Intro: 00:00

Welcome to the infinitely precious podcast produced by infinitely precious LLC. Your host is James Henry. Remember, you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are.

James: 00:12

Hello, beloved. It's me James and it is another day for us to reflect together. Today is Tuesday, two days after our Easter celebration in the Western Christian Church. Celebration of resurrection and new life and hope which sometimes seems to be challenging to find. It's not the lack of faith necessarily or anything else.

James: 00:45

It is that all of the information seems to be to the contrary. And it's hard to fall back to a place where you can feel the trust again. And the path is no longer as clear perhaps as it once seemed. When I signed up, at least when I imagined that I signed up for this journey of faith in the tradition of Jesus following his path, I kind of had the idea that the path would always be clear. That I would always know what might be next.

James: 01:34

I don't know why I got that idea, perhaps it was the folly of youth. But I have noticed in my journey of faith repeatedly, not all the time but certainly at various points in my life, that the path I was certain was ahead was no longer visible. In fact, it had disappeared altogether. Maybe you've experienced this if you're a hiker and you go into the woods, I am occasionally a hiker, and there are clearly marked or blazed trails for you to follow, but you decide you're going to go off on your own. You know, take that path less traveled if you will, and the challenge becomes it's not always a very clear path and it does disappear.

James: 02:23

Maybe it was a deer path or maybe it was some other kind of path and it doesn't always unfold the way you anticipated it would, so then you have to retrace your steps to try to figure out where you are. What does that have to do with this idea that the path sometimes disappears for us as we're trying to move forward? Well I think that it's just absolutely true for people of faith and for people without faith, for people who are struggling to figure out what it is they see in this world and whatever meaning they might glean for themselves about what matters. There are moments when you were pretty sure that whether it was school or a teacher or perhaps your own faith that told you the pathway while narrow was one that you'd be able to pick out. They don't always tell you that there are going to be those moments when it's not clear what the next step is and all you've got is this moment right here, This moment right now.

James: 03:37

So what do you do when the path ahead disappears? When you were so certain that this was your career path or your relationship path or your personal path or your faith path and suddenly that changes up on you. What do you do? Well I'm just going to share with you what I do. Once I've figured out that I can't see a clear path ahead, there are too many potential directions in which to go or there seem to be no potential directions in which to go or the directions that are available to me are not the path I want to take.

James: 04:21

And there's all the possibilities. What do I do? Well, it comes back down to being where you are right now. You can't quite glean what the next step is on the path. There are too many choices, there are no choices or the choices that you have are not the choices you want.

James: 04:45

In that moment, I try to rock back on my heels if you will and for me rocking back on my heels is attending even more closely than usual to my daily practice. Now maybe you don't have a daily practice. Maybe you've been thinking for a long time, wouldn't it be good if I had a daily practice but you haven't ever started it? Well, I don't want you to feel guilty about not having a daily practice. I don't want you to feel guilty if your daily practice is really only an every other day or once a week practice because you can't quite get up to doing it on an everyday basis.

James: 05:25

This is not another opportunity for you to beat yourself up. But for me what it is is attending to what I have found is the grounding place for me. And for me that's my daily practice. So just to my right, it's to the left of the screen that I'm on right now, there is a chair. It's where I sit every morning.

James: 05:54

Every morning looks a little bit different, but it usually includes things like silent meditation, journaling, quizzing myself on my new Aramaic vocabulary words as I'm trying to learn the language of Jesus, sitting quietly, just drinking my cup of coffee, any of any or all of those things can be part of my everyday pattern. So you've come to that place where it's not clear what the next step is. If you can, you rock back on your heels. You take a moment. If you have longer, you take more than a moment perhaps.

James: 06:36

Perhaps you pull out your journal and you start writing about what has brought you to this place. What it is that you thought might be the next step but isn't anymore. What the choices are and you begin to just write free form without trying to carefully consider what your answer is going to be. Just letting your unconscious and conscious dance together as you write what is coming up. Just write about where you see yourself right now, how you're feeling about where you are, what thoughts are rising about that, what paths seem to be available or not or whatever arises in you.

