, prayer (silent, breath, intercessory, community, and life-as-prayer), cultivating bodily wholeness (caring for and listening to your body through exercise, prayer, and meditation), the examen of conscience, Sabbath rest, and creating a personal rule of life. These practices do not necessarily have to be learned in the order the book gives, but they each build on and support each other. Together they all lead up to the logical end of creating the rule of life: a set of prayerfully determined, individualized commitments to “values, practices and relationships” that determine what one does daily, weekly, monthly, yearly in order to sustain openness to God.

The book is a valuable resource for any individual seeking a deepened journey with God, whether new to the spiritual disciplines, needing a reminder, or hoping to create a rule of life. It can also be used by a small group, a spiritual director and directee, or a couple.

Appendix A is a guide for taking a group through the book, with prompts for the leader and study questions for everyone. Barton emphasizes that anyone who wants to go through this book as a small community must commit to the journey together – to the prayer and practices outlined, as well to creating a safe environment of support for all, where God (not any person or persons within the group) is understood to be in charge of each person’s spiritual transformation. Appendix B offers a short list of disciplines that may help an individual counter particular sins and negative patterns; for example, the practice of Sabbath keeping as a way of transforming patterns of over-busyness.

Although Barton confesses at one point that it is only in solitude with God that she does not feel lonely, she also establishes the importance of entering into spiritual transformation within the context of Christian community and spiritual friendship. She names Christian community as a discipline in itself, and a vital element of the formation process. It was first modeled by Jesus and the disciples – both by the larger group of 12, and by the select few that he choose to be with him in more vulnerable moments.

Barton is a gentle and encouraging guide, modeling the kind of unhurried listening to self and to God that she is advocating. Without making the book about herself, she helps the reader identify with the physical and spiritual exhaustion that led her to seek transformation. Her simple confession at the end that she has slipped out of her own sacred rhythms while finishing this book also demonstrates the generous acceptance of self that comes from a fuller understanding of God’s love for each of us, and his patience for wherever we may be on our journeys.  

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Awakening the Creative Spirit: Bringing the Arts to Spiritual Direction (Book Review)

Awakening the Creative Spirit: Bringing the Arts to Spiritual Direction

by Christine Valters Paintner and Betsy Beckman

The book’s premise is that “a primary way that we can experience God’s mystery is through the process of our own creative expression,” that the “arts are the language of the soul” and that “God has been inviting us into this sacred dialogue since the earliest awakenings of humanity.” Art is individual, but also collective, rooted in human memory (the authors are fans of Jungian dreamwork) as well as in the primal rhythms and movements of communication between mother and child. The authors link art with right-brain activity, and claim that art making can bring balance between the two hemispheres of the brain, with their different kinds of wisdom. They conclude that we all have divine creativity within us, meaning we are all in essence artists, and write from this same perspective of openness towards many religions and spiritual experiences.

The authors describe the expressive arts as similar to prayer in that the focus is the process, not the outcome. The art-making process is a kind of pilgrimage – a journey that risks the unknown as a way to encounter the sacred. It is also a way to create a tabernacle for the inner self – to create space and welcome for one of the many voices inside you clamoring for attention to emerge, and be heard.

In the context of spiritual direction, the spiritual director becomes an “artist for the soul,” and the artistic process is an invitation to listen to the self without judgment, and to be fully present in the moment.  The book includes guidelines for the direction experience – confidentiality, mindfulness, honoring limits, risk-taking, honoring wisdom, and expressing needs to the group – as well as initial guidelines for engaging the arts that are too many to list here, but would be useful for any practitioner.

The book is broken into three sections: Spiritual Direction and the Arts, Explorations of Different Art Modalities, and Working in Different Life Contexts. It’s a nice mix of background and underlying philosophy, examples of exercises, snippets of artistic products (poems, Psalms, photographs of artwork, descriptions of dances), and responses to exercises from a variety of people, both directors and workshop participants. Each exercise is keyed with a symbol so the reader can easily tell what modality is used, whether storytelling, imagination, movement, visual art, music, or poetry.

Paintner and Beckman have created a useful resource / toolkit for those interested in using art in spiritual direction, either with individual directees or with groups. I do think that experiential learning in addition to reading the book would be helpful, and perhaps necessary, for most people who wanted to use these modalities, especially if (like me in several of these areas) you lack expertise or comfort in the arts.