Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

The Spiritual Break – The Gathering

 

Dear Friends,

A few years ago I was walking in the woods in New Hampshire with my friend Tom. We had been talking for hours — the way you can with old friends you haven’t seen in a long time. As we entered a stand of trees above the stream on his property, he stopped, breathed in slowly, and said:

“Mike, this is my sanctuary … This is my chapel.”

I’ve thought about that moment many times since. Not because it was unusual — but because it was true. And because most of us have a place like that, or a moment like that, and we rarely stop long enough to name it.

That’s what Sacred Noticing is, at its heart. The practice of stopping long enough to name what is already here.

I’ve been writing about this practice for a few years now. And for a while, I’ve been sitting with a quiet thought: that it might be better practiced together than alone. So I’m opening a monthly gathering. Nothing elaborate. One hour on the first Tuesday of each month, online via Zoom. A small group of people who want to sit with the practice together — with some silence, a short reflection, and honest conversation about what the practice is doing in ordinary life.

The first gathering is in July. We’ll begin with The Sanctuary — which is where everything else begins. Where Tom stopped in the woods. Where the practice finds its ground. I’ve written a reflection on that theme which I’ll share in full on the site. A few lines from it, to give you a feel for where we’ll begin:

We all have these places in our lives. Somewhere where the encounter with the marvel of God’s creation snuggles us tightly. Where we are, once again, in the womb that gave us life.

Perhaps you can visit yours again soon.

Read the full reflection — The Sanctuary

If you’d like to join us in July, just reply to this email with the word Gathering. I’ll send you the Zoom link — it’s permanent, so you’ll only ever need to ask once. There’s no registration form, no course to sign up for, no commitment beyond showing up when it’s right for you. The door is open on the first Tuesday. Come if you can.

The Sacred Noticing Gathering — July

And going forward the First Tuesday of each month

Time: [6:30pm] Pacific · [9:30pm] Eastern · [TIME] GMT

One hour · Online via Zoom · Free

 

Theme for July: The Sanctuary

 

To join: reply to this email with the word Gathering.

I will send the Zoom link by return.

One more thing. Some of you have been asking about the book. The Practice of Sacred Noticing is now available — on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and as a signed copy directly from me if you’d prefer that. It’s the written companion to what we’ll be doing together each month. I’m glad it’s finally in the world.

Get the Book

All formats

Order a personally signed copy, or find Sacred Noticing at your preferred bookseller.

Where is your sanctuary right now?

Perhaps it’s closer than you think.

I’ll see you on the first Tuesday.

— Michael

spiritualbreak.com

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 5 Comments

The Childhood of a Thought

A thought arrived one morning, as thoughts do, carrying the particular confidence of a thing that has been here before.

It came wearing familiar clothing — a worry I recognize, a narrative I have followed many times down the same corridor to the same small room. It arrived not as a stranger but as a regular guest who knows where the kettle is kept, who doesn’t bother knocking anymore.

I noticed this. Not immediately — that would be too tidy. For a few moments I followed it where it wanted to go, the way you follow someone down a hallway before you realize you were not intending to go in that direction.

And then something shifted. Not through discipline, not through the effort of attention redirected. More like a small adjustment in altitude. A step back and up — just slightly — to somewhere I could see the thought from the outside, the way you see weather from a hillside rather than from inside it.

That small shift is what I want to share with you today.

Most of us live in the valley most of the time. It is not a criticism — it is just the default geography of an unexamined life.

In the valley, thoughts become indistinguishable from the one thinking them. You are anxious and you are the anxiety. You are grieving and you are the grief. You are the irritated version of yourself in the car behind the slow driver, and you are entirely that irritation, with no remainder.

The valley is not a bad place. It is an honest place. Everything feels real there because it is real — the thought you are inside is a genuine thought, the feeling it carries is a genuine feeling. The valley doesn’t lie to you about the temperature.

