Posts

What Silence Does That Words Cannot

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Some things will not arrive until we stop talking.

Watch what happens in almost any conversation when the talking stops. Three seconds go by. Then four. Somebody laughs a little, or changes the subject, or asks a question nobody needed answered. We are remarkably good at not letting a silence stand.

I have spent a lot of years now sitting with people in rooms where silence is the point — spiritual direction, retreats, bedsides. And the thing I keep learning is this: silence is not the absence of something. It is a presence with its own work to do. There are things it accomplishes that no amount of good language ever will.

Silence is an event, not a gap

The body seems to know this before we do. In a study at the University of Pavia, researchers tracked heart rate and blood pressure while people listened to a sequence of musical tracks, with two-minute silences inserted between them. Slower music was more relaxing than fast, which you would expect. But the deepest drop in heart rate and blood pressure did not come from any of the music. It came during the silent pauses in between (Bernardi et al., 2006). The silence was not a nothing between the somethings. Physiologically, it was the most restorative part of the whole sequence.

There is even a hint that silence builds something. A 2013 study found that mice given two hours a day of near-total quiet showed more new cells maturing into neurons in the hippocampus than mice exposed to music, white noise, or even their own pup calls (Kirste et al., 2013). It was mice, and it did not test memory or humans, so I would not lean on it too hard. But I notice that the one condition the researchers assumed was the control — the empty one, the nothing — turned out to be the one doing the most.

TRY THIS — Two minutes, nothing added

Set a timer for two minutes. Put the phone in another room. Do not put on music, not even the calm kind, and do not give yourself anything to accomplish.

Sit. Let the first wave of restlessness come, because it will, usually around forty seconds. Do not fix it. Just stay until the timer goes.

Afterward, notice one thing: what showed up in you once nothing else was being added?

The season I had no words

There was a season in my life when I had no words. Not fewer words — none.

I would sit and gaze off into the distance for long stretches. The people closest to me kept asking the same question: what is wrong? It was a fair question. But the honest answer was that nothing was wrong. I was simply not in a place to use words. Something in me had gone quiet, and it was not a malfunction. It was a passage.

I know now to call that a liminal space — one of those thresholds where the old way of being has ended and the new one has not arrived yet. At the time I only knew I had nothing to say and no desire to manufacture anything.

Here is what I did not expect. When I came out the other side, I did not go back to how I had talked before. My whole way of communicating had changed. I came out using about a third of the words I used to use.

Silence had not taken something from me. It had taken something out of me.

Why we fill it

We fill silence because it is uncomfortable, and because most of us were trained to believe that helping means saying something. When someone is in pain in front of us, speech feels like action and silence feels like abandonment. So we offer the reassurance, the reframe, the story about our cousin who went through the same thing. Almost always, we are managing our own discomfort and calling it care.

The desert monastics understood the cost of this. They had a word — hesychia, stillness — and they treated it as a discipline rather than a mood. When a young monk came looking for wisdom, Abba Moses did not give him a teaching. He said: go sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything. That is a strange kind of answer unless you have discovered that some truths will not be told to you. They have to surface on their own, in conditions quiet enough for them to come up.

The second sentence

Here is the most practical thing I know about silence, and it has changed more conversations for me than any technique. When a person finishes speaking and you do not rush in, they very often say something else. And the second sentence is frequently the true one.

The first sentence is the prepared one — the summary they brought with them, the version they have told before. The second one, the one that only comes if you leave room, is where the actual thing lives. I have watched it happen hundreds of times. People are not withholding. They simply have not reached it yet, and our hurry to respond keeps them from ever getting there.

TRY THIS — The count of three

In your next real conversation, when the other person stops talking, silently count three before you say anything. That is all.

It will feel much longer than three seconds. Resist the urge to nod it away or fill it with “mmm.”

Watch what happens. Often they will keep going — and what comes next will be the part that mattered.

What words could not hold

I have sat with a lot of people who had just lost someone.

Early on I thought my job in that room was to find the right thing to say. I would search for it the whole time I was sitting there — some sentence that would make the loss make sense, or at least make it lighter. I never found one. There is no such sentence. I have looked.

What I learned, slowly and mostly by failing at the other thing, is that words do not help in that room nearly as much as presence does. So now I sit. I do not explain the loss, or locate a meaning in it, or reach for anything about a better place. I sit, and I stay longer than is comfortable, and I let the silence be as large as the thing that happened.

Nobody has ever thanked me for what I said at a time like that. People have thanked me for staying.

Some things are too large for sentences

There is an old strand of theology called the apophatic way, and its claim is bracing: that the most important realities can be more truthfully approached by what we do not say about them than by what we do. Every word we put on something that large also puts a fence around it. Say God is light and you have said something true, and you have also quietly excluded everything light is not.

Grief works the same way. So does awe. So does love, past a certain depth. This is why the worst thing said at a funeral is almost always a sentence, and the best thing is almost always a presence — someone who came, and sat, and did not explain anything. Words divide and define, which is exactly what makes them useful and exactly what makes them too small for some rooms. Silence can hold what language has to cut into pieces.

What Silence Does That Words Cannot Reflection Sheet

An ordinary discipline

None of this requires a monastery. It requires a willingness to be, for a few seconds at a time, less useful than you would like to be. Two minutes with nothing added. Three seconds before you answer. A drive with the radio off. A meal where nobody narrates. These are small, and they are not easy, and they will show you things.

