How Can I Develop a Daily Spiritual Practice?

Developing a daily spiritual practice can be a meaningful and transformative step in your journey. It can help you connect with the sacred within you, cultivate mindfulness, and find a sense of purpose and peace. Here’s an outline to guide you in creating a daily spiritual practice:

Get Clear on Your Intentions

Reflect on your reasons for wanting a spiritual practice. Have you heard it’s a good thing to do, or does someone you trust and admire have a daily practice that really helps them? Are you making changes in how you live your life so that what you do each day is more aligned with what you believe or value?

Once you’ve gotten clearer on the WHY, begin to identify the WHAT: your specific goals and what you hope happens through your practice. Do you want to become more calm, relaxed, focused? Do you want to better understand what’s happening in your life each day so you can discern what to do next? Are you going through something and looking to better cope with it? Or do you long to expand your consciousness and become more compassionate and understanding?

Getting as clear as you can about the reasons you want to cultivate a daily spiritual practice will help you as you make choices from the many tools, techniques, and options available to you. One option is to meet with a spiritual companion or director, and I’ve provided some tips on how to search for one in this post.

Choose a Suitable Time and Space

The most powerful thing about a practice is the effect on you of engaging in it again and again, over time, so finding a way to integrate it into your life–even five or ten minutes, at first–is crucial. At the same time, it’s time and space apart from that life specifically intended to open you to the sacred gift within.

So set aside a consistent time each day for your practice. Create a peaceful, designated space to cultivate solitude, get quiet, and open yourself to reflection and transformation. It’s helpful to choose a place and time that are likely to be free from distractions.

For many people this might be first thing in the morning–as soon as you get out of bed, or after you’ve made a cup of coffee or tea. But if you’re not a morning person, try doing it right before bed. Or if you make your own schedule because you work from home or are retired, you can choose a time of day when you’re usually at your best: rested, awake, focused, with good energy.

Many people who run or go to the gym to work out do so at the same time of day. They have their running or workout clothes, often solely reserved for that activity. Runners have their favorite routes and routines. For people who work out, establishing a consistent pattern of getting to the gym is more important, at first, than how strenuous or long the workout is. Those can come later, after the practice is set.

It’s the same with consistency of time and space set aside for your spiritual practice. And don’t be afraid to start small.

Select Spiritual Tools and Techniques

Explore various spiritual practices (e.g., meditation, prayer, yoga, mindfulness) to find what engages you. Experiment with different techniques and tools to see which might help you toward your intention for the practice.

Many sources of guidance are available from books, mentors, or spiritual leaders who inspire you. A favorite of mine is A Sacred Primer: the Essential Guide to Quiet Time and Prayer, by Elizabeth Harper Neeld. I like it because it’s short and to the point, and it’s addressed to both readers who have a belief in God and those who don’t but are clearly on an inward journey. She identifies the elements of a daily practice while providing flexibility among options, including not only the things you assume would be part of a spiritual practice, like meditation, prayer, or journaling, but also things like writing poetry, painting or sculpting, playing or listening to music.

Meditation and Mindfulness

Incorporate meditation to quiet or focus your mind, open you to self-awareness, and let go of stress. Practice mindfulness throughout the day by being present and fully engaged in your daily activities. Many of us try to multitask to accomplish all we need to do, listening to a podcast while cleaning the house, for example, or watching TV while on the treadmill. But what would happen if you just washed the dishes when you wash the dishes, or listen to music while sitting quietly in a comfortable chair and not reading?

What thoughts might float to the surface of your consciousness while vacuuming or mowing or cleaning the garage? Maybe that’s too scary to contemplate, because some thoughts that float to the surface might be unwelcome: your huge to-do list at work, an old grief, self-critiques which become self-recriminations.

But this isn’t necessarily all bad. Often these thoughts point to things in your life you might attend to instead of block out: broken relationships, long-overdue amends with people you’re normally close with, conversations with a partner which you’ve been avoiding, a destructive habit you’ve been meaning to address but keep putting off.

What to do with these? Prayer and writing can help immensely to move them from your mind to out in front of you–on a computer screen, the pages of a journal or diary, or even into your larger consciousness.

Prayer and Affirmations

Include prayer, affirmations, or mantras to express gratitude, seek guidance or help, and get some perspective on what’s troubling you, or on your spiritual journey as a whole. You may have grown up with the idea that prayer is asking for things to happen in us, to get us through a tough spot, to receive some guidance. There’s also prayer for others, whether you pray for something going on in their life to get better, or simply for them to know they’re not alone.

But there are also mantra prayers, where you use a sacred word or the divine name repeated over and over to help develop focus or to serve as a return point after you’ve had a thought come to you, which you’ve then let go.

There’s lectio divina, or “holy reading,” which has come to us from ancient monasticism, which is reading a passage slowly and meditatively, stopping when a word or phrase captures your attention and then using it as a doorway into a period of reflection and contemplation that can lead to insight.

There’s also what’s called visio divina, or “holy seeing,” where instead of a text you make an image the subject of your reflection and contemplation, whether of a photo or painting or sculpture or landscape.

Journaling and Reflection

Maintain a spiritual journal to record your thoughts, experiences, and insights. And go beyond just recording, to reflect on those thoughts, experiences and insights, as well as how you feel about your progress, any challenges or roadblocks you’ve encountered, and the impact your practice is having on your life.

A journal has been immensely helpful to me over the years to gain clarity on certain things, because for me, writing helps me get just enough distance on a thought or feeling by putting it “out there,” where I can look at it more objectively, noticing patterns over time, and thereby find guidance for what’s next. Clear writing leads to clearer thinking, for me. Working things out by writing about them is a form of prayer, for me.

Reading and Study

For millennia, spiritual seekers have found that reading spiritual texts, books, or sacred scriptures can deepen, strengthen and develop their beliefs. Each religious and spiritual tradition has its own set of suggested readings for its followers.

But while choosing things to read based on whether they align with your beliefs is good way to learn about a particular spiritual path, it’s also helpful occasionally to read works written by people whose perspective challenges your own a bit, especially in our polarized, identity-based culture. Engaging in a program of self-study can deepen your understanding of the path you’re on.

And keep in mind, just as a secular piece of music or art can serve as a wonderful springboard to meditation and reflection, so can secular books and texts. Often the content is important from a spiritual point of view, and other times it’s most helpful as a doorway into thoughts, feelings, images, prayers.

Community and Support

Like a lot of people, your journey may be a solitary one. At a certain point it will be important to seek out others who are a similar journey of their own. This is one of the big reasons why religions exist, because people have a need to find each other, to know they’re not alone. People need mutual support, not just in the form of doing things together, but by sharing with another what’s happening inside them and celebrating that collectively.

This is also why a spiritual companion or spiritual director can be of help to you. It’s a place of safety to share your experiences, questions, and insights with another person whose only agenda is to help you attend to your inward journey and discern your path along the way.

Call me at 612-470-2688 or contact me here to schedule an initial appointment with me, virtually or in person, to explore the possibilities for your inner life.