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The Inner Table is for those who sense that something deeper in them is asking to be lived. These essays explore how to make sense of your inner world, trust what is emerging, and live with greater coherence between inner truth and outer life.

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For the past ten or so years, I have been perpetually preparing some kind of communication. Most weeks there were multiple sermons, reflections, meetings, and leadership presentations to create and deliver. And somehow, thankfully, the ideas didn’t dry up.

Over time I found that there were three particular spaces that helped me to access this inner resource of ideas: walks, contemplative practice/prayer, and the shower! And they continue to be my main portals into a surprising source of creativity within me, that never seems to run dry.

Perhaps the greatest lesson I’ve taken from this, though, is the importance of margin. Each of those three spaces help me to turn off momentarily, or at least, to reduce the intensity of my calculating mind. It’s not so much about the break in activity, but the break in my usual mode of attention. I’ve come to appreciate the importance of regular moments when we turn down the incessant inner dialogue, the planning, the constant background monitoring of what needs our attention next, or the impulse to fill any moment of boredom.

I could make a fairly convincing case for how margin makes us more creative, clearer, and perhaps even better at our work. All of that is true, but there can also be a problem with that argument; margin can quickly become just another strategy for making us more productive.

These days, the thing I value the most about margin isn’t so much to do with creativity. It’s that it makes us more available to connect with deeper dimensions of ourselves, and to life around us. It enables to access a richness that we can’t reach through thinking and effort alone.

Despite what the prevailing narrative and wisdom around us might suggest, life is not just something we make happen. Much of life, and often its best parts, has to be received. Our deeper sense of self, our values, our vision for life, our capacity for love.

Receiving requires a different kind of posture. A humility that recognises the limits of what we can manufacture for ourselves, and enough trust to leave some space for life to surprise us. The recognition that some things only become perceptible when we stop trying so hard to produce them.

For me, margin is less about having breaks and more about becoming more receptive.

This reminds me of the Zen concept of beginner’s mind - the idea of meeting reality without assuming that we know what it wants to say. I also hear an echo of it in Jesus’ language of being poor in spirit: a posture that is more attentive and receptive rather than organised around self-sufficiency and control.

Over the years I have spent enormous amounts of time and energy pursuing insight, trying to understand myself and work out solutions to whatever challenges were before me. And some of that has undoubtedly been helpful. But I’ve also come to see how this constant effort can crowd out my deeper perception. It limits my attention to what I can project, plan, control, produce and solve. My attempt to manufacture life can actually get in the way of my deeper truth, wisdom and gifts emerging.

Margin opens something else in me. I notice more. I am more easily affected, expanded, and enriched by what is actually happening around me.

There are, of course many good reasons why we can struggle so much to allow and prioritise the margin that benefits our life in so many ways. Perhaps most of them have to do with some kind of discomfort or fear. We may find that constant activity and productivity regulates us. They make us feel useful, worthy, acceptable. They give us a sense of control and security, and at least momentarily, relieve some of our anxiety.

For some of us, we may resist margin because part of us is reluctant to discover what may surface when our activity stops. We might find that there is not a whole lot of substance to us other than what we produce. We might be confronted with a feeling of emptiness. Or perhaps we can sense the buried pain that is waiting for our attention.

Whatever the resistance, I find it useful not to judge it too quickly. It has usually been serving us in some way. If we can pay it some attention, it might give us a clue as to the kind of support we need in order to become more receptive to life.

As well as working with the resistance, there are also small, everyday ways we can develop this more attentive posture towards life. Small ways we can leave some moments in our day unfilled. This may feel uncomfortable, or even threatening at first, especially if we are used to keeping our attention occupied. Sometimes we discover that the discomfort passes more quickly than we anticipated. At other times something may surface that does need our attention and perhaps some support from others.

The key is to start small. When you are waiting in a line, try to leave that space unfilled rather than pulling out your phone. Just be present. Notice. Be receptive to the life within and around you. Remind yourself that doing nothing is not a waste of time, perhaps the opposite.

Sometimes, of course, it can be hard to stop. We just can’t seem to switch into a more receptive state. The mind seems to have a will of its own. And our nervous system doesn’t just settle because we have decided to prioritise some margin. This is where I have particularly found body-based practices like breathwork helpful. Connecting more intentionally with our body and breath can be a relatively easy and effective way of grounding us and helping us to become more receptive.

Especially when we are beginning, external margin can help us to create greater internal margin. But as this capacity develops, we may find that margin is something that we can also allow for in our active lives. We can even be busy and under pressure, but at the same time less internally crowded, and more receptive in the midst of our effort. It becomes possible to have a demanding day without completely losing contact with ourselves.

I think we can often feel this quality in people who have developed it. They bring a certain kind of spaciousness into a room, a lack of urgency or demand, which may be one of the greatest gifts that we can offer one another.

Perhaps the most significant fruit of regular margin in our life is that it changes, or at least clarifies, what we care about. When everything feels urgent and dependent on us, it becomes difficult to differentiate what truly matters from what is just demanding our attention. Margin helps reorder our attention. It reconnects us with what really matters to us so that we can care for the right things in the right way.

Without a doubt, we need initiative, effort, discipline, and the willingness to participate wholeheartedly in our lives. We also need regular moments when we stop trying to make everything happen, moments when we can be receptive to the life that wants to be lived in and through us.

The key is not to turn this into another trap, where margin becomes just another strategy for getting somewhere. The reality is that sometimes the space we create may not seem particularly fruitful or productive at all. Sometimes nothing obvious happens.

Maybe part of the invitation of faith is simply to leave some space without demanding that anything happen in it.

For paid subscribers, I have included a list of small invitations for creating more margin in everyday life. Perhaps choose two or three and simply pay attention to what it’s like for you to try them.

I hope you can be enriched by some extra margin over the coming week!

Dan.

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Some simple ways to create more margin.

Small everyday ways we can help ourselves to become more receptive to life…

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The Inner Table is for those who sense that something deeper in them is asking to be lived. These essays explore how to make sense of your inner world, trust what is emerging, and live with greater coherence between inner truth and outer life.

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I tend to hear the voice especially on days when I don’t get through the list of tasks that I set myself.

“You’re falling behind, you won’t succeed, you won’t be okay, you need to catch up, just get a little more done before you finish today”.

I refer to it as a voice, but I experience it more as a deeply entrenched pattern of thought, which seems to have a mind and will of its own.

I’ve been fortunate, if that’s the word, to have had a number of such voices during my lifetime. And after being in relationship with them for over forty years I’ve come to recognise that, even though in a strange way they’re trying to protect me, they are not particularly good at supporting my growth. Like many of our protective mechanisms, they can become inhibitors. I experience them as much more of a scared tyrant than an encourager or an enabler. And when fear is given too much authority, it tends to keep our lives small.

We all tend to carry at least one of these inner tyrants. Each has its own characteristic narrative, and is triggered by different circumstances. Over time the narrative builds and becomes so familiar that it feels true. It has a way of shaping our reality. I recognise it more clearly now, but for a large part of my life I didn’t experience voices like this simply as fear or self-criticism. I often experienced them as conscience, as the responsible and moral voice within me, and at times even the voice of God. That made them particularly difficult to question or challenge, which is why they can have such a significant influence over our choices and ultimately our lives.

Over the years I have become convinced that an important task of our inner work is learning to distinguish between the different voices moving within us beneath the surface of everyday life.

Not every challenging voice is a tyrant. Sometimes we might be conscious of a voice that is actually closer to our inner wisdom, what some may call conscience, helping us to acknowledge where we are out of alignment with our deeper values. This is a voice that supports us to live congruently with who we truly are, and who we desire to become. It helps us to recognise the times when we need to acknowledge our failures and seek repair. It may unsettle us, and it may even provoke a feeling of guilt, but it doesn’t need to shame and diminish us in order to get our attention. It can confront our behaviour without putting a question mark around our fundamental goodness or worthiness.

When this voice is present, something in us knows that our failures don’t define or disqualify us. In fact, they can often become openings for greater wisdom and a life that is more genuinely our own.