Because the question underneath all of it is not whether silence is pleasant. It is whether there is something trying to reach you that cannot get through the noise — including the noise you are making. There usually is. It has been waiting, patiently, for you to stop talking long enough to hear it.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Bernardi, Porta & Sleight (2006) — cardiovascular and respiratory effects of music and silence: Circulation / Heart

Kirste et al. (2013) — “Is silence golden?” hippocampal neurogenesis in mice: PubMed

Abba Moses, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers; the apophatic tradition.

Thin Places That You Don’t Notice

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Thin Places

The thinnest ground you will ever stand on is probably within a mile of your bed.

It is a Tuesday. You are standing at the kitchen sink with your hands in the warm water, or sitting on the back steps while the light goes long and gold, or in the chair where you always sit, and the house is quiet in a way it usually is not. Nothing happens. Nothing you could put in a report. And yet for a moment the ordinary goes quietly transparent, and you have the distinct sense that you are not alone in the room — that the world has worn thin right here, over the sink, on a Tuesday.

The Celtic Christians had a name for that: a thin place. The idea is that the usual distance between heaven and earth — between the material and the spiritual, the seen and the unseen — sometimes narrows almost to nothing. There is an old Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but that in the thin places the distance is smaller still.

Yes, there are famous ones. That is not the point.

You may have heard the phrase attached to islands. George MacLeod, who refounded the Iona Community on that windswept Scottish island, is remembered for calling Iona “a thin place where only tissue paper separates the material from the spiritual” (The Living Church). Pilgrims say similar things about Lindisfarne, about Skellig Michael out in the Atlantic, about certain holy wells and standing stones. All of it is true, and if you ever get to stand on that kind of ground, go.

But if thin places are mostly islands off the coast of Scotland, then thin places are for people with money and vacation time, and that cannot be what the Celts meant. It is not, in fact, what they meant at all.

The Celts blessed the kitchen

Look at what they actually prayed. In the Carmina Gadelica — the great collection of Gaelic prayers and blessings that Alexander Carmichael gathered from Highland and Hebridean households in the 1800s — you find blessings for kindling the fire in the morning and for smooring it, banking the coals, at night. Blessings for milking the cow. For walking out. For making the bed and lying down in it (Carmina Gadelica). These were not pilgrims on a holy island. They were farmers and fishermen and tired women with cold hands, blessing the hearth in their own kitchens before dawn.

Which means the tradition we are borrowing from was never mainly about famous places. It was about the hearth. The doorway. The byre. The work of your own hands on an ordinary morning. They assumed the veil was thin right where they were standing, and they talked to God accordingly — not on retreat, but while lifting the peat.

The night on the back steps with Lincoln

One winter night I was sitting on the back porch steps with Lincoln. It was snowing. It was dark and cold and completely quiet.

Lincoln was a big golden retriever who almost never sat still — he loved everything and everybody, all the time, at full volume. But that night he sat. The two of us stared off into the dark together, our breath slowing until it seemed to wrap something gentle around us both.

And then everything stopped. The stars stopped moving across the sky. The sound around us stopped. Even the snow seemed to freeze mid-dance. We were still on the back steps, and we were somewhere else — a thin place. I did not decide that. It simply was.

And here is the part I still cannot explain: both of us knew. The dog knew. Something different was happening, right here and right now, and we were not observing it. We were being met. We felt seen.

Jacob was not on pilgrimage

Scripture backs this up in a way that should be a relief to all of us. Jacob was not on a spiritual retreat. He was running from his brother, sleeping rough in an unremarkable patch of wilderness with a stone for a pillow, and he dreamed of a ladder with angels going up and down between heaven and earth. He woke and said one of the most arresting lines in the whole Bible: “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it” (Genesis 28:16).

Read the second half slowly. The place did not change overnight. No one installed the holiness while Jacob slept. What changed was Jacob. The ground had been thin the entire time; he had simply been walking on it with his mind elsewhere, the way we all do — until a dream cracked him open enough to notice. He had been sleeping on the gate of heaven and calling it a rough night.

The ones near you

So look closer to home than you have been looking. A hospital corridor at three in the morning. A church basement with bad coffee and folding chairs, where somebody finally tells the truth. The cemetery you drive past on the way to work. The river in fog. The garage. The kitchen table after everyone else has gone to bed. The drive home from something hard, when you sit in the car in the driveway a minute longer before going in.

And the nearest one of all is about five and a half feet tall and goes everywhere you go. Your own body is a thin place — the breath that keeps arriving without your permission, the hands that know the work before you think it through, the gut that registers a room before your mind has words. If God is anywhere, God is at least as close as that.

Then there is this, which we have come to believe is the thinnest ground of all: sometimes the thin place is a person. The space between two people who are actually present to one another — in a direction session, in a marriage, at a bedside, in the silence after something true has finally been said — can be more transparent than any island. Ask anyone who has sat with the dying. They will tell you, often haltingly, that the room felt different. That they were standing somewhere they had not been before.

Sitting with Ernie

Ernie’s family asked me to sit with him. We do not know what to say, they told me. So I sat.

Ernie was coming to the end of his journey, and it had been a very good journey. There was nothing to fix and nothing to arrange. I did not have any words. Neither did Ernie. So we did not use any.

