Note: these “From Desert to Garden” articles aren’t about acquiring a religious status of some kind, like “saved, disciple, Nirvana.” Here, “spiritual” means “awakening our senses to all of life, including the unseen dimension.” Wherever that leads you religiously is a valuable but separate question.

The greatest contribution you will ever make to the world and everyone in it is to bring your whole self – fully-connected to the world we see and to the invisible world all around us – to the people, events, and tasks that you face every day. Your whole life as a garden – refreshed and refreshing others – that’s your contribution!

We’re making an important assumption:  life from the unseen world is constantly intruding, constantly seeking our attention.  Vibrant spiritual life doesn’t depend on you to figure it out.  It comes from outside us. It begins in us when we notice it.

Are you hunting for your life?  Or is your life being offered to you? 

Choose a posture of living in response to the invitation. Then you’re ready for the first task of waking up to spiritual life. That’s what our previous article was all about. This one will make a lot more sense if you read the other one first.

The first task of waking up spiritually is noticing the invitations.

The first task of waking up spiritually is noticing the invitations.  Today we’ll look into how to see, hear, touch, taste, smell, intuit and sense the larger dimension of life.  It doesn’t quite happen by accident, though it can start that way!

Today’s episode: why we notice, and some ideas about how to notice. In later episodes we’ll talk about what to notice. Noticing, all by itself, is a great start.

In our 21st century globalized, super-networked culture to develop a lifestyle of noticing is counter-cultural. To begin with, you’re going to make some deliberate choices in what and how you manage yourself. To sustain the lifestyle, you’ll benefit from support from other people who are pursuing noticing, too.

Why do you say it’s counter-cultural?

Because so much of the world around us works against noticing.  Day-to-day life is full of so many stimuli, so many points of information coming at us constantly.  All that stimulus can “happen to us,” to make us feel things, form opinions, and especially to shape desire in us for products, services, and experiences – without us even realizing that’s it’s happening to us. 

When it does show up to us – you know, in an unexpectedly well-targeted ad in your Facebook feed – we might laugh it off. But it’s serious and significant:  if we’re spiritually unawakened we’re being shaped without realizing it.  In a disturbing way, it’s happening with our permission: we actually let ourselves watch the commercials, listen to the jingles, gaze at the logos and labels designed to attract and embed into our attention. 

But in another way, it’s happening without our permission.  We don’t realize how much of our hearts are caught!  Vienna Teng’s beautiful but chilling song The Hymn of Acxiom is like a love song by an AI. It takes us by surprise, as we realize what is singing to us: “Isn’t this what you wanted?” How will we answer?!

Do you really want a mind and heart so colonized by corporate, political, and other-people’s influence that you can’t tell where they end and you begin?! 

This isn’t a judgment on your tastes or opinions:  watch, read, soak in whatever you want:  but you should decide what forms you spiritually!  but you should decide what forms you spiritually! You should have a voice in determining what influences the kind of person you are becoming – beyond being dulled by constant exposure to the Internet’s fragrance!

Noticing is the first step in waking up to the real world, getting out of the Matrix – so to speak.  It’s like breaking up hard ground in a garden, so that seeds of life can be planted and water can seep in to nourish them – instead of simply bouncing off and never getting in. 

Noticing creates space so that we can accept invitations from the unseen – so that we can perceive stirrings.

Noticing creates space so that we can accept invitations from the unseen – so that we can perceive stirrings. Spiritual life – moving from desert to garden – is living in deliberate connection with the whole world around us – seen and unseen.  It flourishes when we deliberately turn our attention to it. 

Choose to create space. That’s going to mean slowing down.

Choose to create space, space for breathing, feeling, noticing, dreaming, stirring – for finding where “everything else” ends and where “you” begin.  That’s going to require slowing down. 

Slowing down means becoming deliberate in what you allow yourself to experience – so that what you do, say, and think comes from a different place.  That begins by becoming deliberate in how much exposure you’re going to have to all the noise.  It means “My life is mine, not theirs. I know I’m overwhelmed by data – but I’m going to take it in at my speed, not theirs.”  Even if you can’t do this perfectly, just starting is an improvement!

Lest I say it poorly … we’re not talking here about a passive style that makes us victims of circumstance, voiceless and clueless.  Your passion, your energy, your zeal – all of that is important and worthwhile.  The question is how you direct it:  to the nothing, or to the invitation? 

A few practical ideas:

Whatever you give your attention to, give it deliberately.  Try to eliminate extraneous, unnecessary noise and artificial visual stimulation. 

New phone softwares have options for you to set limits on the amount of time you interact with social media. Use them! Find a balance that allows you to do what you need to do – but don’t allow yourself to feast on it anymore.

if you have to drive in your car, turn the radio off for a while.  The news repeats itself all day anyway.  You already know all the commercials, and the new ones won’t make you a better person.  The radio commentary might be interesting, but it’s nothing you can do anything about right now anyway.  Turn off the music, too – not because there’s something wrong with it, but because we’re creating space for you to think, feel, notice new things in new ways that you haven’t noticed before.

