1장
The Quest for Inner Stillness: Finding Sacred Moments in a Hectic World
In a world that never stops moving, Jacob Z. Hess and his co-authors offer a revolutionary perspective on spiritual practice that has captured the attention of both religious and secular audiences alike. Featured on Oprah's SuperSoul Sunday and recommended by mindfulness pioneers like Jon Kabat-Zinn, this book bridges Eastern contemplative practices with Western faith traditions in a uniquely accessible way. What makes this work particularly groundbreaking is how it reclaims mindfulness as an inherently Christian practice that has been part of Latter-day Saint tradition all along-just waiting to be rediscovered. As religious communities worldwide grapple with declining engagement, this book suggests a radical solution: perhaps what's missing isn't more activity but more stillness.
2장
When Spirituality Runs Dry: The Modern Crisis of Attention
We live in a world engineered for constant stimulation and perpetual engagement. Harvard research reveals that while Americans have gained approximately six hours of leisure time weekly since 1965, almost all of it has been consumed by screens, primarily television and digital devices. Our smartphones, tablets, and computers bombard us with an average of 63.5 notifications daily, creating what religious leader Patrick Kearon aptly describes as an "endless cycle of buzzing, beeping and vibrating." This frenetic pace was "never designed for" human bodies, as depression researcher Stephen Ilardi emphasizes, affecting not just our mental and physical health but straining family relationships to breaking points. Studies show that the average person checks their phone 96 times per day - approximately once every 10 minutes of waking life.
The Chinese language offers profound insight into this modern condition. The character for "busy" (, mang) literally suggests "death or loss of the heart," combining symbols for "heart" and "destruction." In contrast, mindfulness (, nian) combines characters for "now" and "heart," meaning to experience the present moment with your heart fully engaged. This linguistic contrast perfectly captures our modern spiritual dilemma and the cost of our perpetual busyness.
Many who leave faith communities report that experiences once rich with meaning have become mechanical, overpaced, and joyless. Religious services that once provided sanctuary now compete with streaming services and social media for attention. Unlike marketing campaigns promising immediate answers and instant transformation, authentic spiritual growth inherently involves exploration, uncertainty, and productive struggle. When we approach faith with our "microwave mentality" of instant gratification - expecting immediate enlightenment or instant peace - we set ourselves up for disappointment and disillusionment.
Mindfulness - defined as "paying attention, in the present moment, on purpose, and non-judgmentally" - has become central to a growing counterculture movement resisting our hyperstimulated world. This practice, supported by over 6,000 scientific studies, demonstrates benefits ranging from reduced anxiety to improved immune function. Rather than opposing technology or efficiency, this movement invites people to slow down, cultivate stillness, and create intentional spaces for reflection. The authors argue that these practices aren't foreign imports but are already deeply embedded within Christian tradition, though often unrecognized - just as Catholic leaders once described meditation as "something that had originally been at the very center of Christian practice and had become lost." Historical Christian practices like lectio divina, contemplative prayer, and the liturgy of the hours all embody this same spirit of mindful presence.
3장
Beyond Spiritual Checklists: Finding Depth in Religious Practice
In our busy modern lives, we often approach faith as a checklist of activities rather than opportunities for spiritual connection. We describe faithful members as "active" and summarize the gospel as actions-prayer, missionary work, church attendance. This emphasis on "doing" can flatten and diminish worship's power.
Despite counsel that we need "a place of refuge where peace and serenity prevail," many prioritize activity over rest. One young Latter-day Saint mother recounts pushing herself to exhaustion-serving as Primary president, volunteering for everything-until contracting mononucleosis. Her response was thinking she wasn't "praying enough" or "serving enough," until her husband finally declared, "This is not what Heavenly Father expects of you!"
When overscheduled, we risk becoming like those in scripture who reject new truth because they "already have enough." Like an overfull teacup that can't receive more tea, our minds become too full to receive divine guidance. Just as Christ "emptied himself" to do the Father's work, we too may need to empty ourselves-our minds, expectations, and busyness-to truly commune with God.
The restored gospel provides numerous opportunities to stop doing and start being: Sabbath, personal prayer, scripture study, family meals, sacrament, temple attendance. Yet we often approach these as just-one-more-thing-to-do rather than intentional moments of sanctuary. What if we approached each practice "on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally, as if our lives depend on them"? We could experience kneeling before God not just to say words but to rest in His presence, family scripture study as an anchor for hearts rather than just "getting a chapter done," and temple attendance as a divine haven rather than "doing a session."
Rather than incessant busyness, religious practices offer excuses to stop meaningless activity and instead sit with loved ones and at the feet of the Lord. These practices serve as anchors in a hurricane-force culture, providing what religious leaders call "the desired and much-needed peace and refuge from the world."