The voice of a tyrant, on the other hand, has a way of keeping us small. Its classic ploy is to remind us why we are not good, not worthy, not deserving of what we deeply desire. Or not ready to make the contribution we sense is ours to make. With someone constantly looking over our shoulder, it’s very difficult to take the risks that are necessary to become more fully ourselves. Instead, we tend to focus on trying to please the tyrant, or at least, keep it at bay. We try harder to meet whatever expectations we feel will make us acceptable, good or worthy. And that often involves denying legitimate parts of ourselves.

Of course, distinguishing between these voices is not always straightforward. Discernment requires us to pay attention not only to how a voice feels in the moment, but to what it tends to produce in us over time. Because our inner world is complex, good discernment also requires humility, time, and often the perspective of others.

For many of us, the inner tyrant is a burden that we have just learned to carry throughout life. We have become so familiar with the voice that most of the time we don’t even recognise it. It has just become part of our lens, shaping the way we see ourselves and the world we inhabit. And in doing so, it subtly and gradually takes the reins of our lives. Without realising it we gradually hand over more and more of our agency to these fearful voices.

As many of us have no doubt experienced, when a tyrant has free rein within us, it usually also has an impact on our immediate environment and relationships. Even when we make an effort to contain the tyrant to our inner world, inevitably it finds a way through our defences. The harshness we carry towards ourselves tends to show up especially in more familiar relational settings. We hold those around us to the same impossible standards we hold ourselves to. Perhaps we find ourselves getting irritated with a child, or with our dog, in a way that is disproportionate to their behaviour and level of maturity. Perhaps we find ourselves struggling to have compassion for others. None of this makes us bad. It simply makes sense once we understand where it comes from. How could we expect to offer others something we haven’t yet learned to give ourselves?

When I ask a client whether they would speak to others the same way they speak to themselves, they tend to respond with an emphatic “no!”. That would be a horrible thing to do, they say.

Then comes the question that really tends to strike a chord: “so why would you treat yourself in that way?”

Deep down there is usually a story. A seemingly legitimate reason. An environment or set of circumstances that brought the tyrant to life; sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly. Many of us allow the tyrant to speak so harshly because deep down we believe we deserve such treatment. We may carry an idea that we have seriously messed up, that we are bad, or at least undeserving of good things, even if we are not fully conscious of it.

It seems to me that one reason we are so willing to entertain the tyrant is that, in a strange way, it can play a redeeming kind of function in our psyche. As long as we are condemning ourselves, we can feel as though we are somewhat paying for whatever it is that we have judged ourselves for. Keeping ourselves small becomes our, albeit maladaptive, way of finding peace. A kind of self-salvation.

As a young man I made some choices that I came to regret. I carried a great deal of shame about them, which helped give birth to one of my familiar tyrants. It kept reminding me of my failures, using them as evidence of why I was disqualified from the life I desired. For a long time I accepted these ideas, believing that this was how I could atone for my mistakes or balance out the ledger, so to speak. An eye-for-an-eye kind of justice. Over time I began to recognise how this belief could lead me to unconsciously sabotage things when they were going well.

Many of us seem to have adopted some version of this self-salvation dynamic. For some it may be denying ourselves and playing life small; for others it may involve incessant giving, religious scrupulosity, perfectionism, overwork, or a resistance to receiving compliments, care or rewards. Rather than saving us, however, these patterns tend to reinforce the tyrant’s authority. Each time we try to satisfy this voice, we give it another reason to believe it should be in charge.

A key task of our inner work is not necessarily to get rid of these voices, but to stop allowing them to run our lives. This rarely happens all at once. It tends to begin small, in the moments when we notice the voice speaking and can pause before automatically believing or obeying it. That pause is where the distance begins.

From there, it can be helpful to say the thought out loud, or put it down on paper, and ask honestly whether it’s true, whether it’s the whole truth, or whether there might be more going on than the tyrant is willing to see. Part of this discernment is also becoming curious about where the voice may be coming from, what it has learned to fear, and what it may still be trying to protect us from. Having someone trained to support you with this work can be incredibly fruitful.

Each time we notice this voice without automatically believing or obeying it, a little more distance begins to open up. And that distance gives us room to notice other movements and voices within us that may have been there all along. Depending on our language or tradition, we might understand these movements as wisdom, the deeper self, Spirit, or the presence of God.

In my experience, this voice carries a distinctly different quality. It’s more spacious, understanding, patient and compassionate in a way that the tyrant is not. It can speak truth, and even offer a challenge, without needing to threaten us into responding. Sometimes I am a little shocked to notice an inner voice that is now actually reminding me of my goodness, and what I am already bringing to the world. Rather than trying to shape me into something more impressive, I often experience this voice as permission and freedom to trust my heart, to have a go, even when I won’t get it perfect.

Unlike the tyrant, this voice is not preoccupied with us needing to prove our worth or somehow make ourselves acceptable. In my experience, it draws us towards greater wholeness and more authentic self-expression. It seems to operate from a different starting place, where our worth is never in question. This means that our growth becomes less about making ourselves better and more acceptable, and more about becoming more fully ourselves.

The alternative to manufacturing our own salvation is learning, gradually, to receive what we have spent so much of our lives trying to earn. For me, that might mean deciding to finish my day even when there are tasks I haven’t yet gotten to. I might still notice the old voice urging me to keep going. The anxiety may still be there, but more often than not, I can now pause before automatically obeying that urge. I take a moment to notice what is speaking, where it may be coming from and what it is trying to protect, and to ask whether what it is telling me is actually true.

Sometimes reclaiming our lives begins there. Not by finally silencing the voice, but by no longer letting it have the final word.

As usual, I’d love to hear from you if you’ve resonated with something in this reflection.

Dan.

P.S. A theme like this reminds us of the importance of developing our capacity for good discernment. Back in February, I began a three-part series starting with ‘How to make better decisions’, which you might find helpful if you’d like to reflect more on how to make more informed decisions.

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The Inner Table is for those who sense that something deeper in them is asking to be lived. These essays explore how to make sense of your inner world, trust what is emerging, and live with greater coherence between inner truth and outer life.

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For a period of ten years I led small groups of young adult men over to the Philippines, on what I called an immersion experience. The purpose of the trip was most simply to engage and do some life with the people and communities who lived there; to immerse ourselves in a different culture, a different way of seeing the world. As a way of facilitating this, we would help to build some basic housing, doing the labouring ourselves while leaving the skilled work to the local tradies. But it was always about the relationships we were building, not the houses.

Leading that program year after year helped me to appreciate the power of meaning. It was so touching to see the hearts of these men, ranging from their late teens into their forties, softened and in some cases broken open by a sudden encounter with meaning. They realised how good it felt to give, to make a difference, to be part of something bigger than themselves. Some spoke about this immersion, which in many ways was physically draining and uncomfortable, as the best experience of their lives.

Watching that happen so consistently taught me something about the inherent power of meaning, and how it actually works. Most of us probably don’t spend a great deal of time consciously thinking about how to live a meaningful life. Yet the longing for meaning still sits somewhere in the background, influencing and shaping so much of what we do. Sometimes we don’t become conscious of it until we experience a real absence of meaning. Life may be going reasonably well on the surface, yet deep within we feel a kind of flatness, a lack of spark or sense of purpose. At other times, the opposite happens. We stumble into something deeply meaningful, and suddenly get a taste for the particular richness that meaning can bring.

The longing for meaning seems to be one of the defining features of being human. We carry a deep desire for our lives to matter, to belong, and to participate in something larger than ourselves.

The theme of happiness tends to get a lot more airtime than meaning, yet I suspect that some of what we are searching for when we pursue happiness is actually a deeper experience of meaning. Meaning does not necessarily make life easier or more pleasurable, but it can make even difficult experiences feel deeply worthwhile.

Meaning, in my experience, has an inherently spiritual quality. It reaches a depth in us that little else seems able to touch, and can forge a unique kind of inner foundation, which comes from being connected to a life or story larger than our own. I’ve come to experience meaning as a type of wealth, an abundance that wells up from within rather than depending entirely on what we accumulate outside ourselves.

Yet the benefits of inhabiting a meaningful life do not end with us. Meaning has a way of enlarging our heart. It gives us a reason to care beyond the boundaries of our own comfort and wellbeing, and provides some of the inner aliveness and fullness that makes this kind of large-heartedness more sustainable. Without those inner resources, generosity can easily become something we perform mainly from duty, obligation, or the need to feel that our own life matters. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with starting there, but our giving tends to become freer and more sustainable when it grows from a genuine connection with something we already experience as meaningful.

