In the fall of 2025 I received a book as a gift. It was titled Sacred Balance – How  Ancient Practices Can Restore Modern Minds.  The author is Miriam Diephouse-McMillan who is a Chaplin in a psychiatric hospital.  In it she writes about nine spiritual practices you can use to help make a conscious connection to God.  

I have been reading it with interest and sometimes doing one of the practices.  Last week I spent the week focusing on Loving Kindness Prayer. This is a stillness practice.  So I lit a candle, sat in my chair and started repeating  the prayers over and over again.  Each time I did something shifted for me.  I felt lighter and more peaceful.  There was a sense of connection to a greater whole. At the same time I had a deeper knowing of who I am as a person.  I had a profound experience of Love that totally enveloped me.  I felt it inside and out.  I practiced this prayer every day for a week.  Each time I did it became easier to connect, to just be with and in that Love.  I call that Love God.

This week I have decided to try another one of the practices – Mindfulness – Practicing the Presence of God.  This is what I call an embodied practice where I bring conscious awareness of Love into whatever I am doing.

I began by rereading the chapter on Mindfulness practice. In it, she shares many reasons why it is helpful to practice. She explains how to practice throughout your day using specific tasks as examples. She also shows how you can increase your feelings of joy by doing this. It all sounded good to me. So let’s see how it works for me this week.

One of the tasks she suggested we could practice with is doing dishes.  She mentioned this several times throughout the chapter. I see it as a good place to start albeit challenging for me to do so.  Doing dishes is one of the household tasks I avoid. I stay away from it as much as possible because I do not like doing them. I don’t know why exactly I just don’t.  Those who know me well or have visited my home have seen my counter tops and sink filled with dirty dishes more often than not.  In fact, I once received a watercolor painting. It depicted a sink full of soapy water and dishes piled high. A cat sat on the counter beside it, just looking at it.  That painting hung in my kitchen for years.  I stopped feeling embarrassed about it and or trying to “fix” my problem years ago.  Eventually I get around to doing them and I have a clean kitchen for awhile anyway.  

Reading this chapter on mindfulness really struck a cord with me. I began to think something or someone was playing with me because there were so many references to doing dishes.  I felt a bit uncomfortable at first knowing how much I detest doing dishes. At the same time, I thought it may help me overcome this aberration in my personality. So I kept reading with a sense of humour about it all trying not to take myself too seriously.  It was when I got to the end that I just had to laugh out loud.  Miriam wrote “wash each dish as if it were the baby Jesus”. Oh come on!  Really?  I got where she was going, I really did!  The irony for me was that I was being invited to see something I hate doing as a loving task.  That is the point right? I looked around and could feel God laughing with me.  Sometimes God guides us to a place of Love through unexpected ways. This guidance helps us see things in a new light.

I will begin my practice tomorrow.  The sink full of glasses can wait another day.  

Have a good one dear reader!