Something I keep returning to from last week’s reflection - knowing that a different quality of seeing exists is one thing, actually practicing it in the middle of all of this (waves around at our world) with a restless mind is something else entirely. I wanted to dig a little deeper. I hope you’ll humor me.

What the Nous Actually Requires

LeLoup is honest about what this kind of seeing costs. The nous doesn’t arrive because we want it to or because we’ve set aside fifteen minutes for it. It tends to become available in the moments when we’ve stopped insisting that things be other than they are. Something in us finally exhales and releases the need to be anywhere other than exactly here. For most of us, that doesn’t come naturally. We’ve spent years building interior lives around staying in motion, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It just means the nous requires something we haven’t practiced much.

LeLoup’s reading of Mary Magdalene suggests that she had learned something most of us are still finding our way toward :: that the deepest seeing requires a quality of presence that being in motion simply cannot give us.

Mary Magdalene didn’t see the risen Christ because she was spiritually advanced or had her life together. She saw him because she stayed. She was there with all of her heartbroken, uncertain, nowhere-else-to-go and nothing-left-to-perform-ness. (I know I made that up. But you know exactly what I mean.) In that raw, unguarded, desperate and wholly present moment :: the nous did what it was designed to do.

It saw what our restless minds never could.

What I find both challenging and quietly hopeful about this - the nous isn’t reserved for mystics or people with more uninterrupted silence than the rest of us. LeLoup describes it as part of what it means to be fully human. Mary Magdalene embodied it not because she was extraordinary :: although I think she absolutely was, and dare I say Christ did too :: but because she had learned, through everything she had suffered, received and been healed of, to trust what she knew in the deepest part of herself.

She trusted Christ. And she trusted herself.

That knowing is available to us too. But it does ask something of us - the willingness to be here, in all the ordinary, in all that is hard and broken in our country right now, without immediately reaching for something more useful or more productive or more spiritually impressive.

I’ll be honest with you - that willingness is still very much a practice for me. The inner voice that wants to be doing something, accomplishing a task, moving toward the next thing to escape the hard of the current reality - I know that voice intimately. A contemplative life hasn’t made it disappear. It’s given me a little more space between identifying that voice and my healthiest response to it. That space - as small and fast as it sometimes is - is where the nous lives.

Practice :: Seeing with the Mind of the Heart

What I want to offer you this week isn’t a technique for looking harder or noticing more, it’s an invitation to shift the quality of attention itself toward what LeLoup calls the mind of the heart.

Give yourself about fifteen minutes somewhere quiet, with your phone out of reach and nothing to accomplish. Before you try to practice anything, just be present, feel your body settle into the chair, take a few slow breaths and let yourself actually be here. You’ll probably notice the interior noise pretty quickly :: the restlessness, the to-do list, whatever your mind is carrying into this moment. That’s okay. You don’t have to quiet it or argue with it :: just acknowledge it the way you’d acknowledge traffic outside a window, and let it keep moving without following it.

From there, take a slow breath and imagine dropping below all of that into something quieter and more still. You might place your hand on your heart to help anchor that movement. You might use a single word :: here, open, present :: something to return to gently when your mind wanders. Then find something ordinary right in front of you and look again. Look with the nous, with the mind of the heart. Look with a quality of attention that ‘s curious and receiving rather than judging.

What do you notice? Not what you think you should notice - what do you actually see? Sit with what surfaces and trust it. No judging. Close with three slow breaths and give thanks to the Sacred for being present in the process of learning to see with your heart.

With heart,

Dedra

I’ve been studying Mary Magdalene this summer and this research and commentary noted above come from The Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Jean-Yves Leloup (author), Joseph Rowe (Translator), Jacob Needleman (Forward)

I don’t mean seeing more clearly or paying closer attention :: it’s just different. I’m not sure if it’s a deeper intimacy with the Beloved or a part of myself that I’d forgotten was even there.

While I’ve been recovering this summer, I’ve been studying the Gospel of Mary Magdalene through the lens of Jean-Yves LeLoup’s extraordinary translation and commentary. Something in it has been quietly rearranging the furniture of my interior life :: and breaking my brain a little. Kidding. But possibly not really.

LeLoup writes about the nous :: what the ancient Greeks understood as a capacity for a different kind of knowing altogether. Not our intellect or our emotions, but something deeper :: what he calls the finest point of the soul. An intermediate realm between the purely sensory and the purely spiritual, where true seeing actually happens.

Mary Magdalene, LeLoup suggests, was someone who had learned to see from this place :: which is why she saw what others couldn’t. She had learned to be present in a way that most of us have forgotten is even possible. I think she saw with the mind of the heart because of how much healing Christ did in and through her.

I’ve been sitting with that :: the mind of the heart. A friend recently asked me what part of Mary’s story has resonated with me the most, and that’s it. The mind of the heart. I think it names something most of us have been trained out of :: or told we simply shouldn’t trust.

It feels like this world rewards a very specific kind of seeing :: the kind that produces results and looks successful. Most of us have internalized that so deeply that even when we stop :: even when life requires us to slow down :: the inner voice keeps right on going. As an Enneagram 3, my support center of Thinking and Doing is so comfortable to me. I’m always scanning, assessing and asking what I should be doing or helping with. I know that voice well. Many of us do :: and you don’t have to be an Enneagram 3 to recognize it.

What I keep noticing is that the nous :: that deeper faculty of seeing :: cannot operate in noise. It requires something the noise actively resists :: stillness and presence. A willingness to simply be here, in this ordinary moment, without needing it to be anything other than what it is.

I’m sure that Mary Magdalene didn’t arrive at the tomb with a plan. She probably arrived heartbroken, uncertain and wholly present to what was directly in front of her. In that deep presence - she saw.

LeLoup writes that Mary’s vision was a vision of the nous :: a faculty that becomes available to us when we stop grasping, stop striving and stop insisting that reality be something other than it is. When the psyche turns toward the nous, he says, it is no longer subject to craving and ignorance. It has discovered something more true and more sustaining than anything our restless minds can produce.