From that place, offering something of ourselves becomes a natural expression of something that we deeply care about, which is what I saw happen in those men in the Philippines: giving something physically demanding and uncomfortable, and somehow coming back fuller than when they left.

If meaning is going to become lived, it needs to become more than an intellectual idea. Similar to what I said about identity last week, we wont experience meaning by simply entertaining meaningful ideas. It is possible to carry a philosophical or religious framework that gives us a compelling account of what makes life meaningful and still experience little meaning in our actual lives. These ideas and beliefs can certainly help orient us, but meaning only really becomes part of our experience when we live into what they point towards, and especially when we embody what matters to us. Meaning surfaces in the meeting place between what matters within us and the life we actually participate in.

Today’s piece on meaning is a kind of culmination of my past three articles, where I have been circling themes of relationship, intimacy and identity; themes I consider central to a flourishing life. At the heart of all three articles has been the encouragement of a certain kind of participation in life. One that is increasingly honest, open, generous, and congruent with what we experience as alive and true within us.

A few weeks ago, I reflected on how the right relationships help us to become more fully ourselves. I then explored intimacy as the growing capacity to know and be known, to reach and be reached, and to allow ourselves to be more genuinely affected by another person and by life itself. Last week I turned to identity and how we often discover more of who we are by taking small risks to embody our deeper values, desires, and capacities.

What I want to propose today is that each of these movements is also a pathway into meaning. Becoming more honestly ourselves, participating more deeply in relationship, and giving expression to what matters within us do more than help us grow. They make life more meaningful.

Meaning is therefore not something reserved for the fortunate few. It is not just for those who have work that seems obviously purposeful, or for those with more time and resources to pursue meaningful experiences. Meaning is less about quantity and more about alignment. It usually grows as the way we actually live becomes more connected with what matters to us, with the people around us, and with a life larger than our own.

Meaning often deepens when we are willing to have a go: giving expression to our creativity, investing in relationships that ask something real of us, or finding some way to participate in a life bigger than our own needs and concerns. We all do this imperfectly, inconsistently, and often with mixed motives. But thankfully, meaning doesn’t require perfection, only a willingness to keep moving towards what genuinely matters.

That being said, participation alone is not enough. We have probably all had the experience of doing things we would normally consider deeply meaningful, such as parenting, volunteering, or supporting another person, and yet still feel disconnected from that meaning. This may be partly because meaning depends not only on what we are doing but on our capacity to be present and available enough to receive what the experience is offering. This is where intimacy becomes important.

As I discussed in a recent piece, intimacy is a quality that softens us towards life, and therefore enables us to receive the meaning that is already present within the life we are living. This deeper, more intimate connection with ourselves, with other people, and with the world around us, seems central to how meaning actually becomes something we experience rather than something we simply recognise from a distance.

One of the conditions I find particularly helpful for this kind of receptivity is spaciousness. Whenever I am busily moving from task to task, I notice that my attention narrows, my protective barriers naturally go up, and my level of connection with myself and the world around me tends to drop. I might get more done, perhaps even things that matter deeply to me, yet experience little of their meaning. When we don’t have sufficient space in our day, our experiences can blend into each other, and we can miss the rich and meaningful moments.

Inner and outer spaciousness requires us to be deliberate about margin. A few minutes of quiet at the beginning and end of the day, some space between tasks and appointments, and moments in our week when we allow ourselves to be unproductive all give us an opportunity to notice what has actually been happening within and around us. Margin creates space for life to be received more deeply. It also helps us to recognise some of the ways that we have become defended against the life and meaning that is trying to reach us.

So cultivating meaning asks both of these things from us: the courage to participate more fully in what matters, and the openness to et life reach us through that participation.

We step towards what we value. We offer what we have been given. We allow ourselves to know and be known. We participate in something larger than our immediate concerns, and, just as importantly, we remain open enough to be affected by it all.

This kind of participation will not always feel comfortable. Becoming more honest about what matters to us can alter relationships, priorities, and commitments, and sometimes ask us to live with a degree of uncertainty or misunderstanding. But meaning does not depend on comfort either.

Meaning, then, is less something we need to go out and find, and more something that becomes available as we participate more fully in what matters to us, and remain open enough for life to reach us in return.

If any of these recent reflections on intimacy, identity, or meaning have stirred something in you, I’d love to hear about it in the comments, or if you’re a subscriber, by hitting reply to this email.

Dan.

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The Inner Table is for those who sense that something deeper in them is asking to be lived. These essays explore how to make sense of your inner world, trust what is emerging, and live with greater coherence between inner truth and outer life.

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For a range of reasons, I grew up with the idea that I wasn’t very intelligent.

I struggled to concentrate and had little interest in reading or writing. I was a little awkward socially, terrified when it came to speaking publicly, and didn’t feel I had much to say that was of interest or benefit to others. I considered myself, to a degree, more practically minded, and my grades at school seemed to support that understanding of myself.

But as life unfolded and circumstances shifted, these ideas were gradually challenged.

In my early twenties, I became somewhat desperate to understand myself and how I could get more out of life, so I began reading. Over the years that followed, I realised that not only could I read, but that in fact, I am a reader. I came to appreciate that learning, understanding myself more deeply, and my own inner growth are important aspects of who I am. They are part of my identity.

Fast forward several years. I am living in a religious community, in the very early stages of formation for the priesthood, and I am given a topic to teach my fellow novices. I feel ill-equipped for it, but I do some research and develop a lesson plan. And in the process of delivering it, I begin to experience the surge of a certain kind of energy flowing through my words and body language. As I move into this unfamiliar territory, I start encountering a gift, and perhaps even a calling, that I had not previously recognised.

I realised in that moment, in front of that small audience, that not only can I communicate something effectively, but that in fact, I am a communicator. I have a capacity to meet people in a particular way through my presence, words and way of understanding the world.

What I came to appreciate through these experiences, and many times since, is that our identity is something we discover as we live into it. I did not act because I had finally understood exactly who I was. Taking concrete steps became part of how I came to understand myself more deeply.

Much of who we are only becomes known, developed and inhabited through our participation in life.

What do we mean by identity?

I’m reflecting today on something I have increasingly come to see as part of the core work of both spiritual practice and inner work: discovering and gradually learning to inhabit the particular miracle of who each of us is, in our own unique and imperfect ways.

In the world of spirituality and self-development there is often a great deal of focus on healing our inner wounds and pain, and that work is a good in itself. But it isn't the only fruit. Healing can also free us to discover more of who we are, and to give fuller expression to the life within us.

I have already been dancing around this theme in previous articles. I’ve reflected on the movement from borrowed authority, where our decisions are shaped largely by external norms and expectations, towards a growing trust in an authority that can emerge from deeper within us. As we learn the discernment to make that shift well, we inevitably begin drawing nearer to a fuller sense of ourselves.

But what exactly are we drawing nearer to?

We tend to understand identity through the different ways we can name and locate ourselves. We might speak about our age, gender, nationality or culture, our work and family roles, our religious or political affiliations, our personality traits and interests, or the groups to which we belong.

These things matter, and can all contribute towards our sense of self. They locate us socially, connect us with purpose, histories, and communities. But they can still leave much of us hidden.

I can tell you that I am a writer, a Christian, an Australian or an introvert without telling you very much about what I most deeply value, what draws my attention, what I long for, or what I am capable of bringing to the world.

This is what the experiences I shared above helped me begin to learn about myself. They were not simply discoveries of latent talents, but clues to what I value, what brings me alive, and something of the way I seem to be wired to serve and love the world.

A fuller understanding of identity includes what matters enough to us that we are prepared to arrange our lives around it, the desires and interests that keep returning, the qualities and capacities that seem to become more alive when they are expressed, and the particular ways we care for people, create, contribute and make meaning of our experience.

Identity is more than the answer we give when someone asks who we are. It is also the person who gradually becomes visible through the way we live.

There is a particular kind of inner grounding that begins to develop as this deeper sense of self takes shape. We become less dependent on circumstances or other people’s responses to reassure us. This means we can be misunderstood, criticised, make mistakes, or watch a familiar role come to an end without completely losing ourselves. This grounding also gives us a greater capacity to hold other people’s imperfections, without needing them to be different for our own sake. And the energy once spent meeting external expectations then becomes available for the life that is actually ours to live: we become clearer about what deserves our attention, more able to bring ourselves honestly into relationship, and more deeply connected with ourselves, others and the world around us. The benefits are many and varied, but in short, the more we settle into our sense of self, the more freely we’re able to love.

