Our lives are full: full of responsibilities, to-do lists, distractions, and the anxieties of a news cycle that has morphed from a twenty-four hour news cycle (which was bad enough) into an 86,400 second news cycle. To quote the great 1980s philosopher Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” The aim of this series has been to find ways of doing just that: stopping and looking around, especially at the inner life, listening for what our soul (or heart or Self or spirit) might be trying to tell us that we can’t hear because the din of our thoughts and worries is simply too loud.
As we’ve seen there are lots of ways we can approach this. But I’ve never been a fan of one-size-fits-all solutions. And honestly, I think the soul speaks to us in so many different ways that no single practice ever contain them all. And so the approach I’ve taken here is to develop a toolkit of practices we can dig through to find out which best fits the needs of the moment.
This toolkit includes practices that:
- still the mind:
- empty the mind:
- focus our energy:
- engage the imagination (as is meet and right):
- plumb the depths:
And we wrapped it all up by looking at my version of Florilegium, that takes the pieces that stand out to us the most and arranges them in a more beautiful and memorable way. The immediate goal of this is to create something like a ‘personal Red Book’, a record of our active engagement with the inner life like the one that transformed C.G. Jung’s life
The ultimate goal is to create the space for us to hear the still, small voice within that can often tell us what we already know but don’t want to remember, or need to hear but really don’t want to.
I hope you’ve found found the series enjoyable and meaningful.
Matthew Root 