James: 07:18

That's a practice using the journal that allows you to kind of maybe gain a little bit more clarity in the midst of the mist, the fog that surrounds you. Perhaps it might become clear at least the direction to take next, but maybe it won't. Maybe it won't. Another practice that I find very helpful is my meditative practice And in that meditative practice, I use centering prayer which is letting go of every thought as it arises using a sacred word which brings me back to my intention. It's not a mantra.

James: 07:59

I don't repeat it over and over again. Sometimes I do because I keep getting caught in my thoughts, but for the most part it's about releasing myself simply into the openness, not to grab the thoughts. Maybe you use a more mantra based practice where you have a word that you use, a mantra that you just use over and over again to keep your mind from chasing thoughts and instead that mantram is your focus. Very, very intentional practice like that. It's important to sort of clear your space when the path disappears.

James: 08:41

To sort of clear your mind of any preconceived notions about what you ought to do next. What is the next thing for you? Because sometimes it's those preconceived notions that lead you to believe that there isn't a path for you and when you let go of the preconceived notion, you find that it's clear what you have to do, what the next step might be. We often bring a lot of expectations into every moment of our lives about what ought to be next for us. And if it's not our own expectations, it's the expectations someone else has placed on us.

James: 09:22

It could be a teacher. It could be our faith. Could be it could be our parents. It could be culture itself. It could be the nation in which we live.

James: 09:33

It could be a rite of passage at a certain age that you're supposed to do something at that age. You imagine that is the expectation. The opportunity to rock back on our heels when the path is unclear or disappears altogether is the opportunity to say, oh my gosh, I'm making all these assumptions about my life. I've brought all these preconceptions into this moment and I need to let them go because none of those preconceptions is going to let get me to the next step. Instead, I'm going to be open and trust that I've gotten this far in life across various kinds of terrain.

James: 10:17

The path was probably not always clear and easy. Sometimes it was rocky and mountainous and muddy and all those kinds of things. Whatever your path has been, you've come to this moment. Can you trust that the divine is enough, that you are enough in this moment to get you to whatever the next step is? Especially if you release all the things that you were so sure were next for you.

James: 10:53

It's not an easy it's not an easy path, it's not an easy thing to do. In fact, I would say this could be very challenging, very challenging. But if you make it a regular practice, I won't even say daily, if you make it a regular practice to sort of take stock of where you are, to listen to yourself, to your intuition, to your body. Does this feel right? What is holding me back?

James: 11:26

What is it that is keeping me from seeing a path ahead? And if you can let go of whatever that those things are that are keeping you from moving forward then you have the opportunity and the opportunity to strike out. Clearly you need to move forward, you can't stay where you are forever. Well you could try but you probably can't. So figuring out a step, tentative as it may be, bold as it may be, is a place that you can try to go.

James: 12:06

Those are my thoughts for today. It's there are moments, I'm in one of those moments when there are a lot of things happening and a lot of things trying to make their way into my consciousness, trying to help me make decisions or force me into decisions whatever, and I am trying to be careful about how I make those and what they look like. So I encourage you to do the exact same thing. Find a practice that works for you. Journaling might be really good just because it allows you to clear the decks.

James: 12:42

Meditation, letting go of all the thoughts, recognizing what the preconceptions about your life are. That's a possibility. Another possibility might be to do sacred reading, something we practice every Thursday on this same channel, same spot at noon. Any of those things are possibilities. But do something and don't just jump ahead.

James: 13:11

Take us a moment to rock back and figure out what's keeping you, what's holding you, and maybe there's a path you didn't even see before. So just some thoughts for this day for you, I encourage you to take those up. I'd love to hear your thoughts about them if you want to share them. If you have a topic you'd like for me to talk about on a Tuesday either in the podcast or in the broadcast, you can send it to me at infinitelypreciousllc@gmail.com and I will certainly take a look at it. Until the next time remember you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are whether you know what your next step is on the path or not.

James: 14:02

Go in peace my friends until the next time.