When Spiritual Practices Fall Flat

How I Learned to Listen More Deeply

Are you listening to your body?

I didn’t realize, when I was hospitalized in Mexico in April 2012, that my body was screaming at me to stop.

Intuitively, I knew something was wrong. That’s when I really began to listen, at least as best I could. And I chose to pivot, personally and vocationally.

With a major shift in lifestyle and geography, I settled into a slower routine and began engaging new practices with regularity. I was proud of myself for slowing down, even for making a courageous vocational move, one I characterized using Nouwen’s language of “downward mobility.” I sometimes wonder if I was more interested in the performance of downward mobility than the experience of it.

Nevertheless, with this massive pivot, I created more space to intentionally enter into new practices. Contemplative prayer. Yoga. Regular exercise. More intentional time with my kids. But within a year, I still felt restless. It still felt like the old me was driving the fast-moving bus.

What I didn’t realize then, but can see now, was that I was merely adding practices on top of a neglected and dysregulated nervous system.

My body had been living in a chronic, small-t trauma state for years. And I was the classic minimizer, the helper who regularly dismissed his own needs.

My nightstand included works by Rothschild, Siegel, and Badenoch, but I was reading for other people’s bodies and nervous systems, not mine. Even with a significant move from San Francisco to Michigan, even with an earnest effort to simplify and slow down, I was still living chronically outside my window of tolerance. What I couldn’t see then was that I was using silence and solitude to foster a bit of calm and connection to God without addressing the deeper, dysregulated undercurrents below.

Don’t get me wrong. The practices did create some calm, some joy, even some connection to God. My kids loved that I was around more. Life’s slower pace offered some gifts. But it was a little like cleaning and decluttering the house while ignoring the electrical wiring sparking behind the walls.

Here’s the thing.

We may sincerely desire deeper communion with God while our body remains braced, scanning constantly for danger.

We may acknowledge the shadow side of our Enneagram type without attending to the lingering survival energy that animates our reactions.

We may leave an abusive community or relationship and become champions of justice or reform without realizing how much oppositional energy still lives in us.

We may practice contemplation or meditation or yoga or self-help vagal exercises without honoring the surging flight energy within, the very energy that can turn healing into another form of spiritual perfectionism.

We may be told by a therapist to grieve our mother’s past absence while never attending to our present inner disconnection.

And it’s frustrating, isn’t it?

I would find myself perpetually restless and dissatisfied, always scanning for the next thing that might finally help. Another book. Another practice. Another retreat. Another insight. All of it driven by an unseen survival energy within.

And I’ve learned, through my own work and thousands of hours with others, that many of us live here without knowing it. You may be sincere, eager, wanting to grow. You may be doing the practices, reading the books, naming your patterns, pursuing justice, engaging therapy, seeking God.

But beneath it all, your body may still be braced.

And a braced body will turn almost anything into a strategy for survival, even the most beautiful spiritual practices. This does not mean the practices are bad. It means they need to meet us where we actually are.

Because addressing our deeper dysregulation is different from engaging vagal exercises that foster calm.

Because identifying how and why we live in perpetual vigilance is different from naming our Enneagram type.

Because acknowledging the chronic functional freeze that leaves us numb and going through the motions is different from committing to a morning quiet time.

For me, the invitation was not to abandon silence and solitude, but to stop using them to bypass the truth my body was telling. I had to learn to listen beneath my thoughts, beneath a typology, beneath my helper identity, beneath my well-practiced spiritual language, beneath the breathing exercises, beneath the yoga, even beneath my more faithful presence to my family. These were all good, but they did not help me see and name the hidden, dysregulating cycle.

I had been trying to calm my body before I had learned to listen to it.

Reflect

• Where have I been using good and beautiful practices to create calm, or even connection with God, without attending to the deeper survival energy still moving within me?

• What might my body be trying to tell me beneath my thoughts, my spiritual language, my personality type, my productivity, or my role?

• What would it look like to stop managing my body and begin listening to it as a place where truth, ache, longing, and God’s invitation may be revealed?

Explore This More in Healing What’s Within

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