Endure Chapter 14: Bookends

Welcome to Chapter 14. This is Ben Greenfield. This is Chapter 14 of my book Endure, which you can find@getindoor.com It's a guide to spiritual stamina and spiritual endurance. And it's a new book getindore.com each week I'll release a little snippet of a chapter right here on this feed. Let's do this. Chapter 14 bookends anyone who has struggled with organizing their personal library or any random bookshelf in their house knows how handy a decent set of bookends can be. Bookends are simply some type of tall, sturdy and heavy enough item that when placed at either end of a row of upright books, support or buttress them so that they don't topple over. Especially when there's a long line of books, books of varying sizes or no other good way to support all those precious books. I like to think of my own morning and evening journaling, meditation, prayer and Spiritual disciplines practice as a bit of a bookend approach to my day. A helpful support and buttressing process that serves as a reliable and positivity infusing habit that makes each day better. And just like a workout routine that consists of, say, a morning sunshine walk and evening weight training session allows for gradual buildup of increasing spiritual stamina and endurance. For this bookends process, I use a handy journal called the Spiritual Disciplines Journal. I designed it and it's@spiritualdisciplinesjournal.com but I have a very unique approach I've honed over the years to get the most out of that journal. I detail the thought and theory behind the actual disciplines in the journal itself, namely Gratitude, Service, self examination and Purpose. And in my last book, Fit Soul, I really get into spiritual disciplines and the purpose of them and the benefit of them. But in this chapter I want to give you insight into my own practical usage of the journal. So in a video that I'll link to on the Resources webpage for this chapter@getindoor.com Chapter 14 and in the description I'm about to give you, I'll fill you in on how I personally combine spiritually strengthening strategies like meditation, breathwork, visualization, tapping, prayer, gratitude, service, self examination and purpose into my own morning and evening journaling practice. So let's start with bookend number one, the Morning Spiritual Disciplines Journal Practice. For your morning journaling practice, I recommend that you find or create some kind of a sacred space that you can go to each time you journal. This can be a comfortable meditation cushion placed in a quiet area of your house, a favorite spot in your backyard, or a nearby location in nature, inside a peaceful sauna, if you happen to have access to one, or if you're the type of person who knows that once the day's busyness gets going, you'll be more likely to skip your journaling practice simply in your bed each morning. Once you've found a good spot, here's what to do. If you want to simulate my own practice, which seems to work pretty well, first download the free Insight Timer app, which is available on most app stores. Set the timer for seven minutes, a seven minute meditation. And I actually use background music. I like the Angel Choir as my background music of choice. It just works. And then also set a timer to chime at the beginning of the meditation. You also want to, and this is super easy. In the Insight Timer app, set a timer to go off at the first two minute mark, the second two minute mark, and the third two minute mark. Now, once you press start, what's going to happen is you'll get a ding. The angel choir will start if you decide to do the angel choir. And then the first two minutes will go by, you'll hear another ding, the second two minutes will go by, you'll hear another ding or chime, and then the third two minutes will go by, you'll hear another ding or chime, and then you're done. So you're kind of breaking up those seven minutes into a few chunks. Now, as the meditation begins, you'll want to start to breathe with a six count in and a six count out, Long, slow and deep breath and preferably through the nose from deep in your belly. Now, as you begin breathing, you're going to read the verse at the top of the page in the Spiritual Disciplines journal, if you're using that, and then start the timer. So for the first two minutes, all you're going to do is meditate upon that verse. And I've chosen some of my favorites in the journal. You could also meditate upon a positive mantra. You could simply say, I am here, God, and listen to the voice of God. You can ask God for clarity. After you say I am here, you can open your eyes and read the verse again if you'd like. Basically, these first two minutes are just a chance for you to settle down, to connect to a truth in the verse that you've read, to connect to yourself and to connect to God. Just a chance to kind of check in with the body, which is especially nice if you've, if you've done a few things that morning and you just need to settle down and prepare for the rest of the day. When the bell chimes at that first two minute mark, begin to dwell upon what you're grateful for that day. So visualize someone or something you're grateful for and bring it to life in your mind's eye. See it, feel it, sense it, breathe the gratefulness into your heart center. That's a technique called Quick Coherence, which you can learn more about at the website heartmath.com and I'll link to that on the resources webpage for this chapter as well. So when you're ready, write down what it is that you are grateful for in your journal. And if you finish writing and everything before the next bell chimes, just close your eyes and return back to dwelling on on the gratefulness as you continue that deep breathing pattern. Now, when the bell chimes at the four minute mark, begin to think about who you can pray for, help or serve on that day. Ask God to bring someone to mind if you can't think of anyone and write the name of that person in your journal. Then close your eyes and begin to plan