Everyday Spiritual Practice: Simple Pathways for Enriching Your Life

by Scott W. Alexander (Editor)

Overview

Have you wondered how to integrate your heartfelt beliefs into your life? In this thoughtful collection a wide range of contributors describe the small everyday practices that bring meaning to their lives.

What shapes your efforts into an everyday spiritual practice is your commitment to making the activity a regular and significant part of your life. Forty inspiring contributors share their personal, daily spiritual practices—from meditation and prayer, to recycling and vegetarianism, to quilting and art. This collection suggests a wide variety of ways in which you can spiritually examine, shape and care for your life, to achieve wholeness and happiness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781558963757
Publisher:	Unitarian Universalist Association
Publication date:	06/01/2001
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Scott W. Alexander is the editor of Salted With Fire: Strategies for Sharing Faith and Growing Congregations, AIDS and Your Religious Community, and The Welcoming Congregation. He currently serves as Minister at the River Road Unitarian Church in Bethesda, Maryland.

Read an Excerpt

We live our lives too much in a shell built of inattention and distraction. An analogy is the shoes we wear that keep us from feeling the ground. A few years ago my family went up to Sedona to play and hike among the rocks. The path was finely ground red dirt, the kind that puffs as you walk on it. My children begged to take their shoes off. At first, all I could think of were such practical worries as hidden glass, or snakes, or stubbed toes. Thank goodness they were persistent. The truth was that we needed to take off our shoes; we needed to feel the earth beneath our skin. I will never forget that cool, incredibly soft Sedona dirt molding itself to every footprint. Too bad for the strange glances of passing hikers. We had a wonderful time.

The world is full of wonder, if we but stop and pay attention. It is there, waiting to feed us, even in very difficult situations. The day is made up of moments, and each moment can be an eternity of peace to those experiencing pain or grief. They are like blessings, and we count them, one by one throughout the day. They help us keep our balance.

Pause for those moments every so often to listen and to look, to feel and to smell, to taste and to appreciate, to feel thankful for the beauty which is around us even in the smallest grains of red dirt and in the grandest blue of sky. The mundane world is a source of deep spirituality. Notice it, appreciate it, for you are it and it is you. This spiritual practice is one tool to help us feel our connectedness and sense the oneness for which we yearn.

Like hungry swallows

we search

for there is emptiness

in every breast.

We do not have to fit ourselves to someone’s prescribed discipline in order to feel we are being spiritual. Spirituality is with us always, and our individual situations will define the tools we choose to use, if we take the time to listen to ourselves and know our joys and yearnings, whether for quiet or a walk in beauty, for exercise or music, for sunsets or sunrises, for strenuous activity or the hand in ours, for the glance of a child, for effort or work that is meaningful, for the creative task or the work of community, or for the moments of appreciation which are available to us anytime and anywhere. Whichever path you choose, may you find that for which you search, and your yearning be fulfilled.

Table of Contents

Introduction

THE BASICS

Balance Susan by Manker-Seale

Listening to Our Lives by Kathleen McTigue

The Middle Way by Michael A. Schuler

Eclectic Spirituality by Barbara Wells

A Spiritual Maintenance Schedule by Arvid Straube

ENGAGING THE MIND: Contemplation

Silent Retreats by Andrew C. Kennedy

Creating an Altar by Johanna Nichols

Adversity by Barbara Merritt

The Sacred Moment by Edwin C. Lynn

Living by Heart by Laurel Hallman

Mindfulness by James Austin

Sitting Zen by James Ishmael Ford

Monastic Practice by Wayne B. Arnason

Sacred Reading by Susan J. Ritchie

Prayer by Erik Walker Wikstrom

ENGAGING THE BODY: Activity and Nourishment

Movement by Robert T. Hughes

Martial Arts by Sarah Lammert

Yoga by Eva S. Hochgraf

Exercise by Scott W. Alexander

Fasting by Marta Morris Flanagan

Mealtime by Aaron R. Payson

ENGAGING THE HEART: Relationship

Everyday Relationships by Jane Ellen Mauldin

Partnership as Spiritual Practice by Brian J. Kiely

Marriage by M. Maureen Killoran

Parenting by Pat Westwater-Jong

Loss and Grief by Jennie Knoop

ENGAGING THE WILL: Right Action

Spiritual Practice for Our Time by Rebecca Parker

Social Justice by Art McDonald, Deborah Holder, and Stephen H. Furrer

Anti-Racism by Dorothy May Emerson

Simple Living by Ken Brown

Recycling by Audrey W. Vincent

Vegetarianism by Helena P. Chapin

Giving by Tony Larsen

ENGAGING THE SOUL: Creativity

Quilting by Laurie Bushbaum

Meditation by Hand by L. Annie Foerster

Gardening by Barbara Davenport

Cooking by Lynn M. Brodie

Art by Julie-Ann Silberman