I’ve been asking around and I still don’t have an answer. How or where do you experience your higher power? Is it something you feel in your body? Think in your mind? Experience between the in and out breath? I remember the very first clue I had on my quest to fully experience a spiritual connection. A mentor asked me, “When you know you’re on the right track, when things are going well, where do you experience it?” I pointed to my solar plexus, explaining that it was a cool, clear, relaxed spot about there. “That’s God,” she said. I’ve been building on that insight ever since, showing up to pray and meditate, do some kindnesses, and then doubling back to see what in me is being fed and where. A lot of us foodies (and addicts in general) aren’t especially present in our bodies; as I get more in touch with mine, I’m more and more training myself (with the help of another mentor) to experience the moment through my all senses. And now the question where working on is also, where am I experiencing God? It matters not because I have to analyze everything, but because I want this place to grow bigger and stronger and ever more present. The more I show up to honor it with solitude, prayer and meditation, the more it grows, and the more it feeds me, and the more useful I can be to myself and others. But I still crave understanding. Where do you experience God…not under what circumstances, but where in your self? Inquiring souls want to know! xox

There is a group of activist monks somewhere who work with the poor. And a rule of their order is that they must have time for prayer and meditation in this pattern: An hour a day, a day a week, a weekend a month and a week a year. I haven’t quite hit that mark yet, but I am back from a week rambling through upstate New York. First a few days in the Adirondacks, then a couple in rural Chenango County (near the Finger Lakes), polished off by two days near Oneonta, New York for a family wedding. With all that running around there was still plenty of time to just sit reading, writing and staring. So restorative! The only way I know of to hear that still small voice through the mind-chatter every brain churns out. My regular daily meditation practice still needs work—when I’m on my everyday schedule, it’s tough to eke out more than a few minutes morning and night. Yet the more I do, the more I want to do, because I feel deeply, deeply fed and what didn’t make sense begins to. And I am reminded who I really am in the eyes of the universe, beyond all the trials and tribulations of  my  worldly life.