This is why I have come to see identity work as an important part of any personal development or spiritual practice.

It should also be said that whilst we can certainly arrive at a settled sense of self, the great traditions remind us that we never fully exhaust who we are. There are qualities, desires and capacities within us that we have not yet recognised, or perhaps have never had the conditions to develop. Our process of self-discovery and becoming is the journey of a lifetime. Knowing who we are is not about landing on a final definition of ourselves, but becoming more familiar with what is most deeply ours and learning to give it honest expression.

The identities we are given

We all begin life by borrowing an understanding of ourselves from the people and worlds around us. As children, we do not yet have the capacity to stand outside our environment and assess what it is telling us. We learn something about who we are through the faces looking back at us, through what is praised or discouraged, what creates belonging, what gets us noticed and what seems to keep us safe.

This is simply part of how a self begins to form. The difficulty is that this way of navigating identity can remain the status quo well into adulthood, long after we have developed the capacity to question it.

Many of us are not really shown another way, so we continue to derive a significant part of our sense of self from what is around us: the work we do, the kinds of people we associate with, the clothes we wear, the teams we follow, or the roles and expectations that have become familiar. None of these things are necessarily superficial or false. They may genuinely express something about who we are and where we belong. But they become limiting when they begin to substitute for our own lived encounter with ourselves.

And something similar can happen spiritually.

For many years, I had a cognitive understanding that I was made in the image and likeness of God. As my contemplative prayer developed, I even began to taste inwardly something of the truth of this identity.

But this concept was still quite vague. I had no real idea what being a “child of God” was supposed to look or feel like, other than the stories of saints which I rarely resonated with, and a certain moral and ethical code I was encouraged to follow. This identity I was invited to believe in was a beautiful idea that made sense to me, but it did not seem to make a whole lot of concrete difference to my life. It did not automatically make me more trusting, courageous or confident in my felt sense of self, or in what I had to bring to the world.

I had been taught to believe that I bore God’s image, but I had not really been taught how that truth might become embodied through this particular life. What did it mean for the divine to find expression through my gifts, desires, temperament, limits, interests and particular way of seeing? What might it mean to take those things seriously, rather than continually trying to become the kind of person I thought a good or spiritual person was supposed to be?

I believe there is great value in ideals, traditions, wisdom and people who help us see beyond the limits of our immediate sense of self. But an idea about who we are cannot substitute for an experience of ourselves. Our inherent dignity, for example, does not need to be achieved before it becomes true, but that truth only begins to affect the way we experience ourselves and live as we gradually learn to inhabit it.

Part of maturity involves moving beyond a more prepackaged way of living, where we try to conform ourselves to an inherited idea of what a good or faithful life should look like, towards something more personal, dynamic and open-ended. We begin to ask what those deeper truths might actually look like as they take form through this particular life. I have come to think of identity as something we both discover and participate in forming, and that participation is itself an important part of the spiritual journey because it asks something of our faith.

You become it by living it

Reflection matters. Prayer matters. Reading, therapy, coaching, trusted relationships and periods of genuine solitude can all help us become more conscious of ourselves. But eventually something needs to move from reflection into experience.

We accept a desire we have been suspicious about, or notice an interest and give it some room. We recognise that something matters to us and begin planning a little more of our life around it. We allow a gift to become visible, express an opinion we would normally keep to ourselves, try something we have been curious about, or take a small step towards a life that has been tugging at us without requiring ourselves to know where it will lead.

Sometimes this is as ordinary as taking singing lessons, learning to draw, hosting a dinner, applying for a role or letting another person read something we have written. What matters is not the scale of the action, but that it allows something that has previously existed mainly as an intuition or possibility to enter actual experience.

The process is less about identifying a feeling and immediately concluding that we have found our truer self, and more about entering an ongoing conversation with life. We sense something, give it some expression, notice what happens, allow reality to answer back, and gradually learn from the experience.

This is why I think the concept of small experiments can be useful. They allow us to explore what is emerging without turning every desire into a life decision, and to remain open to being surprised or corrected along the way. We do not need to commit ourselves to an entirely different future before we have had a chance to experience even a small part of it.

Some parts of us have been obscured and need to be uncovered, while other capacities have barely had the chance to develop. Experience gives us information that thinking alone cannot, especially when we are intentional about reflecting on what our lived experience is showing us. Honest action does not only tell us something about who we are. It also develops our capacity to become ourselves.

Learning what to trust

I see this regularly enough in my coaching work. People can spend years building their lives around what was responsible, acceptable or expected of them, to the point where the question of what they actually want can be really difficult to answer. But with enough safety and the right questions, small signals often begin to emerge: an interest they keep returning to, something they envy in another person’s life, or a kind of work that gives them energy.

The process requires both courage and humility. We need enough courage to test what is emerging rather than continually suppressing it, and enough humility to allow experience to teach and correct us. Both can feel risky to the parts of us that prefer life to remain familiar and predictable.

What begins to emerge in us will not always fit neatly with the identities we have inherited, or with what the people around us have come to expect. A new boundary or direction may alter the way a relationship works. A desire we begin taking seriously may unsettle someone who has known us in a particular way. Taking what is emerging in us more seriously does not automatically mean that every choice we make is right, but neither does another person’s discomfort necessarily mean that we have lost our way. One marker worth paying attention to is not simply how alive something makes us feel in the moment, but whether it draws us over time towards greater honesty, love and connection, even through discomfort, rather than towards self-protection or withdrawal.

This is where healthy spirituality can do some of its most important work. Not by telling us exactly who to become, or guaranteeing that our choices will work out, but by giving us a deeper ground of belonging from which to explore. The more deeply we come to trust that our worth and place in God are not hanging on whether we get the next step right, the freer we become to experiment, fail, change direction and keep listening.

Faith does not remove the uncertainty involved in becoming ourselves, but it can give us enough security to take this important journey. It can also remind us that there may be far more within us than we can see at any one time, and that pursuing what seems to be calling for expression is usually not necessarily selfish or prideful. It is often part of how we bring more of ourselves to the world.

Perhaps we should pray less for our identity to become clearer, and more for the courage to recognise and accept what we already sense to be true, and to dare to believe that taking a small step towards it might itself be an act of humility and faith.

This is one reason we so often wait for certainty before moving. We think that if we could first know ourselves completely, we might then be able to act without so much risk. My own experience suggests that something closer to the opposite may be true.

We do not need a complete picture of who we are before we begin. We need enough openness to give something that feels meaningful a little room in our actual life, and enough attention and support to notice what the experience reveals and develops in us.

Sometimes the next part of who we are only becomes visible once we give it a chance to be lived.

A question to sit with

Think of one experience in which you stepped towards something that felt meaningful but uncertain. Perhaps you followed an interest, expressed something more honestly, accepted a responsibility, set a boundary or just allowed a different part of yourself to become visible.

What did taking that step show you about yourself that you could not have known quite as clearly beforehand?

And is there something in your life now that might deserve the same kind of small experiment?

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The Inner Table is for those who sense that something deeper in them is asking to be lived. These essays explore how to make sense of your inner world, trust what is emerging, and live with greater coherence between inner truth and outer life.

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Every month I gather online with three other men for a time of connection and honest sharing. We informally call it a soul circle. I consistently walk away from that conversation knowing that I have been truly reached and, as a result, feeling more energised, encouraged and clear.

The purpose of the soul circle is to create a space that supports us to reflect on our lives more deeply, so we can navigate them with a growing level of consciousness and intentionality.

We open up what is most alive for us at the time, and what we sense is asking for attention. We talk about vision and goals, internal and external challenges, and what we are noticing emerging within us as we participate in all of that.

As we listen to one another, we mirror back what we are hearing or noticing. Not advice, but what we are sensing as we listen. Perhaps it is a question, a wondering, or something we are seeing or hearing between the words. It is a space where each of us is deeply heard and received.

Last week I reflected on the significance of certain types of relationships in helping to facilitate our growth. We do not become more fully ourselves alone. In this piece, I want to reflect on relationship not only as a catalyst for growth, but as a key fruit of our growth.