4장
Sacred Pauses: Creating Space for Divine Connection
Sometimes following God may actually involve doing less rather than more. Religious leaders consistently encourage periods of stillness and contemplation, recognizing that spiritual growth often happens in moments of quiet reflection rather than constant activity. President Ballard urged his followers to "be still and listen" amid modern distractions, noting that "even Christ found time to stop and engage in purposeful periods of solitude." He specifically referenced Christ's retreat to the wilderness and His solitary prayers on mountaintops as examples for modern disciples. President McKay would retreat to his hometown when particularly burdened, simply sitting before a fire, finding that these moments of quiet contemplation often brought his most profound spiritual insights.
The Sabbath offers a weekly mindfulness retreat, though many end Sunday exhausted rather than renewed. Adam Miller describes the Sabbath as "God's way of interrupting our lives...a beat of stillness, a little pocket of eternity." This sacred pause requires intentional preparation - stepping away from email and social media, protecting time for sitting together, talking or reading, even waking earlier for unhurried communion with God. Some families experiment with periods of silence, finding it creates "a quiet oasis from sound, communication, and chatter" that provides the renewal for which the Sabbath was designed. Successful Sabbath observance might include nature walks, meaningful conversations, scripture study without time pressure, or simply sitting in contemplative silence.
While retreat can happen anywhere, our homes should become primary sanctuaries - spaces deliberately designed for spiritual connection. Religious leaders teach that our universal need for refuge and peace finds its "ideal place" within our homes. The priesthood ordinance of home dedication specifically establishes them as "sacred edifices where the Holy Spirit can reside." This might manifest through creating quiet corners for meditation, maintaining areas free from electronic devices, or establishing family traditions that honor moments of stillness.
The temple offers another sanctuary for retreat, though our language about "temple work" and "doing sessions" can inadvertently frame the experience as task-oriented rather than restorative. Beyond performing sacred ordinances, we might approach temples as Meditation Centers where every element - from the architecture to the ceremonies - is designed to facilitate divine connection. Their silence, stillness and solitude create space for a unique relational meditation with God. Research confirms that focused meditation physically strengthens brain regions responsible for concentration and awareness while reducing fear responses-benefits the temple enhances through symbolic, creative experiences that activate our intuitive capacities. Regular temple attendance can establish patterns of contemplation that extend into daily life, creating micro-sanctuaries in ordinary moments.
5장
The Art of Sacred Conversation: Reimagining Prayer
Even longtime followers of Christ experience periods when prayer feels mundane, shallow, and empty-leaving us wondering "what's the point?" Rather than abandoning prayer as ineffective, we can deepen our experience by reimagining our approach. Creating more silence within our conversations with God opens space for divine work, allowing us to receive direction in that sacred stillness. This transformation begins when we shift from viewing prayer as a daily task to seeing it as an intimate dialogue with the divine.
Joseph Smith taught that we may "converse with God as one man converses with another." This profound insight suggests prayer should feel natural, authentic, and deeply personal - like speaking with a trusted friend who knows us completely. Elder Holland warns against making prayer a "laundry list of requests" without allowing God to speak back-we need to "provide an environment for Him to speak" by staying quiet and silent. When Mother Teresa was asked what she says to God when praying, she answered simply, "I listen." Her response exemplifies the often-overlooked receptive dimension of prayer.
When we approach prayer primarily as pleas for God to do something-"Help my wife to..." "Soften his heart"-we risk treating God like a genie or Santa Claus. Five-year-old William insightfully asked, "Why do we keep telling Jesus what to do? Are we Jesus's king? I thought He was our king?" This childlike wisdom reveals how easily we can slip into treating prayer as a mechanism for controlling outcomes rather than surrendering to divine wisdom. Our prayers change substantially when we focus on being tools for His purposes rather than treating Him as a tool for ours.
Elder Christofferson shared Bishop Tutu's beautiful metaphor of prayer as sitting before a winter fire-"just there" with God, letting His warmth envelop you. These moments of connection don't require elaborate words, just acknowledgment of both our circumstances and His presence. This image captures the essence of contemplative prayer - a practice of being present with God rather than always doing or saying something.
Prayer isn't something to merely get done but a practice to develop, much like learning a musical instrument or mastering a craft. When our minds wander during prayer, we can gently redirect our attention back to God-as Francis de Sales taught, an hour spent simply bringing back a wandering heart is "very well employed." Like meditation, prayer is something we learn and improve at over time. This growth process involves developing patience, cultivating awareness, and learning to recognize God's voice amid life's noise.
The transformation of prayer from obligation to conversation requires both intention and practice. Some find it helpful to begin with silence, others with gratitude, and still others with scripture. What matters isn't the method but the authentic desire to connect with God. As we develop this sacred dialogue, we often find that the greatest answers come not in the form of solutions to our requests, but in the gradual transformation of our hearts and minds through divine communion.
