What Is YOUR Spiritual Practice?

“You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you.”
- Sue Monk Kidd

The phrase, “spiritual practice,” might bring to mind prayer, meditation or yoga, but that’s not all it can be. As Sue Monk Kidd alluded to, it’s individual and you can create it. It’s anything you do regularly that connects you to your own spirit, or connects you to Spirit with a capital ‘S.’ 

IMAGE by Ryk Naves

I know people who use writing or art as a spiritual practice. Some use shamanic journeys or hypnosis. Or service to others. Or martial arts. Or running. Some connect to God through nature. My main spiritual practice is singing. I sing in the car. I sing in the shower. I sing prayers. I write songs about my intentions and sing them to myself as I walk on the beach, or up the mountain I live on.

Do I sing well? No. Do I view singing as a performance to be judged? No. I’ll leave the performing to Lady Gaga. 

I often use toning to connect with God and guidance. Using sounds without words, drawing out the notes, swirling them around each other, I let go and allow the music to alter my consciousness and carry me into the in-between spaces.

I like the way Joy Gardner-Gordon described it in her book, The Healing Voice:

“To be inspired—with words, song, dance or art of any kind—is to breathe in, to swim in, to merge with the Muse.”  

And what creative, spiritual explorer wouldn’t want to do that?!

I’ve had little adventures of traveling on music, which will sound odd, unless you’ve also had them. One morning, I was toning in the shower when I was carried in consciousness by song into a cavern with garnet-lined walls. In the darkest part of the cave where I landed, I felt a group’s presence. Although I couldn’t see anything, I heard people toning. I continued toning as I had been in the shower and we joined voices. I had the sense we were using the combined vibrations of our voices to build something, but I didn’t know what, or how that could be. There was a sense of being in another time, place, or dimension, where building with sound might just be possible.

My excited heart may have skipped a beat, because one moment I stood washing my hair in the shower, and the next, my consciousness stood singing in a gem-lined cave! My brain loves decoding a mystery so, of course, it wanted to figure this out. Where was I? Who were these kindred spirits? Unfortunately, once the inquiry begins, the spell is broken. I popped myself right out of the experience and into present time. Now I was back in the shower with warm shampoo suds sliding down the side of my face. So, I relaxed again into the sound of my own voice, trying to get back to the cave and the people, but as much as I wished to, I couldn’t return.

Julia Cameron who wrote, The Artist’s Way, calls God, “the Great Creator.” We’re all creators, too. Creators of our art or craft, creators of our lives, and creators of our own individual spiritual practices. Mine is song. What’s yours? I’d love to hear what brings you closer to Spirit.