As we mature inwardly, and as our spiritual lives become more deeply embodied, it is likely that we will find ourselves increasingly capable of a certain kind of relational connection. We become more able to know and be known, to reach and be reached, to affect and be affected by another.

My ability to participate in a group like this is perhaps one of the clearest signs of my inner growth over the years. As I mentioned in my last article, I grew up with little experience of vulnerability or deeper relational connection. I did not really have a concept for it, and for a long time I carried a kind of discomfort with the experience of vulnerability and tenderness.

It was not until my adult years that I started spending time with people who had this capacity for deeper and more honest connection. Being in the presence of their honesty enabled me to connect more honestly with myself, which was liberating and deeply refreshing. It felt like a whole new way of being human, which in many ways it was.

As I have learned to foster this quality, life has quite literally never been the same. I am not sure there has been anything more expansive or deeply satisfying. The capacity to allow the right people to truly see and reach us, and to be able to offer the same in return, opens possibilities for our lives that little else can open in quite the same way.

The more honestly I listen to people speak about their lives, the more convinced I become that most of us carry a deep desire to be known. We desire to share our experience of life. To be met in our questions, griefs and desires. To be seen, appreciated and honoured as we are.

This touching of hearts is what I sometimes refer to as intimacy. It is the deepest kind of contact with another: honest, receptive and without a point to prove. It can show up in any relationship, not just our romantic ones.

Intimacy, as I understand it, is an expression of our deep human longing for connection. It is experienced in a unique way with other people, but this kind of connection can open us to a deeper receptivity to, and participation in, life itself. I would go so far as to say that intimacy is a profoundly spiritual experience. To me, growth in holiness looks a lot like becoming more available for communion with ourselves, with one another, with the world around us, and with the larger life we may refer to as God.

The practice of intimacy is much larger than telling someone our deepest thoughts and feelings. It involves a kind of mutual abiding. An emotional form of hospitality that is given and received within a relationship where each party carries equal dignity.

We make room for another person to be heard and received as they are, without immediately trying to fix them, manage them or reduce their experience to our own perspective. This does not mean that we never challenge or influence one another, but that our care is not conditional upon the other person becoming who we want them to be.

Within this hospitality we share our attention, affection, wonderings and dreams. We learn to be honest about our weaknesses and failures, and to discover that we can still be accepted within them. We learn to trust, to play, to laugh, to listen, and simply to be in each other’s presence without needing to fill every silence.

In the process of all that, we affect and are affected. We make a world together. There is a mutual influence and empowerment that can only be born of this kind of communion with another.

This, of course, does not mean that intimate relationships are free from difference or misunderstanding. We will sometimes fail to hear one another well. We will disappoint each other, retreat behind familiar defences, or discover that we see something quite differently.

Intimacy is not perfect attunement. It is partly the growing capacity to remain in relationship when attunement breaks down. To recognise our impact, to speak honestly about what has happened, and to find our way back when repair is possible.

There is a certain perspective, clarity and richness of experience that surfaces through this kind of intimate connection. Some parts of us may never become fully visible, let alone fully lived, without the interplay of others in our lives. In the presence of another, we often gain access to parts of ourselves that remain unavailable in isolation. We also become more available to a fuller range of human experiences, such as delight, admiration, affection and play.

This, it seems, is how we have been wired to live as human beings. We come most fully alive through connection and mutual communion. The periods of isolation many people experienced during COVID were perhaps one of the clearest reminders of this. The old saying “no man is an island” only really made sense to me when I started experiencing genuine intimacy.

It seems to me that intimacy is integral to a deeply fulfilling life. There is no real substitute for knowing and being known, for reaching and being reached by another.

Although we do try.

Sadly, many of us have lacked people in our lives who have modelled deep emotional connection. We have not necessarily been taught how to develop this capacity. Instead, we encounter countless experiences that promise connection, or resemble intimacy, but don’t actually create genuine contact.

We commonly mistake intimacy for sex. Or assume that having a partner, a large friendship group, or many followers on social media means that we are deeply connected. Intimacy can be experienced in all these contexts, but it can also, perhaps more commonly, be obscured by them. Physical and social connection is not the same as intimacy.

Even spiritual and religious practices can become substitutes for intimacy. A person may be deeply committed to prayer, reflection or spiritual growth, yet still avoid vulnerability and remain difficult to truly reach. Spirituality can deepen our capacity for communion, but it can also become another place to hide. I have known this tendency in myself too.

The reality is that most of us have unspoken and unseen guardrails in place throughout many of our relationships. No-go zones when it comes to what we will share and how close we will allow people to come.

There is, of course, wisdom in this within some relationships. Not everyone is entitled to our vulnerability. Openness without safety or discernment does not always lead to intimacy.

But emotional defence can gradually become the norm, even across our closest relationships, including with our partners. We may long to be known while living in ways that make it difficult for anyone to reach us. Including ourselves.

Because of our lack of mentoring in this aspect of life, we tend to seek out the fruits of intimacy without doing the work required to get there. We try to manufacture the right external conditions, without realising that genuine connection also asks something of us inwardly.

We cannot force intimacy to happen, but we can help create the conditions for it. We can develop a posture for it to surface.

Transparency is one key quality of this posture. This is much more about real contact than total disclosure. It is the ability to share ourselves honestly and to invite others into the parts of our lives that are most alive, meaningful or tender.

But transparency also needs to be coupled with vulnerability for intimacy to surface. The two are often confused.

On its own, transparency can become another way of keeping people at a distance. We can tell someone many personal details without allowing ourselves to be genuinely affected by their presence or response. Vulnerability softens us towards another person. It allows them to meet us in our deeper reality and, at times, to feel with us.

For genuine intimacy to surface, some of our protective mechanisms need to soften. We need to surrender our rightness, or our sense of power over another. It requires us to bring our guard down so others can see us as we actually are. It involves a kind of mutual tenderness, which can feel uncomfortable, or even terrifying at times.

Most of us would much prefer sweating it out day after day in the gym than doing the far more demanding work that real intimacy asks of us. I want to suggest that this is, in many ways, the real work of growing up.

Because of what this kind of growing up asks of us, we tend to become good at masking our need for intimate connection.

We may hide from it by keeping to ourselves, or through charm, humour, competence, busyness or constant conversation. Some people hide through silence. Others hide by becoming highly social while revealing very little of their deeper reality.

One of my own strategies over the years has been to show great interest in everyone else while revealing very little of myself. Another has been keeping busy with projects that excited me. These strategies helped me connect with people and with meaning, while still controlling how much of me was available to be known. This kind of worked, until it didn’t.

This is why I talk about intimacy as a fruit of inner work. It can be very difficult to allow ourselves to be met by another when we have not developed some capacity to meet and accept ourselves.

We all carry ideas and beliefs that tend to separate us from ourselves and from others. We carry old hurts and sensitivities that can easily be triggered when people come close. Unless these are attended to with care, it can be difficult to find the inner security and spaciousness needed to offer the kind of hospitality that can truly receive another person, free of the old need to change them.

It seems to me that there is a specifically spiritual dimension to this inner growth. As we find ourselves held by a greater compassion, mercy, tenderness and love, the desire and conditions for deeper connection also begin to emerge. As we become more at home in our own humanity, we become more able to welcome the humanity of another.

Safe and honest relationships also help to develop this inner capacity. They give us new experiences of being seen, accepted, and received. They gradually teach us that closeness does not always need to end in rejection or loss.

The movement towards intimacy works in both directions. As we become more able to meet and accept ourselves, we become more available to others. And through being honestly received by others, we often discover parts of ourselves that we could not reach alone.

This is perhaps one of the deeper movements of the spiritual life: becoming increasingly available to be met. By another person. By beauty and the natural world. By the presence we call God.

Intimacy begins whenever we allow something real to reach us, and find within ourselves the willingness to meet it in return.

Thanks for reading,
Dan.

P.S. It might be helpful to take a moment now to notice where in your life you already feel most deeply reached, and what becomes possible within you there.

One of the great joys I experience in my depth coaching work is supporting people remove the barriers that keep them from deeper connection, with themselves, with others, and with the larger life beyond them. If that is something you are exploring, you can find out more here.

