This is part two of three from Academy for Spiritual Formation #43, a program of The Upper Room. Our faculty presenter for session five of eight was Dr. Heidi A. Miller, associate professor of spirituality and Christian ministry at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, teaching on prayer and the art of discernment. Part one was about the word just. This one is about the body.

Wednesday morning, Dr. Heidi told us to find a spot.

Stand if you want. Sit on the floor. Lie down on the floor if that is what works. If you need to turn away from me so it does not feel like anyone is looking at you, turn away — there is a spot behind the piano that is perfect.

Then she gave us three minutes and this:

Acknowledge the gift of your body. Our body is our friend. Notice where you are carrying tension, or pain. What does your body want you to know? And in time, if it feels comfortable, take your hand and touch that part. Remind that part of your body of belovedness. Then find the rhythm of your breath right there. Breathe in belovedness. Pause. Breathe out the tension.

When I sank down into the center of my body, I found that I loved it, and that I knew what was best for it, and I felt it telling me that I was not hearing it.

This may sound like a strange thing to come out of a three-minute prayer, but I stopped eating gluten and sugar. I am slowly feeling different. The brain fog is lifting.

She called it a body awareness prayer, and she was explicit about why she kept starting us there. “The locus of discernment is here,” she said — not in the head. “Our bodies are a locale of discernment.” We make sense of our lives through our bodies and through stories, “and mostly, it’s embodied stories when you put that together.”

Then she told us about her grandmother’s window.

The imprint of presence

Her mother was an English child of the Second World War, evacuated out of London, raised under Victorian rules in a house with an anxious mother who had reason to be anxious. What she learned was that you tidy up. Whatever you touch, you leave no trace of having touched it.

She married an American, and his parents sponsored her, and they called her daughter. Not daughter-in-law. Daughter. And they put their own son in his place when they saw him startle her once as a joke: You don’t ever do that again. Do you hear me? You don’t do that to my daughter.

The grandmother’s name was Myrtle. Eighth-grade education, Southern Baptist, and when the Spirit moved her she would just go whoop.

One day the family was packing up to leave after a week, and there was a plate glass window the kids had been pressing their hands against all week, watching to see who was coming up the road. Heidi’s mother said: Mama Myrtle, let me wipe that down before we go.

And Myrtle said: Now, Wendy, don’t you clean that window. I’m going to get so much joy looking at all those fingerprints for weeks and weeks and weeks.

“The imprint of presence,” Heidi said, “can be everywhere.”

Her mother learned it from Myrtle and passed it down. When Heidi was three or four and wanted to be in the kitchen, her mother started her on thumbprint cookies — press your thumb in, again and again, then fill the dent with jam. Heidi complained that her mother was faster at it. Her mother said: someday, when you teach someone how to make cookies, you will go faster too.

And when her brother tore his teddy bear doing something he knew he should not have, and brought it to their mother teary, braced to be scolded — she cleared off the kitchen table, carried a lamp over, laid out a handkerchief, set the bear down on it and said, It’s okay. We’re going to take care of this bear. She built an operating room in the kitchen, with the light, and stitched it up while he watched.

At her celebration of life, his words for it were: she tilted the whole universe in love toward me.

I would have cleaned the window

I sat there doing the arithmetic on myself.

I would have cleaned the window. Not out of cruelty — out of the thing I called responsibility. For thirty-eight years I ran a company with failure is not an option painted above the door. I worked constantly. I very seldom took a break, and when I did, I was already thinking about the next job and the next idea. There were no fingerprints left anywhere, because I wiped them, and the people around me learned to wipe theirs too.

If I can be totally honest in this moment: I do not know if I could, or would, do the same things in business that I did before. Sometimes I feel the cost was too high for the outcome — and the outcome, of course, was not money.

Why you cannot achieve it

Here is the part that got me, and it got me because she said it about herself first.

“I’m a three on the Enneagram,” she told the room. The achiever. Checklists, tasks, the completion of tasks. “But this approach does not work with being present.” And then: “Presence is not something to be achieved. Presence is a way of being.” And then, dryly: “That’s super hard for a three.”

I am an Eight, not a Three, but the machinery is close enough. Hand me presence as a goal and I will go at it the way I went at everything, and the going at it is exactly what forecloses it.

She had two names for what gets in the way.

