The Five Best Practices to Restore the Soul

The practices of your week and day may drain your life, but what practices restore your soul?

‘Oh, that’s so good for the soul’

Sometimes I hear people say that. Sometimes I say it myself.

It’s that moment when you feel a restoring of something drained out of you. You feel like your energy tank has been topped up.

Often, this comes as a result of a practice or an activity that you do.

Practice – something you regularly do. An activity, habit, or custom.

What are some practices that restore the soul?

What do you do that helps restore your inner life?

This is part four of a series called Restoring your soul.

Here are my five best practices that help restore the soul.

The best practices to restore the soul

1. ‘Ceasing’ practices

Can you simply stop? Take a moment, catch your breath, and stop all your doing. It’s a practice to stop.

I have one day a week where I cease all my normal weekday activities.

The sabbath, or ‘to cease’ is a day of religious observance and abstinence from work, kept by Jewish people from Friday evening to Saturday evening, and by most Christians on Sunday (Wiki).

For me this means I don’t cook meals on a Sunday. I prepare them in advance.

I don’t go shopping on a Sunday, I do this in advance or plan for it for the next week.

I actively prepare in the days ahead to cease.

I shift things around in my schedule so that I can rest and restore. I trust God, that in the following six days after the Sabbath that all will be provided. I can enter the ‘cease day’ with knowing everything is taken care of.

I am not legalistic about this. It’s not rule bound and etched in stone. There is an openness to emergencies such as if my donkey fell down a well.

“Is there anyone here who, if a child or animal fell down a well, wouldn’t rush to pull him out immediately, not asking whether or not it was the Sabbath?” Jesus Luke 14:5

Having a Shabbat or a day to cease becomes a life transforming practice. It teaches you to number your days. I have six days to get my work done, prepare and plan. The seventh day can become a day when other soul restoring practices fill our lives. Practices such as I have listed below

2. Sleep practices

Sleeping is a gift that restores not just the body but seemingly every part of ourselves.

I know that for many sleep can be a problem. Both getting to sleep and staying asleep.

I have had nights where my mind just could not switch off. But sleep restores the body and restores our view of life.

And it’s not just nighttime sleep. It’s having little naps during the day. Quietly slipping off for a doze when exhausted.

If youre burning the candle at both ends then you will soon be exhausted

3. Food and drink practices

Eating good, healthy food and drink does something good for the soul.

Nutritious food that doesn’t weigh you down. Food with flavours and taste. Drinking water or other beverages that restore dryness.

It’s not only eating for eating’s sake. To meet a physical need, it’s more eating and savouring the goodness of the food. Not rushing the meal, but quietly enjoying the provision.

Possibly it’s eating a meal with others and talking about the experiences of the day. Maybe commenting about the food and drink. The flavours being discovered.

A prayerful thankfulness for the lives who have grown the vegetables, etc. Gratefulness to God for the ‘daily bread’ that has been given.

Elijah, in his physical and spiritual exhaustion, gets met with provision from God.

Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, ‘Get up and eat.’

He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again.

The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, ‘Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.’

He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food for forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God. 1 Kings 19:5-8

4. Creativity practices

A question I often ask myself when I am listening to tired, worn out people is this.

Where are they being creative?

I believe we were created to create. To carry on the creative expression that God began and we read of in Genesis 1.

So often I find that being creative is lost to the tedium of the every day. A sign of wellness is the expression of being creative. It could be in cooking, making music, art, sewing, woodworking, card making, gardening and a host of other other forms.

Often it’s an activity that is tangible and tactile.

The practice of being creative is a sign of health. For those whose work is being creative, such as being a writer, then it might be that you are creative in another area, such as in the garden.

5. Devotional practices

The final group of practices are those that speak to the internal dialogue you are having with God. Practices based around prayer, reading of scripture, worship, etc.

Here are a few suggestions

Bible reading – 14 Proven Bible Verses to Help Your Mental Health
Listening to the Lectio Divina Daily Lectio Divina
Journalling – Too much Traffic in your Mind? Try Journaling
Meditation on scripture
Christian Mindfullness – How to Chew on the Bible with Mindfulness
Prayer
Singing
Silence
Stillness – Grow the Practice of Stillness for your Mental Health

These practices can easily be let go of, but remain some of the most important things you can do.

They all add up

All of these practices add up for the steady restoration of a tired burned soul.

I believe millimetres matter. It’s those small little steps that over time, practiced every day and every week, add up to a habit of your cup being filled.

A useful practice is to complete ‘The Cup’ exercise.

The cup being a metaphor for your life.

This is a simple little exercise that you do each day. You note what has filled your cup and what has drained it.

Some things can be both fillers and drainers.

You do this over a period of a week and then look for themes and patterns.

Relating to this post, you might look for the practices that you have done that have either filled or drained your cup.

Questions?
Comments?
Email me 🙂📨
barry@turningthepage.co.nz

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Quotes to consider

Despair is what happens when there is a lack of new creation. When things are just are what they are and there is a deep sense of impotence that there is nothing you can do about it. Rob Bell
Instead of imagining all the meals ahead of you, focus on the meal in front of you. Don’t give up burgers for the rest of your life. Just order something different one time. It’s hard to change lifelong habits, but it’s not that hard to change a meal. Over time, those meals become your new habits. Jonathan Safran Foer
God’s healing has more to do with learning to worship than it does with getting life fixed. Craig Barnes
Whether life is bumpy or smooth, the most supernatural thing we can do is to want to know God better, to value his pleasure and his purposes above everything else, and to want directions for the journey into his presence more than a plan for making life work. Larry Crabb
To meditate on the Shadow is a serious thing. Victor Hugo Les Misérables
Folded arms toil, clasped hands work. A gaze fixed on heaven is a work. Victor Hugo Les Misérables
To contemplate is to labor, to think is to act. Victor Hugo Les Misérables
The antidote to stress, depression, anxiety, despair is to be on then off, work play, inhale exhale, summer winter. Rhythm is built into creation, and the problem with the modern world is that you can get tomatoes at 2 am Rob Bell
If we do not regularly quit work for one day a week, we take ourselves far too seriously. The moral sweat pouring off our brows blinds our eyes to the action of God in and around us. Eugene H. Peterson
Spiritual growth begins with the easily overlooked disciplines of attentiveness and surrender. David Benner

Questions to answer

What practices, or activities, restore your soul?
What practices, or activities, drain your soul?
What would you need to do so that you could have a complete day where you ceased all your normal everyday type activity?