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The Inner Table is for those who sense that something deeper in them is asking to be lived. These essays explore how to make sense of your inner world, trust what is emerging, and live with greater coherence between inner truth and outer life.

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For most of us, growth happens both slowly and suddenly.

Slowly, over months and years, we become a little more conscious of what is alive within us. We trust our own heart a little more than we once did. We become more comfortable naming what we feel, acknowledging what we want, taking certain risks, and allowing more of what is real to enter our relationships.

Often, this growth is only visible in hindsight. We look back and realise that something has shifted. We are a little less governed by approval, or less afraid of disappointing people. We have begun expressing something that once remained hidden, perhaps through our work, our relationships, our creativity, or the contribution we feel drawn to make. We have not necessarily become someone entirely different, but more able to inhabit the life that we sense, in some mysterious way, was already ours.

Then there are other moments, perhaps only a handful across a lifetime, when growth feels more sudden and disorienting. More like an eruption. Or like being knocked to the ground and blinded by a great light, in the case of St Paul. Something suddenly breaks through the careful arrangements by which we have understood ourselves and managed our lives. Often after such an experience, at least for a time, what once seemed obvious no longer does.

Growth happens slowly, and then sometimes suddenly. At least that is how we tend to experience it.

Both movements belong to the human journey. We could not live permanently inside the second kind of experience, or we would be constantly disorientated and probably get very little else done. Disruption is not the only path towards growth, but it has often been in these more intense periods that I have found myself invited, or led into a new threshold of being, and a growth that I could never precipitate by my own intention or effort. This seems to be the norm for many of us.

I have also come to recognise that disruption does not necessarily become growth on its own. It may unsettle an old identity or bring something previously hidden to the surface, but what happens next is shaped, in no small part, by who is around us when it happens. Our deepest shifts often emerge within a relational setting. We need people who can help us stay with what is unfolding, recognise what may be emerging within it, and resist the temptation to move us too quickly back into what was familiar or what seems safest and most sensible.

Depending on others in this way did not come naturally to me.

I became good at processing my own feelings and being emotionally self-sufficient at a young age. Without fully realising it, I had become resistant to vulnerability. I hadn’t developed the muscle of allowing myself to depend on anyone. One part of me didn’t feel worthy of other people’s support, and another part didn’t trust it.

The great exception to this rule was during the more sudden and intense periods of change in my journey.

In those times I often found myself unexpectedly needy. Something was clearly shifting beneath the surface of my life, and some part of me was desperate for someone who understood the kind of territory I was entering. Someone who could help me find language for it, and help me navigate the way forward.

Books helped at times. They gave me language for my experience and the reassurance that others had known similar terrain. But they were rarely enough. I needed the presence of another beating heart. Someone who could hold space for what was emerging in me and make sense of it, rather than trying to tame it into something problematic, smaller and more familiar.

In the middle of sudden and significant growth spurts, part of us will often wonder whether something has gone wrong. Our familiar ways of understanding ourselves provide a feeling of stability, control, and even a feeling of rightness. They help us know who we are, what others expect from us, and how we are meant to move through the world. But when those reference points begin to loosen, even for good reasons, some part of us may register the change as danger. In the midst of these disruptions I have often found myself asking: Have I done something wrong? Is this bad? Am I bad?

Thankfully, at these significant points in my life, I have always somehow been met by people able to offer the kind of relational context that could truly support what was emerging within me. A spiritual director, a therapist, a coach, an older friend. Often a combination.

One such person was someone named Jules. A few years ago, during one of these significant periods of inner awakening, I found myself laying it all out with her, putting words to things I had never quite named before.

Her presence was a profound gift to me. I remember the look that would sometimes come over her face. A kind of surprise, as though she could not quite believe I had been carrying this experience without recognising that something important and life-giving might be emerging within it. What I had interpreted mainly as collapse, she could also see as the possible emergence of something more mature, honest, and expansive.

She did not try to convince me that everything would work out, or tell me what the experience meant. She simply helped me notice something that fear had made difficult to recognise from within. Her presence gave what was emerging in me somewhere to be held while I slowly learned to relate to it differently.

What made her presence so helpful was partly that she did not need me to be any particular way. What I shared did not unsettle her or make her rush to interpret it. She did not need to manage it, soften it, or redirect me towards a version of myself that made more sense to her.

The capacity to hold this kind of space for others is not only precious, but rarer than we might imagine.

Many of the people who love us also carry their own fears, needs, and unspoken expectations of who we should remain for them. Their care is often completely genuine, and it can still come bound up with a picture of us they have grown comfortable with, or a role we play in their own sense of stability. A picture of someone forms early in a relationship, and it rarely updates itself just because we have begun to change.

This is why it matters to cultivate relational contexts that can support our becoming.

At their best, these contexts become something like a living container, a kind of womb. A living, protected space in which what is still forming can develop without being forced too quickly into definition or action.

We don’t need a number of people who understand every part of us. Perhaps it’s just one trusted person, a few close friends, a small group, that can offer this kind of supportive space.

The type of support we need will not always be the same. At times, it may come from someone who has travelled similar ground before us and can offer a wider perspective born of experience. They may recognise a pattern or possibility that is difficult to see from within the experience itself.

At other times, we need less interpretation and more presence. A friend or companion may not fully understand the territory, but may be willing to stay close without an agenda, allow us to speak before we are clear, and resist the impulse to hurry us towards an answer. Both forms of companionship can be deeply formative. One offers perspective. The other offers room.

This does not mean surrounding ourselves only with people who affirm everything we think, feel, or want. That would not help us become more truthful. A good container includes people willing to notice where fear may be shaping our interpretation, or where our account of things is incomplete. The difference lies not in whether they agree with us, but in the quality of attention their response comes from. Are they attending to what is actually happening, or trying to restore their own comfort?

When we are in the process of change, it will sometimes take time for people around us to catch up with a change we have already made within ourselves. Some patience may be needed. Occasionally though, it asks for something harder: accepting that a particular relationship has limited room for an important part of who we are becoming.

The most supportive people offer what they see, then leave us free to test it against our own experience, values, responsibilities, and deeper sense of direction. They may help us recognise a movement within us before we can fully trust it ourselves, without presuming to tell us where that movement must lead. Mature inner authority looks something like being open to the wisdom of others without handing them the final word on our lives.

Being met in this way also asks something of us. Many of us have learned to present a version of ourselves that feels safe to reveal: capable, certain, and easy to be around, while privately hoping someone will recognise what is happening beneath it. We cannot make ourselves vulnerable everywhere, nor should we. But where trust has been established, part of finding the right people is gradually becoming willing to be found by them. If growth is in some way a relational reality, then vulnerability is a key to our becoming.

Most of us give real thought to the work we do, the home we live in, and the goals we pursue. But just as important to a flourishing life is the relational context we cultivate, or fail to cultivate.

Our deeper growth often requires a place where we can speak before our experience is fully formed, where what is emerging in us has room to be recognised, questioned, and gradually trusted. We need somewhere challenge does not become control, and where our own capacity for discernment is deepened rather than replaced by well-meaning advice.

We are always becoming in company of some kind. It is worth asking, from time to time, how intentional we are in choosing that company, and what it is making more possible within us.

Here’s to finding good company for the journey.

Dan.

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The Inner Table is for those who sense that something deeper in them is asking to be lived. These essays explore how to make sense of your inner world, trust what is emerging, and live with greater coherence between inner truth and outer life.

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For as long as I can remember, I have associated worth, security, acceptance, and contentment with hard work.

If I want to live the life I desire, I need to put in the hard yards. I need to remain switched on. I need to keep pursuing insight and clarity. I need to keep working on what can be improved, deepened, corrected or built.

There is, of course, value in some of this. I am not drawn to a life of passivity or carelessness. Many of the good things in my life have come through effort, discipline and a willingness to keep showing up.

But somewhere along the way, effort became more than a value. It became a hidden kind of security.

As you can probably imagine, this way of living brought with it an underlying level of strain. A discomfort, and sometimes even a guilt, around being unproductive or inefficient. A sense that if I was not moving something forward, I was somehow falling behind.

Over time, without realising it, I became somewhat acclimatised to this strain. Sometimes it felt like responsibility. Sometimes it felt like virtue. Sometimes it felt like I was becoming more deserving of the life I was trying to build.

But life has a way of challenging our hidden agreements.