If you’re travelling with earphones on – turn them off.  Not because what you’re listening to is bad, but because we’re freeing up head-space, heart-space, so that you can begin noticing. 

Where you can, reduce multitasking:  try to bring your whole attention, your whole self, to whatever task, conversation, event, or person is in front of you. 

Where you can, finish the tasks you start before beginning new ones.  Try to bring completion into your lifestyle to minimize the demands and distractions on your attention from “unfinished business.”  This will allow you to bring more of yourself to your day, and give your senses more room to work.

This one will seem silly, but bear with me:  with products in your home or office, turn the labels away from you, so that you can’t see the images created to get and keep your attention.  You already know what they are, what they’re for, and why you have them.  You don’t need to the extra stimulation clamouring for your attention, taking up space in your mind and heart!  Turn it away. 

It’s not that labels are wrong – they can give us useful information.  But we don’t need this information pressing in on us all the time!  We can have a say in how much of our heart-space are taken up by these products – and the forces behind them.

Turn off background music, radio commentary, TV, etc. in your home.  A friend of mine said, “I can’t do that, because then the demons come out.” Let them come! Leave a pad of paper and a pen nearby, and write down what you notice. Put distance between you and your demons – not by running from them, but by “naming them.” Find a friend to talk about it with! You might be surprised how much better you feel.

Turn down the volume on e-conversations about faraway topics, things that don’t affect you personally, things you can’t do anything about anyway.  Not because they’re bad, but because they take up an incredible amount of heart space – they’re a powerful distraction from your attention to the world in front of you, inside you, and all around you. 

Cultivate some times of silence, space for your brain to rest and your heart to breathe. 

Turn on music when you decide that you want to listen to it – all by itself, for its own merits!  Turn on the radio commentary when you want to learn something from it – then turn it off again.  If you’ve got something to say about the issues of the day, say it – then turn it off and put it down.  Don’t carry it with you like a label, like clothing, like your identity as a person.  Turn it off and put it down. 

Decide that your spiritual awakening, moving from desert to garden, is more important than any product or experience or argument that you will ever face. 

Sounds self-centered, doesn’t it!  It isn’t – it’s exactly the opposite!  The greatest contribution you will ever make to the world and everyone in it is to bring your whole self – fully-connected to the world we see and to the invisible world all around us – to the people, events, and tasks that you face every day.  Your whole life as a garden – refreshed and refreshing others – that’s your contribution! 

Create space in your heart by setting aside a regular time when you deliberately walk more slowly.  A great way to slow down and create space is to synchronize your breathing with your steps – then there’s no way you can run!  Hey, running is good – do it some other time.

Create space in your senses by deliberately eating and drinking what you need, when you need it – not way more, and not constantly.  If you can, rest when you’re tired!  Why?  Because we want our bodies to find their natural cycles, natural sensitivities, un-pushed and un-driven.  Then our senses will begin to function the way they’re designed to.  They’ll work as part of how we encounter life and integrate its experiences.  Their information to us will be more than overstimulated, overdriven opportunities for someone else to make money.  Our senses will help our hearts to know, and to live deeply.

The first task of becoming a garden is waking up to spiritual life.  That means building an attentive, sensitive, undivided heart. 

Think of it like a small plant in a big garden – if you want it to grow, care for it!  Water it, feed it, nourish it – but especially, get rid of the weeds all around it that take up the water and sun and care. 

Create space where a seed can grow.  Break up the hard ground in our hearts created by coping with so much noise.

If you choose to create break up the ground to create the space, to pull the weeds of competing attentions, to wake up – then the seeds of spiritual life will come. 

Your life is more valuable than anything you will ever own, than any experience you will have, than any accomplishment you will achieve.  Your life is greater than your successes – and greater than your failures.  It can be greater than your joys – and greater than your sorrows.  Your life is more important than any opinion you will ever have about anything.  I might add, other people’s lives are more important in these same ways.

It’s all about the kind of person you’re becoming.  The kind of person you are affects everyone around you – and everything around you.  That’s the one thing you can do something about.

The simple truth is that our way of life cannot continue indefinitely.  Change is coming, sooner or later.  One way or another.  Change has happened before, and it will happen again. 

Awakened spiritual life opens our hearts to deeper realities that don’t change.  With an awakened spiritual life we can live in both the changing world and the unchanging world. 

Awakened spiritual life connects us with people, with the world around us, with ourselves, with the unseen “whatever else” is out there. 

And nothing can take that away.

So you think there’s something wrong with the world? You’re in good company! Let your spiritual awakening, and the kind of person you become, be your contribution to making it right!

As the Canadian folk musician Bruce Cockburn sang, “Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight. Gotta kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.” Spiritual awakening is huge – for us, and for the world all around us! It’s worth this kind of fight!

Find someone in your life to share this commitment with – someone who will stand with you and encourage you to take control of the attention of your heart.  That’s what I do.  Once a month I pay a trained spiritual director for an hour of focused conversation where I can share what I’m noticing, reflect on it, and grow with what I learn. 

I myself have been trained, too, and I maintain a practice of supervised spiritual direction for others.  Let me know if you’re interested.