Grounding + Becoming
A Spacious Wisdom Cross-Pollination
There is a current between knowing and unknowing. It will carry you.
Each one is troubled by the ultimate questions. And no one else’s answer can satisfy the hunger in your heart. The beauty of great questions is how they dwell differently in each mind, how they root deeper than all the surface chatter and image. How they continually disturb. Your deep questions grow quickly restless in the artificial clay of received opinion or stagnant thought, and if you avoid this disturbance and try to quell these questions, it will cost you all your peace of mind. Sooner or later, every one of us must come to our contemplative longing and gain either the courage, the recklessness to begin our own contemplative journey.
-John O’Donohue
What Does It Mean to Go Slow?
Explore what it means to go slow with this evocative image collage. What does it stir in you?
Contemplative Curiosity: Teilhard de Chardin on Truth Setting the World Ablaze
What do you notice and wonder as you read this Pierre Teilhard de Chardin quote on the way truth spreads.
We Are Called to Nurture a Just and Loving World
This practice invites you to engage with evocative images to listen with curiosity for inner resonance and resistance.
Core State Meditation: Holy/Hurt Podcast
This lovely meditation by Dr. Hillary McBride invites us to visit this place John O’Donohue wrote about in the quote above.
Something is Happening That Can’t Be Explained
Practice listening to your inner wisdom by contemplating an evocative image and sensing what arises in you.
Make Way for a Breath of Fresh Air
Sometimes an image or phrase can help us gently help us excavate this wisdom (like an archaeologist, not a construction worker!). Here’s a practice to experiment with.
Contemplative Curiosity: Praying Our Experiences
Praying our experiences means being open to seeing ourselves as we are. This requires an awareness and an honesty that will root us in our actual daily life.
Contemplative Curiosity: Mary Oliver on Praying
What does Mary Oliver’s instruction on prayer evoke in you? Here’s an invitation to engage with her words contemplatively.
It Can Renew Your Faith in the World
Sometimes an image or phrase can help us gently help us excavate this wisdom (like an archaeologist, not a construction worker!). Here’s a practice to experiment with.
Contemplative Curiosity: John O’Donohue on Beauty
“The human soul is hungry for beauty; we seek it out everywhere…”
Contemplative Curiosity: Dr. Gerald May on Making Friends with Mystery
When we were children, most of us were good friends with mystery. The world was full of it and we loved it. Then as we grew older, we slowly accepted the indoctrination that mystery exists only to be solved.
Contemplative Curiosity: John O’Donohue on Awakening to Your Life
“…the most trustable form of soul balance is when you trust it to happen of itself.”
Felt Sense: A tool for noticing + naming our body’s wisdom
Here’s a tool I use in my life and my trauma-informed spiritual direction practice often. Naming our felt sense of something helps us connect with the wisdom of our body.
Sunrise/Sunset: A Practice for Awakening a Weary Soul
Join the Earth’s rhythms as a reset for your soul, inspired by John O’Donohue.