As I have become more conscious of this underlying tension, and tasted more of the larger life beyond it, certain questions began to surface.

What if there is another way to move toward what I most desire? What if my life could be more spacious and still allow me to build, create and contribute in meaningful ways? What if strain is not actually a necessary ingredient of a flourishing life?

Even writing those questions, I can feel a part of me is uneasy.

Ease still feels a little risky. Perhaps even irresponsible. There is a part of me that suspects that if I allowed more space, something important might fall apart. I might lose momentum. I might become complacent. I might stop being taken seriously. I might lose acceptance or the sense that I am earning my place.

At a deeper level, there can also be a fear of what we might have to face if we stopped pushing. Perhaps we would have to ask whether the life we most want is actually emerging through all this effort, or whether the effort has become a way of not having to find out. If we are always working, always improving, always moving something forward, we can defer the deeper question indefinitely.

That is the strange thing about strain. It can become painful, but also reassuring. It can narrow our lives while also helping us feel safe. It can keep us from rest, joy and receptivity, while still giving us the feeling that we are doing what life requires of us.

Many of us carry some version of this.

Not always around work. For some, the hidden rule may be about responsibility in a family. For others, it may be about always being useful, agreeable, emotionally steady, spiritually serious, financially cautious, available to everyone, or careful not to want too much.

These rules are rarely written down. We may not even know we are living by them until something begins to challenge them.

They often sound like wisdom:

Don’t get your hopes up.
Don’t need too much.
Don’t rest until everything is done.
Don’t disappoint people.
Don’t enjoy things too freely.
Don’t be too visible.
Don’t trust ease.
Don’t let life become too good.

I’m not referring here to the strain that naturally comes with a life of genuine commitment, but rather, the strain we carry as a permanent condition. One is the honest cost of caring about something. The other is a framework we have mistaken for faithfulness. The question is not whether difficulty belongs in a full life, but whether we have allowed it to become the proof that we are living rightly.

Some of these rules may have formed for understandable reasons. They may have helped us belong, survive, succeed or make sense of life at an earlier time. They may have protected something in us that genuinely needed protecting.

But a rule that was once useful can start to limit the life now trying to surface.

A life organised around strain can turn us inward. So much energy goes into maintaining the pressure and managing the anxiety that comes with it. This leaves less of us available for the people and things that matter most. Less presence. Less generosity. Less capacity to receive what is good and offer it forward.

This is where I have found myself thinking differently about detachment.

We often speak about the virtue of detachment in relation to material things, success, approval, outcomes or control. And rightly so. Freedom can be found by learning to hold these things lightly. Not because they don’t matter, but because they cannot carry the full weight of our identity and the deeper life that is within us.

But I wonder if one of the deeper forms of detachment is the willingness to hold lightly the frameworks through which we interpret our lives. The hidden rules. The assumptions we have mistaken for reality. The inner logic that tells us what we are allowed to want, how hard life has to be, what makes us good, what makes us safe, what we believe God expects of us, and what kind of person we are permitted to become.

This kind of detachment is not about becoming vague or careless. It is not about challenging every belief simply because it is old, or replacing hard-won wisdom with whatever feels appealing in the moment.

But there is a way of gripping even our partial understandings so tightly that there is no room for life to refine them. We can become attached to a worldview not because it is fully true, but because it is familiar. It helps us know who we are. It tells us how to stay safe. It gives us a script.

And sometimes the script keeps working long after it has stopped serving our movement towards greater wholeness.

This also makes me think differently about conversion, another word often used in spiritual and religious settings. We usually think of conversion as a change in what we consciously believe, or a shift in our stated values and behaviour. There is certainly a place for this. But conversion can often remain more at the level of ideas than we realise. It may change what we affirm, and even how we try to live, without yet reaching the deeper agreements that keep us organised in a particular way.

A person can believe in grace and still live as though their acceptance, worth and security must be earned through strain.

A person can believe they are loved and still organise their life around the fear of disappointing people.

A person can believe God is generous and still distrust joy, ease or desire.

A person can speak about freedom while still living under an old, unspoken law of caution, approval or self-protection.

A deeper conversion works more slowly and less tidily than a change of mind. It involves the gradual uncovering of the frameworks that govern us beneath our stated convictions. It reaches into the places where our rules are carried, not only in what we think, but in what we feel, what we fear, and what we allow ourselves to want.

This is why deeper change can be so slow. It is not enough for the mind to agree with a truer idea. Some part of us has to become safe enough and free enough to live from it.

That is where my own resistance to ease has been revealing. It is not that I intellectually believe a strained life is better. If I were speaking with someone else, I would have no difficulty telling them that a meaningful, successful life does not need to be built on constant pressure. But the discomfort I notice within myself towards more ease suggests that part of me still trusts pressure more than spaciousness. Some part of me still associates ease with danger.

And rather than judging that part, I am trying to listen to what it has been protecting.

I am not sure I have fully resolved that distinction in my own life. But I am somewhere in the middle of it, noticing that the question itself is already a kind of movement.

As I learn to befriend and allow more ease into my life, even in small and subtle ways, I find a new spaciousness opening up within me: a capacity for a deeper clarity, creativity, and love. I notice that I am much more ‘in’ myself, more capable of choosing the life I genuinely desire to live.

So perhaps the invitation toward ease is not an invitation toward less. It may be an invitation toward more: more availability, more honesty, more of what we most deeply desire to build and contribute, but from a less defended and more genuinely free place.

I suspect many of us are invited, at different points in life, to let one of our hidden rules be gently questioned. Not all at once, and not dramatically. Even a slight loosening can open something significant. Often it begins with a small disturbance: something that used to feel obviously true no longer feels entirely true. A way of living that once gave us security begins to feel a little suffocating. A desire returns, even after we have explained it away. A moment of ease arrives, and instead of receiving it, we notice ourselves becoming suspicious.

These moments can be unsettling, because they threaten the inner arrangements that have helped us feel safe. But they may also be invitations. Not to throw everything away, but to loosen our grip. To let life question what we have assumed. To allow a larger and truer perspective to reach us.

It seems to me that this is part of what genuine spiritual growth asks of us. Not simply to believe more beautiful things, but to allow those truths to reach the places where we actually live from. Not simply to say we are loved, but to notice where we still live as though we must earn our place. Not simply to admire grace, but to let it slowly challenge the older agreements we still obey.

This is one concrete way that salvation begins to take shape. Not as rescue from life, but as a deeper freedom to live it more truthfully and more fully.

Naming a hidden rule matters. Once it becomes visible, it is no longer quite identical with reality. We can begin to ask whether it is fully true. We can ask what it has protected, and what it has cost. We can ask what might become possible if we held it a little more lightly.

If something here has resonated with you, here’s a question you might find helpful to sit with:

What is a hidden rule have I been living by? And what might become possible if I began to hold it a little more lightly?

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Noticing the hidden rules.

A Companion Practice for paid subscribers of The Inner Table.

This short practice is designed to help you identify the hidden rules that are shaping your life right now.

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The Inner Table is for those who sense that something deeper in them is asking to be lived. These essays explore how to make sense of your inner world, trust what is emerging, and live with greater coherence between inner truth and outer life.

There are decisions we can think about for so long that thinking begins to lose its usefulness.

We go over the facts, speak with people we trust, make lists, and imagine the different paths our lives could take. Then we return to the question once again, convinced there must be one consideration we have missed, one piece of advice we have not yet heard, or one final angle that will make the answer obvious.

Sometimes more thinking is exactly what is needed. If we do not understand what a choice involves, further research, conversation or experience may genuinely help.

But there is another kind of uncertainty, one that lingers even after we have thought carefully, because clarity involves more than the mind.

It is often cultivated through at least three related movements: becoming more aware of what is shaping our perception, developing sufficient inner freedom, and finding our ground in a presence that is deeper than the decision itself.

These movements do not guarantee certainty. But they do help create the conditions in which we can become more available to what is true.

Clarity begins with self-awareness

A decision, especially a significant one, impacts the whole of us.

The mind may be weighing consequences while the body is carrying a fear or tension we have not yet found words for. Old memories of risk, loss or disapproval may be shaping our response beneath the surface. One part of us may be protecting a sense of belonging, while another is holding grief or desire that has not yet been fully acknowledged. We may be trying to make a responsible choice while also preserving an identity that took years to build.

