Let the Soul Stretch Out: Embracing Stillness for Spiritual Growth
Slowing down allows the soul to stretch out, creating space for divine love, peace, and wisdom to transform life in profound and nourishing ways.
Table of Contents
The pace of modern life often obscures the soul's light, yet intentional stillness can restore peace and allow divine grace to flow through every moment.
In this series—It's About Time: Reclaiming Sanity, Serenity, and Spirit in a Fast-Moving World—we are examining the value of slowing down—for our health and overall well-being, our capacity for spiritual connection to ourselves and to others, as well as gaining greater access to our intuition and creativity.
Times Are Urgent: Why Slowing Down Matters
It is not new for people to want a respite from the intense pace of life in the world, yet now it feels more urgent. Today, we find ourselves more entrenched in life's complexity and often at a loss to recover the simplicity of time and space that fosters sanity, serenity, and soul nourishment.
Even the best time management fails to nourish the soul. We just get better at doing more, and when we do as if by magic, more to do arrives. Have you ever emptied your email inbox? More emails arrive, even more than before because now people think you are someone who answers email!
"Times are urgent; let us slow down."
—African proverb, shared by Bayo Akomolafe
The Nature of Soul Nourishment
How do we nourish the soul? Isn't the soul by its nature self-sufficient and always fully nourished? Yes, like the sun always shines, but the earth's rotation obscures it at night. Or even during the day, if we go inside, close the doors, and cover the windows with blackout curtains, we don't see it.
If we want to experience soul nourishment, we must open ourselves to it. With prayer and devotion, we open the door of the heart. With contemplation and meditation, we open the windows of the mind. Then, we can use discernment and discipline to open the space in our life for the soul's light to shine through.
Intentionally slowing down, deepening our breath, gathering in our scattered attention, and making space for the soul to stretch out, we invite the light of peace, love, power, and wisdom to light the way forward.
Lessons from the Great Ones: Finding Stillness
We can look at the lives of the great ones and see how they did it. We can witness how they slowed down when things got urgent.
In the Christian Bible, there is the story of a woman about to be stoned to death, and Jesus is caught in a conundrum between upholding the law or choosing compassion. Here's the story from John, Chapter 8, New Living Translation:
Jesus returned to the Mount of Olives, but early the next morning he was back again at the Temple. A crowd soon gathered, and he sat down and taught them. As he was speaking, the teachers of religious law brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd.
Teacher," they said to Jesus, "this woman was caught in the act of adultery. The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?"
They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger.
When he stood up, he said, "All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!"
When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one.
Then Jesus said to the woman, "Where are your accusers? Didn't even one of them condemn you?"
"No, Lord," she said. And Jesus said, "Neither do I."
An angry crowd of lawmakers, and a woman about to be killed. An urgent moment. What does Jesus do? He slows it all down. He stops. In a moment of urgency, Jesus doodled. He doodled! He makes time for the soul light of wisdom to rise, and it does.
Then there's the story about Gandhi's hour-long daily meditation practice and how he adjusted that schedule when faced with a hectic day of meetings. His companions asked him how he would fit in his regular hour of meditation. He told them it would need to change. With so much that is important to do, I will meditate for two hours today instead of one.
When things feel urgent, and we get busy, our reflexive tendency is to do the opposite of what Gandhi did. We usually think that our time for accomplishing must be increased and that we can carve it out of "soul time" – our time for meditation, prayer, or just being in nature, all the ways that the soul can stretch out. We imagine missing that "just this time," but it doesn't take much for it to become a pattern, and our lives become narrower, more hurried, and ultimately less fulfilling.
How to Let the Soul Stretch Out
Explore the importance of slowing down and nourishing the soul in today's fast-paced world with inspirational stories and practical advice.
Rebuilding Sacred Practices for the Soul to Stretch Out
Sacred rituals, like weekly sabbath practice or daily meditation, create intentional space for the soul. If our practice is spacious and surrendered, meaning not task-oriented—not meditating, trying to get somewhere, or getting through it as an obligation—then meditation is a time every day when the "soul can stretch out." And if we allow our life of doing and achieving to erode our time to sit in meditation, then we must begin again. Or if we attend satsang or retreats regularly and then lose that rhythm, we begin again.
Buddhist teacher Mingyur Rinpoche said, "Meditation is like ending a dysfunctional relationship with ourselves." The ways that we take time for the soul are consistent with ending a dysfunctional relationship with ourselves.
Whether it is through meditating every day, having a weekly sabbath practice, or regularly attending spiritual retreats, all of those options are opportunities to let the soul stretch out, to commit again and again to be a fully functional, healthy spiritual being, open to experience the fullness of our life.
Regularly creating the space and time required to let the soul stretch out is a radical act today. It requires us to invest our precious time in something open-ended, not goal-oriented, and not intended to be productive.
Here is something to watch out for as we set aside time to nourish the soul. The ego often attempts an end run in the soul stretching out space. The rationale is that time spent in meditation will make us more effective. While that may happen, going into our meditation as an exercise in self-improvement is a path to finding more frustration than fulfillment in our practice. Setting up a sabbath practice with your partner to improve your relationship requires the same mindset. Therapy would be a better choice for that.
A Radical Act: Slowing Down
Times are urgent. Let us slow down. Be radical. Give up the idea, the requirement, and the constricting belief that soul time needs to be useful or productive.
Abraham Joshua Heschel told the story of a man observing the sabbath who decided to walk through his field. While walking, he notices a spot where his fence has broken down. He thinks about what's required and decides to repair it tomorrow. Later, reflecting on his day to let the soul stretch out, he realizes that even thinking about work or planning for it violates the spirit and purpose of the sabbath. He decides he will never repair that broken spot in his fence but rather let it remind him of his higher priorities. Divine grace entered the open field of his heart-mind, and it changed him.
Another version of that story says that, in time, a tree sprouted and grew in the broken space in the fence. It is an inspiration to remind us that as we make space for the soul life through discernment, discipline, and surrendered devotion, grace flows into and through our lives in supportive and surprising ways.
Open up space and time for your soul to stretch out. Let the soul lead and see what happens.
Practical Steps for Soulful Living
- Prayer and Devotion: Begin and end the day with gratitude and a sense of divine connection.
- Meditation: Make time daily for a meditation practice that allows the soul to expand without external demands.
- Sacred Rituals: Establish weekly or monthly spiritual practices that honor life’s sacredness and offer time for reflection.
Letting the Soul Lead
When we create space for the soul, life begins to flow with grace. Poet Lynn Ungar’s Camas Lilies inspires us to step away from the rush of life and embrace the beauty of simply being.
Camas Lilies by Lynn Ungar (Bread and Other Miracles)
Consider the lilies of the field,
the blue banks of camas
opening into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground their bulbs
for flour, how the settlers' hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?
And you -- what of your rushed
and useful life? Imagine setting it all down --
papers, plans, appointments, everything --
leaving only a note: "Gone
to the fields to be lovely. Be back
when I'm through with blooming."
Even now, unneeded and uneaten,
the camas lilies gaze out above the grass
from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep your life will shine.
Make no mistake. Of course
your work will always matter.
Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.
Slowing down and letting the soul stretch out isn’t just restorative—it’s transformative. As we create space for divine love, grace flows into every aspect of life, bringing peace, wisdom, and joy.
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