The contemplative tradition has always known that the Sacred doesn’t hide from ordinary life. Hildegard of Bingen called it viriditas :: the greening, living force of the Divine moving through all created things. Not in the extraordinary moments. In the ordinary ones.

The light moving across the floor in the morning. The sound of something familiar. The small, unremarkable beauty that was always there, waiting to be noticed by someone who is choosing to see differently.

The invitation of this late summer moment :: before the pace picks back up and the calendar fills again :: is to practice seeing with the mind of the heart. To let the nous do what it was designed to do :: not look harder, just deeper, and with your whole heart.

With heart,

Dedra

Journal Prompt

What ordinary moments this summer have caught you off guard with their beauty or meaning? And what would it look like to practice that quality of seeing more deliberately in the weeks ahead?

It feels like we have a habit of moving through seasons without stopping to receive what they offered :: especially if they were fast, furious or just plain hard.

Late summer has a bittersweet way of slipping past us. One day we’re in the middle of it :: and then suddenly we’re already somewhere else in our heads, making lists, preparing our families to return to their regular schedules, sometimes already bracing for September. We tend to move on before the season has even finished speaking. Some of us are even ready to push past summer entirely :: because honestly, it’s been A LOT.

I want to slow us down for a moment.

Before we turn the page :: what did this summer actually give you? What did it teach us?

And I want to be clear :: I’m not interested in critiquing or judging our summers. None of the productivity conversation :: what did I accomplish, what did I finish or figure out, did I get my life together? None of that.

I’d love for us to get curious about what summer actually held :: the unexpected grace, the hard thing we carried, the small faithful practice that kept showing up for us even when we didn’t feel like showing up for it.

Because here’s what I’ve been sitting with :: we showed up this summer. Maybe not in all the ways we planned. I certainly didn’t plan any of what summer taught me. Maybe not perfectly or consistently or with the kind of intentionality we wished we’d had. But we showed up. We tended something. And the Sacred was tending us right back.

Back in June I wrote about cultivation :: about the gardener who doesn’t force things to grow but shows up consistently, with attention and patient care, trusting the process. I want to return to that image now as summer winds down, because I think it holds something worthy.

A gardener doesn’t just tend the soil and walk away. At some point, hopefully, she stops and looks at what grew, what didn’t make it and what is still quietly struggling. She receives the harvest :: not just the gorgeous full blooms, but the small struggling vines too. The ones that came up slowly, in the corners she almost forgot about, in the places she wasn’t even watching.

The contemplative life works the same way.

Growth on a soul level rarely announces itself. For me, it doesn’t arrive with fanfare or a clear before-and-after video montage. It typically shows up as a little more gentleness in a moment that would have completely undone me in June. It happens when we find the capacity to sit with something hard without immediately needing to fix it or figure it out.

And that’s not nothing. That’s actually everything.

Not every summer looks like rest and ease. Some summers hold grief. Some hold transition, caregiving, survival or a kind of exhaustion that doesn’t have a pretty name. And some summers hold the bittersweet totality of both :: the hard and the beautiful all tangled up together.

Every single bit of it is sacred and worthy of our noticing.

The contemplative life doesn’t ask us to have had a perfect season :: it asks us to be honest about the one we actually lived. And to receive it :: the growth we can see and the growth we can’t yet :: as something the Sacred was present in all along.

Here’s the piece I keep returning to personally :: the Beloved has not been absent from our complicated summers. The Beloved was in the morning walk we took just for our sanity, the one nobody else knows about. In the moments of silence we fiercely protected. In the breath prayer we returned to even when it felt like nothing at all was changing inside of us. The Beloved was there in the moment of unexpected peace in the middle of something really, really hard.

The question that lingers though :: did we let ourselves receive it?

So before fall arrives, before the pace picks back up and the calendars fill again :: I want to offer an invitation. Sit with your summer for a moment. Don’t evaluate it, grade it or decide whether you did enough. Just get curious about it. Welcome it. Look at what actually grew :: in the corners you weren’t watching, in the ordinary moments you almost didn’t count.

And let’s ask ourselves honestly ::

Did I let the Beloved tend to me this summer?

Did I notice when love showed up in the small and ordinary places?

Did I receive what was being offered, even just a little?

The noticing :: offered gently, without judgment :: is itself an act of contemplative faithfulness. The summer gave you something. It always does. Join me in receiving it.

With heart,

Dedra

Journal Prompt

Sit quietly and ask yourself :: what did this season actually hold for me? Not what I planned or hoped for :: but what was actually here.

Did I let the Beloved tend to me this summer?

Did I notice when love showed up in the small and ordinary places?

Did I receive what was being offered, even just a little?

The question: “Teacher, what is the great commandment in the Law?”

The answer: “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great first commandment. The second, which is like it, is this: You must love your neighbor as you love yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the prophets. Matthew 22:35-40

We hear it so often does it really sink in? With a heightened level of healing over the past almost year now, I’ve been sitting with the part we tend to gloss over :: as yourself. The phrase assumes something that some of us never fully stop to learn or practice.

The text assumes we already know how to receive love. How to feel, embody and allow it to reach us somewhere true and deep rather than just acknowledging it intellectually and moving on. Think about the person or yourself when receiving a compliment or recognition - it’s instantly dismissed. It happens so fast we barely notice. But it’s worth noticing, dear friend.

In my experience :: both in my own interior life and in sitting with others :: it’s one of the hardest parts of this great commandment - or priority ask of us from God.

When I ask people in spiritual direction how they experience being loved by God, most people can’t get past the clichés until they become more curious

“God is good all the time.”

“I know they love me.”

“God’s always with me, so I know they love me.”

All of it’s true. The piece that we miss is feeling it, embodying it long enough for it to become part of our soul.

The clichés aren’t dishonest. They’re what we reach for when the question gets too close or they are the armor we put on when someone asks us to go somewhere we haven’t quite learned to go yet, or just don’t want to go.

How am I worthy of this type of love? I don’t even know what that means!

Not :: does God love me? Most of us can answer that question with our heads without missing a beat.