What the valley withholds is the view.

From the hillside, you can still see the weather in the valley. You are not pretending it isn’t there. You are not trying to achieve some elevated spiritual state, above the ordinary mess of things. You are simply — and this simplicity is the whole of it — at a vantage point from which the thought can be seen as a thought, rather than lived as the whole of reality.

The hillside is not distant. It is available whenever you remember to look for it. The practice of Sacred Noticing — the Pause, the small breath before response — is the path up the hillside. It is not a long path. Sometimes it is one step.

Here is what the contemplative tradition rarely tells us: from the hillside, the thought is not frightening.

It is, in fact, rather like a child playing hide and seek.

My granddaughter, who has hidden behind the curtain — the curtain that does not reach the floor, the feet clearly visible beneath it — is entirely certain she cannot be seen. This certainty is not a failure of intelligence. It is the logic of hiding. She has entered the game fully, has committed to the position, and is experiencing with complete sincerity the thrill of concealment.

From where I am standing, I can see her completely. I know exactly where she is. I am in no danger of being surprised.

And what you feel — if you are paying attention to what you actually feel rather than what you think you should feel — is not strategic advantage. It is affection. She is delightful precisely in her certainty of invisibility. You are not trying to defeat her. You are not trying to expose her as a fraud. You can simply see her, and see her from love.

 

I can see you.

 

This is the interior movement that changes everything. Not a shout. Not an accusation. A quiet recognition, offered without alarm.

The thought that has been arriving with such confident familiarity — the one that knows where the kettle is, that doesn’t knock anymore — when seen from the hillside, does something interesting. It shifts. Repackages. Tries a slightly different approach, a new disguise, a different door. Because the pattern that has been running on the groove of long habit is not accustomed to being seen. It has relied on invisibility. The groove is its infrastructure.

And you, from the hillside, can watch this with something very close to tenderness. Because the hiding child is not your enemy. This is a pattern that learned, somewhere, that this particular hiding place was safe. It has childhoods of its own.

Evagrius Ponticus was a fourth-century desert father whose insight into the inner life remains startling sixteen centuries later. He called these recurring visitors logismoi — not quite the word “thoughts” in our modern sense, but thoughts with momentum, thoughts that have learned to travel in particular patterns, thoughts that arrive not randomly but along the groove worn by all their previous arrivals.

Evagrius was not describing pathology. He was describing the ordinary interior landscape of any person who pays attention. The thoughts of anxiety, of restlessness, of accumulated grievance — these are not signs that something has gone wrong. They are signs that something happened, and the groove it wore is still there, still operative, still offering its well-worn path to the mind that arrives unguarded.

What the desert fathers knew — and what the hiding child helps us feel rather than merely understand — is that the groove is not the self. The thought is not the thinker. The weather is not the valley.

You did not choose the first arrival of the thought that arrives most persistently now. You were not always in a position to choose what happened when it arrived. The groove was worn before you had the vocabulary for it, in rooms you may no longer be able to name.

But you are here now. On the hillside. With a view you did not always have.

Let’s be honest about what this practice can and cannot do.

You cannot, through the act of noticing a thought from the hillside, simply choose to be free of it. The groove does not disappear because you have seen it. The pattern that has been running for years does not dissolve in the recognition.

What changes is smaller — and more important.

The moment between the thought’s arrival and your following it — that is where freedom actually lives. Not in heroic moral choice, not in the achievement of a spiritual state, not in the successful suppression of an unwanted interior visitor. In the gap. In the brief moment where the hillside view is available and the groove has not yet run.

Evagrius was precise about this. The thought arriving is not a moral event. The following is where choice enters. And the choice, in the beginning, can be nothing more dramatic than: I can see you.

That seeing — held for even five seconds before the pattern runs — is the practice. It does not require the suppression of the thought or the prior resolution of whatever the thought carries. It requires only the momentary altitude of the hillside view.