how you can go out of your way to serve that person, help that person, or even simply pray for that person. In that very moment, you can begin to send that person positive emotions and pray for them, though you'll want to continue to do so throughout the rest of the day as well. When the bell chimes at the six minute mark, here's what you do. Raise your hand to your chest and begin to tap over your heart 10, 15 or 20 times. This is a process of setting an anchor for the feeling of peace you are experiencing as you approach the end of your seven minute meditation. Anytime you're stressed later in the day, you can return to that same feeling of peace quite instantly, surprisingly, without a seven minute meditation, by simply tapping in that same location as you're tapping, listen to God continue to pray, continue to breathe deep and slow and enjoy the feeling of peace and love and joy that you've generated during the seven minutes. Now, at the very end of my own meditation, right at the seven minute mark, after I finish my tapping, I like to take a deep breath in a long sigh and then finish with the Lord's Prayer. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen. Why this prayer? Well, frankly, Jesus said it was how we are to pray. It provides good structure and prayer training for other prayers you might say throughout the rest of the day. And it's quite easy to memorize and recite, which means you can rely upon it even when you don't know what to say or don't know how to pray. Although a mere seven minutes may seem like quite a brief amount of time for your morning practice, if you're anything like me, you'll find that this doable chunk of time allows for greater consistency, a low barrier to entry, and greater conduciveness to gathering loved ones, friends or family members who may want to join you without having to herd cats for some kind of epic but time consuming morning meditation. This is the same reason most of my physical workouts don't last much longer than about 30 minutes. I know a brief workout that I'll do every day of the year is much better than a long, brutal multi hour workout that I grit my teeth to even get started and am more prone to skip or to only squeeze in one or two days of the week. Now let's move on to the evening. For your evening journaling practice, you can return to your sacred space or as I found this works. Because the evening practice tends to be quite relaxing, you can do it in bed as the very last thing you do before you fall asleep each night. Now you really won't need the Insight timer app for evening journaling and meditation, but you can use it if you would like. So for this in silence, I begin by simply closing my eyes and start in two a four eight breathwork pattern which is slightly more calming than the six in six out breath from the morning and the four eight breathwork pattern is simply a four count in and an eight count out, preferably through the nose. The process of exhaling for a longer period of time than you inhale will naturally activate your rest and digest parasympathetic nervous system and prepare your body for restful and refreshing sleep. As you breathe for anywhere from three to six minutes, begin to visualize the day that's just passed by. During this time, I recommend you replay your entire day in your mind like a movie. Watching yourself in the third person and identifying what you've done well, what you could have done better, and where you felt most self actualized and connected to your purpose statement. Watching the character of yourself in your own mind in the third person, ask yourself what you aren't rooting for that character to do, or wishing they'd done differently, or where they failed and learned. Ask yourself what you're proud of that character doing and how you really see them acting their best, or in that movie where you're really rooting for them as a laudable hero. Finally, ask yourself where that person seemed most in the flow and doing exactly what seems to be the very reason they're in the movie in the first place. Where are they most purpose filled? As you play that movie in your mind, stop when necessary and write down in the appropriate spaces in the journal what you've done well, what you could have done better, and when or where you lived your life's purpose. Now I like to finish with a prayer of gratitude and a request to God for a refreshing night of sleep and an impactful day the next day. And then I smile, open my eyes, finish and tuck away my journal to have it ready for the following morning. Like the morning meditation, this practice is brief with a low barrier to entry but a great deal of value packed into a short period of time. I've personally found the process of self examination to be particularly impactful for learning from each day and making the next day even better, more purpose filled, more productive, and more connected to God. I enable myself to learn from my failures, to see how certain elements of my day were structured to allow me to do good, and I can identify the sections of my day that seem most impactful and purpose filled. As a result, every day gets just a little better and these gradually better and better days tend to stack throughout the entire year and provide for a veritable renewing of the mind and spirit that allows you to grow more like Christ with each consecutive day. Surrender. Finally, I'd like to leave this chapter with a word of encouragement for you, especially if you still find yourself struggling to prioritize or to carve out the time for the practice I've just described or for breaks to pray and remain in union with God throughout the day. I was recently reading Andrew Murray's provoking book Absolute Surrender. It's a good book and well worth a read. Regarding union with God, he says the keeping is to be continuous every morning. God will meet you as you wake. It is not a I question if I forget to wake in the morning with the thought of him, what will come of it? If you trust your waking to God, God will