A NEAT Approach to Spiritual Practice

There is a bit of spiritual advice that is attributed to St. Francis de Sales: everyone should pray for half an hour a day, unless they are reeaallyy busy. In that case they should pray for an hour a day. It is also said that Martin Luther prayed two hours a day unless he was too busy; then he prayed three hours a day.

I’m ready to stipulate that these guys were onto something. That our lives benefit from a fairly significant chunk of time spent in spiritual pursuits each day, and that when we’re challenged–by poor health or financial stress or family difficulties or underemployment or everyday life in 2023–we probably need to double our baseline measure of spiritual endeavors or at least up it by 50%. The exact number of minutes or hours will vary from person to person, and so will the necessary increase when times get rough.

However, despite having said all that, and believing it more or less, I struggle to schedule in two hours or one hour or even just thirty minutes of spiritual practice a day in good times, much less upping it to three hours or two hours or one hour when my life gets overwhelming. My internship supervisor made the importance of commitment to a regular spiritual practice clear to me, using the words her mentor had spoken to her years before: without a regular spiritual practice you will dry up and blow away.

I take stabs at it–spiritual discipline–from time to time. Writing in a daily gratitude journal, attending vespers at nearby progressive Christian churches, giving something up for Lent, answering a self-reflective question a day for the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, for example. But these attempts never last long–certainly not long enough to be worthy of the label discipline. So, I wonder, sometimes, when it will happen. When will I dry up and blow away, and what will that look like in my life? Maybe it already has and I simply haven’t noticed it.

Then I had an epiphany of sorts, reading a piece on npr.org–a surprisingly consistent source of insights. The headline declared There's a way to get healthier without even going to a gym. It's called NEAT. NEAT, the article explained, stands for “non-exercise activity thermogenesis”, and the significance of NEAT is that non-exercise activity–walking, taking the stairs, weeding a garden, pushing a grocery cart–account for a significant, though small percentage of the calories we burn each day. Building more NEAT into our lives can’t replicate the healthful benefits of the recommended weekly hours of sustained moderate activity, but can fruitfully supplement “regular” exercise.

Our lives aren’t comparable to those of the sixteenth century men of religion Francis de Sales and Martin Luther, into which hours of prayer seemed to fit (though it may be that ordinary working folks of their day rolled their eyes at the idea of an hour of prayer a day). While some of you probably do engage in a disciplined spiritual practice–sitting in prayer or meditation or silence for a set amount of time; walking a labyrinth; practicing mindfulness; going on retreat once or twice a year–while some of you may be spiritual discipline pros, many of you are probably like me, having only mixed and short-lived forays into spiritual practice. Others of you might not think spiritual practice or discipline has any place in your lives. Still, I’ve spoken previously about the considerable benefits of attention to our spiritual lives: improved mental and physical health, longevity, decreased risk of suicide. So, I think whichever one of those groups any one of us finds ourselves in, applying the principles of NEAT to our spiritual lives can serve us well.

Except we have to come up with a different snappy name for–SSP, maybe. Sporadic Spiritual Practice. Or, Lula’s Speedy Mindfulness. Or, The Art of Blessing the Day.

Anyway, when I started thinking about NEAT and my spiritual life I began to realize all the ways I already incorporate bits of spiritual practice into my days and weeks. Lucia and I begin our shared meals with grace–the same free-form thanksgiving ritual I learned at my family’s supper table. Sunday services aren’t times when I can fully immerse my spirit in worship, but without fail, during silent meditation, I name each member of my family and all my closest friends, individually, holding them in prayer. When I am weaving or engaging in other repetitive activities I often chant when I breathe in, I breathe in peace; when I breathe out, I breathe out love. I’ve no doubt my spiritual, physical, and emotional health would all be enhanced by a more regular sustained spiritual discipline, thirty or sixty minutes a day. Still, perhaps these and other micro-practices are why I haven’t yet dried up and blown away.

Someone years ago told me that she had always wanted what she called a habit, so she developed a practice of praying whenever she heard a siren because sirens, whether police, fire or ambulance, always means someone is in trouble or danger. Some people turn their gardening into a prayer for the earth, or their cooking into a prayer for those who will eat the food. Others stitch or paint their prayers into their art. Still others know their social justice work to be prayers for reconciliation, equality, protection, peace, the future of their community. After all, no less a theological and justice leader than Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.

Unitarian Universalism doesn’t have liturgical hours of prayer like the three Western monotheistic traditions. Nor do we have prescribed blessings for going on a trip or hearing good news or seeing a rainbow or hundreds of other ordinary occurrences. But we can create our own blessings that fit into our days as we already live them for things we already do or already notice. We could make the first bite of any fruit or vegetable or breadstuff a blessing for the grower and the harvester, the truck driver and the baker. We could end our days with thanks for shelter in which to lay our heads and start our days with thanks for waking up. When we catch a glimpse of ourselves in a mirror we can say to ourselves, ‘behold the image of the divine’.

If we start with the one or two blessings that come most readily to mind–perhaps the moments of your day that you thought of as I’ve been speaking–and then once those blessings are as automatic as breathing (but not faded into so much background noise) we can add a couple more. Soon, I predict, we’d find like Peter Mayer, that everything is holy now. We won’t need an hour of disciplined spiritual practice because almost every minute of our 16 or 18 or 20 waking hours each day will be spiritual practice. And the bits that aren’t, the parts we can’t discover or create blessings for, the parts we curse, then we know what it is we are called to make new. And that knowledge and the tools we raise for the renewing, the re-creation–those will soon become blessings, too.

The scientists who study NEAT are careful to point out that it is most effective alongside regular exercise and diet. Likewise, I feel confident in saying that Lula’s Speedy Mindfulness isn’t sufficient unto itself for a robust, healthful, spiritual life. It’s best practiced alongside regular participation in a faith community that draws us out of the world for reflection and healing and sends us forth into it again as co-creators, that reminds us of the interdependent nature of our existence in the universe, that helps us recognize all the opportunities for sporadic spiritual practice that come our way..

Still, as Dr. James Levine, an endocrinologist who pioneered research on NEAT says, "The power of NEAT is that it's available to absolutely everybody. We can all do it and we can all do a little bit more." So, too, the art of blessing the day. We can all do it. I believe we all already do it. And we can all do a little bit more, until someday beyond our calendars and outside our understanding, together, we transform the world into perfect holiness. Amen.