Listening to Sacred Stillness: When We Are Too Tired to Listen

When We Are Too Tired to Listen

I believe it is important for us to follow our contemplative practices regularly. The practices themselves help us learn how to be open to the sacred stillness within us and around us. Our contemplative practices help form a framework for spiritual life. Even when we are too tired to listen.

It helps us when our intentional practices become habits and we find ourselves at home in them. When we begin a new spiritual practice it can be a challenge for us to sustain a regular schedule until the practice becomes a habit.

Our goal, though, is not to become perfect, never missing a day or losing our focus. Contemplative parties are not about being perfect, or about competing with other contemplative people. It is not about being the best contemplative we know.

What is essential to our practices is when they reflect our true selves and our true relationship to the sacred. We are not practicing to earn spiritual points or a good grade, or to show we are holier than anyone else.

Contemplative practices are different forms of prayer, of being in union with spiritual life. It is more than simply listing the things we want God to do for us like a shopping list.

We practice being open to the presence and action of God’s spiritual life within us. Our practice helps us learn to recognize spiritual life in the stillness of the world around us.

Contemplative practices are about paying attention and recognizing what is sacred in the stillness we experience. We listen and begin to appreciate the sacredness of the stillness within us and around us in new ways.

There are times, though, when we get tired. It is difficult to pay attention, to listen to sacred stillness when we need rest.

Sometimes We Are Too Tired to Listen

Some of us like to believe there is a wide separation between our physical lives and spiritual life. We tend to observe spiritual life as something ethereal, conceptual, philosophical. Physical life seems more immediate, more tangible, more real.

It is easy for us to divide spiritual life, which we see happening in our minds or our hearts, from the physical life happening in our bodies.

Our minds and hearts and bodies, our physical lives and spiritual life, are integrated. It is impossible for us to understand one without the other.

Spiritual life can feel distant when we are too tired to listen. It is a challenge for us to pay attention or to recognize sacredness when our eyes are struggling to stay open. Physical life and spiritual life fit together in us.

Even when we realize we have an opportunity to spend time listen reflectively it seems like too much effort. We continue letting our minds work through our thoughts. Thinking and analyzing, organizing and ordering have become habits we cannot set aside.

It is as if a wall separates us from listening to sacred stillness and we do not have the energy we need to find a way around it.

We might believe it would help us, and might even want to, but listening seems to take too much effort.

Some of us spend so much of our time and strength struggling and a contemplative practice seems like one more struggle.

What do we do when we are too tired to listen?

I do not believe it is helpful to build a contemplative practice on a base of guilt or duty or expectations. My own practices have helped me discard those motivations.

We can find other reasons to listen to sacred stillness.

When We Are Too Tired to Stay Awake

There have been times when I decided I was going to practice listening no matter how tired I felt. What often happens to me is my listening practice becomes a napping practice.

I know people who believe when we fall asleep while we are listening we need to continue our practice after we wake up. Other people tell me we are so open while we are asleep the time counts as part of our listening.

It seems to me when we cannot stay awake we need rest at least as much as we need listening to sacred stillness. We fill our lives with noise and distractions, and we need to learn to let go. Some of us are so exhausted we fall asleep when we begin to listen to sacred stillness. The stillness draws us in and gives us opportunities to rest and be restored.

We might assume our lives are stretched between the poles of distraction and exhaustion. It is easy for us to forget how significant sacred stillness and spiritual life are in our lives.

Contemplative practices are how we teach ourselves to remember what spiritual life is all about.

Are We Too Tired to Listen to Anyone?

As we practice listening to sacred stillness we begin to recognize we have not been listening well at all, to anyone. We have taught ourselves how not to listen to stillness, how not to listen to our family and friends, our colleagues, even ourselves.

Many of us feel we are working as hard as we can to meet goals and standards and expectations. We do not have the energy to listen, to pay attention, to be open. Some of us exhaust ourselves in trying to do everything.

Spiritual life does not require us to deny who we really are. Our spiritual journey is a voyage of discovering ourselves, of living the lives we are intended to live.

We are not supposed to exhaust ourselves in passing tests or meeting expectations. Spiritual life is a relationship between our true selves and someone sacred.

Our lives are not ordeals we need to endure or walls we need to climb.

We need to get the rest we require and prepare ourselves to practice listening to sacred stillness.

How often are we too tired to listen today?

Who will we be too tired to listen to this week?

[Image by fltmech98]

Greg Richardson is a spiritual director in Southern California. He is a recovering assistant district attorney and associate university professor, and is a lay Oblate with New Camaldoli Hermitage near Big Sur, California. Greg’s website is StrategicMonk.com and his email address is [email protected].