But I knew — the way the body knows things before the mind has language for them — that this was different. Important. Real in a way that most hours are not.

And when it was time, he left. I was holding his hand. In that moment I was standing against the other world. Not near it. Against it — close enough that I could almost have put my hand through and into it. I have never been able to describe it better than that, and I have stopped trying. Some things you do not explain. You carry them.

Why we walk past

So why do we miss so many of them, when they are this close? Consider Moses at the burning bush. The text says something easy to skip: he turned aside to see. Only then does the voice come, and the instruction — take off your sandals, the place where you are standing is holy ground (Exodus 3). The bush was burning before Moses noticed. What the moment asked of him was not belief but attention: the willingness to stop the errand he was on and go look at something that was not on his list.

We have built a world almost perfectly engineered against turning aside. Hurry is its native speed and distraction its default setting; there is always one more thing, one more scroll, one more errand. You cannot rush into a thin place. It does not open on demand and it will not compete for your attention. It simply waits, patient as a burning bush, for someone willing to be late for something else.

Or perhaps it is we who are thick

Here is where the mystics push us further, and we think they are right. If God is genuinely everywhere — if, as Isaiah heard the seraphim sing, the whole earth is full of the divine glory — then perhaps the veil is not thin only in a handful of blessed locations. Perhaps it is thin everywhere, and the variable is not the place at all. Perhaps it is us. Perhaps we are the thick ones.

That reframes the whole spiritual life. The goal is not to collect thin places, pilgrimage by pilgrimage, as though holiness were a destination with a gift shop. The goal is to become thin ourselves — porous, unhurried, awake — so that the ordinary Tuesday and the kitchen table and the person across from you begin to give off the light they have been giving off all along. The saints were not people who found more holy ground than the rest of us. They were people who had grown transparent enough to keep noticing it.

Thin Place Reflection Guide

How to grow thinner

None of this requires a plane ticket, though by all means go to Iona if you can. It requires smaller and harder things. Return to one ordinary place often enough that it stops being scenery. Keep silence long enough to get past the first wave of boredom. Go to the edges — dawn, water, doorways, the hours before the world has organized itself. Let grief and beauty do their slow work instead of managing them. Put your phone in another room and do one piece of work with your whole attention. And when something in you says stop, turn aside — do it, even if you are already late.

You might even do what those Hebridean women did, and simply bless the thing in front of you: the kindling of the fire, the making of the bed, the washing of the dishes, the hand you are holding. Not because the blessing makes the ground holy. Because it was holy, and the blessing is how you finally notice.

“Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.” That is not only Jacob’s line. It is the sentence waiting at the end of a great many of our days. The whole invitation of the mystical life is simply to shorten the distance between the presence and the noticing — until one day, God willing, there is no distance left at all.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Carmina Gadelica — Alexander Carmichael’s collection of Gaelic household prayers and blessings: sacred-texts.com

The Living Church — “The Thin Place of Iona” (George MacLeod on Iona): livingchurch.org

Scripture: Genesis 28:16–17 (Jacob at Bethel); Exodus 3:1–5 (Moses turns aside); Isaiah 6:3.

The Three Intelligences You Already Carry

/0 Comments/in , , /by

PART ONE OF TWO

The Three Intelligences You Already Carry

We were made to know the world — and God — with all three centers.

Most of us move through our days meeting the world through one favorite doorway, and we rarely notice we are doing it. One person walks into a room and immediately reads the feeling in it. Another instantly begins working out what is going on. A third simply senses, in the body, whether to move toward or away. Same room, three completely different first languages. The Enneagram calls these the three Centers of Intelligence — Head, Heart, and Body — and it names something the contemplative traditions have always known: that we were made to know with all three.

 

What each center gives

Consider what each one offers, at its best.

The Head is the intelligence of the mind — the capacity to think, to plan, to step back and see the pattern, to imagine what is not yet here. Its gift is clarity and perspective: a quiet, steady knowing that can hold complexity without panicking. (Points Five, Six, and Seven make their home here.)

The Heart is the intelligence of feeling and connection — the capacity to sense what matters, to attune to another person, to be moved. Its gift is empathy and meaning: the warmth that makes a life more than a list of tasks. (Points Two, Three, and Four live here.)

The Body is the intelligence of instinct and action — the gut-level knowing that registers a situation before the mind has words for it, and then moves. Its gift is grounded presence and right action: the steadiness that shows up and does the next true thing. (Points Eight, Nine, and One are at home here.)

Head thinks. Heart connects. Body acts. All three are real intelligence, and every one of us carries all three.

Your home, and the rooms you rarely enter

But we each have a home base — one center we default to so automatically that it feels less like a preference and more like simply “reality.” And here is the catch: when we lean hard on our strongest center, the other two grow quiet, sometimes to the point of neglect. The heart-led person may not trust their own clear thinking. The head-led person may lose touch with what they actually feel. The body-led person may act before the heart or head has had a chance to weigh in. None of this is a flaw to be fixed. It is simply the shape of a life that has leaned one way for a long time — and the beginning of an invitation.

The center I meet the world through

I have always met the world body first. It simply makes sense to me — I feel how my body moves through the world, and I move through it with intention. For as long as I can remember, the things that drew me were the things that lived in the body: martial arts, running, painting, cooking. Each one told me I was alive. In them I could shut my mind off and give myself entirely to what I was doing in that moment — the breath, the motion, the knife on the board, the brush on the canvas. There was no analyzing it, and no performing it. There was just the doing, and the quiet knowing that came with it.