6장
Working with the Restless Mind: Finding Peace Amid Inner Noise
When we try to create stillness in our spiritual lives, we often discover that inner noise actually increases rather than decreases. As Cynthia Bourgealt notes, "Even when the outer world has been wrestled into silence, we still go right on talking, worrying, arguing with ourselves, daydreaming, fantasizing." This unexpected resistance can derail our best intentions to cultivate deeper spiritual connection.
What if these un-relaxing experiences are actually integral to cultivating stillness? The point of meditation isn't to purge uncomfortable sensations to reach calm, but to observe all inner activity from a place of acceptance. Stillness often reveals underlying turbulence that was unnoticed all along. While we could avoid or distract ourselves from what emerges, mindfulness invites us to turn toward inner noise. Counterintuitively, facing what's uncomfortable becomes the beginning of deeper calm.
After teaching the Nephites, Jesus perceived "that ye are weak, that ye cannot understand all my words" and encouraged them to "prepare your minds for the morrow" (3 Nephi 17:2-3). Like tuning an instrument, preparing our minds enhances revelation. A period of intentional silence before prayer sharpens focus.
Even as the body rests, the mind often continues its activity. One woman found that "coming back again and again to attention to my breath" helped her relax when her mind "was going a dozen directions" at bedtime. Another sister initially became frustrated when her mind wandered during meditation, feeling she "couldn't do it!" Eventually, she realized meditation works through cycles of focus, distraction, and refocus-not forced stillness but training the mind to recognize wandering and return to calm repeatedly.
Having an anchor helps ground the wandering mind-a "still, quiet place" for attention to return to. While anything can serve as an anchor-a song, a child you're playing with, bread or water, a phrase-the breath is most common. President Nelson has invited us to consider change even in "our breathing." The breath references the life God is "lending [us]" (Mosiah 2:21) and provides an elegant gateway to stillness.
When discomfort arises during quiet times, Jon Kabat-Zinn invites students to "cradle the discomfort" with tenderness and compassion. One bishop emphasized committing enough time to prayer to work through resistance: "That's the great thing about designating that time for prayer with a sense of conviction. Because then instead of inching toward it, you already clear out enough time to wrestle with yourself during the hour before God."
7장
Seeing Reality Clearly: Mindfulness and Spiritual Discernment
Questions about truth-how to discern it and hold onto it-can cause ongoing angst and deep pain. Some lack desired assurances, while others grapple with confirming truths or face disorienting new information. For those wrestling to "know," mindfulness offers significant help by teaching that thoughts are just thoughts, not automatic reality.
We tend to treat thoughts as automatic reality, but mindfulness teaches us to observe mental content without identifying with it-imagining thoughts as a river passing by while we sit on the bank, or as clouds overhead. This distance allows us to evaluate thoughts objectively: Is this thought true? Is it good? Is it of God? One man with depression had interpreted his harsh self-criticism as divine disappointment, but through mindful practice recognized these weren't inspiration.
Rather than living by every thought from our heads, Christians seek to live by "every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Yet scripture reading can become as distracted and empty as prayer when approached mindlessly. The question becomes: what would it look like to prioritize having an experience with God in the scriptures, rather than just getting it done?
Sacred reading goes beyond comprehension to interpretation-what does this mean for me, right now? It's one thing to understand what Isaiah's words meant historically, but another level entirely to discover what meaning God wants you to take away in this moment. Scripture becomes an encounter with both God's words and His Spirit, serving as a "Urim and Thummim" for personal revelation.
Lack of knowing isn't an aberration in God's plan but a central feature of mortal experience. To know as God knows, we must experience mortality through limited perspective, without clear view of our eternal past. This uncertainty preserves our agency-we're "provided with sufficient materials out of which to fashion a life of credible conviction or dismissive denial." It's in this lack of clarity that our growth and learning happen, and our freedom to direct our lives is preserved.
If the gospel plan accommodates not-knowing, perhaps we can too. Instead of fighting against uncertainty, we can use it as a platform for new inquiries before God. When faced with silence from God, we can choose to stay present rather than leave-discovering that "God's silence is not itself a rebuke but an invitation" to share silence with Him.
8장
Awakening to the Present: Finding Heaven in the Now
Since heaven and eternity are real to Christians, we can sometimes focus so much on life after death that we miss the goodness of life after birth. Mindfulness invites us to treasure the richness of the present moment-the miracle of walking on earth, blue skies, white clouds, and our own two eyes-rather than trudging through life numb or on autopilot.
Many people come to mindfulness classes stressed and worn down, appearing almost like zombies-emotionless faces and hunched postures. While we focus on the separation of spirit and body in death, we pay less attention to how they become estranged in life through sleep deprivation, illness, trauma, stress, or substance use. This creates a semiconscious haze where we overlook much around us.
