Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

Frederick Buechner

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Listening to Your Life
Frederick Buechner

Mystic In-Between State

The mystic experience of God’s presence often times occurs unintentionally in what we might call liminal space. Being in a state of liminality (from the Latin, meaning “threshold”) is the experience of being on a threshold or in a state between different existential planes. Our experience of liminality may occur when our old understanding breaks down and for a time our experience of the world may be without explanation. With most of our experiences, the understanding passed on to us by our culture and language community is sufficient to explain those experiences.

At times, however, something comes into our lives that causes that understanding to break down. It could be the death of a loved one or some other traumatic event that our understanding is unable to process or interpret. At such moments without a sufficient understanding, we are no longer in our heads but are present in a way that we seldom are when our understanding is intact.

Experience Without Interpretation

When our understanding is intact, we experience life as a routine without much consciousness of what is actually before us. Because our understanding makes life routine and predictable, we are free to be somewhere else in our minds. We are free to think about the past or the future rather than being present.

When some traumatic event enters our lives, it disrupts our understanding and all of our consciousness focuses on the here and now. One circumstance has all of our attention. and we are in the liminal space of pure experience. The traumatic nature of the experience makes it impossible for our understanding to filter out the experience, but it is an experience without interpretation because the filters that normally mold and make sense of out experience are inadequate.

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Contemplative Prayer
James Danaher

Keys for Being More in the Moment

• Start small and make it a regular practice.
  Build new, helpful habits through repetition over time.
• Make a change in your routine.
  By making small changes to our routine, we naturally notice things more.
• Simplify your life.
  We can make positive improvements in our life by cutting out things, even if it means doing less or doing only one thing at a time.
• Practice deep breathing.
  We can reduce, and perhaps alleviate, stress and and anxiety by regulating our breathing.
• Cultivate idleness.
  There’s a fine line between idleness and boredom. Sometimes, the best use of time is to “waste” a bit of it, which can reset our thoughts and actions.
• Savor what you’re doing.
  Make an effort to enjoy whatever you’re doing.
• Focus more on the process than the purpose.
  This is especially helpful when it comes to repetitive, mundane tasks like cooking and gardening.

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The Secret to Everything: How to Live More and Suffer Less
Neel Burton