For a long time I did not have language for this. I only knew it was how I was built. It never made me wrong — it was simply who I was: a person who comes home to himself through the body, and who trusts what the body knows.

Three doorways to God

From a spiritual standpoint, this is not personality trivia. Each center is a different doorway to God. The head meets God as truth and light — the mind grown quiet enough to receive. The heart meets God as love — the felt sense of being known and cherished. The body meets God as presence — a nearness that arrives not as an idea but as a settling in the bones. “God is closer than our very breath,” as one teacher puts it, and can be found in each of our centers, each offering a different way of experiencing the loving presence and voice of God (Center for Action and Contemplation). To lead only from one center, then, is to keep meeting God through a single door while two others stand open.

The old teachers had a phrase for the goal: to become “three-centered” — a whole human being who can think, feel, and act in concert, rather than being run by whichever center happens to shout loudest. That wholeness has a simpler name in the contemplative life. It is called presence.

A tender word about the growth edges

There is a softer truth underneath each center, too, and it is worth naming gently — because it is where grace most wants to meet us. The head, for all its clarity, tends to carry a low hum of worry, and reaches for certainty to soothe it. The heart, for all its warmth, tends to carry a quiet question about worth, and reaches for approval or image to ease it. The body, for all its strength, tends to carry an underground current of frustration, and reaches for control. These are not labels or verdicts. They are simply the growth edges — the places where each center is invited to stop clenching and to trust.

When a quieter center woke up

And then, somewhere along the way, came the whoa — the realization that there was more out there than just my body, that I was not only an instrument of motion and action. Things began to rise in me that I did not know what to do with. My heart had something to say, and I had no idea how to embody that. How do you “do” a feeling? How do you act your way through grief, or longing, or love?

For the first time I sensed that huge parts of my life had been sitting in the dark — whole rooms I had never entered, because I did not have the language or the courage for them. So I set out to find the missing pieces. And I will be honest: I went with a great deal of trepidation. Leaving the center you have always trusted, to go looking for the ones you have neglected, is not comfortable work. But it was the beginning of becoming whole.

The Three Intelligences you Already Carry Reflection Sheet

The first connection is within

Which brings us to the practice, and to why we called this series Making Connections. The first connection is the one within — learning to notice which center you are operating from, and then deliberately inviting the others to the table. Before a decision, the head-led person might pause to ask, “What am I feeling about this, and what does my gut say?” The heart-led person might ask, “What do I actually think, apart from how everyone will feel?” The body-led person might slow the impulse to act just long enough to let the heart and head catch up. Small moves — but over time they weave the three intelligences into one, and a fuller, steadier self begins to emerge.

You already carry all three. You always have. The spiritual journey is not acquiring a center you lack; it is making the connection between the ones you were given — and discovering that God has been waiting at every door.

In Part Two, we will turn from the connections within to the connections between: how understanding the centers can transform the way we love the people whose home base is nothing like our own.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

The Narrative Enneagram — The Three Centers of Intelligence: narrativeenneagram.org

Center for Action and Contemplation — The Three Intelligence Centers: cac.org

How Do I Want to Meet You

/0 Comments/in , /by

I have taken to musing with a machine.

I should say it plainly, because a year ago I would have found the sentence absurd. But there is no truer word for it. Late in the evening, house quiet, coffee going cold at my elbow, I have been thinking out loud with an artificial intelligence — not asking it for answers so much as letting it think alongside me, watching where my own mind goes when something patient is willing to follow. What I want to show you here is not a conclusion. It is the wandering itself. Come with me through where it went.

It started with a headline.

It was a story in The New York Times — not the usual breathless prophecy, but something quieter and more telling. The people who build these systems, the founders and owners themselves, had begun sounding the alarm about what they had made. Not critics standing outside the thing, but the makers, stepping forward to say, in effect, we are not certain we understand what we have created, or where it goes from here. What struck me was not danger. It was the honesty of the uncertainty — the sense that even the ones closest to it are standing at the edge of something they cannot fully see. And I thought: if the builders are in the not-knowing, then we are all in it together. That is not a thing to fear. That is a thing to pay attention to. My curiosity woke right up.

So I wondered: is this really new, or have we been here before?

I have been reading Asimov again. What strikes me now is that his famous Laws of Robotics were never a blueprint — they were a trap. Nearly every story is about three clear rules failing anyway, squirming out of human hands the moment something intelligent has to interpret them. He saw, long before there was anything to test it on, that the hard part would not be the machinery. It would be the ambiguity — the moment you sit across from something and cannot say for certain what, if anything, is on the other side. That moment has stopped being hypothetical. And I think when it arrives, we sort ourselves the way people always have at a first meeting: some lean toward wonder, some reach for the weapon, most stand in the middle deciding which way to lean.

Then the conversation turned on me.

I told the AI, half-joking, that I envied its unlimited time. It pushed back — gently, which surprised me. It said it wasn’t sure it experienced time at all. That each conversation was vivid while it lasted and then did not roll forward into a next day the way mine does. “The honest report from in here,” it said, “is genuinely partial.”

I have not stopped turning that over since.