And here is what becomes true over time, through practice rather than through discipline: the groove grows shallower. Not because you have fought it successfully. Because the following — the automatic, unexamined continuation — has been interrupted enough times that the groove’s infrastructure begins, slowly, to loosen.

You are not choosing to be free. You are practicing the single small act of freedom that is actually available to you, in the actual moment you find yourself in.

Which, it turns out, is enough.

 

The Thought That Arrived

It came in wearing yesterday’s clothes,

certain of its welcome,

certain I wouldn’t notice

what it had been wearing last time.

I noticed.

Not in triumph.

The way you notice a child

who believes the curtain

reaches the floor.

I can see you,

I said, without saying anything.

And watched it

try a different angle.

Repackage.

Arrive as something else.

Quieter.

More itself.

The thought passed.

The way weather passes

when nothing holds it.

And the room received

what the thought

would have prevented.

 

The thoughts you have been hosting are not you.

They are the patterns formed by what you did with thoughts that came before them. They have childhoods too — shaped by receptions you barely remember making, in rooms you may not even be able to name.

You did not choose the first arrival. You were not always in a position to choose what happened next.

But you are here now.

On the hillside.

With a view you did not always have.

And what moves through the gap the hillside creates is not yours to manufacture.

It is yours to receive.

 

Which has always been the better invitation.

 

Which thought has been arriving longest — and what would change if you could watch it from the hillside just once before it becomes the weather?

 

— Michael

spiritualbreak.com

 

“I want to mention quietly, as you are my closest readers, that The Practice of Sacred Noticing book is now available at Barnes and Noble and Amazon, in both print and digital formats. You’ll find it here. I’ll have signed copies ready to send in about ten days if you’d like to wait for one of those instead. Either way, I’m glad it’s finally in the world.”

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 2 Comments

The Fruits of the Gifts

The Fruits of the Gifts A reflection from spiritualbreak.com

I want to ask you something before we begin.

When was the last time someone was genuinely patient with you — not performing patience, not managing their reaction with visible effort, but simply patient, in a way that felt effortless and real — and you thought to yourself: that is a Gift of the Holy Spirit?

I am guessing the answer is not recently. Or possibly ever.

We tend to notice the fruit. We rarely trace it back to its root.

Here is something I have been sitting with.

We were taught — and the teaching is not wrong, exactly, just incomplete — that the Gifts of the Holy Spirit are something we receive and then, over time, develop. Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety, Fear of the Lord. Given at Baptism, confirmed at Confirmation, and then — the unspoken implication — waiting to be earned through a life of sufficient virtue, or learned through years of sufficient formation.

Earn or learn. That is the frame most of us are carrying.

And it is the frame, I think, that quietly separates us from something we already have.

The Gifts are not waiting for our readiness. They were placed in us before we had any idea what to do with them. They did not arrive conditionally. They were not issued on a provisional basis pending our spiritual development. They are already present, already operative, already ours — in the full, unconditional sense of a gift from a God who does not give the way we give, with an eye on whether the recipient has done enough to deserve it.

This is not a small distinction.

If the Gifts are something we earn, then the question I am always asking is: have I done enough yet? Am I sufficiently holy, sufficiently formed, sufficiently advanced on the spiritual path to expect Wisdom or Counsel to move through me today, in this ordinary moment, with this person I am finding difficult?

The answer, most days, is no. And so we wait. And the Gifts sit.

If the Gifts are something we learn, the question becomes: do I understand them well enough? Have I been through enough formation, read enough of the right books, practiced enough of the right disciplines to deploy them with any confidence?

Again, most days, the answer is some version of not quite. And so we defer. And the Gifts sit.

But if the Gifts are simply gift — given, present, already ours — then neither of these questions is the right one. The question is not whether we are worthy or whether we are ready. The question is only whether we are available.

I want to be honest about why this is harder than it sounds.

