This week’s teachings and meditation are an excerpt from the Feel section of The Quiet Teachers, from book club last year.
To skip to the meditation: minute 16.
The opening talk explores the difference between faith and hope—how they contrast, how they function, and the art of striking a balance between productive action and effective surrender: how we can exercise personal authority to take action in alignment with what we know to be true—while simultaneously releasing attachment to the outcome.
Personally, I’ve never found much use in hope. It always felt like a semi-clever strategy to be somewhere, anywhere, but here. Hope could convince me that the heaviness in my heart or the dark corners of my mind were just fleeting experiences, and my imagined future would be more tolerable - more correct. Faith, before I actively cultivated it, was confusing. My mind has always been more stubborn than I think it should be—cynical, doubtful, and relentlessly fast. Blind belief was never an option for me; I needed a God I could question, deny, and even argue with.
My devotion and love for Spirit are woven into my being; they always have been. But so, too, are my patterns of control, worry, and despair. For as long as I can remember, the pendulum between them was agonizing—I would trade my worry for surrender only when exhaustion left me no other choice. To find an integrated faith that could truly support me, I needed my belief to be strong enough to hold my doubt and withstand my scrutiny. Paradoxically, it was through fact-based analysis that I built a discernible faith in the Mystery—one that could contain my worry, rather than erase it.
Hindsight, after an emotional storm, is one of the finest fact-based methods I know for building an authentic and sturdy faith. When you reflect on the dark and confusing moments with greater clarity, try asking: Then what happened? What came next? Who stepped in? What character was developed? What was holding me? What intelligence or awakening was available to me? And so on…
My faith always needed proof—until it had enough. Eventually, I could no longer deny Spirit’s elegant fingerprint all over life’s storms. Though existence is profoundly confusing and painful—excruciatingly beautiful, even—I can blur my eyes and see the mundane miracles, the opportunities to serve, to awaken, to help - that seem to be intrinsic to experiences in this realm.
When emotions storm through us, it can be frustrating to admit that feelings don’t care about facts, and facts are seemingly indifferent to our feelings. Today’s talk and meditation are to help you find how they can relate and respect one another. And when it seems impossible to align the spiraling emotions with the complex mind, faith, I have found, is an incredible ally.
This talk also delves into the interpretive mind and its many facets—how our internal meaning-maker, when left unexamined, unconsciously shapes our limiting beliefs and behaviors.
The Practice:
The breath practice prepares you to sit while disrupting habituated and held emotional patterns, offering stagnant energy a pathway to move.
The meditation focuses on strengthening your ability to stay present with sensations, thoughts, and emotions—while becoming aware of when you leave your embodied experience and start narrating it. You’ll be invited to observe your stories and sit with patterns of overwhelm or avoidance just a little longer.
**Thank you for being here. I am committed to sending weekly audio & written excerpts from my extensive recorded library to offer solace or support during these times. I hope these teachings help you carry what life has placed before you. While shorter meditations and teachings are readily available across many platforms, my intention is to cherish and expand our collective attention span through these longer practices. I love you, A
Click here for information and registration to my upcoming Meditation Series.
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