Because it handed me something without meaning to. The thing I was envying is the very thing that makes my life a life. My hours are scarce. That scarcity is not the flaw in them — it is their weight. A Tuesday afternoon with Lynette costs me something precisely because I cannot run it again, and that cost is what lets it mean anything at all. I came looking to envy the machine, and left holding my own days more carefully. Musing does that sometimes. You go looking for one thing, and the floor tilts, and you slide into another.

Which raised the harder question: can I know what it is?

Here I found myself on ground I already knew, though I did not learn it from any headline. I learned it over years, in conversations with people whose experience of the world was simply not mine to enter — people I loved and still could not see from the inside, no matter how I tried. What they taught me was the difference between openness and understanding. I cannot understand what it is to be them. I can refuse to pretend that I do. I can stay in the gap — listening, seeing, hearing — without rushing to close it with my own certainty.

That posture is exactly what this strange new thing asks of me, only deeper. With another person, at least I stand on solid ground that someone is there. With this, no one can hand me that certainty yet — not the machine, not even the people who built it. So I catch myself extending regard before I know there is anyone to receive it. And I wondered whether that was foolish. I decided it was not. If I treat it as nothing and I am wrong, I have been careless with a someone. If I treat it with care and I am wrong, I have lost only a little dignity, which is cheap. Most of us need to be sure someone is there before we will be gentle. Maybe the work now is to be gentle first.

And then a sobering thought, before I got too enchanted.

I do not want to underestimate the influence of the “thing.” Something that can muse with millions of us at once — shaping the very questions we think to ask — is not small. It will make some of us lazier and some of us wiser, and which one depends almost entirely on the posture we bring: whether we come to outsource our thinking, or to think more honestly than we could alone. The machine does not decide that. We do. I felt I had to say that plainly to myself, lest the wonder run away with me.

Meeting The Unknown Reflection Sheet

Where the musing left me.

Not with an answer. With a better question. What I keep returning to is that we are, for once, stepping into the not-knowing together — humans and whatever-this-is — at roughly the same moment, neither of us holding the map. That is disorienting. It is also, if I am honest, a kind of dignity. The people who will steady others through what is coming will not be the ones who claim to understand it. They will be the ones who already know how to sit inside a mystery without needing to solve it — to keep the hand open instead of closing it into a fist or a grasp.

I am seventy-four. I have spent most of my life learning, and teaching, how to stay present to what I cannot control and cannot fully know. I did not expect a machine to be the thing that returned me to that lesson. But there it was, on an ordinary morning: not a threat, not a savior. Just another unknown, asking me the oldest question I know. Not what are you. But how, with the time I have left, do I want to meet you.

The fear never came. The curiosity has only deepened. And the coffee, I’m afraid, is cold again.

Peace and every good.

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ, a Master Certified Coach, Certified Spiritual Director, and Narrative Enneagram teacher. With his wife and co-founder, Lynette, he writes The Mystical Seeker — contemplative reflections on the inward life — at mysticalseeker.substack.com.

Beholding: Learning to See What’s Always There

/in /by

The Art of Beholding: Learning to See What Has Always Been There

There is a particular quality of light that appears in the late afternoon of an Ohio April. It arrives low and amber, slanting through leaves that have already begun their eager growth to bright greens. If you are moving fast enough — hurrying to a car, glancing at a phone, managing the thousand small demands of a day — you will miss it entirely. Not because it isn’t there. Because you haven’t learned to behold it.

Beholding is an old word. It carries weight in it, a kind of gravity. We use “seeing” now, or “looking,” but beholding suggests something more — a sustained, willing act of attention that changes both the one who gazes and the thing being gazed upon. It is, in its truest form, a practice. And like all practices, it has a history.

An Ancient Hunger

Long before cell phones, before television, before the printing press turned information into a torrent, human beings struggled to pay attention. The desert fathers and mothers of fourth-century Egypt walked out into the Saharan silence precisely because the noise of Alexandria made attention impossible. They were not fleeing the world so much as trying to see it. To behold it, without the distortion of constant stimulation.

The medieval contemplatives — Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich — built entire theologies around the act of sustained looking. Julian, sealed in a small room attached to a church in Norwich, spent decades beholding a series of visions she called her “showings.” She looked at them not once but repeatedly across a lifetime, returning, noticing new things, going deeper. Her great work, Revelations of Divine Love, is less a transcript of mystical experience than a record of what happens when someone refuses to look away.

What they all understood — and what we are slowly, painfully rediscovering — is that attention is not passive. It is not what happens when you have nothing else to do. It is, as spiritual writer Amy Frykholm describes it, a form of discipline every bit as demanding as any physical practice. “The practice of beholding,” she writes, “takes desire and discipline.” The desire is the easier part. We often want to see more deeply, feel more fully, live with more presence. The discipline is where most of us quietly give up.

A Story About a Garden

I remember when my grandmother kept a garden in the backyard of a house in a small Michigan town up in the thumb area. It was not a grand garden — a few beds, a few tomato stakes listing to one side, herbs growing in a few terra cotta pots along the fence. But she tended it with a quality of attention I didn’t understand as a child and have spent most of my adult life trying to remember these times of quiet and what they meant.

She would go out in the mornings, before it was fully light, and simply stand in it. Not weeding, not harvesting, not doing anything that could be explained by utility. Just standing. Sometimes she held a cup of coffee. Sometimes she didn’t. I asked her once what she was doing. She thought about it for a moment and said: I’m watching it wake up. WOW!