But :: am I worthy of it? Is this particular version of me - the unfinished one, the one who has gotten things wrong, the one whose worth has been tangled up for years with roles, achievements and whether or not the people in my life have loved me well. Is this person worth the love the Sacred is offering? Have I confused how others have loved me with how the Beloved loves me? Because those types of love are not the same thing, not even close.

Those questions don’t get answered by more theology or knowledge, they get answered by slowly and gently doing the work of the interior practices.

Henri Nouwen spent his whole life wrestling with exactly this question. Brilliant man, beloved by millions, and quietly convinced that he wasn’t enough. What shifted for him - eventually, gradually, after years of interior work - was learning to separate his worth from every role he had ever played. Professor. Author. Priest. Caregiver. He had to learn, slowly and with great difficulty, that the Beloved was not a title he could ever earn. It was what he already was. BELOVED.

“The real work of prayer,” Nouwen wrote, “is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me. To gently push aside the silence and the many voices that question my goodness and to trust that I will hear the voice of blessing.”

That’s the work friend. Not more information about love, better theology, just becoming quiet enough to hear a voice that has been speaking gently over you all along.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe, both from Nouwen and from my own practice:

All the love and peace we need is already within us. We aren’t searching for something that isn’t there. We are simply and beautifully being invited over and over, in the ordinary moments of our days to acknowledge what has always been true. We are the Beloved. Not because of what we’ve done or who has loved us well or not or how together our lives look from the outside.

We are already The Beloved.

One of the most honest and useful practices I know for beginning to feel this rather than just know it is the Examen.

Please hear me, not as a performative review of your day. Please don’t use the practice as a checklist of what you did right or wrong. Be gentle and curious turning toward one question at the end of each day :: Where did I feel loved today?

Not where should I have felt loved or where was love theoretically present. Honestly, where did the feeling of love actually land - in my body, in a moment, in something small and ordinary that I almost didn’t notice? The question, if asked honestly and daily, begins to change something within. It trains our interior eye to notice what’s already in front of us. We being to notice that awareness becomes belief. It moves from our head and settles somewhere True.

With heart,

Dedra

Journal Prompt

At the end of today, sit quietly for a few minutes and ask yourself - Where did I feel loved today? Where did I actually feel it, even briefly, even in something small? Write it down. Breathe, hand on heart and give the Triune God thanks.

Spiritual direction makes space for something rare :: a space where you show up and you slowly begin to allow your true self to open up. Spiritual directors are trained to listen and hear (two different things) as well as pay attention to the presence of the Sacred and simply notice. We are curious about what is moving in you, what is being avoided and what keeps surfacing, gently.

Over the last five years of practicing that sacred relationship, I’ve found over and over again, that the thing most of us are avoiding, without being aware of it, is the practice of receiving love itself.

Something the contemplative tradition has always understood is that love is not primarily an intellectual experience. We certainly can know we are loved, believe it theologically, acknowledge when someone says it and yet feel completely untouched by it in any real or embodied way.

None of that is a failure, it’s simply a gap between our head and our heart :: and it’s one of the most honest things we can admit about our interior lives.

Our bodies are where love actually lands :: or doesn’t. The desert mothers and fathers understood this. Every great contemplative teacher (thank you Fr. Rohr) who has ever guided someone toward the Sacred has known that real transformation is not just cognitive - it has to be embodied. Love moves through us and settles somewhere deep and physical before it becomes something we can express to others.

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Some of us search for home in achievement :: in the quiet hope that if we do enough, produce enough, become enough, something will finally click into place and we’ll feel like we belong. Some of us search in usefulness :: if I give enough, if I make myself indispensable enough, surely love will follow. Some of us search in understanding :: if I can just figure it all out, if I can make sense of the Sacred and faith and what I believe, maybe then I’ll feel safe enough to receive it.

Some of us have stopped searching altogether. Not because we found what we’re looking for :: but because the searching got too hard and the disappointment got too heavy.

If any of this lands and it’s where you are right now :: you’re in good company. And you’re not as far from home as you think.

Here’s what the Enneagram has taught me, both in my own interior life and in sitting with others :: every type has a particular longing. A specific ache underneath all the striving, searching and self-protecting.

And, it seems that underneath every longing, is a question that’s been quietly (sometimes loudly) been there for years.

How do I move from knowing I am loved to actually feeling it somewhere true?

Not the polished version. Not the one that performs and produces and keeps it all together so convincingly that even we sometimes forget it’s a performance. (Just me? :) )

Just the True Self :: the one Rohr says has been there all along, completely untouched by everything the False Self has accumulated or lost.

The Enneagram reveals to us that love is already available to every type. The Sacred says the same. The slow, tender, lifelong work of spiritual formation is learning :: really learning, not just knowing intellectually but feeling it somewhere deep and true :: to open ourselves to receiving it.

For the One - who is always aware of what needs to be better :: the invitation is to receive love not when you finally get it right, but in the middle of the trying. The Sacred is not waiting for your perfection. You are loved in the process, not just at the finish line that keeps moving.

For the Two - who gives so beautifully and so much :: the invitation is to let yourself be tended to. To practice receiving with the same grace you offer everyone else. The Sacred doesn’t love you more when you’re useful. You are not a human doing. You are a human being :: and that beloved is more than enough.

For the Three - who has learned to lead with the highlight reel :: the invitation is to bring the outtakes. The Sacred has already seen them and hasn’t looked away. The love available to you was there before you achieved anything or failed miserably..and will be there long after. You can rest inside it.

For the Four - who carries the ache of feeling somehow fundamentally different :: the invitation is to let that very depth be received. Your sensitivity is not a problem to be managed. It is a gift. You’re loved in your longing and need to FEEL so deeply, not in spite of it.

For the Five - who observes more easily than they engage :: the invitation is to come out of the watching and into the being watched :: with love. You don’t have to understand everything before you can be held. You are already held.

For the Six - who scans the horizon so faithfully for what might go wrong :: the invitation is to rest, even briefly, in what has held before and is holding still. The Sacred is not another thing to be suspicious of. It is the ground beneath the ground. You can trust it. You can trust yourself.

