For years I felt that my desire and intention for spiritual practices was greater that my familiarity with them. By this I mean that my interest was high, but my knowledge was low and limited to a handful of practices common to our culture, such as prayer, reading scripture, and meditation. Perhaps you too have felt similarly, now or in the past, and craved spiritual exercises, but could not find ones that suited you. Because Unitarian Universalism embraces religious freedom of the individual, we do not possess an obvious and widespread set of spiritual practices outside of collective worship, in the way some other religions do. What is likely the easiest path to a spiritual practice is by adding intentional mindfulness to the passions you already hold.

Mindfulness is fully bringing our attention to the experience of the present moment. The opposite of mindfulness would be to engage in tasks on auto-pilot, without thought or awareness. In what has became a famous example of mindfulness and intentionality, Zen Buddhist monk and author Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in Creating True Peace (pgs. 143-44 ) about eating an orange as a spiritual exercise of mindfulness. We could simply eat an orange as a piece of food. Or, says Hanh, we could eat the orange meditatively, appreciating it as a miracle of nature that nourishes us. Peel it and focus on how it feels. Smell it. Savor it as you eat it. Imagine the sun and rain it took to nourish the fruit. Imagine the tree that carefully produced it. One has to be intentional to eat an orange in this manner. But that level of mindfulness transforms the experience from an everyday mundane action to a spiritual exercise employing intentionality and mindfulness.

I have found mindfulness useful in my regular walks in Nature. Sometimes I approach it simply as a walk in nature that provides exercise and a break from everyday life. But other times I intentionally approach the walk differently, taking my time and being truly present to the experience. I focus on each of my senses and what they are bringing to my experience. I appreciate individual trees or animals. I reflect about Nature and my place in it. From the outside, all of my walks look the same. But the intention I bring to particular walks makes them different from one another inside, transforming some into spiritual experiences of Nature reverence. Through intention I transformed something I was already doing regularly into a spiritual practice.

This kind of intentional mindfulness can be applied to most anything. This means we can all create a spiritual practice from out of any of the things we do with our day. For most of us, it is likely easiest to apply intentionality and mindfulness to those things we have the most passion for. The book Everyday Spiritual Practices, edited by UU minister Scott Alexander, offers wisdom from many authors discussing how they created spiritual practices from passions like martial arts, quilting, recycling, and cooking, among others. Yet it is not passions alone that can benefit from mindfulness. UU minister Chris Buice, in the book Roller Skating as a Spiritual Discipline (pgs. 12-14) suggests we should be mindful about everything we do, even unpleasant tasks like changing a diaper. If we do not, we will constantly put off joy because there are always more unpleasant or mundane tasks to be done.

So it is not necessarily what you are doing that provides the potential for a spiritual practice. It is how you are doing it that matters. With intention and mindfulness, most anything, for some people even unpleasant things, can become a spiritual practice. Studies have shown that the practice of mindfulness is closely correlated with greater well-being and a reduction in depression and anxiety. We can all benefit from being more intentional.

Joel Tishken, Intern Minister