Mindfulness encourages expanding awareness to all parts of our experience-not just living in our heads or being consumed by feelings. This helps synchronize body, mind, and spirit so we become more fully integrated and alive. Often mundane experiences help us recalibrate: a moment of tenderness, a belly laugh, or memories of past wholeness.
Prophets describe the possibilities of reinvigorated life using the same language as the literal Resurrection-being "made alive in Christ" and "alive unto God" in this life. This awakening has distinctively Christian meanings, referring to having spiritual eyes opened to see our true relationship with God and rediscover the sweetness of following Him, rather than "sleepwalking" as Elder Uchtdorf warns against.
There's a crucial difference between living in the moment and living for the moment. One draws us to relish the richness of whatever is here in our lives; the other is a hedonistic quest for pleasure. Even while decrying hedonistic living, Elder Neal A. Maxwell taught, "We need to concentrate on what has been called 'the holy present,' for now is sacred."
What if we could glimpse eternal life now, rather than waiting for a distant future? Like Thoreau who encouraged people to "find your eternity in each moment," we can see glimpses of heaven in messy day-to-day living. Eternal life isn't just a life span measurement but "a certain way of being alive" that involves seeing the divine in mundane details. As Adam Miller puts it, "Eternal life is just like doing what you're doing right now, but doing it the way God himself would do it."
9장
Sacred Relationships: Seeing the Divine in Others
Mindfulness and the pure love of Christ are remarkably similar-both involve nonjudgmental, compassionate presence. Both are ways of being rather than mere techniques. As Robert Millet defined love as "seeing someone truthfully," meditators and religious practitioners are essentially training the same muscles.
Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas taught that truth comes through the face of the other. Religious scripture describes a community where "they see as they are seen, and know as they are known"-referring to relationships of profound intimacy. Mindfulness helps us slow down to be present with each other, enabling us to truly see and know one another beyond superficial interaction.
True intimacy means allowing others to see our innermost selves and truly seeing others. The Latin root intimus means "innermost"-"into me see." Being truly heard is nearly indistinguishable from being loved. Many people are moved to tears simply by feeling genuinely seen. Timothy Keller noted that being fully known yet truly loved is like being loved by God-liberating us from pretense while fortifying us against life's difficulties.
Being a healing presence requires truly being there with others, especially in their pain. Compassion (from Latin "com-passion") means "to suffer with." Henri Nouwen acknowledged how difficult this is: "What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure." Yet our greatest gift is our ability to sit in solidarity with those who suffer, bringing new life to dying hearts.
During a ministering visit, when Jacob tried making humorous remarks, a depressed sister said, "Please stop. I just need you to be here with me." Similarly, Jacob recalls his bishop visiting his cancer-stricken brother Sam, holding his hands and simply asking, "How are you doing?"-offering deep comfort without distraction or platitudes. Even Christ, in His worst moment, asked His disciples to "watch with me"-to simply stay close.
While we often expect gatherings to be uplifting and comfortable, sometimes being together is hard. Like the story of the annoying monk who left the monastery only to be brought back by the head monk who explained, "We need him. He is the yeast to our bread." With practice, our hearts grow large enough to embrace everyone, transforming both ourselves and our communities. Some days you're the bread, some days you're the yeast-and we need each other to keep growing.
10장
Finding Stillness in a World That Never Stops
Everything we experience in life begins as new and exciting before becoming familiar and routine. A new job becomes old, a shiny vehicle loses its new-car smell, and the excitement of newlyweds naturally settles. Our spiritual practices and faith communities follow this same pattern, sometimes evolving in unsettling ways.
A couple once asked their spiritual leader, "Is this it? Is this all we can expect?" Despite following all the expected practices, they struggled to feel the peace others seemed to find. Many in similar situations simply conclude "This just isn't working anymore for me" without much further curiosity about why their experience differs from others who find joy in the same practices.
While many explanations for faith departures focus on individual or institutional deficiencies, broader cultural dynamics affect everyone-the "consuming, distracting, deafening, accelerating, frenetic culture" we all inhabit. Just as chronic stress damages healthy bodies and heavy schedules corrode promising relationships, spiritual lives become depleted when we can't genuinely stop, rest, and commune with God.
There may be another way to approach our faith, even in its most flat, uninspiring moments. Rather than seeing spiritual depletion as disappointing, we might recognize it as good news-if physical health challenges result from lifestyle patterns, we can change those patterns. The same applies to spiritual life. Reviving faith may be as simple (or difficult) as recalibrating our daily pace to rediscover the sweetness of unhurried existence.
In our world of accelerating "war of words" and "tumult of opinions," we must make space to sit at the Savior's feet. After "cheerfully doing all things that lie in our power," we're invited to the perhaps harder task: to "stand still" and "be still, and know that I am God." In Sabbath refreshment, quiet prayer, and temple stillness, we create space for God to "do wonders among us."