For the Seven - who keeps moving toward the next beautiful thing :: the invitation is to stay. Just for a moment. Just here, in this breath, in this ordinary unremarkable now. The love you are looking for is not around the next corner. It’s here, now.

For the Eight - who leads with such fierce and beautiful strength :: the invitation is to let your tenderness be seen. You are loved in your fullness :: the strength and the vulnerability both. You don’t have to choose.

For the Nine - who has a way of merging with everyone else’s needs and losing track of their own :: the invitation is to let the love of the Sacred find you specifically. Not the peacekeeper. Not the one who holds it all together. You :: the quiet, particular, irreplaceable you that sometimes gets lost even to yourself.

I want to leave you with something I’m still learning to receive myself. I’ve known it intellectually for years :: heard it taught, read it in books, nodded along in agreement. But knowing something and actually feeling it somewhere true are two very different things. And the distance between those two places is where most of our interior work actually happens.

The love of the Sacred was never something we had to go looking for. It was never contingent on our understanding, our performance, our belief, or our growth. It’s been here before we were conditioned to start searching. It’s going to be here after we no longer are breathing.

The invitation :: the only one that has ever really mattered :: is to receive it. Not all at once. Just a little more than yesterday. Begin to notice how love finds you in the everyday :: in the unexpected moment of beauty, the conversation that held you, the quiet that felt less empty than it used to. Let yourself feel it. As slowly as you need. As deeply as you can.

With heart,

Dedra

Journal Prompt

Read your type’s invitation above slowly. Sit with it for a moment before you respond to it.

Then ask yourself honestly :: what would it feel like to actually receive that?

Not to agree with it intellectually, but to let it land somewhere true and deep? What gets in the way of receiving love from the Sacred exactly as you are right now?

Not because anyone sat us down and said so explicitly. But the messages were everywhere :: in the family systems we grew up in, in churches that welcomed us conditionally, in a culture that quietly insists our worth is something we produce rather than something we already carry.

And so we built something - Richard Rohr calls it the False Self :: the carefully constructed version of us that knows how to perform belonging. The false self that knows how to be useful enough, agreeable enough, together enough to deserve a seat at the table.

The False Self isn’t something to be ashamed of. It developed because it had to. At some point, being our actual selves felt genuinely unsafe - so we adapted. We learned the rules and we got very good at playing the game.

The cost, of course, is that somewhere along the way we stopped knowing where the performance ended and our true selves actually began.

The False Self, the Enneagram and the Beloved

Rohr has described the Enneagram as originally intended to help spiritual directors support the transforming of people into who they are in God. The Enneagram is not a personality test. It’s not a system for explaining yourself at dinner parties.

The Enneagram is a map of the soul. It shows us the particular shape our False Self took, the specific strategy each type developed to survive and the path back toward the True Self underneath.

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We look outward :: for the right community, the right church, the right circle of people who will finally receive us as we are. Those things matter. Community matters. Being truly received by other people matters deeply.

But here’s what I’ve learned, both in my own interior life and in the sacred work of sitting with others :: you cannot receive what you haven’t yet learned to offer yourself.

Belonging begins on the inside. That’s both the harder truth and the more hopeful one.

Henri Nouwen spent most of his life searching for a place he truly belonged. He looked for it in academia, in missionary work in Peru, in contemplative monasteries. He was brilliant, prolific, beloved by thousands :: and quietly, persistently homeless in his own soul.

He finally found belonging at L’Arche :: a community where people with intellectual disabilities lived alongside their caregivers. Definitely not where anyone would expect a world-renowned theologian to land. But Nouwen said it was the first place he truly belonged. Not because he had earned or achieved it or finally gotten his life together enough to deserve it.

Because he had been received. Fully. As he was.

What shifted for Nouwen at L’Arche wasn’t the community itself. It was something that had been quietly happening in his interior life for years :: a slow, painful, grace-filled movement from performing his worth to simply receiving it.

He wrote ::

“When we belong to Jesus, we belong with him to his heavenly Father, and to each other. Having found our true home in God, we then can live in the world without becoming subject to its obsessions, compulsions, and addictions.”

Belonging to others, Nouwen discovered, flows from belonging to the Sacred. And belonging to the Sacred begins with belonging to yourself :: to your truest, most honest self, the one underneath all the performing and striving and proving.

Richard Rohr calls this the True Self :: the place where the Divine Presence already lives in you. Not something you earn or develop or achieve. Something you uncover. Something you return to.

Rohr writes :: “Our true self is discovered as we stop defending a false self and begin to rest in the love that already holds us.”

That false self :: the one that earns belonging through performance, through being useful, through never asking too much or taking up too much space :: it developed for good reasons. It learned early that love was conditional. That welcome had to be earned. That belonging required a certain kind of behavior, a certain kind of belief, a certain kind of person.

And so we performed. And kept performing. Until the performance became so habitual we forgot it was a performance at all.

The inner work of belonging is the slow, tender process of setting that all down.

Not all at once or dramatically. Just becoming curious or noticing when the performance begins to kick in. Noticing when we start protecting and offering it a little compassion. And then, gradually, beginning to rest in the truth that the love underneath was always already there.

This is where belonging becomes a full circle.

When you begin to belong to yourself :: when you begin to know and receive your own truest self with something like the gentleness the Sacred has always offered :: something opens up in how you relate to everyone else.

And here’s what I find most beautiful about this :: the inner work doesn’t just change how we see ourselves. It changes how we hold other people.

There’s a gentleness that starts to grow in us. A little more room for other people’s complexity. A little less need for everyone around us to have it all figured out. Because we’re slowly releasing that requirement from ourselves too.

That is the ground true community grows from. Not perfection or sameness. Just people honestly being received. People who have done enough of the inner work to receive each other honestly.

That’s the full circle of belonging - it begins, always, with the harder and more hopeful journey inward.

With heart,

Dedra

Journal Prompt

Where have you been looking for belonging outside yourself - in a community, a relationship, a church, a role - that you haven’t yet been able to offer yourself? What would it look like to take one small step toward belonging to your own truest self this week?