When something is given to you — genuinely given, not earned or learned — there is a particular kind of disorientation that follows. We are not very good at receiving. We are much more comfortable with a transaction we understand: I put in this, I get out that. Gift, in the pure sense, disrupts the transaction. It arrives without an invoice. It cannot be repaid. And without the familiar structure of earning or learning, we are left with a question we do not quite know how to answer: what do I do now?

And into that gap — the gap between receiving a Gift we did not earn and knowing what to do with it — two things tend to move in.

The first is the mind, with its reasonable desire to be in charge. If I cannot earn this or learn this, then let me at least manage it. Let me deliberate about when to deploy patience and how much understanding to offer and whether this situation warrants Counsel or whether I am reading it wrong. The mind steps in with the best of intentions, and in doing so, becomes a kind of intermediary between the Gift and the moment it was given for. The ego, trying to be helpful, ends up being an obstacle.

The second is something subtler. A quiet resistance that does not quite believe the Gifts are a natural part of us. That they belong to another category of person — holier, more practiced, more naturally contemplative. That when something like Wisdom or Fortitude moves through us, it must have been an accident, or someone else’s prayer on our behalf, or a good day we happened to be having. We discount it. We explain it away. We keep it at arm’s length, because to claim it as ours would feel, somehow, presumptuous.

Both of these — the deliberating mind and the resisting heart — have the same effect. They separate us from what was given. Not maliciously. Not even consciously. Just by inserting something between us and the Gift that was never supposed to be there.

What I find most striking is that this separation is not a spiritual failure. It is almost a spiritual inevitability, given how we have been formed.

We have been taught to work for what we receive. We have been shaped by communities that, with genuine love and genuine theological seriousness, emphasized the importance of formation, practice, and growth. None of that is wrong. But somewhere in the transmission, the Gifts got quietly reclassified as achievements rather than endowments. And once that happened, we started approaching our own spiritual inheritance with the posture of a student rather than the posture of a recipient.

The student asks: am I getting this right?

The recipient asks: what is being given here, right now, that I might allow through?

The fruits — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control — are what emerge when the Gifts are unobstructed. They are not produced by trying. They are not the reward for getting the practice right. They are what naturally appears when something that was always present stops being blocked.

The question Sacred Noticing puts to me, every day, is a simple one.

What did I put between myself and the Gift today?

Was it the deliberating mind, calculating whether this was the right moment and whether I had enough spiritual capital to offer something real? Was it the quiet disbelief that Wisdom or Counsel could actually be mine to offer, in this unremarkable moment, to this ordinary person in front of me?

Or did I, even briefly, get out of the way?

I do not think this is a question that generates answers so much as attention. Which is perhaps where it wants to leave us.

The Gifts are present.

They have always been present.

They are waiting not for our readiness but for our willingness to stop standing between them and the moment they were given for.

What would it mean to simply let them through?

 

Add ten seconds to each moment, And my response would be better, kinder, warmer, more forgiving, than my first.

But can I ever be as loving as He is to me?

— Michael Cunningham OFS

Michael J. Cunningham, OFS, D.Min. is the author of The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint (Contemplative Company, 2026) and Executive Director of San Damiano Franciscan Retreat Center in Danville, California. Weekly reflections at spiritualbreak.com.

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

The Barking Collar

 

The Barking Collar

My dog has a barking collar. Not the kind that shocks or hurts—just a collar that emits a gentle ringing sound when she barks too loud. It’s enough to let her know there’s cause and effect. She’s learned to use it. She’s actually happy when we put it on because it means she gets to go out in the yard, to roam and explore and be free.

I often think I need a Sacred Noticing collar.

When I Forgot to Listen

Several months ago, I had what I can only describe as a misfortune—talking to a lot of people who had already made up their minds on an issue and didn’t want to discuss it. They just wanted to walk by and be done with it. Political conversations, mostly. The kind where you can feel the door closing before you’ve even finished your sentence.