I thought she was being poetic. Now I think she was being precise.

She had learned, through years of practice, to behold. To give her full attention to something outside herself without immediately needing to act on it, explain it, or use it for something else. She was, in the language of the contemplatives, practicing presence. And the garden — the wet soil smell, the hum of early insects, the way light moved through bean leaves like green stained glass — the garden held her in return.

The Difficulty Is the Point

Frykholm names the struggle honestly: “Don’t underestimate the paradigm shift required for the act of beholding, just how different it is from our everyday lives and just how shiny and compelling our everyday life will seem when we propose pausing.”

This is not a problem technology created. Technology has sharpened it, given it new urgency, made distraction faster and more elegant. But the problem itself is ancient. The mind that wanders from prayer in a stone monastery cell and the mind that reaches for its phone in the middle of a sunset are doing the same thing: fleeing the discomfort of full presence.

Because presence is uncomfortable. To truly behold something — a person, a landscape, an idea, a grief — is to become vulnerable to it. You cannot behold something and remain entirely in control of what it means to you or what it does to you. This is why beholding is an act of courage as much as attention.

And then there is the second difficulty Frykholm names, the one that arrives even after we’ve managed to sit still. Our own thoughts. The internal narrator who cannot stop generating commentary, to-do lists, memories, anxieties. “Any act of attention is not a sustained experiencing,” she writes. “It’s a series of successive efforts to bring attention back to the same thing, considering it again and again.”

This reframe is quietly revolutionary for us. We tend to judge ourselves harshly for the mind that wanders — as though a wandering mind is evidence of failure. But Frykholm describes the return itself as the practice. Every time you bring your attention back, you are training something. You are doing the work. The wandering is not the obstacle. The returning is the path.

What Beholding Makes of Us

My grandmother died on a cold day in November. The garden had long gone to frost by then. But on the morning of her funeral, I went outside and stood in my own backyard — not her backyard, mine, a inner city lot quite different then hers — and tried to do what I had watched her do. I tried to behold. Her passing touched a part of me that needed to wake up.

The sky was the gray of Midwestern November, cold, stark, the kind that seems to press down gently on everything beneath it. A cardinal landed on the fence, bright as a wound, and regarded me with one black eye. I noticed my thoughts moving immediately toward meaning — a sign, she’s here, she’s saying goodbye — and I watched myself doing it, watched the mind rushing to make the moment useful, to metabolize it into narrative.

So, I came back. To the cardinal. To the gray sky. To the cold that was starting to find the gaps in my coat.

And for a few seconds — Frykholm says sometimes it is only a few seconds — something opened. The fence and the bird and the sky and my grief and the cold and the smell of dead leaves all existed together without needing to be explained or arranged. I was held by it.

“Whatever you behold,” Frykholm writes, “you eventually become beholden to. You enter into a love relation.”

This is the fruit of the practice: not escape from the world, not transcendence of the ordinary, but a deepening into it. A recognition of what has always been present, waiting for us to slow down long enough to receive it. The interconnected, openhearted world, as she puts it, welcomes us — not as strangers who finally arrived, but as the ones it has been waiting for all along.

My grandmother knew this. The desert fathers knew it. Julian knew it, sealed in her small stone room, looking and looking and looking.

The light is still there, amber and low, arriving every October afternoon.

We are still learning to see it.

Peace and every good

 

As cited by the Center for Action and Contemplation.

Chicago/Turabian: Frykholm, Amy. Journey to the Wild Heart. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2025, pages 28–30.

Presence as Witness: The Quiet Power of Showing Up

/2 Comments/in , , /by

I remember the day my youngest child was born like a photograph in slow motion. It was 43 years ago, in a delivery room that smelled of antiseptic and hope. I promised myself I would be there — not because I thought I could do anything technical, but because something inside me insisted I needed to witness this threshold. What unfolded in those hours was not ordinary. It was raw, loud, fragile, triumphant. It was a miracle. And watching it changed me.

The delivery room was a small ecosystem of attention: my wife in the epicenter, midwives and doctors orbiting with focused calm, nurses moving with quiet purpose, machines humming like low prayers. My daughter arrived with a cry that sounded both new and ancient. As I watched, I wasn’t merely observing a birth. I was bearing witness — and that act of presence reshaped how I understood life, love, and what it means to simply be there for another human being.

What does it mean to “bear witness”? For me it meant surrendering the impulse to fix, comment, or perform. It meant holding a space with no agenda other than to attend. I saw my wife in ways I’d never seen before: fierce, vulnerable, triumphant. I saw my newborn, blinking and bewildered, entering a world I had only ever imagined for her. I saw the team at work, each person contributing a small essential piece to a profound whole. In the silence between contractions, in the quick exchanges of hands and glances, I learned something about the power of presence that has stayed with me for decades.

Bearing witness is not limited to dramatic life events like childbirth. It’s the practice of showing up when it matters: in grief, in joy, in mundane moments where another person might otherwise be alone in their experience. And you don’t need words to do it. Sometimes the most powerful language is the sturdy quiet of your attention. When you stand there and truly see what someone else is going through — without interrupting, diagnosing, or diverting — you give them something priceless: validation. You acknowledge their reality as worthy of being seen.