She wasn’t performing. She wasn’t achieving anything. She was simply :: present. Turning toward the Sacred with nothing but her breath and her willingness to show up.

We are still learning from her.

Today, I want (inadequately at best) to take you back to where she sat :: because I think there’s something genuinely steadying about knowing that what you are doing when you breathe intentionally toward the Sacred :: you are joining a stream of human prayer that is more ancient than we can comprehend.

You are not alone in this. We have so many ancestors and saints standing right behind us.

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There are seasons when prayer feels nearly impossible. Not because we’ve stopped caring or lost our connection to the Sacred. Sometimes life is just exhausting :: and let’s be real, life is really lifeing right now. The world is heavy in ways that are hard to articulate. Somewhere along the way, the language of faith got tangled up with real pain :: with churches that excluded, with theologies that condemned, with the slow and particular grief of watching something we once believed in come undone. (And sometimes :: it needed to come undone.)

And now when we reach for prayer, sometimes all we find is silence. Or someone else’s words that just don’t fit anymore.

If that’s where you are right now :: you don’t have to pretend otherwise. Not here.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what prayer actually is, underneath all the language, expectation and religious baggage that gets attached to it.

And what I keep coming back to is this :: breath was always there before the words.

Before doctrine. Before theology. Before anyone told us how to do it right or wrong. Before the hurt. Before the leaving. Before the complicated relationship with church and faith and all of it.

Before all the mess that the Christian faith finds itself in right now :: breath was there. Moving in and out. Patient, faithful and entirely unconcerned with whether we have it together.

The breath prayer is one of the oldest contemplative practices in the Christian tradition :: so old it predates most of the things that hurt us. Simple, quiet and available to absolutely anyone, regardless of where you are with faith right now.

The practice is exactly what it sounds like. You inhale a word or a short phrase. You exhale a release. Nothing elaborate. Nothing that requires a particular state of mind or a resolved theology.

Just breath. Just one word. Just this moment.

Here are three I’ve been sitting with lately. Not because they’re the “right” ones :: just because they’ve been true for me, and I hope they might be true for you too.

Inhale :: You are here. Exhale :: That is enough.

Inhale :: I am held. Exhale :: I release what I cannot carry.

Inhale :: Beloved. Exhale :: Belonging.

You don’t have to feel peaceful to try this. You don’t have to believe it fully. You don’t have to have resolved anything about who you believe the Sacred to be, or where you stand with church or faith, before you begin.

You just have to breathe. Which you’re already doing.

And if none of these phrases fit what you’re carrying :: find your own. One honest word inhaled. One honest word released. The Sacred is not keeping score of your vocabulary, your consistency or your theological clarity.

I know some of you have been hurt by religion in ways that make even the word “prayer” feel loaded. I know some of you are still figuring out what you believe, or whether you believe, or what believing even means after everything you’ve seen and experienced.

This practice is for you too. Maybe especially for you.

Because breath doesn’t require a statement of faith. It just requires a body. And you have one of those.

Come as you are. Breathe. That’s the whole invitation. 🕊️

With heart, Dedra

Journal Prompt

What word or phrase do you most need to breathe in right now :: not what sounds spiritually impressive, but what is actually true for you today? And what do you most need to exhale :: not just from your lungs, but from your life? 🌿

Discernment :: the practice of cultivating enough inner stillness to perceive what's already true :: isn't about choosing the "right" answer the way you'd weigh a pros and cons list. It's not about figuring out what a good contemplative practice should look like on paper. It's something quieter and way more honest than that. It's learning to notice what’s genuinely being invited in you, right now, in this particular season of your life. (or even just in today)

It might be more silence. For others it might be more connection :: more conversation, more presence with the people you love, less isolation. For some it might be creativity, making something with your hands, writing, music, anything that lets something move through you that words alone can’t hold. For others it might simply be permission to do less. To let a season actually be slow, without trying to make even the slowness productive. (as I type that I feel like that was for me…)

There is no wrong answer here. There is only honest noticing.

And honest noticing asks something of us that doesn’t come easily. We’re so practiced at evaluating/judging ourselves, deciding what we should want, what would look like we’ve got it together or are “fine”, what would be the most spiritually appropriate choice. Discernment asks us to set all of that down and simply ask :: what is true?

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It’s generous and unhurried, lingering in doorways and across floors like it has nowhere else to be. Stay a little longer. There’s no rush. Not yet.

Summer is one of the few seasons that still gives us permission to slow down. If life hasn’t felt particularly slow for you this summer :: even if it’s been full and complicated and harder than you expected :: something in the light itself is still offering that invitation.

What are you cultivating right now? What is your soul craving?

Not accomplishing, producing or crossing of a list. (Yes I’m talking to my Enneagram 1,3,6 and 8’s.) Not producing or crossing off a list.

What do you need to cultivate?

It’s a word I keep returning to because it changes the whole frame. A gardener doesn’t force things to grow. She doesn’t stand over the soil demanding results or checking progress every hour. She shows up consistently :: with attention, with water, with the particular kind of patient care that trusts the process even when nothing visible is happening yet.

Our inner lives work much the same way.

What you tend right now :: quietly, faithfully, without fanfare :: will bear fruit in ways you may not even be able to see yet. The contemplative life has always been this. Growth in the soul rarely announces itself. It shows up later, quietly, as a slightly longer pause before reacting. A little more gentleness toward yourself. A moment of unexpected peace in the middle of something really hard.

So I want to ask you something honest today.

What have you been tending this summer? Not what you think you should have been tending. Not the spiritual practice you planned to start in June and haven’t quite gotten to yet. What has actually been sustaining you :: even in the smallest, most ordinary ways?

Maybe it’s a morning walk that nobody knows about but you. Maybe it’s five minutes of silence before the day begins. Maybe it’s a prayer that’s just one word, breathed in and out. Maybe it’s this :: showing up here, reading these words, letting yourself be reminded that your interior life matters.

