In this post: I’ll share a listening practice, and then I’m going to invite you to join me for the next month, for about two-minutes every day, to practice listening with me.
The thing we’re listening for is a simple note from the loving voice of wisdom. That voice is part intuition and part divine prompting, and it is always eager to whisper sweet guidance to any and every quiet and attentive heart.
At the end of this post I’ll let you know how you can follow along, and even participate.
Last week when I wrote I want my attention back, I told you about a few practices that I do in order to subvert the things that distract me from my glorious-god-given-sacred-as-all-get-out capacity to pay attention. Some of the practices not only subvert distractions, but also strengthen that same capacity to pay attention.
I began one of those practices about a month after my daughter was born.
What led to it was one of those simple follow-your-gut-and-Google-it moments when I heard a friend say something about “two way prayer”.
Cautionary side note about Googling things: Outsourcing your curiosity to search engines and AI for immediate—and fleeting—intellectual satiation, is one of the things that tends to atrophy our capacity to pay attention. Our attention appreciates mystery, and, in fact, thrives on wonder. We have a primal need that often goes unmet. It is the need to wonder about things long enough to let our hearts and minds be massaged by the experience of not always knowing.
Even so, I let my curiosity roam. I searched out two way prayer. I listened to a couple of podcasts. And I learned about Elizabeth Gilbert’s stunning community, here on Substack, of two way pray-ers out there writing letters to love.
And I took what I learned and I adopted and adapted the practice for myself, giving it the shape I needed it to have in order to practice it consistently in the context of my daily living.
Side note: Read that last line over again. And next time you come across something you admire that someone else is doing, something that you want to weave into your life, consider that you might very well need to reshape it in order for it to weave well into your life. Redesign the thing so that it works for you. Don’t muscle someone else’s practices into your life. Give yourself a shot at success by making things easier—I’m not kidding. Make things easier and then do them that way consistently, rather than making things harder than they need to be and then quitting when they prove to be, well… too hard.
My practice of two way prayer was born.
This is what I do:
* I open my notebook to a blank page and write the date and this question at the top of the page: “What would you have me know today?”
* I set the notebook aside.
* I pick up a book that I suspect has some wisdom in it. A book of poetry, or some other sacred text, for example.
* I read, more or less at random, until something from the page snags on my heart. It doesn’t usually take much more than a few minutes, if that.
* I stop reading.
* I pick up my notebook and write out the line that snagged my heart.
* Then I listen for the loving voice of wisdom and I write down the message that it has for me—which is, of course, always a blend of universal wisdom and my own personal inner knowing. And it is always rooted in care for who I am as a beloved being who longs to generously, wildly, daily give myself to this world. It’s often quite direct, and it never fills more than a page.
That’s the practice. Now, your invitation.
Beginning on Monday, for five weeks, five days a week, I’m going to share with you a portion of what the voice of wisdom has been offering me day-to-day. Some of them will resonate. Some of them may not. None of them will take more than a minute or two for you to engage.
Here are four ways you can participate, each one deepening on the last:
* Read along via Substack. (Or listen via podcast.)
* Comment regularly—when it resonates and when it doesn’t—with the insight that you’re gleaning about the wisdom that I’m gleaning.
* Adopt (and, as needed, reshape) the two way prayer practice for yourself, and weave it into your life.
* Invite two friends to join you in doing any of the above.
See you on Monday for day one of paying attention to the loving voice of wisdom.
