I am leading a new “Contemplative Cohort,” and this is their assignment for the month, so I am also posting it on this blog. I have shared about the Awareness Examen with many of you, but this gives more context to why I think the Awareness Examen is so important! I find one of the […]

The word contemplation is a combination of the Latin prefix “con” which means “with or together” and “temple” which means a “place reserved for and regarded as occupied by divine presence.” So, with Silent prayer, we are “reserving a time and place to be with God and occupied by His presence.” Silent Prayer is an […]

I teach Pilates at Oregon State University, and the first thing I teach my students is how to breathe intentionally through their exercise. They take a big breath in to prepare, and at the most difficult part of the exercise, they breath out. It seems simple, doesn’t it? But many of them comment that they […]

The picture above is of my first journal started on January 1, 1968, at the ripe old age of nine. I laugh at the entry in February where I declared, “I love two boys now named Clete and Parry.” (But I stopped liking them by April.) Or the more serious entry on February 8, 1970,  “I was baptized today. I […]

“Nature is the staircase by which we climb toward the knowledge of its author.” I am a recovering Type-A personality. I used to go from one point to another not stopping to smell the roses along the way. Then I met my husband, and he is quite the opposite (is there such a thing as […]

“In Your presence is fullness of joy, and at Your right hand are pleasures forever.”(Psalm 16:11) I had prayed for years to have a life where I sensed God’s presence not just in my prayer times but even in the hard times where, in the past, things would come at me at a million miles […]

I first heard of the Examen when I read Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home by Richard Foster. He said, “In the examen…we prayerfully reflect on the . .
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