All of it is enough. The small things, the quiet things, the ones that felt like nothing at the time :: they belong. Every single one. 🌿

The mystics understood that the inner life doesn’t require grand gestures. The contemplative life requires faithful small ones, returned to again and again, even imperfectly, even inconsistently.

You don’t need a dramatic spiritual overhaul this summer. You don’t need a new practice or a better routine or a more disciplined approach to your interior life. You just need to keep showing up for the small thing that is already sustaining you.

One breath. One page. One candle. One walk. One sit. One honest prayer that doesn’t perform anything for anyone.

Cultivated daily - these are the practices that become holy.

With heart,

Dedra

Journal Prompt

What small, faithful practice has been sustaining you this summer :: even quietly, even imperfectly? And if nothing comes to mind right away :: what practice is gently asking to begin? Not a big commitment. Just one small, honest step toward what your soul is craving.

We talked in Monday’s reflection about Sabbath as a declaration, a posture or a practice of saying what we so often struggle to truly believe ::

I am not what I produce. My worth is not earned. The Beloved does not love me more when I am busy.

But underneath all of that, I think there’s something even more tender. Something that doesn’t get talked about enough when we talk about rest.

Choosing to rest :: really rest, not just collapsing from exhaustion but intentionally, faithfully stopping :: requires something that doesn’t come easily to most of us.

It requires trust.

And trust, as it turns out, is one of the hardest spiritual practices there is. (for any Enneagram type)

The Teaching :: Rest as an Act of Trust and Faith

Think for a moment about what rest actually asks of us.

• It asks us to believe that the world will keep spinning without our constant tending.

• It asks us to trust that the things left unfinished will still be there when we return

• It shows that by leaving them for a little while is not only okay but holy.

• It asks something of our nervous systems that most of us have never been taught :: acknowledging that we are indeed safe when we choose to rest.

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There’s always more to do, more to fix. More to become. And no matter how much we give, it never quite feels like enough. The messaging feels relentless and it’s everywhere :: in our feeds, in our inboxes, in our homes, in the quiet voice that follows us into the bathroom at 6am (or 3am) before we’ve even had coffee.

You could be doing more. You should be further along. And somehow, no matter what you do, it still doesn’t feel like enough.

If you’ve been feeling that particular exhaustion lately, the kind that doesn’t go away even when you rest, I want to offer you something for gentle consideration. The word:

Enough.

It’s one of the oldest words in the contemplative tradition. And one of the most countercultural things you can say in the world we’re living in right now.

Sabbath :: in its truest, deepest sense, is not just a day off. It’s not a productivity hack or a wellness strategy or a way to recharge so you can do more next week. Sabbath is a theological statement. A declaration if you will, a weekly, embodied practice of saying:

I am not what I produce. My worth is not earned. The Beloved does not love me more when I am busy.

The ancient practice of Sabbath was rooted in a radical idea, that rest is not a reward for finished work. It is a right. A gift. A holy interruption in the relentless forward motion of striving.

And here’s the thing that gets me every time about understanding Sabbath :: the work was never actually finished. There was always more that could have been done. The Sabbath came and was honored anyway.

I think about this often in the context of what we’re all living through right now. The noise isn’t just internal anymore. The urgency isn’t just the voice in our heads. The world itself feels loud, frightening and demanding in ways that make rest feel almost irresponsible.

How can I rest when so much is wrong? How can I stop when there is so much that needs doing?

But here is what the contemplative tradition has always known - and what the desert mothers and fathers practiced in their own loud, frightening moment in history:

You cannot pour from empty. You cannot love well from a place of depletion. You cannot show up for the world, for the people you love, for the work that matters - if you have nothing left.

Rest is not escape, it’s preparation and faithfulness.

So here is your invitation for this week. This is not a challenge or goal, but a gentle and open-handed invitation.

What if, just for today, you practiced enough?

Put something down unfinished. Say no to one thing that isn’t yours to carry. Sit in silence for five minutes without a podcast or a phone (although the Centering Prayer app is a wonderful tool) or a purpose. Name one thing you did well - not everything, just one. Rest first. Choose silence gently.

You are enough, right now, exactly as you are.

The Beloved loves and sees you.

With heart, Dedra

Journal Prompt

Where does “not enough” show up loudest in your life right now? Is it in your work, your relationships, your spiritual life, your body? And what would it feel like to lay even one thing down and simply rest in the truth that you are already enough?

If you read this week’s free post on what each Enneagram type needs right now, you already know that stress has a way of pulling us into our most familiar patterns. But here’s something I want to share with you that I find absolutely fascinating, not to mention genuinely useful.

The Enneagram doesn’t just describe nine different personalities. It describes three fundamentally different ways of moving through the world. Three centers of intelligence. Three places in the body where wisdom actually lives.

And here’s the thing — stress doesn’t just show up in our thoughts or our behaviors. It shows up in our bodies first. Before we can name it, before we even know it’s there.

The Teaching: Head, Heart and Body

The nine Enneagram types are divided into three groups, called the Centers of Intelligence. Each center has its own way of taking in the world, its own gifts, and its own particular flavor of stress. You probably already know which one sounds most like you. But let’s take a look.

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There is a lot being asked of us right now. A lot is being asked of our hearts, our nervous systems, our faith. When life gets heavy, we don’t naturally rise to our best selves. We tend to reach for our most familiar ones :: the defended, protected versions we developed long ago to help us survive.

The Enneagram teaches us that each type has a particular way of showing up in the world and a particular way of taking the world in. It also shows us that we each have a unique way of responding to stress. We grab a particular armor and put in on, instead of choosing self awareness and curiosity. Right now, for many of us, safety feels very uncertain. (The welcome prayer keeps whispering in my ear… )

So before I offer what each type needs, I want to say this first:

Where ever you are in your type - it makes sense. You make sense. We all make sense.

The goal isn’t to stop the armor from going up. The goal is to notice it gentle curiosity, without judgment, and offer yourself something more aligned.

Here is what your type might need right now.

Type 1 — The Reformer

Under stress, Ones can become rigid and exhausted :: carrying the weight of everything that is wrong with the world and feeling personally responsible for fixing most of it. The inner critic gets louder. Rest feels impossible when so much needs to be corrected or done.