The first she borrowed and renamed. Jacques Ellul wrote about the technological bluff — the premise that we are all intimate now, all accessible, all reachable at once. She calls it presence bluffing. “The more accessible we are to everybody else all the time, the less present we can really even be.” Her example was counting televisions in a restaurant. She got to twenty without turning her head.

The second was an Armani suit jacket.

A friend of hers was going through a mediated divorce — one day to settle everything, a warm Virginia day, both of them working hard at it, real credit to both. She had dressed in layers and was peeling them off as the hours went on. He wore an Armani jacket, and he wanted her to know it, and he wanted the mediator to know it. The room got hotter. He rolled his trouser legs inside out all the way up to his hips rather than take off that jacket.

When the group was telling the story afterward, Heidi said: “I wonder what the headlines in the heavens read. Man thinks he has Armani, but Armani has man.”

And then, immediately, on herself: “As soon as I say that, I can’t escape it either. I think I have that — but that has me.”

That, she said, is as old as Genesis 3. The strangest thing in that story is that the serpent lures them into wanting to possess what they already have. Everything is given. Blessed, abundant, playful, full, theirs. And the lure is: if you have it, you will be like God. So they ate a different story, in their own bodies, over food. And the moment they had it, it had them.

Possession is what keeps us from presence. It keeps us chasing. But the body already knows. Before Adam and Eve could say a word, their bodies knew they were naked.

The question underneath

She asked one more thing I have not been able to put down.

Why is presence so hard? Because being present means being present to your pain. And because being present means admitting you are mortal.

“If I don’t have to be present, I don’t have to grieve,” she said. “Or I can pretend I don’t have to grieve. If I keep busy, if I do more, if I go get more, I don’t have to grieve the hefty losses I’ve encountered. I don’t have to grieve that I too am mortal.”

I am seventy-four years old. I have been busy my whole adult life. I would rather not look too hard at the overlap between those two sentences.

The counterweight she offered is a word. Nephesh — life, breath, fullness of being. And it is not only a noun. In Exodus, God rested on the seventh day and was re-nefeshed. Rest is built into the rhythm before anything else happens — and there was evening, and there was morning, the first day. It starts with the rest.

She told us her mother confronted her about this once. Heidi said, I can’t, I’ve got too much to do.

Her mother said: well, then, you are better than God.

What? I don’t think I’m better than God.

Well, clearly you do. Because God rested, and you think you don’t have to.

Who told you

In Genesis 3, God comes walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hide in the very creation they were meant to commune with. And when God finds them, Heidi pointed out, God does not condemn them. God asks a question.

Who told you you were naked?

“God could well have asked,” she said, “who told you you were not beloved and free already?”

Then she had someone act out Psalm 23. One volunteer, playing God, no lines — just walk around the room and set a table beside each person. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. Watch her do it. Watch the divine table setter set it.

And then she gave us a permission I did not expect. You may need to watch from across the room. You can say: not closer, not right now — I will be over here, you go ahead. You can say, I would like to be in the next room. And she will say: all right. I will set the table. It’s okay.

That is not a technique. That is somebody who understands that presence cannot be forced — including by you, on yourself.

I keep coming back to Myrtle at that window, deciding that fingerprints were not a mess.

For a man who spent four decades wiping glass, that is an entire theology in one sentence.

---

Part 2 of 3. Part 1: Just — the word, the pitcher, and where the story starts. Part 3: being grounded when the ground is moving.

Peace and every good.

---

With gratitude to Dr. Heidi A. Miller

Everything of substance in this post is hers. The body awareness prayer, the story of her grandmother’s window and the thumbprint cookies and the teddy bear, the naming of presence bluffing, the Armani observation, the reading of Genesis 2 and 3, the enacted Psalm 23 and the permission to watch from a distance — all of it came from her sessions at Academy #43, session five, October 2026. The quotations are drawn from recordings of those sessions. What is mine is only what it did to me.

Dr. Miller is associate professor of spirituality and Christian ministry at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, where she directs the Doctor of Ministry program.

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. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Dr. Heidi A. Miller, “Prayer and the Art of Discernment,” The Academy for Spiritual Formation #43, session five, October 2026 (The Upper Room). Quotations drawn from session recordings.

Jacques Ellul, The Technological Bluff (Eerdmans, 1990) — the source of the phrase Dr. Miller adapts into “presence bluffing.”

Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (Viking, 2014) — referenced in her sessions on the body as a place of knowing.