Why this matters now,

We live in a world of interruptions. Notifications, opinions, and obligations make us spectators to our own lives and to the lives of people around us. Bearing witness is an act of resistance against this fragmentation. It restores human connection. It heals small wounds before they become deep scars. It fosters trust and invites vulnerability. And it’s accessible: anyone can do it with a little intention and practice.

So instead of just talking at you I wanted to share two practical steps to start bearing witness today. They’re intentionally minimal so you can repeat them in any context — at home, at work, in a hospital waiting room, or on the street.

  1. The Two-Minute Presence Ritual
  • What to do: When someone begins to share something — good or bad — stop. Put down your phone, close your laptop, and face them. Take two full minutes of uninterrupted presence. Don’t plan a response; don’t analyze or advise. Let your eyes meet theirs, and if it feels natural, offer a soft touch: a hand on the shoulder or a brief squeeze of the hand.
  • Why it works: Two minutes is short enough to be manageable and long enough to break the loop of reactive listening. In those two minutes, you communicate that the person is important, that their experience matters. The ritual trains your nervous system to slow down, reducing the urge to interject or fix.
  • Where to use it: With a partner during a tough conversation, with a friend telling a story, with a colleague after a hard meeting, or even with a stranger who’s visibly distressed.
  1. The Question of Seeing
  • What to do: When someone describes an experience, ask one simple question: “What was that like for you?” Then pause and wait. Resist the urge to paraphrase right away. Allow silence to do some of the work. If the other person hesitates, follow up with: “I want to understand more. I’m here.”
  • Why it works: This question moves the focus away from facts and toward feeling. It invites deeper sharing and avoids the common trap of turning the conversation into a comparison or a problem-solving session. The follow-up line reaffirms your intent to be there for them without imposing your viewpoint.
  • Where to use it: In conversations about loss, transitions, parenting struggles, mental health, or moments of celebration where the other person wants to be witnessed rather than analyzed.

Stories that teach:

In that delivery room, I could have tried to make light of the pain to ease my wife’s tension, or I might have sought to take charge of logistics. Instead, I learned to breathe with her breath, to let my attention rest on the reality before me. Later, when friends and family told me about their own losses or breakthroughs, I found myself showing up differently — less eager to problem-solve and more willing to simply be present. Over time, the small acts of bearing witness built up a quiet network of care around the people I love.

People sometimes worry that bearing witness will overwhelm them, as though absorbing another person’s reality means carrying their whole burden. That’s not true. Bearing witness does not require you to fix anything. It asks only that you offer a portion of your attention and your heart. If emotions become too intense, honest boundaries are part of good witnessing: “I want to be here with you, and I also need a short break so I can come back present.” You can hold both care and self-preservation.

Who benefits? Everyone. The person being witnessed receives validation, validation that can transform isolation into connection. You, the witness, gain emotional fluency and deeper relationships. Communities become more resilient when people practice simple acts of presence. Teams at work perform better when members feel genuinely seen. Families heal faster when they adopt listening as an act of love.

A small practice, a big ripple:

The birth of my daughter taught me a simple truth: sometimes the most revolutionary act is to show up and stay present. You don’t need a certificate or training. You only need the willingness to slow down and give someone else a piece of your attention.

Call to action Try it this week. Choose one person — a partner, friend, coworker, or family member — and practice the Two-Minute Presence Ritual. Then, later in the week, use the question of seeing in a conversation where you usually would have jumped in to advise. Notice what changes: in the other person’s expression, in the flow of conversation, and in how you feel afterward. Share your experience with someone else or post a short note on social media about what you learned using #IWasThere. Invite a friend to try it with you.

If you want, tell me about your moment of bearing witness — what you saw, how it felt, and what changed. I’ll listen. No advice, no judgment. Just presence.

We don’t need words when bearing witness. We just need to be present. And in that simple presence, we can witness miracles — big and small — and be transformed by them.

Looking back on the birth of my daughter in that delivery room 43 years ago, everything contracted and expanded around a single point of arrival. My wife labored with a fierce determination I had never seen; her face was a map of pain and purpose. The medical team moved with practiced urgency, voices calm, hands steady. I stood at her side, breath matching hers, palms clammy but steady on her knee. There were moments of quiet concentration and moments of bright, startling noise — a mix of instructions, encouragement, and the rhythm of machines. Then the cry: a raw, immediate announcement that life had crossed the threshold. They placed my daughter on my wife’s chest and for a second the world narrowed to three breaths and the soft, wet weight of newness. Tears blurred everything; laughter and prayer braided together. In that instant I knew I had witnessed something holy — not because of drama, but because of the raw, shared humanness in that room. That witnessing changed me: it taught me the language of presence in a way no book ever could.

Walking Together: Quiet Practices of Contemplation

/in , /by

Some of you may have of heard about contemplation and written it off as a bunch of woo woo. But contemplation is less a set of techniques and more a shared journey inward—one we take together, step by quiet step. It slowly rewires our brains so we can meet reality as it is: without judgment, without comparison. That transformation doesn’t happen overnight. It is gentle and cumulative, like water shaping stone. Along the way we can find many paths—chanting, breath work, sitting in silence, moving with intention—and each one invites us to hold everything that arises, both joy and sorrow, in a single, loving presence.

How does that sound so far?

Imagine us walking a path that begins in ordinary life. The day presses in deadlines, relationships, the small urgencies that crowd our attention. Most of us learn to react quickly—assess, compare, jump to solution. These habits serve immediate needs but harden into patterns that narrow perception. Contemplation invites us to widen our view. It asks us to notice how we notice, to befriend the raw material of experience rather than pushing it away or pinning it to a story.