When someone says, "I don't know what to do," or hesitates to act, the difficulty is rarely contained in one place. Different parts of the person may be responding to different aspects of the decision, and they may not yet have come into conversation with one another.

This is why it can help, before asking what we should do, to notice what is happening within us as we ask.

When we are rushed, everything can feel urgent. When we are frightened, the safest option can look like the wisest one. When we are ashamed, abandoning ourselves can feel like humility. When we are trying to please, the right answer can become whichever one disappoints the fewest people.

The state we are in affects what we are able to see. But it cannot, on its own, tell us what is true.

Feeling calm does not necessarily mean that a choice is right, just as feeling anxious does not mean that it is wrong. A truthful choice can unsettle us because it is unfamiliar, while avoidance can feel peaceful because it keeps us within what we already know.

The body and nervous system offer information, but they do not always tell us what to do with it.

Our protective patterns can also be difficult to recognise because they are so familiar. They rarely introduce themselves as strategies for managing our fear; often, they come disguised as our values.

“I should be grateful” may express genuine gratitude, or it may prevent us from acknowledging a grief.

“I am only being realistic” may be sober judgement, or it may protect us from the vulnerability of wanting something.

“I need more time” may be patience, or it may be a way of postponing what we already suspect we need to do.

These voices are not enemies. They usually formed for legitimate reasons, and they may still be protecting something real. Becoming more self-aware means compassionately learning to hear what they are saying, what they are afraid of, and what they are trying to preserve.

Clarity grows through inner freedom

It is possible to understand our patterns well and still be governed by them.

We may recognise that we are afraid of disappointing someone and still feel unable to make a choice they might not understand. We may know that a familiar sense of responsibility was shaped by an old role, yet continue to experience every departure from that role as selfish or unsafe.

Inner freedom begins when we are able to place some space around these movements, so that the loudest voice within us does not automatically become the one we obey.

Instead of saying, “I cannot disappoint them,” we may begin to recognise, “A part of me is deeply afraid of disappointing them.”

Instead of concluding, “This would be irresponsible,” we may notice, “Something in me associates this choice with being irresponsible.”

This is not a way of dismissing our fear or talking ourselves out of legitimate concerns. The fear may contain important information. Other people may genuinely be affected. There may be practical consequences that deserve attention.

The difference is that no one voice has to become the whole truth or take responsibility for directing the whole of our life. As we learn to notice these different parts, we may also begin to recognise a deeper sense of self that can hold them all without being reduced to any one of them.

This is part of what makes inner freedom so important. It gives us room to listen more honestly, to recognise the pressures moving within us, and to choose from somewhere deeper than fear, urgency or self-protection. We become less ruled by the strongest immediate impulse and more able to participate in the direction of our own lives.

At times, thinking becomes a kind of shelter. As long as the question remains open, we do not yet have to face what an answer might ask of us.

This is not the explanation for every prolonged uncertainty, and it should not become another way of judging ourselves. Sometimes we genuinely do not know. Sometimes the conditions are not yet present for an answer to emerge.

But when a decision has survived an unusual amount of honest thought, it may be worth asking:

What might become more difficult if I allowed this to become clear?

The ability to sit with that question depends on more than psychological insight. We need somewhere steady enough to stand while we listen for the answer.

Clarity rests on a deeper ground

Much of what limits our clarity is connected to the need to secure ourselves.

We want to know that we will still belong. That we will still be good. That we will be understood. That we will not regret the choice, fail, or be shamed.

When so much appears to depend on the answer, it becomes difficult to listen freely.

Finding our ground in a presence beyond us, whether we call that God, Spirit, or something else, does not usually remove this difficulty by supplying answers. It does not spare us the slow work of discernment, and it does not make us infallible. Nor does it mean that every hard decision will eventually reveal a single, unmistakably correct path.

What it can offer is a foundation and a steadiness deeper than our immediate limitations and fears.

Part of what changes is where our identity comes from. When our sense of who we are depends on choosing well, every significant decision carries more than its own weight. It carries our sense of self. But as we connect with a life and love beyond us, we begin to discover that who we are is not something the decision will determine. It is something already given, already held. We can stop asking the choice to tell us whether we are enough.

Hope shifts in a similar way. It becomes less the hope that everything will go to plan, and more the trust that our life remains held whatever the outcome, and that something meaningful can still be made of an imperfect path.

From that place, greater honesty becomes possible. We feel less pressure to secure ourselves through the decision, and more able to remain with desire, grief, uncertainty and responsibility without rushing towards an answer that preserves a particular image of who we are.

If our worth is not hanging on the decision, the decision no longer has to prove that we are good, faithful, responsible or deserving of our place. We become more able to see because less of us feels threatened by what we might find.

This seems to be one of the ways that grace works within us. It does not hand us a map. It loosens the grip of the fears that keep certain clarity beyond our reach, and strengthens our capacity to remain present to our lives as they actually are, rather than only as we believe they need to be.

We become capable of knowing more as we become capable of bearing more.

This deeper ground can open capacities in us that thought alone cannot produce. We become more able to remain receptive without forcing an answer, and to feel fear without assuming it will determine our direction. A desire can be acknowledged before we know what to do with it, and loss can be accepted as part of a meaningful choice, because an imperfect decision no longer places us beyond the reach of love.

None of this removes the need for reason, counsel or practical wisdom. It allows them to work more freely, because they are no longer carrying the impossible burden of securing our whole identity and future.

Sometimes this greater honesty reveals a direction we have been avoiding. At other times it reveals only that no complete answer is available yet, and that what is needed is not a decision but the patience to remain present until something further becomes visible. That is also a form of clarity, even though it does not look like resolution.

And sometimes what becomes visible is simply the next step. Rather than demanding the whole answer, it can be more helpful to ask:

What has become clear enough for me to acknowledge, even if I do not yet know what to do about it?

Sometimes allowing one honest thing to be seen is already a meaningful step. But often there is also something small to be done. A conversation we know we need to have. A boundary that needs to be claimed. A week without asking anyone else what they think. A desire allowed to exist without immediately being judged, explained away or turned into a plan.

Steps like these can do more than express clarity. They can help create it. A conversation may reveal something we could not have reached alone. A boundary may change the shape of a relationship. A modest experiment may teach us what imagining could not.

This is why having an inner foundation matters so much. Clarity, in the end, is something we walk our way into once thinking has done what it can, and the walking is not guaranteed to feel comfortable. The conversation may not go as we hoped. The boundary may disappoint someone who has relied on us not having one. The experiment may reveal something we did not expect. We can risk these steps not because we are certain of the outcome, but because we are held by something that does not depend on how it goes.

Clarity is not always a verdict delivered by the mind. It may be better understood as a capacity the whole person develops over time.

It grows as we become more aware of what is shaping us, less governed by the loudest voices within us, and more deeply grounded in a love that holds us before, within, and beyond whatever the truth may ask of us.

We cannot think our way into that kind of clarity.

Sometimes all that becomes available is one honest next step.

For now, that may be enough.

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As a thank you to paid subscribers, I’ve added a companion practice below. It is designed to help you sit with an unclear decision, and to listen through the different layers of self-awareness, inner freedom and deeper ground explored in this piece.

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The Inner Table is for those who sense that something deeper in them is asking to be lived. These essays explore how to make sense of your inner world, trust what is emerging, and live with greater coherence between inner truth and outer life.

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The Inner Table is for those who sense that something deeper in them is asking to be lived. These essays explore how to make sense of your inner world, trust what is emerging, and live with greater coherence between inner truth and outer life.

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The Inner Table is for those who sense that something deeper in them is asking to be lived. These essays explore how to make sense of your inner world, trust what is emerging, and live with greater coherence between inner truth and outer life.

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The Inner Table is for those who sense that something deeper in them is asking to be lived. These essays explore how to make sense of your inner world, trust what is emerging, and live with greater coherence between inner truth and outer life.

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The Inner Table is for those who sense that something deeper in them is asking to be lived. These essays explore how to make sense of your inner world, trust what is emerging, and live with greater coherence between inner truth and outer life.

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These essays explore how to make sense of your inner world, trust what is emerging, and live with greater coherence between inner truth and outer life.

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In my last article, I proposed that the greatest enabler of deep change is the inner experience of being held in a wider field of presence.

A field, or dimension of …

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