This was the moment when I really felt it: this.
“This is bliss.”
“This is what matters most.”
Why?
Because it was a combination of what’s important to me and how my soul glows.
These moments used to be fewer and farther in between. Accidental connections to my truest nature. I wanted more.
Nowadays, I have found the words to define my personal guidelines for living a whole life. Living wholly and soulfully. Not accidental, but intentional.
That doesn’t mean life is perfect. Far from it.
I am always practicing and I have a light to guide the way: my personal guidelines for the day-to-day and my inner guide for when things get really tricky.
Everyone has this light, though not everyone has the words.
How does one learn what matters most?
By preparing for the answers: keeping sacred space, knowing your inner guide and asking the big questions, and then, living into them.
Start with Perspective
In one of my favorite movies, About Time, the lead character can time travel.
He doesn’t need a machine like Bill & Ted. He can just close his eyes, focus on a moment, and go there.
The most powerful thing he discovers? He has do-overs.
He can go back and re-do every day, savoring the moments:
- Acknowledging the clerk at the market with a smile.
- Noticing the beautiful windows as he’s running to catch his train.
- Greeting his crying, messy child after work.
Eventually, he stops time traveling and literally only lives in the present.
Feel free to stop reading and go stream it (it’s so good).
Then, you can come back to this post and learn about how to live this way.
Why isn’t life only about what really matters?
According to the movie, life is only about these precious moments—what really matters—it’s just about our perspective on it.
Yes, and, you might be thinking.
There’s actually a lot in our lives that doesn’t matter. More so for some people than others.
How do we know what does and doesn’t matter?
“To discern what is truly essential we need space to think, time to look and listen, permission to play, wisdom to sleep, and the discipline to apply highly selective criteria to the choices we make. Ironically in [our] culture these things—space, listening, playing, sleeping and selecting—can be seen as trivial distractions,” wrote Greg McKweon in Essentialism about the disciplined pursuit of less.
How do we find space and time and permission and wisdom?
We practice.
Keeping Sacred Space
I find the best time for me to practice creating sacred space is when I’m backpacking, when I’m on retreat and when I observe Sabbath, my “weekly retreat.”
In his book, Sabbath, Muller writes, “Sabbath is an incubator for wisdom. When we allow the rush and pressure of our days to fall away, even for a short period of time, we are able to discern the essential truth of what lies before us.”
Poet Wendell Berry, who has a longstanding practice of Sabbath, wrote:
During the Buddhist Sabbath, lay people and monks gather to recite the precepts that govern their practice. There are hundreds of these precepts for monks, concerning everything from how you meditate to how you eat your food and how you wash your bowl.
But more than the specific precepts, it is a time to reiterate what is ultimately important, sacred. Whether the Eightfold Path of Buddhism, the Five Pillars of Islam, or the Ten Commandments, most religions consider certain precepts to be guiding lights to help us find our way through darker times.
Berry often writes poetry about what’s ultimately important, sacred, on the Sabbath. There is a sense of divine inspiration in his observations of the world and its interconnectedness.
“Sabbath is a time when we retreat from the illusion of our own indispensability. We are important in that we are part of something larger,” adds Muller.
Something larger that’s often hard to comprehend without some guidance.
Knowing Your Inner Guide
“Whether we choose spirituality or religion, we need a system of experiences and beliefs that is true to our own experience. We must once again look at our own lives and discover what we already know,” says Cecile Andrews, author of The Circle of Simplicity: The Return to the Good Life.
Anthropology Professor Roger Walsh wrote:
“We know more than we know we know. The inner source has been called by many names: for example, the Hindu’s “inner guru,” the Tibetan Buddhist’s “personal diety,” the Christian Quaker’s “still small voice within,” or the psychologist’s “higher self.” Whatever the name, the implications are the same. We have within us remarkable wisdom that will guide and help us if we learn how to recognize and draw on it.”
Just that simple.
Ultimately, yes, and…
From my experience the learning how to recognize [and listen] and draw on it, is a lifelong quest for the monks and us lay people alike.
Over the years, I’ve come to know and listen to this.
My inner guide is the filter for what is true to me, at any given time, on my path.
As I’ve quieted and settled what Walsh describes as “the outer self” of surface emotions, habits and personality, and then “the inner self” of secret hopes and fears, self-image and beliefs, the listening grew easier, the voice grew louder and clearer.
This so-called voice lies within our “deep self,” or soul.
For some this conversation comes through deep, committed practices with meditation or yoga.
For me this conversation comes mainly through intentional practices of:
- Going on a personal retreat almost every season from 2007-2017, as well as solo backpacking trips since 2015.
- Digesting and listening each week on Sabbath since 2015. In the absence of work, of plans, of internet, of emotions and habit, and of self-image, I hang out with my soul.
It is in these sacred spaces and times when I’ve become acquainted with my inner guide, my deep self, my still small voice within.
It’s always been there, I just hadn’t asked or hadn’t really listened before.
Asking the Big Questions
Listening starts with asking. The curiosity to receive whatever shows up.
Questions like:
- What inspires me?
- What is it like when I’m “in my element”?
- What is love?
- What do I believe?
- What do I fear?
- What’s always been important to me?
- What connects me to Source?
- When do I feel whole?
I’ve been amazed at how often it’s in the most minuscule moment of awe, perhaps examining a worm slithering through the soil, that my inner guide reveals my deepest knowing, the answers to these questions.
“Sabbath honors this quality of not knowing, an open receptivity of mind essential for allowing things to speak to us from where they are,” wrote Muller.
It is a lifelong conversation to recognize our own wisdom.
There is a difference between knowledge and wisdom.
In Essential Spirituality, Dr. Walsh said:
Knowledge informs us, wisdom transforms us.
Knowledge is something we have, wisdom is something we must become.
Knowledge is expressed in words, wisdom in our lives.
Knowledge empowers, wisdom empowers and enlightens.
Wisdom is our deepest knowing.
As such, often our most heartfelt questions are more of a feeling than a thought.
They don’t always formulate into neat, little sentences.
Because it’s not about figuring things out. That’s knowledge.
This is about feeling things out as our being connects the dots and then the answer emerges.
Wisdom.
The wisdom, courage, and clarity we need are already embedded in creation—in nature, in the world, in our lives. The solution is already alive in the problem. Thus, our work is not always to push and strive and struggle. Often we have only to be still, and we will know, wrote Muller.
The Tao Te Ching asks us:
Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?
In other words, until the right answer arises by itself?
Moments Matter Most
Once you start having the conversation, you can discern what is truly essential, what matters most, as McKweon describes.
You’ll know what is important to you and how your soul glows.
You’ll know what this feels like and you’ll be able to start putting the words together to define your personal guidelines for living a whole life.
Once you name it, you can live it even more intentionally. Remembering and practicing these fundamental precepts each week, they become your every day.
“When I am fully aware of clouds moving, birds trilling, insects buzzing and downy feathers floating on the still lake, I lean into the portal from this moment, beyond next week, and into the grand scale of things, weighing the collection of meaningful moments holding my life together,” wrote Shelly Miller.
This is living life to the fullest.
Join others from around the country in the next Sabbath Course as we explore and practice together, inspired by an interfaith, personal approach to this universal tradition. This 7-week course includes fun weekly activities, weekly community gatherings online and your own practice. You’ll experience what students describe as a “positive and significant impact on my personal growth and spiritual exploration.”