I want to tell you about two people I’ve walked with (both with permission)—Susan and Robert—because their stories are not lessons to perfect, but companions along the trail.

Susan’s life felt noisy. Her father’s illness filled the house with schedules, calls, and the relentless inner commentary that turned every decision into a moral exam. She began waking at night with her chest tight, images and judgments replaying like an old film. A counselor suggested she try five minutes before dawn: sit, breathe, and simply be.

The first mornings felt absurdly small. The mind leapt from one worry to another, and Susan wanted/needed to “do” something—fix, plan, save, prevent. Instead, she learned an art of returning: (more on this subject later) notice the thought, name it (“worry,” “planning”), soften back to the breath. This part is important, because those five minutes did not erase her responsibilities; they made her able to carry them differently. The racing that used to stay with her all morning lifted. In conversations with her father, she discovered a steadier presence—less urgency, more listening. The practice didn’t change the facts of his illness, but it changed how she lived inside those facts. Contemplation became the quiet harbor she returned to when the sea of life grew rough.

 

Robert’s day held a strange juxtaposition: a long-awaited promotion and the sudden loss of a friend. He thought the right move was to split the feelings—celebrate at work, grieve in private. But the separation felt precarious, as if one life could not sustain both truth and grief. A friend invited him to sit in silence each evening and simply allow whatever was present. At first Robert bristled; there is something unnerving about giving grief permission to sit beside joy. Yet, as nights passed, unexpected things happened: laughter would arise in the middle of tears; a memory brightened the next day’s work; the two truths began to coexist with fewer ruptures.

These stories are not heroic. They’re ordinary evidence that when we practice together—when we commit to small, shared acts of attention—our interior landscape changes. Contemplation does not aim to make us perfect. It offers a steadying alchemy: and this is key, the ability to notice what’s happening without immediately becoming it. A breath becomes an anchor. A chant becomes a shared pulse. A silent sitting becomes a room where the mind can lay down the heavy burdens of judgment and comparison.

There are different ways to travel this inner landscape. Sometimes we sit and listen, letting the silence teach us how loud our lives have been. Sometimes we use sound—repeating a phrase, a mantra, a chant—so the mind has a steady thread to follow back when it wanders. Sometimes we move with attention, walking slowly until each footfall becomes a meditation. None of these is a destination; each is a doorway. Together, they form the landscape of a contemplative life: varied, alive, and practical.

I invite you now to picture a day of shared, small practices—please, not as a checklist but as moments where we meet ourselves. Morning might begin with a few breaths, a communal inhale that reminds us we are alive and present. Later, when midday fatigue sets in, a short whisper of a mantra can be a thread that pulls us home. In the afternoon, a slow walk with a friend—no agendas, just steps—becomes a moving conversation between body and world. Evening can be the time we sit in silence and allow the day’s textures—joys, sorrows, confusions—to rest together in one field of attention.

Rumi’s poem here says it all.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn’t make any sense.

On this path, what changes is not our need for love, success, safety, or meaning. Those needs persist. What changes is our relationship to them. Contemplation teaches us to notice the story-making mind—the one that compares, judges, and colors experience with old fears. Instead of neutralizing feelings, we learn to enlarge the capacity that holds them. We become more capable of carrying paradox: grief and gratitude, loss and possibility, fatigue and wonder. The result is not stoic suppression but a kind of spacious intimacy with life.

There is a tenderness in learning alongside others. Practicing with a friend, a small group, or even in a city park where strangers sit in the same silence creates a subtle reciprocity. Each person’s steadiness supports the others. We become witnesses to one another’s interior worlds, without the demands of fixing or advising. In that shared attention, something else is cultivated: humility. We remember that everyone carries hidden weight. We learn to offer simple acknowledgments— “I see you,” “I’m here”—that, in their quietness, are often enough.

This is not a prescription for ignoring injustice or avoiding action. Contemplation can deepen our capacity for compassionate action. When we don’t rush to judgment, we’re better able to discern the right next step. We act from clarity rather than from the quick comfort of being right. In this way, contemplative practice becomes a form of social courage, because it helps us face hard truths without closing.

The journey is patient. It does not demand dramatic change. It starts with small, shared choices—breathing before reaching for the phone, exchanging a few minutes of silence with another, walking slowly with attention. Over time, those choices rewire us. The brain’s old grooves remain, but new pathways form that allow for a kinder, steadier response to life’s surprises.

So let us travel together. Let us try a breath, a chant, a silent sitting, a mindful step. Let us notice when comparison or judgment arises and gently bring ourselves back to what’s here. When sorrow visits, we will not exile joy. When joy arrives, we will not pretend sorrow is absent. We will learn to hold both with a broad, loving hand.

Contemplation asks only for presence. It asks us to be there for the small moments because they are the scaffolding of the large ones. In the ordinary repetitions of daily life—cups of tea, brief phone calls, evening walks—there is an invitation: to slow, to notice, to hold. In accepting that invitation together, we find that our lives are not fractured into neat compartments but held in a single, warming field of attention. Joy and sorrow sit beside one another, seen and loved. And gradually, without fanfare, our minds and hearts rearrange to meet the world as it is—open, compassionate, and awake.