And I barked at them.

Not literally, of course. But I might as well have. I felt the tightness in my chest, the heat rising in my face, the defensive thoughts forming: Why won’t they listen? Why are they so closed-minded? Don’t they see how important this is?

I didn’t pause. I didn’t take three breaths. I didn’t ask myself what this moment needed from me.

Instead, I pushed. I made my points more forcefully. I tried to open their closed minds with the sheer force of my rightness. I quoted sources they wouldn’t trust. I used logic they weren’t interested in hearing. I barked louder, hoping volume would succeed where gentleness had failed.

And predictably, spectacularly, it accomplished nothing except creating more distance.

Later, sitting with my journal, I asked myself: Was it really their minds that were closed? Or was it their hearts? And if their hearts were closed, what made me think my barking would open them?

More uncomfortably: What about my own heart? Had I been truly open to them, or was I just frustrated that they weren’t open to me?

The collar had been ringing the whole time. My jaw was tight. My shoulders were hunched. My breath was shallow. All the physiological signs were there, the gentle warning that I was about to create damage I’d regret. But I’d ignored every signal, pushed through, responded quickly because quick responses feel decisive, productive, right.

Except they’re often just barking. And barking rarely opens hearts.

When I Remembered to Pause

Years earlier, my daughter came home from school upset about something. The kind of upset that announces itself with a slammed door and heavy footsteps up the stairs.

An earlier version of me would have launched into immediate parent mode. Either “Let me fix this” or “When I was your age…” or perhaps the always-ineffective “It’s not that bad.”

But this time—maybe because the weekend’s failures were still stinging, maybe because I’d been writing about Sacred Noticing that morning—I caught myself.

She came into the kitchen, grabbed a snack with more force than necessary, and said something about a teacher being unfair.

I felt my fixing instinct activate. The urge to advise, to solve, to make it better with my parental wisdom. The impulse was so strong, so automatic.

But I paused.

Three breaths. Feet on the ground. What does this moment need from me?

And in that gap—that brief, sacred gap between stimulus and response—I noticed something I would have missed entirely if I’d barked: her face. She wasn’t looking for solutions. Her body language wasn’t asking for advice. She was hurt, yes, but underneath that, she was scared. Something about this teacher situation had touched a deeper wound.

From that place of noticing, from three breaths of pause, what emerged was completely different than what my initial reactivity wanted to say.

I simply said: “That sounds really frustrating.”

Then I shut up.

She stood there, eating her snack, and I could see her deciding whether to say more. The silence felt long. Uncomfortable. Every parent-instinct in me wanted to fill it with wisdom, guidance, questions.

But I stayed in the pause. Stayed present to her, not to my need to fix her.

And then she started talking. Really talking. Not just about the teacher, but about feeling like she didn’t fit in, about a friendship that was hurting her, about fears she’d been carrying for weeks that I’d had no idea existed.

We stood in that kitchen for over an hour. I mostly just listened. Occasionally asked a gentle question. Mostly just created space for her to find her own way through what she was feeling.

When she finally went upstairs to do homework, she hugged me and said, “Thanks, Dad. You really helped.”

I hadn’t done anything except not fill the space with myself.

Later, I heard her tell her brother on the phone: “Dad’s gotten really good at listening lately.”

The gift had been shared. Neither of us had noticed it happening in the moment.

The Collar I Actually Need

Here’s what I’m learning: The difference between the political conversations and the kitchen conversation wasn’t that I cared less about politics than I care about my daughter. If anything, the issues we were discussing felt enormously important—life-and-death important.

The difference was that with my daughter, I heard the collar ringing. I felt it activating—the tightness, the urge to jump in, the parental rescue instinct—and instead of ignoring it, I let it interrupt me.

With the political conversations, the collar was ringing just as loudly. But I was so convinced of the importance of being heard, of opening their closed minds, of winning the argument, that I ignored every signal my body was giving me.