What you need right now: Permission to put down the burden of fixing or doing, even briefly. You are not responsible for holding the world together. The Sacred is still at work even when you rest. Especially when you rest and enjoy life!

Type 2 — The Helper

Under stress, Twos give and give until there is absolutely nothing left and then feel quietly resentful that no one noticed the cost. In stress, the impulse to care for everyone else intensifies, while the capacity or willingness to receive care quietly disappears.

What you need right now: Let someone tend to you for a change. Your needs are not an inconvenience. They are holy. You cannot pour from empty pitcher and you matter as much as the people you love and are called to care for.

Type 3 — The Achiever

Under stress, Threes move faster. Their support center is thinking/doing, so bydoing more, producing more, achieving more it’s as if productivity could possibly outrun the anxiety underneath. The image stays polished even when the interior is quietly (or not so quietly) falling apart.

What you need right now: Slow down long enough to feel what you’re actually feeling. Process through your emotions. You are not what you produce or how productive you are. The Beloved sees you, the real you, beneath the accomplishments and facade and the Beloved loves what is there.

Type 4 — The Individualist

Under stress, Fours can sink into the feeling that they alone carry the weight of this grief that no one truly understands the intensity of what they feel. The beauty and pain of the world hits them harder than most, and right now the world is offering a great deal of both.

What you need right now: To be reminded that your sensitivity is a gift, not a burden and that you don’t have to carry the world’s sorrow alone. You are seen. You are not too much. Come up for air when you need to. Take a nature walk and notice all the little beauties.

Type 5 — The Investigator

Under stress, Fives disappear into their minds, not out of indifference, but out of a deep need to understand before they can engage. Right now the world is offering more questions than answers, which can keep a Five perpetually in research mode and rarely at rest.

What you need right now: Close some tabs, literally and metaphorically. You don’t have to understand everything to be okay. Come out of your head and back into your body. One breath. One moment. That is enough data for right now.

Type 6 — The Loyalist

Sixes scan for danger when they are under stress. They run through worst-case scenarios, questioning who and what can be trusted, bracing for what might go wrong next. In a world that is genuinely offering new things to worry about every week, this is an exhausting place to live.

What you need right now: An anchor. Something faithful and true that has held before and will hold again. You are not alone in this. You are allowed to set down your watchfulness, even for a moment. You don’t have to stay on guard every minute. The Sacred is keeping watch too.

Type 7 — The Enthusiast

Under stress, Sevens reframe, pivot, and look for the silver lining. Sometimes they bypass real pain in the rush to find something better to focus on. The relentless optimism can be a gift, but it can also be a way of avoiding what genuinely needs to be grieved.

What you need right now: Stay in the room with what is hard, just a little longer. You don’t have to fix the feeling or find the bright side. Sometimes the most faithful thing is simply to sit with what is true. You are brave enough for that.

Type 8 — The Challenger

Eights get bigger under stress. They get more forceful, more protective, more ready to fight for what is right. In a world with genuine injustice and real threats, that fire is needed and welcomed. But it can also become armor that keeps tenderness out.

What you need right now: Let your softness show, at least to someone safe. Your strength is a gift. So is your heart. The world needs both from you right now, and you don’t have to carry it all alone.

Type 9 — The Peacemaker

Under stress, Nines can disappear into numbing :: scrolling, sleeping, merging with the noise rather than engaging with it :: anything to avoid the discomfort of conflict and uncertainty. In a world this loud and fractured, the pull toward checked-out peace is strong.

What you need right now: Remember that your presence truly matters. Your voice matters. Your particular way of seeing and holding things together is a gift the world genuinely needs. Wake up to yourself, gently without force and just be present. We need you here.

Whatever your type, the invitation is the same. Notice without judgment. That’s the whole practice.

The Sacred sees you clearly your patterns, your armor, your particular way of moving through the world and She loves what she sees. Not the polished version. Not the defended version. The real one.

You are beloved. You are enough. And you certainly are not alone in this.

With heart, Dedra

Journal Prompt

How has stress been showing up in you lately - in your body, your patterns, your relationships? And what does you actually need right now, not what you think you should need, but what would genuinely bring you home to yourself?

Because knowing that stillness is resistance is one thing. Actually practicing it - in the middle of a loud, frightening, demanding life - is another thing entirely.

So this week I want to offer you three things: a teaching, a practice, and a prayer. Something you can actually use, not just think about.

A Teaching: What the Desert Mothers Knew

The desert mothers - the Ammas - were some of the earliest contemplative teachers in the Christian tradition. Women like Amma Syncletica, Amma Sarah, and Amma Theodora left the cities of the Roman Empire in the third and fourth centuries and went into the wilderness to pray, to fast, and to find God in the silence.

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I want to say that clearly, because I think many of us have been made to feel otherwise. That stepping back from the noise is a luxury. That tending our inner life while the world is on fire is selfish. If we’re not constantly consuming, reacting, and posting our outrage, we aren’t paying attention.

But I want to offer a different way of seeing this.

What if choosing quiet - deliberately, intentionally, on purpose - is one of the most faithful things we can do right now?

The world is loud in ways that feel new and relentless. The headlines arrive before we’ve finished our coffee. The algorithm knows exactly which fears to feed and exactly when to feed them. And for those of us whose faith is rooted in mercy, in welcome, in love that actually costs something - watching what is being done in the name of God right now is its own particular kind of exhaustion.

It would be easy to be consumed by it. And if you have been, I understand completely.

But here is what the mystics knew. Here is what the desert mothers and fathers discovered when they walked away from the noise of empire and into the wilderness:

When the world gets loud, the faithful get still. When the world gets loud, those that yearn deeply for connection, have to practice silence.

Not silent. There is an important difference. Stillness is not indifference. It is not looking away from suffering or pretending the hard things aren’t hard. The desert mothers and fathers were some of the most prophetic voices of their time - precisely because they were rooted deeply enough in the Sacred to speak from love rather than fear. To act from presence rather than panic.

