Listening to Your Soul When Your Mind Won't Sit Still

Have you ever been told to just be still and listen for God, and felt your whole body resist the instruction? Or sat down to journal your way toward some inner truth, pen ready, and found nothing but static?

I have. More times than I can count. For a long time I thought this meant I was failing at the spiritual life, that if only I tried harder to quiet my mind, the wisdom I was reaching for would finally surface. But I've started to wonder if the problem was never me. Maybe I was knocking at the wrong door.

Stillness and journaling are beautiful pathways in to listening to your soul and connecting with your inner life, and there are times and seasons that both have been very rich and fruitful practices for me personally. But they are sometimes held up as the model for what a deeply spiritual life should look like. And when you are someone like me, who often feels they are constantly having to battle against a busy mind and that you are falling short of some spiritual ideal, I want to encourage you to keep exploring because you are not failing… you just need to find another doorway. I’m learning that maybe we’ve simply been encountering rooms that weren’t built for how we move through the world.

What I've found instead

On the days my mind won't settle, or the words simply won't come, I've started turning to my body instead of my journal. Sometimes that looks like dance, actual movement, alone in my kitchen or up in the woodland behind our house, letting whatever is stirring in me find its way out through motion rather than sentences. I didn't plan this as a spiritual practice at first. It found me on a day when I had absolutely nothing to say to God in words, but a desperate need to reach out to Love, and moving felt like the only honest option left.

What I've noticed since is that the moving often says what the journaling couldn't. A tightness in my shoulders becomes something I can actually feel and release, rather than describe. A restlessness in my legs becomes its own kind of prayer, not asking God to still it, just letting it move until it has said what it needed to say. I still don't always know how to explain what happens in those moments. I do know that something real passes through me that words alone haven't reached in years.

This isn't new, even if it felt new to me

I used to think this was a slightly unconventional way to pray, maybe even one I needed to justify. Then I came across Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century monk who spent most of his life working in a busy monastery kitchen, and who insisted that his noisiest, most physically occupied hours were no less prayerful than his quietest ones. He wrote that the time of business did not differ for him from the time of prayer, even in the clatter of pots and pans. Centuries before anyone was talking about embodied spirituality, he'd already found God in motion rather than only in silence.

That gave me permission I didn't know I was waiting for. If a monk could find prayer in the noise of his hands and his kitchen, maybe I could find it in the movement of my body when my mind refused to sit down.

Embracing our embodiment

This may seem obvious, but all of us, are embodied. Not minds that happen to be housed in bodies, but whole, physical, sensing, spiritual people. It would be strange if the only way to hear God, or our own soul, was through the one narrow channel of quiet, verbal thought. Our bodies were never separate from our spiritual lives. I’ve come to believe they may be one of the most honest ways in.

This matters especially, I think, for anyone whose mind moves quickly, or who finds stillness more agitating than restful, or who has always quietly assumed something was wrong with them because journaling never worked. There is nothing wrong with you. There may just be another room in the house you haven't been shown yet.

Listening to your soul: A small invitation

If you want to try an embodied spiritual practice, here's one simple idea for you to play with.

A few times this week, once a day, put on a song, any song, whatever you're drawn to that day, and just let your body move however it wants to while it plays. No choreography, no goal, nothing to get right. If your hands want to sway and your feet want to stay put, let them. If you want to end up on the floor, let that happen too. The only real instruction is to stay present in your body for the length of that one song, noticing what moves in you rather than deciding in advance what should.

Try holding it a little differently than you might expect. This isn't a warm-up before the real prayer starts, or a technique to get you into a better headspace for listening. The movement itself is the prayer. The noticing itself is the listening. There's nothing to get through on the way to something more spiritual, because you're already there.

You might find something surfaces. You might not, not right away. Either way, you'll have spent three or four minutes actually listening with your body instead of past it, and that alone is worth something.

Some of the truest conversations I've had with God happened while I was moving, not while I was sitting still trying to be good at silence. I wonder what your body might have to say if you gave it a room like that to move around in?

If this resonated with you, we'd love to stay in touch. You can join our newsletter for reflections like this one, or come along to The Reset, our free monthly online gathering. And if you'd like to explore this further, we'd welcome you to look into our one-on-one and group spiritual direction offerings.