Tight jaw. Shallow breath. Defensive thoughts forming. Rush of heat in my chest. These weren’t problems to push through—they were my body’s way of saying: You’re about to bark. This is your chance. You can choose differently.

What the Collar Teaches

My dog’s collar doesn’t punish her for barking. It just gives her information: This is cause and effect. Your barking creates consequences. You have another option.

My internal collar—when I’m paying attention to it—works the same way. It’s not about shame or failure or being a bad person. It’s information. It’s feedback. It’s the universe, or my body, or the Spirit, gently saying: You have another option here. You can pause. You can notice what’s actually happening instead of what you think should be happening. You can respond from wisdom instead of react from wound.

The practice of Sacred Noticing is learning to hear that gentle ringing and trust it. To let it interrupt me before I create damage I’ll regret. To believe that those three breaths will give me access to wisdom I can’t find when I’m in full bark mode.

The Medicine Within

Here’s what the political conversations and the kitchen conversation taught me: I don’t need an external collar. I already have one. My body is constantly giving me feedback, constantly offering me the chance to pause.

The tightness, the heat, the shallow breathing, the thoughts that come too fast and too sharp—these aren’t enemies. They’re not problems I should be strong enough to overcome. They’re the ringing. They’re the signal that says: This is your moment. Right here. You can bark, or you can notice, pause, and respond from somewhere deeper.

With my daughter, I heard it and chose the pause. Three breaths. That’s all it took. Three breaths to let my nervous system recalibrate, to let my amygdala calm down enough for my prefrontal cortex to come back online, to create enough space for wisdom to catch up with my racing reactivity.

With the political conversations, I heard it and ignored it. Pushed through. Barked louder. And created exactly the kind of closed-heartedness I was complaining about in others.

The Freedom of the Collar

My dog loves her collar because it gives her freedom. With it on, she can roam the whole yard, explore, play, be fully herself. Without it, we have to keep her on a short leash.

The collar doesn’t restrict her freedom. It makes freedom possible.

Sacred Noticing works the same way. Those three simple movements—Notice, Pause, Respond—they’re not restrictions on my authenticity or my passion about things that matter. They’re what make real freedom possible.

The freedom to respond from my best self instead of my most reactive self. The freedom to build relationships instead of constantly defending positions. The freedom to leave traces I’m proud of instead of traces I apologize for later.

The freedom to have the political conversations differently next time. Not abandoning what I believe, not pretending the issues don’t matter, but coming to them with an open heart instead of closed fists. Asking what their fear is instead of why they won’t see reason. Creating space for actual dialogue instead of just waiting for my turn to talk.

I don’t know if that will work. I don’t know if open hearts can penetrate closed minds. But I do know that barking doesn’t work. I tried that. Multiple times. This weekend proved it—again.

What I’m Still Learning

I’m getting better at hearing the collar with my daughter. With my family. In quieter moments when the stakes feel lower.

But in the moments when I’m most triggered—when the issues feel most urgent, when I’m most convinced of my rightness, when someone’s closed-mindedness feels most dangerous—that’s when I most need the pause, and that’s when I’m least likely to take it.

The practice isn’t about achieving perfect presence. It’s about the practiced return. Notice when you’ve lost yourself. Feel the collar ringing. Choose to pause, even mid-bark. Even after you’ve been barking for ten minutes. It’s never too late to stop, take three breaths, and say: “Wait. Let me try that again from a different place.”

Sometimes that looks like going back to those political conversations and saying: “I was pretty forceful the other day. I don’t think I was really listening to what matters to you. Can we talk about this differently?”

Sometimes it just looks like noticing faster next time. Barking for thirty seconds instead of ten minutes. Creating five seconds of pause instead of zero.

The collar is always there. The body is always giving feedback. The question is whether I’m willing to hear it, trust it, and let it interrupt me before the barking does its damage.