That kind of rootedness doesn’t happen by accident. It is chosen. Practiced. Returned to again and again, especially when everything in the culture is pulling us away from it.

This is why I choose quiet on purpose.

Not because the world doesn’t matter. Because it does - deeply, achingly - and I want to show up for it from the truest, most grounded version of myself I can find. Not the reactive version. Not the exhausted version. Not the version that has been so saturated with bad news and energy that she has nothing left to offer anyone.

The contemplative life isn’t an escape from the world. It is the very thing that makes it possible to stay present to the world without being destroyed by it.

The Beloved modeled this. In the midst of a brutal occupation, surrounded by suffering and injustice, the Christ I follow regularly withdrew to quiet places. Not to avoid the pain. But to stay rooted enough in Love to return to it.

We are allowed to do the same.

Your quiet is not nothing.

It is not privilege. It is not passivity. It is resistance - the slow, faithful, countercultural kind that doesn’t make headlines but changes everything from the inside out.

It is how you stay whole enough to be of use to anyone.

It is how you remember who you are when the world is doing everything it can to make you forget.

Choose it on purpose. Protect it. Return to it when you lose it. And know that in the choosing, you are participating in something ancient and true and deeply, quietly powerful.

— Dedra

Journal Prompt Where does stillness feel like resistance in your life right now? Where does the noise feel loudest, and what would it mean to choose quiet there, even briefly?

Life does that. It pulls us toward obligation, toward urgency, toward everyone else’s needs and everyone else’s crises - and boy are there so many crises right now. The news alone can take everything out of you if you let it. (part of the reason I took social media apps off my phone) And even if you’ve learned not to let it, the weight of this moment still finds its way in. Through conversations, through the faces of people you love, through the low hum of anxiety that never quite goes away.

So if you’ve drifted away from yourself lately - from your center, from your practice, from the quiet place where you can remember who you are - I want you to hear this first:

You don’t need to explain where you’ve been.

The Sacred isn’t standing at the door with a clipboard, tracking your absences. The Beloved doesn’t love you less because life got loud and you got pulled away. There is no catching up required. There is only this moment, and the small, quiet choice to take one step back toward yourself.

That step is enough.

This is something the Enneagram has taught me - and keeps teaching me, honestly. Our patterns of striving, withdrawing, performing, or people-pleasing aren’t character flaws. They are strategies. Brilliant, adaptive strategies we developed to survive the particular landscape of our lives. When the world gets destabilizing - and it is destabilizing right now in ways that feel new every day, every week - those strategies kick into overdrive. We don’t become worse versions of ourselves under stress. We become more defended versions of ourselves.

The one who strives works harder. The one who withdraws goes quieter. The one who performs tries to look like everything is fine. The one who keeps the peace finds new ways to disappear.

None of this is failure. All of it is human. And awareness, the gentle, non-judgmental kind, is always the first and healthiest step home.

Notice. Without shame. That’s the whole practice.

Coming back to yourself doesn’t require a grand gesture or a dramatic recommitment. It doesn’t require a new morning routine or a retreat or finally getting your life together. It just requires a willingness to return : gently, the way you’d welcome a friend who’d been away for a while.

What’s one small thing that makes you feel like yourself again? Not productive. Not impressive. Just you.

For some people it’s a walk without a podcast. For others it’s five minutes of actual silence. A cup of coffee made and sipped slowly in the sunshine. A prayer that’s just one word, breathed in and out. A journal page that nobody will ever read.

These things are not small. In a world that is loud and urgent and frightening, tending to your inner life is some of the most important work you can do. Not instead of engaging with the world - but so that when you do, you come from a place of love rather than fear. Presence rather than panic.

The contemplative life isn’t about leaving the world behind.

It’s about learning to be in it without being consumed by it.

You are allowed to come back. To yourself, to this practice, to the quiet that has been waiting for you without judgment.

Take one small step. That’s all.

I’ll meet you there.

with heart,

Dedra

Journal Prompt

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine what it might feel like to return to yourself. No explanation needed, no apology required. What does that feel like in your body? In your spirit?

Now, is there one small step - however tiny - that could move you toward that feeling today? Not to fix anything. Not to catch up. Just one small movement toward home.

Beginning is full of energy and possibility. Returning requires something quieter — a willingness to simply show up, without fanfare, without needing to explain where we’ve been.

So here I am. Returning.

And if you’re reading this, I imagine you may be finding your own way back too. Back to yourself. Back to what matters. Back to the quiet beneath the noise — and there is so much noise right now.

If you’ve been paying attention to the world lately, you know the weight of this moment. Many of us are grieving things we don’t have words for yet. Afraid of things we can’t fully name. And for those of us whose faith is rooted in mercy, in welcome, in love that actually costs something — this is a heavy moment. Watching faith wielded as a weapon is its own kind of grief.

That is not the Sacred I know.

The One I follow washed feet. Touched the untouchable. Sat with the ones everyone else walked past. Quieter than the headlines. More interested in the overlooked than the powerful. The Beloved — the one who said blessed are the merciful, blessed are the peacemakers — is still here. Still speaking. Still inviting us into something gentler and truer than what we see on the news.

This is exactly where spiritual direction has always lived. Not above the fray. Not pretending the hard things aren’t hard. But present — finding the sacred thread that runs through even the most disorienting seasons. Helping us remember who we are, and whose we are, when the world makes it very hard to think clearly.

The contemplative life isn’t about leaving the world behind. It’s about learning to be in it without being consumed by it.

That’s what The Mercy Circle is for.

In the weeks ahead, we’ll make space for honest reflection without judgment. We’ll use the Enneagram as a compassionate mirror — not to fix ourselves, but to remember ourselves. We’ll explore what it means to build a quiet, intentional life on purpose. Not as escape, but as faithfulness.

You are welcome here exactly as you are — doubting, weary, hopeful, searching. All of it belongs.

I’m so glad you’re here.

— Dedra

Journal Prompt

What does following the Sacred feel like to you right now — in your own quiet, interior life — beneath all the noise of what you’re seeing in the world?