meet you in the mornings as you wake with his divine sunshine and life. He will give you the consciousness that throughout the day. You have got God to continually take charge of you with his almighty power and God will meet you the next day and every day. Never mind if in the practice of fellowship, failure sometimes comes. If you maintain your position and say, Lord, I'm going to expect you to do your utmost and I'm going to trust you day by day to keep me absolutely, your faith will go stronger and stronger. You'll know the keeping power of God in unbrokenness. Well, this statement resonated with me because that daily, specifically morning keeping of union with God is hard. I don't know about you, but it's hard for me to wake up and suppress the urge to leap from bed. Especially since clearly identifying my life's purpose and instead actually take the time to breathe, read my Bible, and complete my spiritual disciplines. Journaling it's even harder when I'm traveling and I went to bed later than planned due to late night dinner obligations or I had a crappy night of sleep because I'm outside my home environment and then I wake knowing I'm supposed to be at a conference or a meeting in an hour and I have so much to do to get ready, yet I know the very best thing I can do is greet the day by greeting God. Heck, even if I set aside for a moment any thoughts of stopping for a meditation later in the morning, or squeezing in an AM workout, or having a few quality moments with the family, the mere act of praying, cracking open the Bible, and spending time in God's word before my feet hit the floor is just, well, hard. It takes time. Admittedly, not a ton of time, as 10 to 15 minutes usually suffices for me, but it's time nonetheless. And that takes trust. Trust that God will provide for me even if I don't bang out those 20 emails that I really want to get off my chest or out of my mind before I start my real work day. Trust that God will put food on the table even if I don't get those extra precious few minutes of work in. And trust that God will help me remember all those jumbling thoughts marching through my head that I woke up with and I want to act upon right away. Well, is it the same for you? Fortunately, Andrew presents a solution within the pages of the book. And based on the book's title, the solution comes as no surprise. Absolute surrender, he says. When God has begun the work of absolute surrender in you, and when God has accepted your surrender, then God holds Himself bound to care for it and to keep it. Will you believe that he then goes on to write oh, we find the Christian life so difficult because we seek for God's blessing while we live in our own will. We should be glad to live the Christian life according to our own liking. We make our plans and choose our own work. And then we ask the Lord Jesus to come in and take care that sin should not conquer us too much and that we shall not go too far wrong. We ask him to come in and give us so much of his blessing. But our relationship to Jesus ought to be such that we are entirely at his disposal and every day come to him humbly and straightforwardly and say, lord, is there anything in me that is not according to Thy will, that has not been ordered by you, or that is not entirely given up to you. Oh, if we would wait and wait patiently, I tell you what the result would be. There would spring up a relationship between us and Christ so close and so tender that we should afterward be amazed at how we formally could have lived with the idea I am surrendered to Christ. There would spring up a relationship between us and Christ so close and so tender that we should afterward be amazed at how formerly we could have lived without the idea I am surrendered to Christ. We should feel how far distant our intercourse with him had previously been and that he can and does indeed come and take actual possession of us and give us unbroken fellowship each day the branch calls us to absolute surrender. So what does all this mean when we truly love God and have a desire to live a Christian life? When we truly have surrendered to God all that he will care for us and our each and every need when we come to God daily and pray, yes, earnestly pray that we would have the fortitude and trust to surrender all worries, work, racing thoughts, lack of time, stress, pressure, scarcity and doubt upon him. Then we will stay in bed to greet God each morning and read that Bible not because we have to, but because every last shred of our being wants to and loves to. So I pray each day that as I grow in grace and grow in God, that He would make every morning in bed reading the Bible something I at looked forward to just as much as a juicy ribeye steak, a glorious sip of a fine Bordeaux, a beautiful hike with my family, a luxurious day with my wife, or a game of tennis at the park. Summary in the same way that a good set of bookends will keep your library from toppling, a good routine that begins and ends each day can serve to keep you calm, peaceful, grateful, purpose filled, impactful, and infused with a spirit of loving God and loving others throughout the hours between each morning and evening. I can't recommend this practice highly enough, and I hope I've now equipped you with all the knowledge, direction and tools you need to begin implementing it yourself. Now, how about you? Do you currently have a morning or evening meditation or journaling practice? Do you trust that God will create the time to do so and care for you, even if you feel like you just can't squeeze it in? Is there anything else that's keeping you from beginning? And if not, how and when do you plan to start? Well, if you go to getindoor.com, you can grab the physical or digital version of this book with ample note taking sections for you to reflect upon those questions and also for resources, references, links, and additional reading and listening material. For this chapter you can visit getindoor.com chapter 14 that's getindoor.com chapter 14.