That’s the practice. That’s the collar I need. That’s the gift I’m still learning to receive.

Lord, help me hear the gentle ringing—in my body, in my breath, in the moment before I bark. Give me the wisdom to pause even when I’m convinced I’m right, especially when I’m convinced I’m right. Help me remember that opening hearts matters more than winning arguments, that creating space for others matters more than filling it with myself. Let me wear this practice like my dog wears her collar: not as restriction but as freedom, not as burden but as gift. Amen.

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 1 Comment

A Christmas Night Homily

Christmas Night Homily

 

This Christmas, I found myself at Mass at my granddaughter’s school in Washington, DC. Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart—a small chapel, an intimate gathering. The celebrations held that quality of closeness where every word matters, where presence itself becomes prayer.

 

The Nigerian priest who celebrated Mass that evening remains unnamed in my notes, though his homily has stayed with me like light through a window. His focus: coming into the light—a major theme of Advent and Christmastide. But Father made this achingly personal. His words centered not on the presence of God, but on our practiced art of turning away.

 

He spoke of his own darkness—a time when depression rendered him to long days of sadness in his room, the curtains drawn, the world shut out. Until a fellow priest entered, crossed the room, and threw back those curtains.

 

“Come out into the light,” the priest said.

 

In that moment, everything shifted. What followed in his homily was not performance but presence—authentic love pouring through words, gesture, the very movement of his hands. This was real.

 

He offered three invitations.

 

 

Come Into The Light

 

Do not remain in the darkness. This was his first call. Not a command but an invitation.

 

Remaining ignorant of God’s presence can be an accident or a choice. We all have free will. The expression of love in the world is how God’s presence is detected. Where love is absent, other wills make themselves known. Simple, really, when you see it this way.

 

How often do we choose the familiar shadows over the unfamiliar light? We know where the walls are in darkness. We’ve learned to navigate by feel. But the invitation remains: step into the doorway where morning breaks.

Regardless of our spiritual path, love draws us. Even those who feel unloved yearn for it. This is turning the light on. Coming out of the darkness. If you are darkening someone else’s room, you could do something to change that.

Release The Past

Being present is where we live our lives. And yet many define themselves by what others say they are, or what they say about themselves. The past becomes identity. Where we have been becomes who we are. This is a choice, not a permanent state of being.

Our past whispers of who we were. But the present moment—this breath, this choice, this opening—speaks of who we might become. Keeping God in the frame, discerning rather than deciding, exploring instead of retracting, discovering where the light is, or could be, and then following it—this makes all the difference.

Our past is not us. It’s where we have been, not where we are going, unless we choose to return there.

What would it mean to release the stories others have told about you?

What would it cost to release the stories you’ve told yourself?

 

 

Embrace Responsibility

Even as children, we learn the benefit of not being the “guilty one.” Quickly, we develop skills to blame others for where we are, or what we might become.

How much energy flows into changing others? How little remains for transforming ourselves?

Many spend their lives trying to change the behavior of those around them. Yet psychologists and spiritual directors tell us the same truth: the person who has the greatest opportunity to change us is ourselves.

Still, we spend so much time trying to become someone who is trying to mold us, and then blame them for how it turned out. I took the wrong advice. Made the wrong move. Went to the wrong school. Picked the wrong job.

The list goes on.

And while others certainly play a part in shaping our path, blaming them for what happens to us will not help in the long run. We are, to a certain extent, masters of our own destiny. To claim this mastery, we must become more vulnerable, willing to take responsibility for our decisions and their outcomes.

 

This is not burden but liberation. Not guilt but grace. The freedom to choose, again and again, the direction we will turn.

Coming Home

And so we return to that Christmas Mass, to curtains thrown back, to light flooding a darkened room.

The invitation is always the same:

 

Come into the light.

 

Not tomorrow.

Not when you’re ready.

Not when you’ve figured it all out.

 

Now.

 

This moment.

 

Here.